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