Rob me Blind

Today I tried to work for my exams. Of course, I failed. And so, instead, I decided to try to write a poem that rhymes. I've never written a poem that rhymes before. I often dislike rhymes. They can destroy the emotion, tie up the poet, destroy the honesty and turn the exercise of poetry from one which seeks to overwhelm the reader with the beauty of shared emotions, to a mathematical formula, something created purely for the purpose of showing one's prowess. Look at me, I can write a sonnet! Look at my iambic pentameter! Feel the wrath of my ruthless enjambment! 

But, yesterday, a friend of mine told me that poetry conforming to certain norms, certain verse lengths, certain rhyme patterns, can be good, because it can increase the reader/listener's ability to comprehend. I didn't fully agree with this, but in any case, I attempted to add some rhymes where I could, and, actually, it was really fun to write. It is a poem about trying to forget memories, and, given that I was going to be cliched anyway by trying to make it a little bit closer to typical poetry, I decided to take a picture from the place where I grew up, to let it grow in my mind and see what formed.

Rob me Blind

 Half-men, half-art

Half-dancers in half-dark,

Half-lost, half-gone,

Our half-beauty half-dead, half-newly born.

And, hark, all this I have sworn:

There are mysteries brewed between our eyes,

Deep and deepening,

Held in empty-wing-stretched arms

Incomprehensible, incomprehended, incapable, unmoveable love-struck charms,

But beautiful.

This

is true,

because I want it to be so.

Remember:

On a bench we parted,

And our hardened hands hard shook

And I,

Your crooked innocence,

Half-took.

Hidden,

Held,

Hidden.

Remember:

You said your father died,

And I almost laughed,

Because I never know how to behave,

I’m half-cursed

To half-here, half-there,

Half-British wit,

Half-Irish care.

In either case, I’m island bound.

And now:

Dreaming of a victory,

A heart-head victory,

A brew of love and wisdom,

Wolf and man and cat and fox combined

And in harmed-healing harmony.

I try to ship these memories long,

Long-longing-listlessly away,

Like souls to scattered bodies go,

I try to ship them.

Out.

Remember:

Of course,

After you left,

It would only be logical,

That I mourned a while,

On a window seat,

Lit a few candles,

Stared in the mirror.

Cliched, but valid.

Necessary.

And then:

Did you hear?

To break my brittle back,

To free frozen fear,

I borrowed the hangman’s rack,

And here,

suspended,

I shivered

Crippled and

Cracked.

But,

mentally-ailed,

feebly I failed:

Stepped down,

Slipped away,

Slew myself away.

Ran back to a pitied useless craving day.

Regretted,

And on life went.

Half-academic bliss,

Half-bourgeois Kent.

And as down I stepped,

Hidden half-bled hope,

Fell from the suspended rope,

Half-Hidden

Half-hoarse

Half-whored

Half-glorious

And dropped on the ground

Bead by Bead.

And in those beads I found little pathetic mirrors of the world, each reflecting something, each showing a different stage of life, each with more wrinkles on your face.

But now, disgraced,

I ship them onwards

And I wait.

I take your words,

And I push them

Off the shore.

A lantern

On a coffin ship.

But it is daylight

And it is a cold, wind-rained beach

And I am barefoot

And the beach bugs crawl

Between toes.

And the soft ice cream stench

Twists past the currents.

The raw cliffs tower above,

And the tower, it almost falls,

mourning Napoleon’s dying day,

but it composes itself,

and fulfils its role.

The air shakes its undulating crowns,

Humidity builds,

And refuses to be cleared,

And as I feel my empty turning stomach die,

The sand grows grief-grey under the grief-grey sky.

I take your words,

And in the day,

I push them to the sea.

They flew-flowed-faded-fucked away,

This memory gone onwards,

To rest,

To rest,

To rest with the wronged and righteous

The sacred and sexless

The forgotten and to be forgotten

The saints and deities

Dictators and prostitutes

Monks and mistletoe,

And everything which is dead, and shouldn’t be remembered.

My heart and hope heavily you mined,

Stole a kiss,

Robbed me blind.

It was great,

Glorious,

Holy.

It rose upwards,

Dance and tangled,

It scraped the angel’s clavicles.

But now, I forget and, burned,

 to normality

return. 

Inspirations: this picture, Jay Brannan, der Steppenwolf, Ginsberg.