The summer lightning of shy human friendship,
Into the cool past that will never come back.

The Poet

Only on me, the lonely one,

The unending stars of the night shine,

The stone fountain whispers its magic song,

To me alone, to me the lonely one

The colorful shadows of the wandering clouds

Move like dreams over the open countryside.

Neither house nor farmland, Neither forest nor hunting privilege is given to me, What is mine belongs to no one,

The plunging brook behind the veil of the woods,

The frightening sea,

The bird whir of children at play,

The weeping and singing, lonely in the evening, of a man secretly in love.

The temples of the gods are mine also, and mine

the aristocratic groves of the past.

And no less, the luminous

Vault of heaven in the future is my home:

Often in full flight of longing my soul storms upward,

To gaze on the future of blessed men,

Love, overcoming the law, love from people to people.

I find them all again, nobly transformed:

Farmer, king, tradesman, busy sailors,

Shepherd and gardener, all of them

Gratefully celebrate the festival of the future world.

Only the poet is missing,

The lonely one who looks on,

The bearer of human longing, the pale image

Of whom the future, the fulfillment of the world

Has no further need. Many garlands

Wilt on his grave,

But no one remembers him.

Hermann Hesse

A poet is the most unpoetical of anything  in existence because he has no identity;  he is
continually informing and filling some other body
Keats

 

 

“I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations — one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it — you will regret both.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

Aspen Tree Moving

Leaving the house your leaves glance white into the dark.
cracks mimic my own –
my mother’s hair was never white.

Dandelion, so green is the Ukraine
an insensible history, I forsake
my yellow-haired mother did not come home.

One life above the well do you hover?
laughter and terror
my quiet mother weeps for everyone.

(A cut up of Pauls celan’s Aspen Tree and Daniele Pantano’s Moving)

Rotten (Collage poem)

The apples have fallen and
invited lovers into her boudoir
and you aren’t here to create a
sensation
everything goes on like before

seducing in the dry grass
voluptuous femininity 14 years on
still the stone has fallen by the bed
longevity covers the pillow.

Silhouette

Night falls

like a dusty attic

tracing her spine

Søren Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard Parable: The Poet

What is a poet? An unhappy man who in his heart harbors a deep anguish, but whose lips are so fashioned that the moans and cries which pass over them are transformed into ravishing music. His fate is like that of the unfortunate victims whom the tyrant Phalaris imprisoned in a brazen bull, and slowly tortured over a steady fire; their cries could not reach the tyrant’s ears so as to strike terror into his heart; when they reached his ears they sounded like sweet music. And men crowd around the poet and say to him, “Sing for us soon again”—which is as much as to say, “May new sufferings torment your soul, but may your lips be fashioned as before; for the cries would only distress us, but the music, the music, is delightful.
Any thoughts ….
Selected from one of Kierkegaard’s more well known works, Either/Or.

These Streets by Paolo Nutini

Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso