Insomnia in a Sty

The red digits from somewhere behind taunt stoically,
Their cold light dancing before the eyes which refuse to abjure
A desolation of memories - each spawned in boredom or fascination
Each painted with equal abandon. As the stench of condensed data
Flings picadores at an absent mind, obligation rebels,
Crying duty! order! reason!
I must ask -
Who ever paid obligation mind?

Ben Finkel
December 13, 2007

Kneeling upon Return

Why is it that this beautiful sky will slice through my mirth to something more somber, something without measure?
Why can people never do the same? Make me stop and stare and drink my eyes,
feel my cloth crawl across my skin as the greys and blues swirl and sunder, painting sadness and glory in transient wisps
of moisture and memory! For to pierce the chasm of abyssal shifting shapes - that are dreams and constructs and awesome fears -
would that not be love? And now, for love's sake, I hesitate to see the sacred shadows of my dusk, my hour, my irrevocable divide,
as they paint their shrouded grounds and azure spaces to frame the purity of impurity's form.

Benjamin Finkel
October 10, 2007

PfS Rises Again

Here we go. Day one of college, and I've decided to resurrect this puppy. Leave comments, as always, even though you never do. Without ado:

Beginning to Live in the House of Sleep

There is a space between the shimmering plane
Of gridded bones
And the deadened wall
Of severed fibers
Where our breath, silent mist, seeps and curls to a cloned and bright facade
Where identical slabs and identical doors
Barricade our fellows -
Our fellows!

This army of strangers,
These sneering eyes,
They claim our own and fell? How can they
Beside their shapes
Attempt to know and spell
Our histories, our fortunes,
Our lusts and longs and nears?
And yet we must instruct them, while we ourselves our taught
Not of spheres and paths and books of slang
But of the families of familiars that our shells have wrought.

And our misty breath mingles, amidst a hall of statues,
Each of the same form, and yet
Of different shapes entirely.

Ben Finkel
September 29th, 2007

20s at Ransom and Erev Tamid

Eventually, this will resume again. In the meantime, something from mid-June that I just dug up, and a poem from last Purim, when I saw the most beautiful sunset.

20s at Ransom

Trapped in glass
words of masters
scream in dignity
Battling a stillborn brawl.
an old war of the present
citing and projecting.
The field is silent and vibrant
near and ancient
new and alien.
Which holds us?
Where have we taken
each other this round?
Everything depends - my lands in order.
______

Erev Tamid

The clouds have lost their luster
But after a moment's metamorphose,
Transform into sleek ravens, black
And violet against the darkened azure,
Whither the brazened and ambered moon ascends.

Dissected, a whole, a crescent against
The dying irridescence of spectrum
The rising majesty of umber
And rises and pearls, wrapping itself
In the olive memory of banded murk,
Remembering
The shadow
Of Earth
Written in darkness.

Erev Shalosh-Esrei b'Adar
Ben Finkel, March 3 2007

Assonance

Obviously, no longer daily. Here's a work in progress:

Fabricated Capricorn approaches apricots;
Valiantly dallying, rally shallow thoughts
Radiating gradients relating raiding dots.

It's harder than it looks.

Ben Finkel

Edited in 2010.

Gully Foyle in the Ice

When I was young
I climbed the cliffs of Denmark
Spying elves in every copse.
In the mist, I was one.

On limbs I climbed above the clouds
Youthful, I trampled spires of ice
Which, innocent, shattered on the ground
But then I saw the pane:

A frigid window of ice
Born of a web
Shining tall among the shards.
As I watched, it fell,
Its might undermining.

Later, I read a book -
It told me that all leaders
Are freaks, born of
Imperfection.

Ben Finkel
April 29th, 2007

Reciprocal

I read - this morning
that

HUMAN SIN IS REAL

and I thought
to myself
aloud

/How strange!
a sinner./

Ben Finkel
April 19th 2007. Posted April 23rd.

I Lost Count At Six Billion

When I first started to read
The entire book said:
"Once upon a time"
In monotony, block typeset.

It was one page,
One side,
But then a tale flourished
And calligraphy laced and I
Was happy, enchanted with the
Weaving.

But it did not stop.
The words kept curling
The trees dying.
The story churned and spilled
And I peeked to the next page
And the next
And no end could be found.

Ben Finkel
April 23rd, 2007
(I'm sorry, there is no poem for Friday. Schedule was weird. I will post Thursday's later)

From Wish to Wish

As I raise my eyes to greet the solitary wall
Of gray
I search
And claw, to decipher the foreign
Familiar
Shapes of fancy that scowl and giggle from their
Loft,
But I am thirsty and thrusting my arms -
Water in pails
Flying, unbroken - and striking down the words
And neither of my needs.

Ben Finkel
March 17th, 2007

Rumpelstiltskin

Violet, the silver spindles twine
amidst each other and the spectrum
air, weaving patters so beautiful
and complex that I, observer, can only
admire. For I know that behind the
spiders, half-glimpsed fingers slam
and paint with Word. Their works
are webs to my threadbare cloth
but I hope yet to spin.

Ben Finkel
April 16th, 2007 (posted April 18)

Stonehenge sways in the wind,
Cloth billowing about under an amber sky
And pale, bare ground.
Metal clad in vacuum,
Pilgrims wander still
To the signs of a mystery
As lost to them as us.


Ben Finkel
April 13th, 2007. A Friday!

Hello?

It's modestly hilarious that no one comments on these posts, these days. I want criticism! So much of this stuff sucks, so I want to know what the gold (or silver, or iron, or stuff that isn't covered in crap) is. What, if anything, is interesting? What sounds lyrical? What would you want to read aloud?

Hell, do you read it? If not, this is wasted effort. Art is worth less without audience. Although, fortunately, never worthless.

Ben

Between the Sun and His Collarbone

There is no purpose, per se,
For the marbles reflecting across the chill,
But as destination, frozen and fluctuating,
Reveals itself to identity,
The obstacle is apparent. Fatal.
And they pour themselves into their
Murderer,
Forgetting and dismissing the journey
Between the sun and the collarbone.

Ben Finkel
April 12th, 2007

Rigor Mortis

Clockwork, the army of hands
Crash down their typesets
Proclaiming the world
By their slanted eyes.

But the gear-mess slips,
Tongues speak the wrong morphemes
Eyes project the matter behind them
The beast topples.

But the hands keep sieging,
The eyes searching,
Never noticing that they are dead.

Ben Finkel
April 11th, 2007

Yarr

I was told not to write something embarrasing to the blog, so my options are rather limited. Visit the Bustopia podcast. Ep6 will be released any day now (as soon as I stop being pwned by homework and edit it). bustopia.blogspot.com. Play starcraft, it is good for you.


-Noobulous

Stress

Accidental definition
Of fitness
Bound us to another spectrum
(of our myriad)
In it fits the world, so far as we can
See;
So much compressed into
A seven-tiered arc,
Excluding the thousand, thousand
Wavelengths in which reality relaxes.

Ben Finkel
April 10th, 2007

Slayer

Anger is a rarity
In the three-tiered thought
As things must puncture the
Levels
Of self, community, God,
Which amounts to one act:
Destruction of Medium
Destruction of Art
Murder, arson, jettison,
Trapped implement, betrayal of the penned
It stabs the self, corrupts the house
Kills that on which divinities depend.

Ben Finkel
April 9th, 2007

Feeling slightly better

Origin

Where was the anvil born?
Any womb of steel and ---

This poem has been assassinated by Mr. Jibladze


Benjamin Finkel
Depressed

April 9th, 2007

As far as I can tell
I am one of the few
Who believes and trusts
The synergy of philosophy.

Everything in our dualistic
Society (Godsatan, totanarchy)
Is painted
In pairs: opposites.

But a rainbow,
A speckled spectrum,
claws choosing aspects
And combining them --

What do we find?
Directions and colors,
Flavors,
As one. Utopia.

Benjamin Finkel
April 5th, 2007

Is it not amusing,
That falling is repugnant
When the panic of naturality
Is compared to its defiance?

The only alternative
In my vision to falling
Is seeking those balances
Of rest, equilibrium.

But falling, I swear, is righteousness.

Ben Finkel
April 4th, 2007

Yellow and blue are oft times
seen as opposites
Whatever that may mean

But when they mix and tangle
Electric and Eloping

The sea of chaos
Paints

The autumn of green with
Scintillation
Showing that
The fringe - minuscule
Is all that can be seen.

Ben Finkel
April 3rd 2007

Media

Amazing, the things we carry.
They are not tools, nor external trinkets
That reflect Platonic universe.

They exist.

They are media and mindgrope,
Worthiness and rank,
We stoop under sustainance,
And yet! we never thank.

Amazing.

Ben Finkel, April 2nd 2007

Light

Criss-crossed grids of ethereal gravities
Spawn the flaming souls,
Marbles against the catacombs
Bouncing around the holes.

They grope at instantanaety,
Shunting all aside
Their primal purpose of everywhere
In the medium which they ride.

Ben Finkel
March 30th, 207

Identity

An ivory chasm breeds overarching wings,
Gossamers on swallowing brightness, shimmering to the
End of a bottomless pit whose bottom,
Reflecting from fathoms deep
Shows the viewer's fears
That are irrelevant, trinkets.

Whoah, there was a thingie in the settings which prohibited random, non-Google-enabled folk from commenting. This has been fixed and slain.

Sorry about the lack of explanations for a lot of these. Most of them I can't explain, myself, but that's not important. Pretend anything: if you find something awesome, I'll give you a cookie and steal the idea. Assuming you tell me. And give me permission to pretend that's what the purpose of the poem was.

Today's is not very good, I know. I wasn't inspired in the slightest. But, so art goes. And if I stop, I'll falter. This is what National Novel Writing Month taught me, and its lesson will pervade throughout my artistic "career."

Please criticize, readers. I really want to improve.

Ben

The pitter-pattered pattern plays upon the wall
Insulting welling anger that sharpens to a ball
Of dandelions lost, and refuge vessels too
Which sail the pond of liver-nerve, ancient and anew.

Ben Finkel
March 28, 2007

I danced upon the railroad tracks, hearing
The rustled sighs of hardened power lines.
Electrons jigging scream and whine above
The smoggy warren-tracks or piercing tines.

Ben Finkel
March 27, 2007

The Clay is not the Grecian Urn

Beauty is not beautiful
Nor truth honest
As the painting is not its paint;

Rather, the current sculpts the stream
And the stars the causeway of night;
Keats lies as one enlightened.

Ben Finkel
March 26th, 2007

Geometric Anarchy

Dalliance of ashes
----muffles the speckled arc
That breathes upon a bank of axes
----spilling to the milky cloth.
The shavings collinear
----of mnemonic life
Split and split and crumble
----before shambling to flight.


Ben
March 23, 2007

Atonement in the Dirt

The hollow clay men crack and caper,
The kiln spitting reams
Of quizzes, news, bills bubbling
Embers' pious dreams.
The potter's fists are in the flames
As they wantonly procure
The sweetened grease and tired gate
Through which the dolls stroll pure.

Ben
March 22, 2007

Housekeeping and Today's poem

Welcome to my new blog! This is to be a repository for the goal of my most recent doomed-to-die goal: a poem a day from school, written at lunch and preserved here. Each night, if I want to, I hope to explain the poem, and commit the intentional fallacy by pretending my interpretation is right.

With less ado:

Today's poem is currently untitled. I wrote it with simple guidelines in mind: no usage of the words [light, darkness, mind, nothingness, infinity...] that plague (or adorn) much of my work. The words tumbled out, with little structure except the alliteration, meter, and rhyme scheme. Note the pair of couplets, repetitive alliteration of 'w', and the change in meter between the couplets. It is the middle item that I found most interesting, and you will see why.

Let's start at the top. "So." This was the kickoff word; once again, I had no idea where I was going with this. I might get rid of it. On the other hand, the jarring aspect of it reflects the theme that I decided the poem has, which I'll get to once I provide all the evidence. "A whittling whisper crossed my path". Note the 'w's. The eroding whisper is a rumor, which the narrator encounters. "And watered the night away." I still don't understand all of my decisions, but I use night here as T.S. Elliot uses winter in The Waste Land: it is a time of comfortable forgetfulness.
This rumor ends that.

"While wandering the dunes of dawn." Dunes rock, seriously. The narrator skirts around wakefulness, and so approaches and "passe[s] the shores of clay," which is Europe. Trust me.

In "And a dwindling wisp" I cheated a bit with the 'd'. Oh well. The dwindling wisp is eleven million people who were exterminated by a particular empire and were hated by those "civilized" cultures such as Greece and Rome when they were in power, too ("Aegean taboo). Always people have hated these groups, particularly the one which made up six million of those eleven. "Across the iron moat", or curtain, but at this point there is no curtain but the preparation of one. The Berlin Wall has not been built, but the seeds of the Cold War are being planted even as this one is being fought together by later enemies.

"Once wed we there", the narrator marries the wisp by way of the moat. "As lions flare" as Britain, with the narrator to its aid, makes landmark victories against the Nazis. "From grass's ancient boat" I'll get back to.

So, by now you may have realized, this is about World War 2. WW2. 'W's. I noticed this afterwards, remember. Entirely coincidental and subconscious. The narrator is America, the wisp is the Holocaust victims, the whisper is the news of the atrocities, the dawn is the war, the lions are Britain, the Aegeans are, interestingly, the Aryans, and the shores of clay (the substance from which mankind was formed, or in this case, modern definition of nationalism and civilization) are Europe's coasts.

"Grass's ancient boats" is still a bit enigmatic to me. I'm a bit tired right now, so expect an edit to this tomorrow. Maybe I'll have thought of something.

Before I go: one word was changed from the inception of this poem to the way you see now. "From grass's ancient boats" was "In grass's ancient boats." I'll remember why I did this tomorrow.

Ben

So. A whittling whisper passed my path and watered the night away.
While wandering the dunes of dawn I passed the shores of clay
And a dwindling wisp of Aegean taboo across the iron moat
Once wed we there as lions flare from grass's ancient boat.

Ben
March 21, 2007