My feet lead me where they want to be,
they lead me to what i want to see.
They lead me to my ignominy,
to my shame and to my failings,
to iron railings and concrete pavings.
A home carved from hate and loathing,
I rest my head on this dirty ground,
no regard for the chattering sound,
of the people who care little or less,
treading where they make their mess.
A home for me in this dank waste,
my inner wars now act in haste,
as i pour this liquid down my throat,
ill in my gut and yet i boast,
further more i breath down this smoke,
wanting ever just to choke.
A life despoiled, a life lost,
and for this at what cost?
I am dead, a walking corpse,
no longer worth any thoughts,
i watch i wait, i listen and hate,
but i am no longer here,
i killed myself long ago,
a ghost of this modern era,
I am what you have to show.
i’m just curious:
why rhyme?
i ask a lot of people this question.
I also have a tendency to rhyme also so I will attempt an answer. It’s more lyrical in a way. My emotions seem more engaged with a poem that I have written which has a rhyme scheme of some kind even if it is extremely disjointed like an A C B E D A or something like that. The funny thing is when I was around 19 to 22 I rarely rhymed with my poetry at all. To be honest I don’t know what changed although I will look into my so called archives to see if I can pinpoint the reason.
that is the only line i don’t like. actually, i just now take that back. its honest and i’d be a damn liar if i don’t admitt i know exactly what you are talking about.
can we make “you” here be the poem’s voice?
but you love philosophy, don’t you? why?
to be in the right when resenting everyone around you because they perpetuate shittiness but simultaneously loving philosophy. something so very human. cerebral. like art. (i bet you someone would love to disagree with me on this point, but i’m not going in that direction just now).
this is what i take from the poem. the philosophy part because this website happens to be what it is.
this means there is a mix of resenting others as much as the voice resents themself. like they personally deserve being a ghost in a shell.
yep. hating self means hating other.
now this is the part in which i wish you would elaborate:
why this MODERN era? what is it about NOW? this poem all of a sudden turns political. the voice and the “others” described in the poem are the same. they are both expressions of a context.
what do you think?
so, as for the rhyming…poetry, for me, is freedom. i can choose my form. its hard to think of one on one’s own. rhyming is a classic. its like continental philosophy sometimes. less kantian, less analytic, but there is still a form. the philosopher needs it.
thanks
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In my mind, every human action is ‘art’ in some sense. In every act we carry out we are making an affirmation of some nature of our ‘self’, every action is a further little chip from the stone which will become, at our death, our sculpture. Some will reach death satisfied, knowing that the work of art they made was how they wanted it, and did everythign they wanted it to do. Others will die gloomy, knowing they never even began on their work. Others die frustrated, they were SO close to finishing, just one more adjustment, and all the other parts would have fallen into place… but alas no.
I will die satisfied, and gloomy. It is not that I have not begun my work, I have made a highly complex piece… but i derive little from it that we might call pleasure or happiness.
It is funny though, when we talk of selves…
There are the many personas we adopt for different people, and the self that we consider us, our nexus of hopes and ambitions and hates. And then there is the Shadow, which contains the scattered remnants of discarded selves. And then there is the Trasncendental Self (sometimes). The self that realises all of these things of it’s nature, and combines them, and looks through them and ponders. The Transcendental Self is a patten behind the pattern, the image that swims out of the page of seemingly random colours, and yet was there the whole time.
The problem for a transcendental self is it cannot associate any one thing with itself, it is the impartial observer. If we have become truly transcendental in this sense, then when we look at a thing we will feel what the self feels, and also the distinct and often contradictory echoes of long dead selves. We know that the current self simply cannot be more correct than the dead selves, and yet we carry on with what the current self desires, ever pained by the cries of our lost passions.
In this line i do not intend to indicate that the ghostly nature is something exclusive to the modern era. I am simply attempting to express a cultural lens through which this ghostliness has been experienced. Had I lived in another era, I might have easily felt the same things, but my interpretations and expressions would have reeked of a wholly different atmosphere.
As for me, I tend not to think about how to express myself, I just do it.
Poems, rhyming, I have done them and they work (in the sense that afterwards i feel i have been expressed, not in the sense that they express my feelings or achieve aesthetic qualities)
It seems to me that expressing feelings or ideas with rhyme is more of an art because it makes it more difficult and unique.