the quietest revolution

What does it mean to be human?
To step away from the safety of the room,
The channels of art, of intellect,
Toward a unity with the next link in the chain,
An exchange, a fulfillment!

How? How does this increased distance help us?
How can a tornado of zeroes and ones
Replace an invitation to love-making?
Replace a quiet laugh, a gentle whisper,
A genuine apology or a insurrectous cry?

Why?

Should I feel sheltered by the security of this room?
Or trapped?
Fooled into complacency?
Skin against skin!
Paint on a wall!
Words surround me in the air like incessant music!
I shall never again deny what I consider to be human!

The quietest revolution is waged in every act of noncompliance,
in every unknown effort of spontaneous fulfillment.
Every cry of pleasure, brush stroke, smile and song- a victory.

we were thieves

to steal, to appropriate!
this was the charge of our artistic minds
but no sooner did our excursion commence
then realize we of this old building’s designs.

and sought quickly us the treaurous find,
of symbolic color and antiquate shine,
the fear of the winds of authority there,
set then aside bravely in pursuit of the dare.

but not all is as seen in the shadow of the past,
and our dissident deed had become but a flash,
in the life of this building, we soon ascertained,
framed in her windows, generations of pain!

so here we are, we, the children of the form,
held closely now within the arms of the storm,
dirtying our souls in the name of the art,
in reverent view of this shelter’s warm heart.

were we thieves now? or did she thieve from us?
stealing a sense of accomplishment and fee?
sending with conviction a cry and a plea,
“listen to my story of betrayal and lust!”

and throughout the evening and thereon and thus,
did live in our memory this old building a tale,
known to know only in the souls of the blue-
a tragedy reserved to the unfortunate few.

Stream of Consciousness

Words from the mind of
Cheyney Allen, Texas A&M University - Commerce


//4AMelusivesleepbeautyintheworlddancesmilemusicjoylaughtersadnessleaveblowingwindwhisperingbrutalityhowlingbellsstainedglasswindowshallelujahlovemusiccrylovesleepeludes...
9 hours ago via Blackberry

the artistic martyr

whether he wants to die or not
is irrelevant.

his office, the scene of the crime,
tells a tale of all intellectuals,
the shelves piled high with treason,
the computer washed over with sin,
the speakers literally dripping with blasphemy.

it is not like he underestimated the risk.

their dark suits embody
the arm of a shadow
hell-bent on growing
into darkness itself:
scratching out every lightbulb
disgracing even the sun
with no intended stop
until even the idea of a photon
-dissidence, compassion!-
ceases to stir a single soul.

the gentleman stirs in his seat.
home, perhaps he expected
or the cold bare grind of the streets.

but most ironic that they kill him
in the very chair
that sewn into the cushions
lies hidden the secret
to eternal enlightenment:
what we would have known about it
burnt with the building.

unmentionable

[Another delightful foray into the mind of
Calee Rigdon, Oklahoma State University]

for you my name.
for much of our time,
you burden me with blame
of a lovers crime.

daily, I see the place
of our first tryst.
mind's eye sees your Ry face
time became sour,
no chance to co-exist

I cannot dismiss
your kindness and bliss.
unmentionable- I may be
but you did experience Me.

Tales from the Metropolitan Outskirts

I. (Greenville TX)

My McCafe is getting quite cool.
I am not convinced I added enough sugar.
It is no matter.
Given the wifi and the app for that
I will hardly remember to finish drinking it.

I pity the manager on his cell phone
With 4:30 call times and tension in his voice.
He does not love what he does- who would?
The difference is that most never hit actualization-
Never look past the highway and the fields
Away from the hamburgers and the cheap ice cream
And understand that America is dying.

II. (Paris TX)

The loop of concrete is needless.
What is to encircle when the money is gone?
When the streets are empty and powerless?
The nearest dose of intellect is either among the houses
Or far away in a distant land.

If the interstate system is a bloodstream
Delivering the economy and the culture
To the empty places of the outside
Then I have found a place truly void
Not only from the 3G network
But from everything.

How many artists are hiding among the trees?
Are they merely an illusion?

III. (Commerce TX)

A half-home is a terrible predicament.
How comfortable can you be
When you know this is not your dream manifest?

I have no comprehension of a life outside
Of the center of the heart.
The absence of a good bag of coffee
Is representative of a much larger problem
As I eviscerate store after miserable store
In search of the ingredients
For happiness.

IV. (Stillwater, OK)
An entire world is merely one tank of gas away,
A dot on a map, a couch or a bed, a condom.
Given a job and a lease on some friends,
I could sink into the woodwork and stay here forever.

The daylight is warm and the evenings warmer still:
We become the ones that forsake circadian silence,
Not shuffling through the oppression of our fathers
But dancing in the cracks between the nation's memes.

The fears, however, are the same.
The money and the shady danger are the same.
The man that follows you home and shatters your buzz
Will reduce only at a broken piece of glass.

The palpable white walls, akin to a flat in some distant land,
And the gentle guitar pouring from the next wall over
Speak to us while we shower together
And I ponder the word 'home'.

Hell If I Know

It is the untouched books on the shelf
That bother me the most.
Their pages yearn to betray a world
Fraught with color.

There are those that would not see it that way.
They know the truth of the matter is so bright to so many
That perhaps a black and white photograph
Will suffice for a veritable Sistine Chapel.
Though their images churn in my mind,
Devoid sometimes of the enlightenment of

red
green
blue

I am more fearful of the fact that

gray
grayer
grayest...

Now seems closer to the right answer
Than all the libraries of every corner
Of every single

fucking

college town.

[no title] Saturday, October 23rd, 2010

'Throughout our goodbye'

[Poet's note: I don't know what exactly in the heck this thing is becoming, be it an extended poem, or the beginnings of a song. But the promising nature (in my mind) of this early, unretouched draft still commands publication.]

Mozart, you genius, you are haunting my dreams,
Keeping from peaceful position my means,
To resist the girl that sits by the bay,
And waits patiently for me to return and say:

“Remember the day where once we had lied,
Decided our kiss was the method to hide,
Our sin and our depth and our intimate ways,
The capstone to our now bygone days?”

When prudence dictates now that I must tell you,
No matter if words we had said had been true,
Though our deepest moments have been left now to die,
I will still love you- throughout our goodbye!”

Limitless Duplicitation:

Chemistry restrained,
Intellect repressed,
Mysticism insited,
Freedom distressed,
Willpower failing,
Cacophony maintained,
Inhibition destroyed,
Psyche ashamed.

My heart is dead.

TEARS for a fallen effigy!
The loneliest lane OF traffic,
The CONCRETE abyss coupled with
The stagnant of the cold.

I can hardly find it in me TO rhyme.

I can hardly FIND it in me to love,
Playing the slots with THE mannerisms,
Flirtations, fleshly tingle, maniacal f___.
I have uncovered my MANIFEST nightmare...

Yet my FEAR; is gone, for the past is beyond redemption.

I owe nothing to the religious,
Nor THE faithful nor the prey,
But perhaps instead the FALLEN,
A HOME I may find in someday.

you are the ghost now

Reprinted with incredible gratitude
Words and choice of photograph are from the mind of:
Calee Rigdon, Oklahoma State University

You are the ghost now
When I drift away,
I encounter you somehow.
The peace of my dreams you slay
Ripping my subconscious apart.
I thought you had been satisfied,
in the destuction of my heart

Detergent

I feel like
You'll learn more
About human nature
Sitting two seats
Across from someone
in a laundromat
Pegged by antiquity
Celing fan spinning
Machines roaring loud
Some people chatter
About the election
Others the war
Few remain silent
Talk about something
Pressure I feel
Am I alone?
I'm not trusted
In this corner
Writing this poem
Because I fail
To applaud Obama
Or dress poor
Or hair brown
Or skin dark
Or face wrinkled
They'll never know
I write about
Their whole existence
Inside this book
They never escape
But do I?

Abstraction

This is the Credo:
This is the flame.
This is the flinging
Off shackles of shame.

I am the fury,
Of artists unleashed,
Those heirs of conscious,
Society bequeathed.

The mingle of poets,
And the sunshine of day,
Will pave over concrete,
Over harbor, over bay,

The consort of music
Will ring in the hall,
The unspoken ethos
Of tyrant’s appall,

The fluid of painters,
Shall outlast our pain,
A swirl of colors
To interpret the stain,

An embrace of horror
Shall accompany the lie:
“No purpose exists here
But to toil long and die!”

To live for the moment
Is the fury of the storm,
You have now the Credo-
And see the movement form!

Existir

If one stops to consider the mall shopper much,
The preteens that are far too young to touch,
The ethnic boy shoveled into his dull ways,
The old man now wishing he was in better days,
The blond college chick that would know all the deals,
The ruffian so easily tempted to steal,
It is a true snapshot of the state of my peers:
The pathetic existence that America endears.

Their lack of concern is what founds all my fears.

This is the part where you get to call me a conspiracy theorist.

Either the individuals/embodiments that are hell-bent on oppressing us are doing a TERRIBLE job…or the intellectual repression I fear from the government and other powerful bodies is working so well that I’m not noticing it at all. I offer a simple example. I’ve yet to find a place anywhere I’ve visited in the US where I can’t find Ayn Rand’s writings, or where I can’t access an online streaming database of Stravinsky and Beethoven. No ISP I’ve ever seen blocks Wikipedia, or inhibits my occasional foray into servers from other countries, like Project Gutenberg Australia or Russia’s official library system. D.H. Lawrence was freely available in the last bookstore I visited- and so was Playboy and several Penthouse Forums! Though I don’t use my money on those last two items (a waste of my time and money, to muster an opinion), the point is established. Censorship in this country against what I would consider ‘radical’ topics and ideas- things that would upset the standard intellectual snapshot of a capable individual, or many individuals thinking the same thing together- is simply not effective.

If we take the negative approach to this observation, and conclude that the censorship is so effective that I don’t even notice it, this gets really messy. Is there a sea of information out there that neither myself nor any of my capable peers have ever seen? Who has it? Why is it being withheld from the intellectuals of my country? I realize this proposal is ridiculous, but I can’t help but entertain the idea that America’s freedom of information is only a shell of what most people seem to understand. I am going to place my confidence on the opposite shoulder- the idea that our government simply SUCKS at withholding problematic information.

So, if I’m at least as smart as the government, and I realize that people like myself are finding whatever they want, and planning to disseminate information in a method consistent with their beliefs, why the hell not take action now?

Maybe I should go back to writing poetry now…this is getting a bit hard to stew on…

Literature to cover this summer

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness
Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Beautiful and Damned
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Bilthesdale Romance
Lewis, C.S. God in the Dock
Marx, Karl. The Communist Manifesto
Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead
Rand, Ayn. The Romantic Manifesto
Wilde, Oscar. The Profundis and Other Writings

What a most depressing continuance.

I continue to lament my enlightenment on the world’s size and complexity. My ability to process my desire for information has not grown more manageable but instead far worse since my first realization, prompting a larger and more tedious struggle to comprehend the material to which I have access. Simply, knowing that all this information exists only seems to make me want to find it more.

I understand full well that I cannot possibly access it all. The local university’s library, generous enough to grant me access credentials, my own university library, the local city library, interlibrary loan, online databases and music stores and random websites…I hold simultaneous thoughts on this phenomenon. I cannot get to everything that interests me…but I still want to learn about it all, in the most thorough manner possible.

Is this how people end up with double degrees, wild career shifts and ridiculous late-night ramps through libraries and religious documents, furiously aware of what they seek but entirely unschooled in the information itself? I’ve seen these kinds of furiously lost people, grasping a semblance of rigid understanding and intellectual contentment but otherwise suffering emotionally at the prospect of passing out of this life without…something.

I fear I am such. I like to think God sends me on this spiel intentionally, but grasping Him…that’s another matter entirely. There is plenty of material, factual and believable information, that would tell me to stop bothering on the prospect of a God entirely, let alone his supposed beneficial nature.

I despise labels, but I fit one pretty well- a disillusioned, knowledge-thirsty pseudo-deist.

moving forward

Your scent in the stairwell
Only lends itself to the image
Of darting across the bedroom
Finally dismaying inhibition
And giving you a taste
Of what I actually feel.

And where is God
When his text tells me
That your skin is forbidden
But the heart he has set in place
Not only fights against inaction
But anticipates reaction

What significance has it
What defense can I possibly harbor
Against an inherent program
That tells me to love you
Despite logic or reason
Screaming at me to flee

The night descends like a sea
Giving way to an intimate mist
Warm like a tender moment
Potent as the sharpest drink
And I am far beyond the point
Where I could have told it no.

As the music and the city
Roar eagerly in the background
My lips will find yours
And many other places
As I anticipate your reaction
And the program rages on.

Loneliness

I once tried to write a small anthem
To embody what we think as youth
To compel those who would dare mock us
To convince them instead of the truth.

But then I saw churches and steeples
And knew that the answer lie far
For mountains of reason will topple
In the face of a religious tar.

And then I fell victim to romance
And had wondered on finding a mate
The poem did at once be abandoned
For fear she absconded my fate.

Not much later still the city set fire
And all eyes were turned toward the blaze
Then not only I but every woman and man
Let terror reduce them to haze.

Then finally I saw the complex
Of how deeply I am repressed
Government culture vocation and greed
Now bring me new meaning to stress.

I haven’t made any such progress
In trying to inscribe the truth
I once tried to write a small anthem
But was banished to inside a booth.

Comfort Dismays

To undress with the eyes
Is one of the agonies I ought to despise
And so often do, until my comfort dismays
And any attempt then to avoid such a haze
Will place my head into an impossible maze
And set my soul and my heart ablaze.
And so perhaps though the volley of lies
I would dare to let the deception then die
And undress her with much more than my eyes.

Tires

Send me down that road
Past the cross between one and the other
Where the cell service ensures I will never linger
And the sky is wide and bright
Not with the specks of useless stars
But the whole of the city.

Chill me to the bone with the endless memories
Friend after friend, lover after faceless lover
The deepest moments held in this city
Shushed like a secret among the trees
And the high-speed concrete's tendency
To take you wherever you heart desires.

Remind me of the times of innocence
That once derived from the lakes and ponds
But instead leaked themselves out
In the gas stations and coffeeshops
That dare to house the intellecut
Of the few of us left among the fires.

Lay my machine out among the speed
And I will give new meaning to eighty
As I see between the concrete and grass
That God watches this night, and others
While the sun goes down on another day
And my life drowns into the city.

Lost

It is hard to articulate whether
We should consider ourselves immature
Or certain
Perhaps lonely
But never, ever
Unfeeling

It is harder still to pinpoint
The spot at which
The nape of her neck
Mixes with the alarm bell in my head
And the uneasy feeling that someday
The world will actually grow up.

But the absolute hardest
Is the vision of perfection:
Romance and magic all blurred together
In a musical and literary climax
Entirely feasible
But never, ever

Found.

A Truth

"The soul of a man under Socialism"*
Is the same as a man that would try
To take the great namesake of nationalism
And turn it all into a lie.

*Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

Park

Somewhere between

The perfection of the weather
The money-soaked trees
The fluorine of the water
The young girl’s birthday party
The rows of shiny cars
The standardized sandwiches
The innocence of the children
The flat arch of the hill
The whir of technology, yet
The unnatural quiet

I see a prison.

Intellectually-charged environments

I am blessed with a very high-variety undergraduate experience. Professors from all kinds of abstract and concrete fields participate in my education, and as much as I sometimes lack the mental fortitude to take all the information offered to me to heart, I am immensely glad that, in many of these classrooms, I am blissfully stimulated.

Unfortunately, the issue with being fully engaged is rarely the teacher itself, but my own inhibitions. If we trace the root of this academic stumbling block of sorts, I find myself with the need to articulate what I may have finally confirmed to myself as what I will now call an intellectually hostile environment.

An academically hostile environment does not specifically imply rivalries or inter-personality conflict, though these are certainly contributing factors. A more impersonal and egocentric complex is what I consistently see, especially in classrooms of equal intellect level, and especially among talented peers as well as myself. Quite simply, it is the discomfort that results from sharing information or opinions when the pupil in question carries full knowledge of the intellectual ‘competition’ occurring during any kind of forum setting (often a classroom). It is a fear of appearing unworthy or unfitting within the environment itself.

Conversely, an intellectually stable environment would be descriptive of a classroom or social network in which the inhabitants tend to recognize an intellectual-or-otherwise hierarchy. The equal ground of competition is often absent from these environments, and the resulting displacement between those who excel and those that do not often focuses the conceptual classroom upon the material being covered and not the power struggle of individuals. An intellectually impertinent environment, similarly, does not demand an intellectual mode of input, and may instead rely more upon work ethic and other atypical factors to determine social standing. These environments tend also to be more comfortable to all participants.

I suppose the perfect classroom environment, through this formula, would be one that embraces cultural, intellectual, and artistic diversity. A natural pecking order forms, everybody feels satisfied and fulfilled, perhaps. This not to mention the typical notion that diversity already provides large quantities of benefit in the form of additionally-diverse talents and knowledges.

An individualist, supporting an integrated classroom setting? My painful elitist tendencies are setting off gigantic alarm bells. Regardless, I have defined an environment that has plagued me in some situations for the better part of four years. That will suffice for now.

I despise this thought.

Truly, I do not appreciate in myself the fact that this may well be a portion of the truth. However, I would prefer to serve myself the honesty of replicating it, rather than living with it within me and not at least exhibiting a portion of the thought itself.

Everybody needs an enemy.

Enemy does not necessarily mean a sworn adversary-combatant, nor a rumorous and spiteful competitor. Enemy simply means a complex by which to keep one’s self sharp and engaged. And If this is the sadistic truth, then somebody ought to be disgusted, upset, or unhappy with your bubble of consciousness at all times in order to keep you sane and sound.

I most certainly do not aim this explanation at anybody specific in my life. I never would. The universality of the statement itself holds more water than any person-to-person accusation could ever bear. I merely ask the nameless reader to consider the reinforcement statement that, I certainly hope, makes my thought true.

How much less weight would that which you hold dear carry if the world around you was not in constant pursuit of destroying it?

As usual, pardon my tendency to over-poeticize the nature of our world. Just as Huxley so aptly stated in the twentieth century, I do most certainly hope this world is another world’s hell. To take the best parts of this world with me and leave the rest behind- it is my most perfect confirmation of my most fundamental deism.

Anger at Nobody

The perfection of an artsy, intellectual, exhilarating, seductive, depressive, duplicitous, dramatic, intoxicating, frustrating, intimate, immature, apathetic, fiery, fiendish, irreverent, incredible student life was marred only by the pain of your inexcusable absence.

Why do you accuse me of being so free?
Where were you when I was trying to be me?

Too Much Information

This may come across to many people as a somewhat ridiculous epiphany. Perhaps it is something that I’ve never spent a great deal of time contemplating before, especially in the wake of a secondary school environment that did a great job exposing me to a wide variety of literature and historical fact. But the fact remains still that I will never get through all the information that is available to me today. Not even close.

I would dare to say that individuals in my respective level of intellectualism have not enjoyed and suffered from this phenomenon much before probably the dawn of the twentieth century. Prior to that time, it seems to me like the information of the world, centered in multitudes of cultural centers throughout the world but never truly connected, had never been linked in enough of a way to provide easy, unrestricted access to literally all of it, in my everyday apartment, in an everyday town!

I came to this realization in the pursuit of a digital abstract of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, so that I could remind myself how significant of a novel it has been for my palette when put up against Huxley and Orwell (I loaned out my printed copy to a dear friend). What do I find in my search? Strangely enough, the entire novel surfaces, unscathed in the original Russian, on a website funded “With the financial support of the Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communications”. With a short burst of Google Translate, I have found exactly what I sought.

Despite the text of the website being in Russian, my realization of just how far away this server actually is did not dawn on me until I attempted to locate it. It dwells in Moscow- thousands and thousands of miles away, and I retrieved it on my computer like it was nothing, another mere commercial website in the Dallas area! What a scathing realization- that my entire society rarely if ever considers the awesome complexity of this phenomenon! And naturally, my shell shock from this thought process only made me want to seek out more.

As the downhill boulder grew larger, I found efforts like Project Gutenberg, which has contributed by themselves almost 30,00 eBook documents for free and open access- enough for a lifetime! Then through my work on an English term paper, the magic of Texas’ Interlibrary Loan shows itself to me- not only does my library have more to study that I could ever endeavor to pursue, but every University library from here to the border with Mexico throws their doors open to my curiosity! I need not include the capitalistic side of the journey- for a nominal fee, I can purchase the information I seek instead through bookstores found in every level of society, every city and every town…everywhere.

If my new intellectual agony is not adequately explained now…I do not know how to articulate it at all.