Pretentious poem of the month - Don't read it, buy it in sev

[Dhul Fiqar]

.....slowing to a trickle.
All hands to the hammer and sickle.

Credit will no longer be accepted at the Beta Bar. The VHS Village is open for business. The red star on your jacket is fading. But don't worry. You can buy a new one for only $9.99 and we'll throw in a copy of 'The Wealth of the Nations'.

Your economic theories are no longer realistic. No one thinks like you any more. No one likes to think OF you any more. Your history is over. But don't worry. You can buy a new one in 666 easy payments. It's ours.

Conform up to a point. Consume anything on this list. Don't be unorthodox. Don't be orthodox. Be the flavour of the month. Be the newest sensation. A dull, burning sensation. Be just enough to repeat. Never be so much that you create.

Now, take off your pants. We may have missed something. Something forbidden. Something you cannot consume. Something we don't produce. Something we don't control. Something we don't want you to want. Something that doesn't further our interests. Something we cannot understand, dominate, or even see.

Something, indeed.

What we sell is the wonderful sensation of nothing. Less real than even the taste of water, as thin as the smell of air.

We sell you the pleasure in buying.
My pretentious poem................. is rapidly dying.

--- G.



(Edited by Dhul Fiqar at 9:57 pm on Jan. 29, 2003)


(Edited by Dhul Fiqar at 10:22 pm on Jan. 29, 2003)

[Pete]

:) Good Comrade, I think it will be better when I am awake and read it aloud, so more criticizm then!

[Dhul Fiqar]

Thank you comrade, vague praise from half-sleeping people is more than enough for now :)

I must say that I wrote it in a fit of histeria over how much stuff I've written and just thrown away over the years, and decided to just open a browser and vent. It didn't take long at all, and the level of quality is thus probably questionable...

--- G.

[canikickit]

Free association garbage. Same type of crap I come out with, I love it!

Like Rastas do, with there free association shit. A lot of Lee Perry's later songs are just him talking off the top of his head.

[Pete]

There is this guy that picks up papers that he sees on the street and reads them as a kind of Comedy act. I read about him in this magazine today.

[mentalbunny]

Dhul, I think it's great, very original, unlike anything I've seen before anyway!

If you've got any more stuff please either post it here or email it to me (look on my profile for email addy).

[Panamarisen]

Guess it´s a very good piece of poetry-in-prose. No wonder, anyway, Dhul, IMO you are a writer in disguise!


¡HASTA LA VICTORIA SIEMPRE!

[canikickit]

He's disguised as a stoner.

[Dhul Fiqar]

Thank you guys :)

I'm a little self-conscious about writing anything except dry articles for magazines, because that's all I've written for so long. For the past few years I've been writing reviews and articles and all kinds of crap, I sometimes fear I've lost the capacity to write what I really like to write. Everything like that I write just seems SO damn pretentious to me after I sit down and read it over. Maybe that's inherent, I dunno.

I guess I've pulled off my Mission Impossible rubber face mask, but there's an even bigger stoner under that ;)

Anyway, here's a more traditional one, but it's not as good as I think it could have been, I'm sooooo out of practice


-------
'Asunder'

I've seen the world written on your face
What a lonely, dark and heartless place.
Your blood was cheap and ripe for the taking,
Was that the point that you were making?

There comes a time to make a choice
Fear was my reason, and not your voice
Yet you still found your only friend,
The dark deep blue, a final end.




(Edited by Dhul Fiqar at 12:20 pm on Jan. 31, 2003)

[canikickit]

I know I was just talking to you, but...

I think that poetry is pretentious, I'd even go as far as saying, on occassion that poetry is crap. I think it is easy to write what would be percieved as a good poem, but poetry is too personal to always touch people.

I don't know, I think it's one of those indefinable things, where you end up contradicting yourself...

"Our lives had crossed on a random fellowship,
our minds were bonded by a distinct type of mellowness."

You know, it means something to me, but to another its just some words which happen to rhyme.

Sometimes the appreciation can lie in the rhyming, sometimes the sentiment and sometimes both.

Then there's also the musical aspect. Some songs could easily be appreciated as poetry, and vice versa.

Anyway, it's all bullshit.

Nevertheless I think writing poetry is good for what is termed the soul.

[mentalbunny]

Dhul I like your stuff, especially the prose-y stuff (I'm not a huge fan of rhyming poetry).

[Dhul Fiqar]

Good thoughts canikickit, and thank you mentalbunny :)

I leave you with a one liner I wrote specifically to freak a certain person out. It worked, lol
--------

I wrote your name on the wall in my own blood. Like a postcard: "Thinking of you."
--- Gunnar

(Edited by Dhul Fiqar at 7:55 pm on Jan. 31, 2003)

[Lefty]

Cool, Dhul. I like poetry in prose...didn't canikickit do something like that in chit chat? Kind of beat-poet-ish, which is awesome.

[Dhul Fiqar]

Yup, and his was better, too :biggrin:

--- G.

[mentalbunny]

can you put a link to canikickit's stuff in this thread? And I reckon that you are in the same league, even if canikickit's stuff is incredible 9which I'm sure it is :wink:) cos yours is such good quality!

I wish I could write like you, I have a more Sylvia Plath/Carol Ann Duffy style.

[Dhul Fiqar]

Since canikickit posts more than... eh.... a post-making machine on steroids (or something else that posts a lot and doesn't sound so far-fetched), I've had trouble finding the exact thread I was thinking of.

Here's another link to some of his stuff

http://www.che-lives.com/cgi/community/top...um=21&topic=344 (http://www.che-lives.com/cgi/community/topic.pl?forum=21&topic=344)

(Edited by Dhul Fiqar at 10:30 pm on Feb. 1, 2003)

[mentalbunny]

Wow, canikickit's good, but i reckon you are in the same league! You are both incredible. thanks for the link

[Dhul Fiqar]

Aww,thankshttp://smileyonline.free.fr/images/gif/classique/vignette1/thumbnails/blush_gif.gif

(that's a blush smiley in case it was hard to decypher)

Could you link some of your stuff?

--- G.

[mentalbunny]

My stuff? Shit, it's all really crap but ok:

http://www.che-lives.com/cgi/community/top...ic=241&start=10 (http://www.che-lives.com/cgi/community/topic.pl?forum=21&topic=241&start=10)

There's also some stuff on page 3 of that thread, but none of it is very good.

Some more recent stuff:

On The guy I’m in love with, telling me he’s in love with someone else:

So fragile,
Like a porcelain doll
Coughing up blood.
Heart stopping
Pulse slowing and
Fainting
Alone, cut off
Floating in an endless
Void, heavy
Vacuum squeezing me
Dry of salt.
Let me disappear and
Cease to have feelings:
“He doesn’t love me”

Like drunkenness
Stumbling, heavy headed
Into locked toilet door
Arms weak, legs lost
Confused by blurry world
Mass of fuzzy colour
Thoughts crowding head:
“Why, fucking why?”

Evening Primrose Oil: Early-Morning Ritual
A glistening globule of glowing glycerine
Warm lemon light trapped inside a transparent prison.
You are small in my hand but big in my throat.
The ease with which you slide down surprises me,
As though you want your shell to dissolve,
Let your essence disperse
And clear my skin
Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do -
Stop my pre-menstrual spots and balance my hormones?
Fat chance, but I’ll take you anyway.

there you go. it's not very good but i feel like i've been living a half life recently so i haven't been very creative.

[Dhul Fiqar]

I know it probably sounds disengenious at first after you praised my stuff, but that is some REALLY good stuff there. I particularly like the one about the jerk who broke your heart, full of emotion and yet detached in a bewildered kind of way. If that makes any sense...

I'm not sure what kind of pills that last one was wrote about, but the first part of it sounded a lot like what I've felt about my substance abuse in the past. Sort of an ode to a chemical, I love it :)

--- G.

[mentalbunny]

I'm touched! It's basically only the first draft but I can't figure out what to do with it. I wrote that back in december and i'm still living with it in my viens, the detachemtn comes and goes, at the moment it's here.

Evening Primrose Oil is stuff women take to help balance their hormones arund "that time of the month". my mum and i had a prject to write loads of poems over the xmas hols and this was the best one that came out of my effort (of which the grand total of poems was 2!). I prefer writing about an object and attaching feelings to it, i find it easier to get my point across.

i'm really touched by your praise, i think both those poems are ok but nothing compared to yours and ciki's.

[Panamarisen]

My personal appreciation: Dhul, mentalbunny, just elaborate what you already got, what you already know, which is really good. Just don´t satisfy with what´s already achieved. Just don´t go after another poem until you´re really sure about your last one. Just remember one of the main points in Arts got to do with avoiding the useless, not adding it... I mean, sacrificing in search of greatness guess should be the main point.

canikickit, IMO poetry, as Arts -generally speaking-, is not pretentious, and has nothing to do with personal appreciations, but with true knowledge and sensibility about the subject, which is quite different.
The musical aspect of a poem actually doesn´t regard to rhyming or not, but to an inner idea of a musical sense. And even if you are not aware of it, canikickit, you got it inside your poems. To rhyme or not just belongs to the external form of the idea, to the external form of the poem in itself...


¡HASTA LA VICTORIA SIEMPRE!

[canikickit]

I find a lot of art is pretentious. Art of any kind.

Particularily with poetry, I feel that any yahoo can write a few lines, and say this is a poem. It doesn't even have to rhyme, sometimes people seem to indulge in the abstract simply for the sake of it being abstract.

I think it is a difficult discussion. A lot of art does not appeal to me, because I feel I can see through it.

For example very simplistic drawings which are supposed to represent something, or shapes in a gallery which represent man's battle against nature.

I don't know, it's not something which I can express, just certain things appeal to me.

With regards to my own "poetry", I wouldn't regard them as poems. They are posts, they are bullshit, I wrote them when I sat down in front of my computer, and decided to write a thread. I just started typing and that was it.

[mentalbunny]

Thanks for the advice panamarisen, but I don't have any creative energy right now so it'll be a while before I can work on it.