metonymy4u

What kind of love did you always want since your youth.
What words would you ever give up for a dream.
I would cut off my own head if I could
and save the world some misery.

As a story you buried in your back yard
birds flew over it without suffering,
none of what most enchanted you left behind.
Like your own skin under the pear tree sunk in the mud.

These are the things I’ve previously left unspoken.
They taught me a simple story of life.
The first cannot proceed without the last.

What do you want to not want to want?

Sometimes I wake up angry and wonder
if I can no longer live with myself.
With the nature of the way things are.

If you are unhappy about your life just
let it be a mystery. Make something up.

Do I have to draw you a map?

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Live enough for death
to be a nasty shock
though not a hard surprise.

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Chopin played long into the evening, mazurkas
of his birthright because I suspect he knew there’s a sense
in which some believe language is violent as it is.
Covert erasure. Then rebirth is love pain and by
impermanence becomes more honest far,
far from the house of being. Communicate?
Animals know someone else inside you –
follow then, follow. Dig another cave. Huddle another night.
Space was so distant once. But

did we care?

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As an anti-dote to rational bias, I propose cognition as part of the emotion always already present to our experience when we thought something. The emotional manifold has already been synthesized – embodied not embrained– by the time thinking runs away with us.

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why was i born the way i was,
how did i end the way i will.
did i forget to breathe the way i do,
was i blind when flowers died.

who appeared among us unscathed
who travels and returned with no scars,
who went home a withered arm?
where did i get my jagged edges
and you your softer one.

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because I’m convinced no peoples would ever accept me,
i walked right up to life and let go. what
was not mine being everything trailed lately
behind. it was feeling only feeling that kept pushing back.
to promises recorded in ink. alone though soon i read through one single night

every book ever scribed. therein as supposed
were found the charmers of evil— you, youth, parents,
and institutions. but i no longer felt compelled to get permission to live.
i turned authors into themselves and pictured what might happen
when one sinks behind beginnings or desire is milked
by the light of an atomic dawn.

i said deliver wisdom to the world and let the wisdom do the work.

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Elisabeth

Ich sol erzaehlen,
Die Nacht is schon spaet—
Willst du mich quaelen,
Schoene Elisabeth?

Daran ich dichte
Und du dazu,
Meine Liebesgeschichte
Is dieser Abend und du.

Du musst night stoeren,
Die Reime verwehn.
Bald wirst due sie hoeren,
Hoeren und nicht verstehn.

Elizabeth

I should tell you now
the night is already late—
will you yet torment me,
beauteous Eliza-bait?

I sing thereof
and withal you too,
my own love-story
is but the night and you.

Do not bother yourself,
these rhymes to disperse.
Soon you will hear them,
hear but not converse.

–Hesse (1902), trans. by m4u

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