I’d never go so far as to call myself a poet - prose is by far my favoured medium of creative endeavour - but my degree requires some poetic involvement so I’m part of a poetry group at uni this term. The most recent poem we read was from a collection called “Oranges” by a poet named Frank O’Hara - myself I did not like it much but for reasons uncertain the reading of it brought up a wellspring of spontaneous lines, the which resulted in the piece shared below. I’ve got a workshop coming up on Thursday for this but as the critiquing here is very likely of superior quality to that a few inexperienced students can offer, after some indecision, here it is, though not really “furry” in nature.
Be brutal in your critiquing if necessary. Thanks for reading.
Raindrops
Envisioned words, spewed-out, spontaneous
A child in the audience (we call him the reader) says to another:
The performer! The beauty of the mask!
Rich with colour, substance, ingenuity –
Ah, illusions all
Whispered words of poisoned kings
Drowned in wishing wells of ecstasy -
The feast is over, clean away the remnants
Halls echo only with squeaking of mice, eating the crumbs
The mask? The veil? The meaning?
You think there is something behind it?
Coyote is a trickster, trust me only to be untrustworthy
Pointed perked ears, dancing golden eyes, arched tail, charming words
What was it Hamlet said? To be, to not be – but does it matter –
The ending comes – is it happily ever after -
Desired by reader or audience, happy, naïve as the virtuous?
Happy ending, sad ending, it’s all really the same:
We all become dust, or blood trickling through an hourglass
Bleached bones under the sand of Time
Drowned maidens drifting in the succulent silence
A god of death with the scale of truth –
Your heart was weighed – too heavy.
The Trickster knows well his trade
Simmering words of affluence
Use all the elements; fire, water, air
Requiems of adventurer’s allegory
Trapped in the prison of a dreamer’s skull
Altruistic pentametre repeated in a parrot’s pantomime
Repeat, repeat – only the insane are truly free
When Anubis says only the sinner can pass,
No redemption for the righteous
Turned away from the gates of heaven
There’s nothing behind them anyway –
All is delusional, nothing is real:
Murmured elegies from between polished fangs
Schrödinger’s cat disguised in limericks
The veil, the veil, but so they say: oh, what must lie behind it!
Dissected like frogs in temple halls
This line, that colour, and this means that –
Five blackbirds in a pie, but it’s the fourth that will kill you
From the sea foam rose Aphrodite the temptress, delight divine
And yet – not really what I envisioned
People assume, but that’s a different paradigm
Do you remember our first kiss?
Students asked for wisdom, so the Coyote told them:
Pandora’s box was empty all along
No meaning there, here – or is it truth
And if someone said: the truth is in the heart of a hairdresser in a small village in Mexico
Well, tis beside the point, remember that only the guilty float
People curse the rain but it’s the sun that burns them
Pity the bride jilted at the altar –
But no, she never made it to the altar – only the first date
Or not even that. After all she’s just an illusion
A figment possibility within the prison
Enlightened by the atonement of the green fairy’s kiss.
If the Knave of Hearts only stole a skeleton key
Unlocked prophet’s words on subway walls: God is dead
And artistry besides, desolate and decrypted
The telephone kept ringing but no one answered
Necromancer’s trickery, perhaps –
But there is nothing good or evil about it
After all the illusion is desired by all
No worth in a story in which Penelope stops weaving, or Olivia marries Malvolio
Sanity is a burden only the foolish can bear
An audience loves a dark-horse hero – yes, the old cliché
Love affairs as deaf as December, but burning hot –
And did your sin-blessed paramour find you?
Souls passing in the night, but intercepting –
Only those drunk and those in love are awake at this hour
I was reading a newspaper headline in a little café in Brooklyn: Man Eaten by Alligator
(remember you were talking in a British accent, sipping wine,
and your editor’s girlfriend was fluttering her eyelashes at you)
“Friday the 13th is the luckiest day” – on a Dead Sea scroll, with its pretensions
But no one attended the tea party anyway. Why should they?
They’re all just ghosts, fooled into believing they’re alive
Only the trickster knows - paint, and pear juice, and white feathers
An oracle’s symphony, written in dreams, so adored, so divided.
History’s pages are written by the blind
Eyes closed, eyes open, still you know he’s grinning at you
Clock’s ticking – or is it? maybe you’re already dead
Or not yet born, or begging on a street in Montmartre
Well. Explicate all you like but the leaves will still turn yellow in October
Take the Coyote’s dare – pull back the veil – nothing’s there
Just the same no one expected the dead to rise
This process – the creation – the illusion
Work of dreamers, lovers, inventors
Born of faceless inspiration, they escaped the prison
In artistic suicide’s sweet surrender.