K'NAAN - Take A Minute (Director: Amir Aziz)

I wish to make this blog, not so much, about me. Tonight, I saw K'NAAN perform on Austin City Limits. And, I must say, he was exquisite. This video provides a wonderful montage of historic figures, who have fought for the liberty of others. By the by, I also read a lot of Baudelaire today, and I'm including below a poem inspired by his Danse Macabre:

ANTINOUS

It may be his eyes were a field of violets,
Or redder than Hyacinth’s lips, to Apollo,
Sun to Hadrian’s kiss
In cloudy skies and neverness

He walked, his gaze an unknown shore.
A point in the night sky,
Beside stars who seemed to grow brighter,
In the light of his remorse.

Even youth in all its dawned dew
Will vapor into ether
Of something newer, a veil covering
His face, thin and diaphanous,

Evaporating time and space.
Hadrian loved his young dream,
A boy whose eyes’ omission,
Many a Lovelace, at the commission

Of some never place grew newer,
With each false lover erased.
But Hadrian could not see,
The remorse upon his boy’s lips,

The deadly kiss,
Of being forever, in the narrowness
That life, and mask, and role,
Defied, the narrowness of his Soul

Trapped behind his poisoned eyes!
The most infamous Lovelace took a mirror
And put it before this boy’s face,
And what could he see

But eyes of black, their blackened grace
The grace of carrying nothing,
An emptiness even space envied,
And time tried to traverse,

But nothing could traverse what seeing them
Saw, the Lovelace laughed, at this boy’s appall,
What was the world before the fall,
But a broken vault, from life’s thinnest pall?

A touch of the poet...

While i did see A Touch Of The Poet, with Gabriel Bryne(s), in the city (New York City), some years ago, this is no blog pertaining to his performance or masterful playwrights. It's more, an intimation of where my mind has been. Oscar Wilde said Hamlet's madness may have been a mask, his way of having a poetic nature cope with the crude realities of "something rotten in the state of Denmark!" I sometimes wonder if his madness wasn't sanity; if the true insanity he could not display, so his foray into madness was really an act of futility. But, I'm not here to analyze. Simply to say, Wilde's explanation of Hamlet pertains to me, too. I find it difficult, at times, to manage the crudities of "reality," even tonight, I was asking the ubiquitous, irksome question, why, are we here?
So, when Nietzsche wanted to discover the soul of man, could he really find anything except Nihilism? Perhaps, nay, Fatalism? That will to power seems to me to be an intrinsic possibility. But, I will not go into Dasein (Heidegger), or Pulchrum Est Paucorum Hominum (Beauty is for the few). I will say, I think being in Montauk some weeks ago (for those not cognizant of Long Island's geography, Montauk is the far eastern tip, where Long Island ends, hence it being called "The End." It's quite lovely. A getaway akin to the Hamptons in everything but... snobbery), I think being in Montauk some weeks ago made me see just how much I miss my father. Looking at the waves he used to surf, thinking he actually met Truman Capote out there, when he was in his early twenties I believe. And realizing that the cancer that killed him, so he couldn't even make it to 60, was synonymous with life... more death, though I believe the two are twins. Something that eats away. That continues. Without a cognizance of anything, except nothing. Through all of this I came to poetic expression.
Here is a small selection of the poems I wrote, I'll include two, maybe three, of six or seven:

DE PROFUNDIS

A sky of ashen shadows
Hovers, no clouds to see,
Just the white light,
It seems, my destiny.

But I prefer shadows
That blacken the earth,
And suck from its blood,
The roots and the dirt,

Another kind of shadow,
One without a source,
Fainting its way through my blood,
Its blood a serpent’s course.

And when it bites into my flesh,
The apple’s rind,
Red and bloodied and intermeshed,
With the blood of death and time,

I seek no answer to my life,
Except that nothing is,
And from nothing, to fashion fate,
Seems the work of Sin.

Here's another, which I wrote today:

CAIPHAS KISS

Your complexion is white,
The freckles on your face,
A sea of clouds,
Overwhelming the light,
The sun once hid.

You give me negation,
Not a shadow
Made stronger by its source,
But a fire’s ember,
Set to windy force,

I’m carried by the wind,
But only when I dream,
And dreams are a source
To the seam
Reality never sows.

In my dreams,
The sun hides,
The moon shines,
And Mary perches atop the moon,
Wearing a thousand thorns.

Nothing like your slap,
Across my face
Making my complexion burn,
Her kiss was born in sorrow,
But yours is born to spurn.

You temper me with your clouds,
With the blue that hides itself,
Much like the sun,
So I am the fate and talisman,
Of being nothing, and no one.


.
And this, in its rudimentary stages, is dedicated to Baudelaire; I also wrote it today:

THE SWAN
For the eternal Baudelaire

1.

A river runs her boundaries, in a sickly stream
Simois runs, and Andromache thinks she’s home,
Seeks the blue sky in her eye’s reflections,
Expands little Simois to new directions.

And when a tear runs down her face,
She dreams of this sacred place,
Here flesh found flesh in soul,
And Hector was a little knoll,

Where Simois hushed itself,
So she could lie in the grass,
No fate to fall,
Except the one in soft blades,

Tickling the tears time befalls.
A swan is out of place,
An albatross to water
Whose air is its home,

I see it, and think of Andromache,
Wings flailing, hurried yelps,
Wandering in the rough,
When the soft water was well enough.

A swan that is an heir to Leda,
Revenge is sharp like its beak,
There are things, of which it does not speak,
Being found without its self-retreat,

Away from home, from anything,
It was a God, and now a king
Without a crown, a clown, performing
Tricks in self-misery.

It doesn’t think repentance,
When joy breeds its diaphanous threads,
Just dances with cloth above its head,
And makes a veil out of my face.

But fate has made another way,
So joy is just a fickle spell,
And heaven is a self-made hell,
Where fire ices everything.

2.

I stood over your mound,
An ant crawled above the grass and dirt,
And life laughed at my expression
Knowing all was its possession,

The ant should have been crushed,
Kicked, smudged into the earth,
But it kept its course,
A swelling river without a source.

Such is life, and its Simois
The flailing Swan,
No place to go, no home to find,
No core to make its blushing rind,

Just Andromache’s dream, her sickly stream,
The river that was her life’s esteem,
Now barren, a little rill whose happening
Happened to be the wound of, nothing.




The last one isn't too good. But I am going to revise it. The others are mediocre, I'd say. Even so, I hope you didn't abhor, them. I'm quite fascinated by the concept of nothing. If all that we see and seem is but a dream within a dream, why are we so focused on purpose?