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.