Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Stanza 1 of About the Axel

There's some glass chamber
Where time is ensnared
In vacuum, suffering unfolding
Wings of phosphorescent
Silence.

Ben Finkel
February 21, 2008

Yeah, it's not much. I wrote this on the board at the theatre meeting, a place where I get rather inspired. I always work better on boards, apparently. Anyway, expect a more fleshed out version, and maybe some non-poetry posts.

Ben

Saturday, February 16, 2008

Stone, Paper, and Light

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26
What is beauty?
That brush of warmth across the neck
Dispelling cotton and irritant
And releasing
In flowering Mandelbrot
Swathes of woven color
Painting

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27
Love of life and soil
So refined and faultless
As thrones
Cast in the water's abyss
Glittering in sky.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28
But what is it?
It is glorious, yes, dignified
And earthly, but to
Seek some algorithm,
Some discrete path of quantity
In no small part destroys its symphony.

NOTES
Beauty heralds divinity,
And only mankind can listen.

Benjamin Finkel
February 13, 2008

Saturday, February 2, 2008

Memories of an Older Home

The shudders first begin within the mind, in that cotton-mired lobe
Near the front, where sometimes elation and apprehension abide.
Alert again, the eye traces the slowly gathering flames
Along the wall
As the rumbling gropes the ear, scratching and imploring.
Again sleep flies as my mind, before the cleansing,
Stabs its first and greatest power
Toward the mess of orange and darkness that
Springs to life and identical complexity before
My young and spiraling imagination.
My imagination! A lens through which faces and buildings
Demons and otherlings,
Stories and chaos,
Bind themselves together, entangled
Driving sleep - that shelter from the fury,
The cease of instilling order to the absurd - yet farther
From me than the unrealities I spin.

And only by abating, by letting irrelevance be,
By letting be that accidental past
Which writes itself as a twirling mess of tangled branches,
Depicted as shadows illuminated by cars
(Which have illustrious histories of history themselves)
- by letting and releasing and respecting while forgetting -
Abstracting.
I could sleep.
And I would awake, to work the consensual order once more.

Ben