Lay open vestibule of our greatest minds,

Upon the lap of the only man in a quarter century

To open thy door, and see thy cataract.

The strophe and antistrophe

Which haven’t a soul

To espouse Grecian category’s empty words;

No, but to me you mean the top and bottom

Of those flawless chemicals of geometry;

A cataract, just like the Great Falls of Buffalo.

Am I the only man to see it for a quarter century?—

How so austere at first

It dances around my eyes,

The ugly ink and plain words.

Yet, it is perfect in meaning.

 

How does a man explain poetry

To those who never drink from its mousse?

It merely tells us what rests beyond all artifice

Into the meaning of these things

We might never take a passing glance.

Waterfalls might have a certain chemical,

Something between Geometry and Stars,

But do those chemicals have meaning?

Or, does the meaning create the chemicals?

 

A man who feels truth is very deceived,

Yet, if one could see the pure feeling of Niagara Falls

That my sinful self could not appreciate…

I will remember the feeling later, at a second glance

In a poem nobody has read for over twenty years.

And that is why I know there is sin.

That is why I know there is such foulness.

I can know the feeling then and now

Both the same, but then I would not chew upon it.

Today, without beholding what my eyes had once seen,

I can see it once again, and in that sight,

Understand what sin truly was.

A lie we tell ourselves to spoil what is good and right before our eyes.

Then, later, one meditates on it from afar,

Without the beauty before flesh’s eyes.

O Masons lay thy bricks of stone

To build your archways and causeways

To build your temperate domes.

The structure was grand.

However, among the stones

There lay a stone oddly shaped,

Which had a strange appearance

And no goodly form.

The masons laid their brick

Casting the oddly shaped stone

Over their shoulders.

 

Soon, the architecture was perfect,

The building’s scaffolding tall,

But it had one structural weakness.

The builders looked over the gap

Where the corner stone needed laid.

No stone fit.

Yet, lying on the marble tiles

Was the stone the builders rejected.

They took it, gazed upon it,

And saw it perfectly fit in the gap.

A strong stone,

A tried stone, and a true stone.

It bore all the weight of the dome and the arches.

 

It soon came that renovators needed to rebuild the structure.

They poked and prodded,

Wishing to do their renovations just.

They examined all of the foundations,

All of the scaffolding.

It all only needed minor renovations.

Nothing so grand or more than plastering and some buttressing.

Yet, they came to the corner stone

Which held the dome and arches.

It was a homely little stone

So the builders wished to replace it

With a gem.

 

They removed the stone

And placed their own, fresh cut stone of ruby into the gap.

However, the ruby did not quite fit.

Nor was it the perfect shape like the other stone was.

No matter how well did the masons cut their stone

The piece could not fit.

 

Soon the arches began to sag

The dome began to buckle

The foundation began to shift from the heavy burden of the dome and archways.

The ruby stone could not hold the weight of the structure.

So, the masons looked once again on the stone they had rejected,

Seeing it could still yet fit into the gap.

They did so, and it stopped the damage from altogether getting worse.

We sometimes like to think

That our arguments are new.

We like to think that our era is perfect

And that our arguments and ideas have not

Lived on since the beginning of man.

 

When you read old works—

If you can understand them—

You start to notice that astrophysics was known in the 16th century.

You begin to understand

That men understood all that we can understand today.

 

The difference between then and now

Is that today we cannot know Word.

We had all of our knowledge then,

But then we had the conscience of Word.

Today we cannot perceive it

And so make Milton’s villain the hero.

Though, in the sixth Chapter he explicitly forbade that reading.

 

It makes me think nobody reads the books

And yet still their scholarship is published.

 

Satan used reason to murder and commit theft.

Philosophy, as Milton understood it,

Was Satan’s justification for making war with God.

Yet, Raphael dismissed man’s faulty reason

Their pitiful explanations of the cosmos,

And told man what Voltaire told us.

 

“Till thy garden.”

There’s nothing more to write.

There’s nothing more to say.

Sailing off to the other-world

At the end of life

Is the only sweetness I can lend.

 

How reason has proven false

All that I loved.

And with that, blood flows through the valleys

Of the wine press.

Lay burden to bear

There were two things I desired.

I will find them when the ship sets sail.

For— You might call it pretentious

But I like writing complex poems.

It speaks what this mind conjures

In full breadth of its image.

 

Perhaps like music

It is loved for the repetitions.

That we can predict the next sequence of notes.

 

In my eye, I see great things

Landscapes and valleys.

I wish to choose language that speaks what is in me.

But, whatever I love, it is insufficient.

What I hate, it is regarded as priceless.

So, blood spills down the valleys

Because we mistake what is stone

With what is flesh.

 

I would love to fly away like a bird

Or hide away in the forests I love.

But, rather, I see the whole world wishes itself to change.

And if change it must,

Then men are the artifacts they worship.

For no knowledge can prove the foundations of love.

Yet, there it is for me to see and touch.

Rather, it takes much imagination to reason it away.

When I set sail, I would have already known.

Before the fault was found

Horae drew her bow

Raised it to his beating lungs

And let fire her flaming salvo.

 

His offense was that he breathed the air

Of the goddess.

For he spake his love in great excesses

His image,

His molten work;

He spoke to her often

About the banner over her

The ensign,

The fleeting glimpse he gave her ivory neck

As it bore nude cream to the sumptuous shoulders.

 

So, she drew forth her iron bow

And shot the crease of his ribs

And penetrated his collapsing lung.

“History flows in its direction—

Those who stand in its way

Are artifacts.” — A Postmodernist

 

How many men does history leave behind?

A good and prosperous nation

Which it did its best to break;

Praises the Cur Kairos

Who is allied with the serfs

Who, after having been made free,

Wish to place themselves back in shackles.

In the hell built for the rich

The idle rich, and the angry rich

Do their dance in the river styx.

 

How I can see it,

But the translator cannot.

In fact, nobody has ever found it before.

 

Probably because a poet knows their poetry.

And we know why it’s written.

 

While Plato lambasted us for not being credible

I found poetry is not our catalog of factoids

But rather the history of our moral knowledge.

I have an IQ of 157.

It’s humbling to see

How I don’t even come close

To the top crust of geniuses.

 

The lowest on a list I found was 170.

 

I love poetry…

 

My claim to fame might be

A high reading comprehension and retention.

 

Lol.

 

I can devour Chaucer like it’s

James Paterson.

 

A difficult text to me is

Ezra Pound’s Cantos,

 

But that’s only because I think it

Intentionally tried to talk in gibberish.

I’m still trying to crack that nut,

But I think it’s a Postmodern Work

Meant to draw out the subconscious’ story.