Everyone else's less wonderful poetry thread

poetix

we murder to dissect
QUANTUM FROTH
the frenzy
of the invisible

dimly illumined matter
candle-proximal

now here more solid stuff
to bark your shins on

small supervening gods
dancing on tables

the small gods in small council
angels going back and forth
with sheaves of papyrus
momentous business

the great gods in their tombs
the great tombs empty

the ONE SKY GOD
munificent above it all
immortal
invincible

a trillion skies aloof
in coldest space streaked
with radiation signatures
of the long-departed

quantum froth
the frenzy of the invisible
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
It's a whipped-up quantum foam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quant...oam or spacetime foam,by John Wheeler in 1955.

"The frenzy of the invisible" was the seed-phrase of the poem - as I was bundling my toddler into her pram this morning, I noticed on the bookshelf next to the pram my wife's copy of Hardcore: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible, by Linda Williams, a book about horror, porn, horror porn, etc.

The empty tombs of the great gods would be:

Atuan_Smee_cover.jpg
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
The "candle-proximal" "dimly illumined matter" is one step above "dark matter", perceptible but only in the dim light of our instruments. I had in mind this passage from Middlemarch:

An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent...
As we move along the chain of being, we pass from such obscure stuff to "medium-sized dry goods" such as tables and chairs, the reliable furniture of the human world. But then we keep going, into the domain of ideology: small gods who dance on the tables, for example the commodity form:

The form of wood, for example, is changed if one makes a table out of it. Nevertheless, the table remains wood, an ordinary, sensual thing. But as soon as it steps out as commodity, it metamorphoses itself into a sensually supersensual thing. It does not only stand with its feet on the ground, but it confronts all other commodities on its head, and develops out of its wooden head caprices which are much more wondrous than if it all of a sudden began to dance.

Beyond ideology, the great co-ordinating myths of human existence (the "great gods") in which perhaps nobody really believes any longer (Lyotard's "incredulty towards grand narratives"); beyond that the sublime of monotheism, and beyond that the vast emptiness of space, which returns us to the froth in which we began.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
I should add that none of these things is "in" the poem (in the sense that you should feel clever if you were able to detect them, and somehow inadequate if you were not) but all of them were adjacent to the process of writing it.
 

luka

Well-known member
@woops
Fuck it, I'm just using this thread to post my own poems now.

Forgive me if I go astray, or do not.
So much of each bright day is sunk in dreaming,
mazy distraction fractally unspooling,
attention splintering against attrition,
you long for boozy rosiness to blossom
or yoga session leave you luminously
empty-headed.

The yogi is unclean beneath his robes.
The roses are advanced in fermentation.
You picture headspace as a loft apartment,
well-sunned, from which the cleaners have departed
leaving a scent of lavender, a sheen
on every surface, tranquilly awaiting
yuppie tenants.

Not this arrears- and rodent-ridden bolthole
where fugitive and half-deranged you quiver
or, worse, are quite at home, in sloven's Eden
which no loss ever ransacked, the heaped papers
aspiring to the ceiling, the floor a lava
of cast-off underthings, even the very
walls perspiring.

The psyche, it is said, is unforgetting,
a chiselled ledger, or a swizzled swirl
of mingled waters, of which each drop drawn
contains all others potently diluted,
non-lethal cocktail from which clarity
is not forthcoming, even at the point of
dissolution.
 

woops

is not like other people
QUANTUM FROTH
the frenzy
of the invisible

dimly illumined matter
candle-proximal

now here more solid stuff
to bark your shins on

small supervening gods
dancing on tables

the small gods in small council
angels going back and forth
with sheaves of papyrus
momentous business

the great gods in their tombs
the great tombs empty

the ONE SKY GOD
munificent above it all
immortal
invincible

a trillion skies aloof
in coldest space streaked
with radiation signatures
of the long-departed

quantum froth
the frenzy of the invisible
this is good too. i like it a lot.
 

droid

Well-known member
The Divining Cause

Volant moon pulled taut to mount straddl’d vale.
Paled balloon hung in perfect plumb.

Scraggy drumlin drumlicked by moontongue.
 

woops

is not like other people
So your poetry is written in a complex web of reference for the cognoscenti @droid, that's also very modernist
 

droid

Well-known member
Adolescent with reference. Brimming like an overflowing toilet. It's quite disgusting.
 
Top