High School Poetry

the Personalization of Impersonal Monologue and Mundanity of Everything and Made-Up Things and Arbitrary Juxtapositions and Internal Esotericisms and Return to Rhythm and Rhyme and Memory.

Jessica Wolfsohn

“Sir Spirit, an’ I drift alone: Oh deep sigh.”

-Elegy for Neal Cassady

“…O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we’re free I’m with you in Rockland in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night” -Howl -Allen Ginsberg

“Even the scarlet flowers of passion seem to grow in the same meadow as the poppies of oblivion.”

-Oscar Wilde

I think I thunk I sprung a leak I bided time I turned my cheek I laughed until my lungs grew weak I sobbed until my ribs did creak I drank the ocean, spilled the stone Ran ‘til no country was my home Slept with drunkards by the tide Licked the shore its last goodbye Gulped down freedom Heaved up wine Preserved my flesh in salty brine (my meats, so dried, I felt so fine!)

And made it back by half past nine Then dressed myself in woman’s pearls And made believe among the girls Who yesterday could hardly speak And now have grown so old and weak!

I think I have lost track of time, I thought myself a man sublime but gnawing paint from ballroom walls and gargling lye in bathroom stalls has turned my eyes a little strange.

I’m not sure from which door I came (or maybe from no door at all but from those walls and bathroom stalls that line the rooms and dancing hallsthey slurp me in; I give them all.)

“Blue oblivion, largely lit, smiled and smiled at me.”

-William Rose Benet

“And in short, I was afraid.”

-TS Eliot

“ Anything beyond the limits and grasp of the human mind is either illusion or futility .�

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-Marquis de Sade

Wild West equine jaws and stony stacked cairns and the ivory skulls’ empty sockets glaring at you where the eyes used to be.

Watch Icy peaks over a cold ocean. The world reflected in a glass pond, and in the spaces, an icy palace This water looms green with duck filth a cloud mirrored is an icicle in yonder glacial castle, it is lost, adrift, alone until it drowns.

Departing to horse skeletons like flecks of golden flake in the pits of a fountain, light-years deep.

I know there are pumas on this mountain.

We never see them.

The old man sat on the cold gray day And he froze and he shook in a peculiar way For he’d seen the hot summers and winter’s disease He’d set fire to the horses and he’d shot at the trees His men were good soldiers they’d died one by one He’d seen as they fiddled and fingered their guns He’d known lusting beauty in boys’ green toothless maws He’d felt tender, embittered, transcending war’s laws He’d smelled lonely men, slept surrounded by bile Touched toes with poor brothers who’d forgotten to smile Had lost all the letters he’d forgotten to send Forgotten to sleep for three days again Every man’s got it figured he’s going to hell They’re not getting much worse but they’re not getting well And he still felt no feeling in his arm, leg, or heart But for one strange memory he’d heard in the dark: “It’s so chilly, so chilly So chilly and cold I can’t feel my fingers and I can’t feel my toes The tear gas keeps leaking it’s filling the trenches I Can’t seem to remember what my mother’s first name is It starts with a jolt that grows soon to your head So blind now, I tell you, can’t wait ‘til I’m dead.”

And the cannons rang out over strange no-man’s land And he held a dead man’s wrist in his hand Distant cries of the rotting no more filled him with dread Now if he could only get himself some good half-moldy bread.

“…That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything ” -William Shakespeare

“Sing then the core of dark and absolute oblivion where the soul at last is lost in utter peace.”

-D.H. Lawrence

“All the filth and horror, fear, hate disease and death of human history flows between you and the Western Lands.”

-William S. Burroughs

“Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.”

-Jack Kerouac

Would you tell me who sang a song who lent a tune who blew the wind who caught the moon who smiled a lie who went to die in the mountains of Thermopylae who lit the lights who drank the ale tobacco drool turned sour and stale

who killed the sun, his only son, and chilled his fists with loaded gun his fists they were all bloody bruised he used no knife he lit no fuse he danced no waltz on some young grave of that young boy whose life he gave but took too soon and came undone left mother’s womb a barren one.

Cool, cleeeeeean, p-p-p-peptic. Septic.

Obtuse, morose, viscose --- apocalyptic.

Striation – hoooowhimsy, sheikh– Palaces of rubies and all-sky visions, no shoes.

Praying mantis – green filament.

Ship deck – blubber splinter.

Drawn bone claws – of trees, hag-witch pale and crooked bat wings.

“ Be just and if you can't be just, be arbitrary. ” -William S. Burroughs

“O Baba, the splendor of Maya is deceptive.

The blind man has forgotten the Name; he is in limbo, neither here nor there.”

-Sri Guru Granth Sahib

“…most delicate jewels; from whom flow the most enervating pleasures and the most enriching sufferings” -Charles Baudelaire

The mass of red, that stuck in the artery and lodged in the lungs.

The very same blood clot that’s killed millions of soldiers; the patriot who believed he was infallible, a certain Lance Corporal Hardy who thought himself superior to all,. but,. Oh, no more than Jesus Christ Our Saviour.

That same lumped sum of dead cell, that brought Odysseus to his knees.

“It works by blocking blood flow to the brain, you see.”

Pride.

Is that one great killer of men.

Whose pink and bulbous head Leads a bulk of 30 pounds, onward, onward, upward Leads wings the colors of flesh in the final stages of necrosis Leads the condor to the furthest watery depths of the sky, tell me: What’s beyond the heavens?

Have you ever seen god?

I have seen the condor in flight; its wingspan spans 8 acres of land, its swollen wattle a mountain in itself Do the trees bow down to your majesty?

Even the carrions must quake with fear, when your silent shadow hovers near.

When you rip their rotting carcasses, with bottle-opener beak, do rotting stenches overpower you? do the odors make you speak, in the ancient voices of the Oracle: “I am the winged sorcerer of the clouds; I will descend when Doomsday’s bugles sound.”

And when the Peruvian horsemen are galloping by (having tethered your might with a rope) and beating bare-fisted your brethren, they call, “don’t worry about them; they’re just seraphim, whose gossamer ulnas float free from flesh tethers!”

Must you sweep low and cry or turn a blind eye?

“Yonder stands your orphan with his gun Crying like a fire in the sun.”

-Bob Dylan

“…I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing…”

-TS Eliot

I. exasperation appears an olive window through which I can see the sea. murky in its withholding nature seaweed beside an old ruined glass flask Repetition is Exasperation is lonely and lovely and cold.

II. Fear is a turquoise oven that bakes cracked clay into unchangeable masses and the lump of skin that may be cancerous flesh.

III. anxiety feels a cinnamon blanket, suffocated. leaping to constrict a small child’s lung in its vice-like grasp.

IV. Relief is a balloon of burnt sienna that pops and pours pus and stings like a skinned knee but aches so delightfully.

V. Disappointment seems A crimson ax calling‌WE HAVE TO SAVE YOU!!!

I think we should save you.

Let them save you, before you feel it scratching at your feet.

“ It occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility.”

-Joseph Conrad