My Audience

You are my poetry.
I listen... what do those thoughts inspire?
I know not anymore what they mean---
Only what you say about them.

Do not come to me, and ask,
"Does your poem mean, thus..."
I do not know.
I want to hear your words
And interpret them like I do Eliot or Wordsworth.

I want to listen.
Do you not understand?
I wrote so much to listen to you
Tell me what they mean.
I know what I meant by them...
What do you see by them?

I can listen, and understand you.
You listen, and understand me.
I wish to listen to you...
Just tell me your honest thoughts.

Know only one thing about me.
I believe in Christ.
But, tell me what you see in my poems
And reveal to me mysteries I had not even fathomed.
Reveal to me the hidden parcels of wisdom
I did not see, nor conceive.
Show me what they mean---
For do you not understand,
Words have meaning?
I say this over and over again---
Thoughts have meaning.
Precise meanings.
Do not shy away from telling me your thoughts.
I will think over them,
Mull over them...
For that is what I want.
I want you to think
And speak important words.
Not sit idly and talk about nonsense.
Talk about something deep,
And if poetry draws that out of you,
I wish to listen and see the chrysalis of your thoughts.

See, those reading my poems,
You are my poetry.
To have never had an audience
To listen to,
To never hear you tell me what they mean---
I am tired of my own thoughts...
Do not make me blue.

I wish to place wisdom
Onto your lips, and make it rain forth.

Otherness

My love, I had forgotten Smerdis was that Death, 
And Death my Doppelganger throughout my odes.

My poem decries the cycle of civilization. 
How there is always a vacuum left where power begins to fail.

In the Histories, Cambyses campaigned in Egypt, 
After his sire Cyrus had freed all his subjects;
Cambyses sought to reconquer them. 
Thus, Smerdis arose to usurp power from his brother Cambyses---
Yet Smerdis was killed by Darius,
So was justified because Smerdis was a changeling
As the story goes---drawing a comparison with Smerdis 
To the Androgynous mobs of Death.

Yet, I felt the presence of the poem,
That its meaning defied even me...
It was born from this author
But---as the Archer told me in his village---
It had a sense of strange otherness.
What I had made was beyond even my own interpretation.
How I could forget something so key,
There it was, beyond me, something I made and could now rediscover---
A poem I wrote had intrinsic meaning... 
Even its author need rediscover it.

It was, then, its own being,
Like I had given birth
And the child grew.
There the child was,
Born of my seed, 
But something else.

Feud of the Avatars

The painful stroke of marginalized
Artists, making 50,000 florins,
Taking up the apprenticeship of sire;
Walking the path his father gave...

When the two great masters met
They hated one another, competing
To best an adversary. Bitter and spiteful,
Like Southey and Byron,
Wordsworth and Shelley,
Leonardo and Michelangelo...

I watch like Raphael,
Wondering at their chafe.
Their unbridled hate.

For all genius is welcome to me...
I will applaud it.

Yet, the modern sage says Michelangelo's unfinished
Pieta is better than the one set in St. Peter's Basilica;
Better than Moses and David
For that, there can be no Raphael now...
For the sophist says
That exegesis is deferred to the reader
And their capricious whims.

I told him, I'd "burn my entire library
"And everything I'd ever wrote
"If you are right."

Yet, his musings were divine...
It was not jealousy, just the disrespect
To communicated thought.

Were Leonardo and Michelangelo
Different? Were they not the same,
Dissecting corpses, and both experts?
Yet, Leonardo was jealous of the craft
Of Sculpture, and Michelangelo 
Defiant in his defense.

Why do I write?
I tenderly ask this question when I see the sophist
Has reign over the modern age.
While I do not wish a scientist to determine the language---
While I do not want an algorithm to determine my meaning---
He says, "Language is not an algorithm, it expands, contracts..."
I say to him, there is one thing I disagree with.
One thing. I said that words can be understood.
And for that, he ignored me.

Like Leonardo's disrespect for Michelangelo's
Sculpture, the terrific thing is that I am not
Simply caked with dust like a baker.
I form with words the sculpture of my architecture...
And I wish them to mean something.
Not just be a kaleidoscope of feeling.

Blushed Facts

Weak faith had I, when every truth
Brought the blush of cherry tomatoes
To my peachskin face. I looked
And every good fact doubted.

I held to faith...
Would cut truth,
And in faithless backbiting
Tear down every bastion of knowledge.

A fire, burning the chaff
Of miracles, truth and beautiful exegesis.

Analysis of A Tale of Two Cities

I'm reading it right now. Am at the chapter where Charles tells the Doctor that he loves Lucile. 

I thought it was disjointed, too. I literally was dreading coming to this novel, but at about the scene where the wine flowed through the street, and the gritty realities of Feudalism were revealed to me, it began to make sense. The random scenes turned into a tapestry, and a story emerged. It's one of the most fantastic things I'd ever seen, actually. It really shifted focus once Monseigneur Marquis was introduced. It became a tapestry, and then adding Charles as the love interest of the Dr.'s daughter Lucile... It's very good. Like, everything else is making sense, and the earlier scenes have weight to them.

I think as Dickens was writing---it was first a serialized novel---he didn't know what direction to take, until the Marquis arrived, and then a plot formed out of thin air.

It's really a completion of War and Peace. Like, Tolstoy gives the Russian perspective of the French Revolution---and I have to say I'm kind of left wondering in Tolstoy why the French would invade---but then seeing the absolute tyranny of French Feudalism, it became clear why they would launch a campaign into the rest of Europe. Like, I know where the novel is going, to show the energy of the French and the oppression they felt.

It really puts into perspective our modern movements. Like, they're rebelling in their affluence. They aren't abjectly poor, and sheep for the slaughter. You can't run someone over in a city, and kill them, and expect to get away with it in America. Like seeing that scene with the Marquis---which is pretty high up in the food chain, but still ought to be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law---running over men and children on the street. And that there is no accountability for him. He does it with impunity. It's a good explanation for the social conditions which led to the French Revolution, and later on the Napoleonic Wars.

Like, it's truly one of the most important pieces of literature ever---it's kind of the other half of Tolstoy's War and Peace. You really get it, why the French would be enraged, but when they met the Russians, the Russians weren't dissatisfied with their treatment. Not until they were freed---which is kind of worrying actually.

A Tale of Two Cities is a great piece of literature. I shouldn't have called it disjointed at the beginning, as those first six chapters establish the character of Lucile and the Doctor. It gives us a portrait of their tender relationship, and the struggle, and when the plot explodes onto the scene, it's gripping.

A Connecticut Yankee

Mark Twain was no fool---
He looked at the records of the past
The Dark Ages---
Even without the amenities
Of iPhones, computers and tvs.
It had indoor plumbing,
Was gaslit, a comfortable place.

There, in King Arthur's dystopian courts---
For the work is a dystopian
Science fiction about time travel---
Men were held in dungeons,
Queens killed with impunity,
Knights rode around aimlessly
And killed one another for profit.
The Church censored, and ruled
With an iron fist.

I read it, and am chilled by it.
I read two works of Feudalism;
Giving me an idea what it was really like.
The cruelty, inhumanity,
The callousness, the lawlessness,
The gross things people did to one another.
Believing in magic and mysticism
Which fully believed by the nobility
Strewn its luck throughout the kingdom
In disastrous chains of misfortune.

I've seen all I want to see of Feudalism.
Let kings be antiquated,
Capitalism flourish
And let the poor be fed by their own work.

As socialism in practice
Is just Feudalism disguised.

Monseigneur

A Tale of Two Cities,
The dystopian nightmare...
Monseigneur kills while he drives
His carriage, and doesn't flinch.
Men in lower social class
Were considered expendable
By those in higher social class.
Lawless, unaccountable...
A little baby was his victim.

It took me a while to understand
The story. I didn't like Dickens at first.
Now, I see a tapestry of the time before times.
Poor flooding the street to drink a filthy flagon of wine,
Prisons where men sit in solitary confinement,
Marquises murdering maliciously like mountebanks.

There is no great past---
And there is no great future---
There is only now.
Let us not spoil it with our greed...

Guangwu

They changed Guangwu before my very eyes.
I have documented proof, if only for myself.
Christ was crucified in 31AD, and the darkening was 
Not a solar eclipse. Someone is literally changing
The facts as we speak. Google literally said
According to yesterday's date, 5/4/22
"A solar eclipse on Passover Would have been impossible." 
End quote. Do we now change astronomy to sate the world's delusions?