Certainty

Have you ever been so certain of something,
only to find that you were completely wrong?

It’s so liberating.

A weight of responsibility
lifts from your shoulders,
Because you make mistakes too.
You play the role of human in this production.

It’s even greater when you think you know something,
then you find out your wrong,
then you find out you were originally right in the first-place.

“Well am I really correct,
do I hold the truth of the situation,
or will my perceptions once again flip.
Now I can‘t rightfully know ANYTHING,
can I?”

This offers the greatest sense of emancipation
from the network of truth.
Weaved into web,
sticky network,
waiting to pull you in.

But upon realizing you’re not at all infallible,
your certainty gets pulled back and spread out,
the way the tide roles in and take a sand castle.

You become not only separate from the network of truth,
but you simultaneously become the network.
And knowing that you’re part of it,
allows you to rise above it; while at the same time questioning
if you really know that you’re part of it in the first place.

Epistemology – a philosophical branch closely tied to ontology that studies everything;
because everything is thought.
And the limits of thought define the boundaries of everything.

It is somewhat disheartening
to come to terms with the truth that all of these ideas thus presented
have already been thought about before.
None is wholly original.
It’s like, what use do I have writing this down when I could go read books on this topic.
Books that would map out my own ideas better than I ever could.

Not that the books know me better than I know me,
it’s that my ideas are not part of me. I don’t own the rights (I’ve yet to develop an original product).
They are part of the collective.
Thoughts and ideas are communal.
They rely on the existence of other people-generating-ideas to exist themselves.

I can’t build a house without the supplies provided to me by other people;
And the underline structure of each house will be loosely based off houses before it
and is not wholly original.
Similarly, I can’t build an idea
without the language/supplies/ideas provided to me by other people.

True independence can only be achieved upon death,
but even then
one relies on the bacteria and worms to facilitate the next step,
which is decomposition.

No one is independent, but we’re all individual.

Everyone is a snowflake,
with our own intricate pattern,
similar yet unique to the others around it,
and we’re falling into one big mound of snow.
The universe is snow.
Everything in the universe is a fluttering flake,
temporarily suspended in the fall to oblivion.

Yet, it’s only a matter of time before I find all this to be untrue.

Caroline

This is a song I wrote for my girlfriend while she was away for a month. This is what we look like when we pose for pictures:

The instruments I use are: classical guitar and banjo

I recorded it on: crappy Sony recording software

It sounds like this:

 

The Break Down

This tile, “The Break Down,” can allude to an array of different topics and directions that this blog post can escape into. For instance, I could be talking about the importance of breakdowns in a piece of metal music. Or, I might be talking about mental collapse. Maybe I’m having car trouble…

Rather, I would like to “break down” my last post so that it doesn’t go largely misunderstood. Parts of it are incredibly esoteric and other parts are written in my own word codes. Hence, I feel it necessary to “break down” my word reasons in my last poem so that I don’t experience mental collapse and, consequently, break down. I’m still going to leave some parts of the poem unanswered – as one man said in the obscenity trial of Ginsberg’s Howl, “Poetry can’t be translated into prose. That is why it is poetry.” – but I do think that there are some inherent historical examples within the poem that need mentioning. This might be moderately conceited for me to do, but so it goes. So here is the poem, again, with the director commentary turned on:

Cumming of a Creed

What we need

Is the cumming of a creed:

A doctrine of divinity that

Shakes human from slumber:

Words of thunder

Instantaneous

To the strike of wonder:

There are no seconds to count (counting time between lightning and thunder)

Between what comes forth:

And what comes fourth

Is always wonder,

Preceding

Curiosity, amazement, bafflement.

 

Wonder is the most common

Denominator amongst demigods

Such as ourselves.

 

Ourselves as barb ells

Of differing masses:

For we all possess

Sharp, measuring minds (“barbs” are sharp – “ells” measure)

With their own

Gravitational pull. (the gravitational pull of an object depends on its mass)

Impatience and

Low tolerance to time

Has left us lightwaits. (one who does not like to wait)

Forever abandon the now,

And start the next,

Forever.

 

Beginning next

This creed shall be of us,

By us,

For us,

In the Abrahamic tradition. (“…of the people, by the people, for the people…” is from the Gettysburg Address, spoken by “Abraham” Lincoln. I’m playing off the Christian, Jewish and Islamic Abrahamic traditions.   

It shall encompass

Perfection,

And end compass

Directions.

 

It shall guide us astray

To the ashtrays

Of our minds

Where thoughts are pinched out

Embers

Laying in heaps

Of perceptual filters,

Yet shielding the Formica countertop

Of life

From collecting dust.

 

It shall explode

Explode

**EXPLODE**

Upon the Hiroshima

Of humdrum humanity,

And

The Nagasaki

Of dismal dailies. (dropings of the atomic bombs in WWII)

It shall be a specter haunting. You erupt (Marx’s Communist Manifesto starts off, “There is a specter haunting Europe – the specter of communism.” Vietnam War was a war against Communists)

27 years later (amount of time between WWII and Vietnam War)

When the values

That vested you

Are vaporized off your body by

Napalm napalm napalm napalm napalm

During Vietnamese Kodak moments (famous picture of little girl with clothing burned off by napalm during the Vietnam War. Google “Vietnam napalm” and you’ll find it.)

That warp your face

Into Edvard Munch hallucinations (Edvard Munch painted “The Scream.” The facial expression in the painting looks similar to the faces in the napalm picture.)

Of harrowing beauty.

 

It shall Socratically “WHY?” you (Socratic method of asking “why?” repeatedly)

While you worry “why YOU?”

Until your ever present thoughts (“ever present” = ubiquitous)

Strip the Y U

From intellectual ubi-quity, (take away the Y and U, and your left with bi-quit. To quit twice.

And you declare “I know nothing” (quote attributed to Socrates)

For the second time.

 

It shall deflower your comprehension

With Joycean oceans (James Joyce used a lot of poetic codes and riddles in his writing)

Of cryptic cry,

And it won’t call the next day.

Or the next.

 

It shall be

Crowley (Aleister Crowley, but also an allusion of a circling crow of death)

Circling above

The flower of truth,

Waiting to descend

Once “what thou wilt” (“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” – Aleister Crowley)

Wilts petals into wonder.

 

And word thunder

Will rumble

As long as

Tongues tumble,

And tongues tumble

All down to the bottom,

Because even this

Fall has an autumn.

Cumming of a Creed

What we need

Is the cumming of a creed:

A doctrine of divinity that

Shakes human from slumber:

Words of thunder

Instantaneous

To the strike of wonder:

There are no seconds to count

Between what comes forth:

And what comes fourth

Is always wonder,

Preceding

Curiosity, amazement, bafflement.

 

Wonder is the most common

Denominator amongst demigods

Such as ourselves.

 

Ourselves as barb ells

Of differing masses:

For we all possess

Sharp, measuring minds

With their own

Gravitational pull.

 

Impatience and

Low tolerance to time

Has left us lightwaits.

Forever abandon the now,

And start the next,

Forever.

 

Beginning next

This creed shall be of us,

By us,

For us,

In the Abrahamic tradition.

 

It shall encompass

Perfection,

And end compass

Directions.

 

It shall guide us astray

To the ashtrays

Of our minds

Where thoughts are pinched out

Embers

Laying in heaps

Of perceptual filters,

Yet shielding the Formica countertop

Of life

From collecting dust.

 

It shall explode

Explode

**EXPLODE**

Upon the Hiroshima

Of humdrum humanity,

And

The Nagasaki

Of dismal dailies.

 

It shall be a specter haunting. You erupt

27 years later

When the values

That vested you

Are vaporized off your body by

Napalm napalm napalm napalm napalm

During Vietnamese Kodak moments

That warp your face

Into Edvard Munch hallucinations

Of harrowing beauty.

 

It shall Socratically “WHY?” you

While you worry “why YOU?”

Until your ever present thoughts

Strip the Y U

From intellectual ubi-quity,

And you declare “I know nothing”

For the second time.

 

It shall deflower your comprehension

With Joycean oceans

Of cryptic cry,

And it won’t call the next day.

Or the next.

 

It shall be

Crowley

Circling above

The flower of truth,

Waiting to descend

Once “what thou wilt”

Wilts petals into wonder.

 

And word thunder

Will rumble

As long as

Tongues tumble,

And tongues tumble

All down to the bottom,

Because even this

Fall has an autumn.

“Bad Fences Make Bad Neighbors”

Burrr... It just got a little frosty in here.

This is my first post in about a week because of my six-day work week and all my free time spent either with my girlfriend or working on the prospects of writing a Holy Book. I have a poetic introduction to this (most serious joke) book in the works which I will eventually post, but in the meantime this is a piece I did last year that I will post for the sake of saving this blog from lapsing into a full on coma.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall”

During epiphanies of disinterest with the self.

Something there is, in moments of clarity,

That doesn’t love the big blinding barricades

Constructed from the bricks of right or wrong,

This way or that, A or B, true or false…

Stones of perceived mathematical objectivity.

Language is the foreman of such mental masonry.

When courage is gathered to climb over these walls,

Leaving behind one’s Humpty Dumpty fears,

The ego erodes to uncover the bottom layer:

A layer deeper than the crust of character and

Even deeper than the mantle of one’s mannerisms;

Down to the pineal core where one finds that

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”

Impromptu

I tried writing a quick poem under five minutes with whatever came to my head first. I was sort-of inspired by Gertrude Stein’s stream-of-consciousness style and Ginsberg’s “first thought, best thought”, although this misses the mark of those poetic prophets.

 

If it doesn’t burn

You should have no problem

Interrupting erupting embers

With your cold touch,

Shift with clutch,

Don’t take much of such

With a grain of salt… halt.

 

Give it a break

For time-breach sake,

Don’t make – if you can’t relate

 

Come back around,

With walls of sound,

Beat to the ground.

Compound and compensate

For what you can’t make;

Two hands will shake

To seal one’s fate.

 

Ambiguity spawns ingenuity,

Embellished with stupidity

Cuz I don’t have this planed

Man.

 

Make the consonants crack

By loosening slack

Between word rhythms.

It’s culinary for your soul kitchen.

 

Often,

It don’t take enough

To pull a diamond from the rough

So either keep pressing on

Or call my bluff.