Every now and again I wax poetic....

[oneirophrenia]

This doesn't happen very often anymore. I prettymuch burnt out the poetic center of my brain years ago writing neo-Romantic tripe so saturated with hyperextended metaphors excised from Classical muythology that even I can no longer comprehend just what the fuck I was trying to accomplish at the time....In more recent years, I've only dabbled in the art sporadically, always focusing these days on incredibly minimalistic, ritualistic Oriental forms such as haiku and tanka. Once in a while I scrape a rubaiyat out of my brainpan, but lately even that has become far, far too sizable and complex for my tastes. I can't even write a damned couplet anymore without hearing the ghosts of Thoreau and Basho whispering in my ear, "Simplify! Simplify!" While the rest of my writing becomes ever more complex, my verse capabilities have compacted themselves to the point where anything larger or more intricate than a tanka poem seems wasteful and painfully overwrought.

So here's one I wrote tonight at work, with a certain someone in mind:

Neko

The moon's gone down, now
night will soak up the last warmth:
come in, be at ease--
I'll heat you up some milk and
make a place for you to rest.

In the white morning
you'll stretch and preen just out of
reach, purr by the door,
and stalk the sun across the
sky and bring it home to me.

Comments

[dadanights.livejournal.com]

Much of the draft [of Gravity's Rainbow] was done in Mexico. "I was so fucked up while I was writing it," Pynchon said, "that now I go back over some of those sequences and I can't figure out what I could have meant."

that "now" was before publication of GR, referring to an earlier, more fucked up, draft.

it's funny when you read your old shit and a completely different person comes across on the page than you remember being.

[oneirophrenia.livejournal.com]

I read my old shit and I think of myself: "Dude...you were such a wanker!"

I *wish* I could say I was as fucked up as Pynchon was when he was writing Gravity's Rainbow, but all of that swill that I produced while I was in college--and let me tell you, I produced a HUGE amount of swill...enough to fill nearly a megabyte of disk space just with *text*--was written while I was nothing more than a bored, lonely, protogoth college student with a fascination for old Roman writers, Greek mythology, and Percy Shelley. Needless to say, the wank content was simply astronomical.

I may have to post some of it someday just so that others can make fun of it...which is all it really deserves, after all! But, hey, some of it's so bad it's actually funny.