Mint & Juleps

Experimenting--minting--Experiminting--

--Can it be a verb?--

--Mint & juleps--summer tea--

Flowers arranged in soft light, twinkling fireflies are captured in masonic jars, they are used to light the entire night--

--only trees to cover love making--

--love making--making love--

--love is a creative act, something built--does that mean you can contract the work out?--

--Love Architects: designing their dream loves, but always committed to other people’s--

What if there were love poets greater than Shakespeare, Keats, Shelly, Byron, but they were too busy having sex?--

--sex--text--love poems were the original sexting--

--People prised Byron because he burned metaphorical--

--Egyptians were writing on papyrus about how good a girl looked in those silky, silky robes--don’t believe me?--look it up--check out poetry pre-circa 1850 and tell me that humans haven’t always been animals--

--Do animals write poetry?--what would that even look like?--would it be in another language?--

What language do animals tell poetry?--Is it vocal, physical, mental, emotional?--Is it some beautiful combination of all of them?--

--Is that the dirty secret?--Love poems written by animals are written with their bodies--

--They produce young and no one is ashamed by it--

A boy masturbates because he is told it is normal, masturbation stays with him his whole life, unlike his love poems--

Love poems aren’t normal--

--love poems are normal--

--this isn’t a love poem--this is an experiment

Kalpa

Kalpa                                                 Kalpa
A world ends                                     A world begins
Kalpa                                                 Kalpa
Not a sound                                       Renewal
Not a sight                                         Rebirth
No thing                                            Rebirthing
Kalpa                                                 Kalpa
An age passes                                    A singing across the stars
A youth passes                                  A boiling in the verse
Youth passes                                      A crying that isn't shameful
Passed                                                Filled
Past.                                                   Full
Kalpa                                                 Kalpa
Light falls                                          Suns rise
Night sleeps                                       Dews drop
Blight leaves                                      Stars shoot
Fight gives                                         Souls twine
Sight dims                                          Lights shine
Kalpa                                                 Kalpa
This is the way the world ends          I celebrate myself and sing myself
This is the way the world ends          I celebrate myself and sing myself
Bang                                                  Song
Whimper                                           Singing
Kalpa                                                 Kalpa

Night Sighs

Lascivious. Vicious. Luscious. Lust.
List. Lost. Low. Lone. Long. Night.
Newt. Cricket. Croak it.
Toad.

Lascivious swamp sisters
Provide vicious cures for lovers' qualms.
Luscious hips help lovers forget old lovers;
Lustful rutting helps new lovers to calm.
List, oh children, list to the sisters;
Lose yourselves to the Lost Girls,
Lie low with their brood my brothers;
Lie long and alone till your longing unfurls.
Night love is the love nature loves best.
Newts and Crickets make love through song and throating;
Their moaning crooning longing in its purest;
Toads make their need known by croaking.

Hunting for Friendships

Hunt. Hint. Hight. Height. Hit. Hot.
Hoot. Hood. Clit. Clove. Close.
Close. Choice. Choose.
Whose?

Hunting through empty rooms with forgotten wares,
Hinting company and friends galore,
Glinting relics of bygone days, lost in the days' affairs;
Highting friends and lovers that they adored .

Falling from a great and terrible life,
Hitting reasons all the way down.
Pounding into circumstantial strife.
Hooting out my melancholy sound,

Cloves smoked between aisles and car seats.
Closing shop for the first last time.
Getting close and closer to getting close.
Choices never waver when they're wrong.
Choose an ending.
Whose?

Ocean Silent

Silence. Silliness. Soulless. Bondage.
Breakage. Storms. Seas. Floods. Tempest.
Tossing. Hoping. Breaking. Bucking.
Broken.

Silence.
Upon the wave-tossed ocean
From the mouths that Fate has spun
Silliness abounds upon the decks,
Until, soullessly, home come the wrecks.
Bound in bondage they come ashore,
Breaking oaths with those that they adore.
Storms are ever brokering
Betwixt the seas and their offerings.
Flooding their wasted depths
With tempests of seafarers' bitter regrets:
Tossing in bed alone next to their spouse
Hoping against hope they'd only reach out,
Breaking the silence with a leg or some such,
Bucking in surprise at the softest touch.
Broken in twain upon the mast
Is no less what happened in the past.

A Kind of a Sonnet

Little purple elephants are dancing now,
Purging slights against the starry prancings now,
Broken musings on a bathroom stall defacing now,
Something sticks inside my casing now.

Fighting fast and losing faster now.
Learning how to be a lie after now/
Learning how to be alive after now.
Flustered fights are fixtures now,
Plastered cross the pubescent pictures now.

Empty, endless mind is ending now,
Draining down the drain unending now.
Scaring scarcely any, scaredy cats abound now,
Founding findings through absconding friends around now.

Colored crazy not yet now,
He said, she said, they said inside my head now.

Remember to ever be.

Unmindful. Unheedful. Wrathful. Hateful.
Successful. Shitful. Sinful. Sightful.
Kindful. Happyful. Sadful. Madful.
Helpful. Hopeful.

Remember to ever be:

Unmindful of the screaming kids,
Unheedful of the souls that dream,
Wrathful of the mind that builds the pyramids,
Hateful of the eyes that gleam.

Successful types in business snipes,
Filling their seats with shitfuls till they're threadbare,
Sinful thoughts building prototypes,
Filling the skies with sightfuls of nightmares.

Kindfully abrogate responsibility,
Happyfully take away another's joys
Sadfully inform the next of kin of life's absurdity
Madfully execute those in your employ.

I hope you find this present guide so helpful
As you ever were so artfully hopeful.

And remember to ever be.

Life upon the Floors

Deep. Delve. Dove. Door. Shore. Shoal.
Shell. Shelved. Shelled. Shelling. Selling.
Barter. Garter. Bitter. Biter. Bitter.
Fighter.

Deep beneath the ocean floor
There lives a witch
And nothing more
Delving deep in midnight pitch
Plumbing depths of starry life
Seeking doves in drunken ditch
Making sacrifice to love & strife
Tempered by being called a bitch.

Doctors open on the ocean floor;
In succession, gawkers gather,
Standing grimly, seeking solace on the shore
Gazing into sunken shoals they flatter,
Finding shells of things that we abhor:
Hard-won husks from sunken hearts a-tatter,
Children shelved, their tearful smiles ignored,
Till they're shelled by parents too grown to matter.

Selling hollow, younger faces
To prisons, patrons, paters galore;
Bartering their youthful, gainful paces
Until their garters gather something more,
Garnering only just enough attention
To retire their aching sphincters from the fore
Collecting their ever-rotting pension
From off the fustian floor.

Abandoning their young upon the floor.
Too cold to leave, too grown to sleep,
Picking themselves from off the floor.
Somehow finding ways to keep
Their bitter bitters inside their helpless sores
Driving them to biting hands that leaps
To feed their bitter maws something more.
Fighting the urge that makes them weep
And turns babes a-baeuty into naught but gore.
I think I'll sleep upon the floor.

Funny Hats

Dead. Deal. Dolt. Dole.
Hole. Whole. Heap. Peep. Creep.
Crawl. Beg. Utter. Shutter. Shudder.
Sunder.

The dead have never struck a deal.
They cannot sing to hear
Nor cry to laugh nor see their way to feel.
And dolts are no more better
While seeking gainful occupation
Pursuing doles inside of holes
From churches' indoctrination.
Receiving sinners' sins and pates,
A heap of bodies awaiting mates
Peeping creepily from among the shores
They cannot crawl from you anymore
They beg and barter, pawning souls
Uttering pious hymns while they are consoled
By stuttering men in funny hats
Who shutter any friendly spates
All the while I start to shudder.
As the world begins to sunder.

The pulse (an early experiment with iambs)

The pulse

The beat

A hope

A deed

Requite me

Requite me

A peer

The form

Too short

For this

Keep trying

It’s there!

Oh no…

It’s gone

Again.

Requite me.

Heroines

Juice. Joys. Jealous. Jealousy. Heresy. Hera.
     Hero. Heroic. Stoic. Stoicism.
Pragmatism. Practical. Practice. Practice. Practice.
     Break. Back. Balk.

The juiciest joys, the sullenest sighs,
Make jealous the zealous, who cry,
Jealously: "Heresy!"
Who know nothing
No, not a thing
of Hera or heroes
or how heroines arose.
From sudden, blitzkrieg heroics
To silent, passive stoics
A practice of stoicism
Never led to pragmatism
A practical exchange
With ever the same refrain
Which stems from the adage:
Practice, practice, practice.
Break you sullen creatures
Back with your stead-fast features
Balk, I beg you
"Never," said you.
Very well.
Stand atop your mountain
And build a better bastion.
I wish you well.

Association Experiment IV

Work, work, work, woke, woe,

woes, walls, was, wars, roars,

rose, ruse, rues, rise, ryes, lies,

leyward, weyward, woeward, westward,

toward, forward, foreward, forewarned,

post warned, fore word, prologue,

what’s past, what’s post, what’s now,

what is, what, what, what, w-

Work, work, work

Work wearies the weary soul

Work wearies the wary old.

None to do

And none to hold

The wayward, weyward sister.

Onward and froward

She casts her Self

She castes herself

Oneward and upward

She finds some help

She founds some Hell.

She warns no one

She warps a nun

Down and down she fell

Until she knelled

by Adriel Ruben with Translations by Miles Boucher

Our first attempt at a literal translation:

Don’t come back to me (A)

Don’t tell me those angry words (B)

I don’t swallow this face of yours (B)

Face that lies to me (visage?) (A)

Go, go tell every one that I am foolish/a fool,

Go and take advantage (bem=really enjoy) of your exaggeration!

It is in your mistakes/error wherein lies my solace,;

(From) In Your fall (verb(reflects))--the Face of Despair (shows).

Go and keep your infantile/childish journey.

Go and try to free yourself (reflexive) from your kharma/lot in life/destiny/fortune/fate!

With this attitude/behavior you become more evil/vile/mean/nasty,

And your arrogance refines itself (reflexive);

Go and keep with those confrontation*/affronting/insulting/outrageous words -

I will be stronger at the end of this road/journey,

Because it is for yourself that you make ready your grave*/pit/hole/burrow

Every day smaller, your road becomes.

Go and get satiated with your injustice!

Go and show why I am still alive.

It’s in your laugh that poke/tease/incite/provoke/induce my anger/ire

And the anger/revenge my life’s only motif/ motivation/motivator/reason…

Go and cry/sing? your sorrows,

Go and taste/savor your fallen/bankruptcy/collapse/crash/fall-ure.

And Slowly/bit by bit/Little by little you die in your own tears,

You make your death my only reward.

Already there are a lot of interesting problems to solve.
The first stanza, we looked at a pretty quick translation and then how the rhyme scheme was going to have to syn up.
In stanzas two and three, we got into some nitty gritty on what word was most important in the stanza to give the sense of the line.
For example: in the third line, solace was better than the other word--consolation--and therefore, the rest of the stanza has to rhyme with solace.
The rest were hard and fast not worrying so much about specifics, but creating vocabulary from which to pull in order to fill in the lines or complete the rhyme scheme and keep the sense of the words.
Whoo!
This was a surprisingly fun first draft and already so many problems to work through.
I'm very excited for this project and hope I can do it justice.
This may just be the first, which is scary, and exhilarating.

An excerpt from one of my latest stories: Haunted, a tale about death, madmen, and other symbols of love.

It all started with a gun to the face.

A bullet to be more precise.

I don’t know calibers.

But, it was a big one.

The End.

I stood over his corpse.

He was not a pretty one.

Not that I had ever met a pretty corpse.

You understand.

It was the polite thing to say: You’re not a pretty corpse.  

I realized that I hadn’t said it aloud.

You aren’t a pretty corpse. He didn’t seem to care. He didn’t move or blush or anything.

I looked around. No one had heard me. I felt embarrassed anyway.  

I blushed.

I coughed and no sound escaped.

Sheepishly, I looked around the room. It was an ordinary room. Ordinary wallpaper with an ordinary design and ordinary peeling edges. Ordinary furniture with ordinary dust and just a bit off center. Ordinary blood splatter, brains and viscera glistening. Ordinary corpse, it really was quite ordinary. Boring to be honest.

Just the sort of place where I would throw a party.

The corpse hadn't exactly dressed up for the affair, far from dapper. I would say he was unremarkable in life and merely pathetic in death. His suit was too large, frumpy even. It had patches everywhere except where it might be considered fashionable. His hair (what was left attached to the skull) was thin and reedy like straw. I could not make out his face because it was no longer there. Technically it was there and there and there. It was technically everywhere: on the walls, the floor, the carpet.

Oh

The carpet looked ordinary too.

Not knowing what the polite thing to say would be I said the only thing I could think:

Nice face painting. I nodded.

It seemed the right thing to say. Given the circumstances.

Association experiment III

Goodness. Godness. Gold. Guild. Guilded.

Guiled. Beguiled. Behaved. Behooved.

Behold. Behind. Beknight. Bespeak.

Kind. Dread. Dead. Doom. Moon. New.

Ghoul

Speak. Sick. Dick. Dyke. Poke. Pike.

Pile. Pill. Will. Wall. War. Was. Walk.

Talk. Tall. Tire. Tired. Wired. Warred.

Good as gold

They said of me.

Polite as of old

And what a delight to see.

"A pleasure in class"

They wanted me to be.

"A right royal ass"

was all I could think of me.

They calmly all fled

Through kindness to me

Filling me with dread

And showed me what a good boy should be.

Association experiment II

Fear. Far. Cry. Cripple. Crow. Cry.

Creep. Reap. Row. Row. Ruse.

Lose. Lock. Lie. Life.

Lies lacing love inside my mind

Babbling within others of my kind

Laughing at my innards in a coffin of my making

My Mother hangs the decorations

Of my anti-celebration

Inciting incidents left, right, and

Sent her away from me and mind

Hardly matters in the long

Haul away the engagement

Ring the wedding knells

Pack up the baby carriage

With all the wasted semen

Pissed it all away

To those who couldn’t care for me

I’m spending every dime I have to see

A broken, run down

Accident

Waiting to happen for me

Form experiment

Broken

Cannot see the rainbow, only the storm

The light shines down like

radiation on the peat black

harrowing that is my soul

As lime green skeletal

fingers claw through the

over ripe melon called my

flesh. I hear it

A crying, calling, cawing

that heralds the end

of a life too bewildered

When is a hug considered rape?

How is a handshake like murder?

How can biting the hand

that reached for you be wrong?

It belongs to the me.

I don't know him.

Here I sit at the end

of yet another apocalypse

and I have to say:

I'm unimpressed.

I expected a bit more

A bit more melodrama

A bit more flash

A bit more whimper

Instead all I got

was this crappy T-shirt

that reads like a tombstone:

Here Lies Fuck All...

So I chalk it up to bad luck that

I didn't stay dead this time

The classroom that is my parent's

house calls me home

home to another.

As the smoke

rises I breathe

the fragments of

deep charred

flesh. How

I have missed

the smell.

It's mine.

My skin flakes away becoming blackened ash

rising on the sighs of all the friends I never kept

and I can't help but wonder

Do I deserve so blessed a fate

My mother applauds: the sound breaks my bones

My father laughs: I flutter an instant more

My sister reaches: I throw my glass frame to the floor.

Thankfully I shatter

Someone is sweeping up the

pieces

I hope they know what to

do with it

It takes a special sort

of know how to jettison

something into space, but that

isn't the only void to drop me in

In a pinch, the

ocean does twice as well.

Shake me out over the deepest part

leave immediately,

don't look back,

save for the scenery

Let simmer for

thirty minutes.

Let the void chill and serve me

Trochee experimentation

Blessing

Pulsing

Digging

Rutting

Fighting

Kissing

Hugging

Holding

Loving

Peace

Association Experiment

Beauty. bees. best. less. kind. carol.

cool. look. see. find. found.

care. king. king. offspring. heir. love.

seen. sound. soon. sign. stem.

grow. green. growth. grown.