Der Herbsttag by Johann Heinrich Voss

Harry Crosby

I exchange eyes with the Mad Queen

the mirror crashes against my face
and bursts into a thousand suns
all over the city flags crackle and bang
fog horns scream in the harbor
the wind hurricanes through the window
and I begin to dance the dance of the
Kurd Shepherds

I stamp upon the floor
I whirl like dervishes

colors revolve dressing and undressing
I lash them with my fury
stark white with iron black
harsh red with blue
marble green with bright orange
and only gold remains naked

columns of steel rise and plunge
emerge and disappear
pistoning in the river of my soul
thrusting upwards
thrusting downwards
thrusting inwards
thrusting outwards
penetrating

I roar with pain

black-footed ferrets disappear into holes

the sun tattooed on my back
begins to spin
faster and faster
whirring whirling
throwing out a glory of sparks
sparks shoot off into space
sparks into shooting stars
shooting stars collide with comets

Explosions

Naked Colors Explode
Into
Red Disaster

I crash out through the
window naked, widespread
upon a
Heliosaurus
I uproot an obelisk and plunge
it into the ink-pot of the
Black Sea
I write the word
SUN

by Harry Crosby

Firebrand

Sun-Rhapsody
The Sun! the Sun!
a fish in the aquarium of sky
or golden net to snare the butterfly
of soul

Quatrains To The Sun
A sunfort flourished in my sunless heart
Beyond the Sun. Here in a tower apart
The sunbirds of my lady’s eyes were caged
Alas, poor targets for the sun-god’s dart.

To my friend : EC

A dream, a dream is our being
of mortal clay,
like shadows on the road we’re fleeing
and fade away.

We measure progress by the ride of
an hours’ strife,
and live - and know not - right inside of
eternal life…

poem by Johann Gottfried von Herder,

I am filthy. I am riddled with lice. Hogs, when they look at me, vomit. My skin is encrusted with the scabs and scales of leprosy, and covered with yellow pus.[…] A family of toads has taken up residence in my left armpit and, when one of them moves, it tickles. Mind one of them does not escape and come and scratch the inside of your ear with its mouth; for it would then be able to enter your brain.”

Poems I

The poetic moans of this century are only sophisms.
The first principles must be out of discussion.
I accept Euripides and Sophocles; but I do not accept Aeschylus.
Do not show lack of the most basic proprieties
and bad taste towards the creator.
Repel unbelief: you will please me.
There are only two kinds of poetry; there is only one.

There is a little tacit convention between the author and the reader, by
which the first calls himself sick, and accepts the second as
nurse. It is the poet who consoles humanity! The roles are
switched arbitrarily.

I will not leave any Memoirs.
Poetry is not the storm, any more than the cyclone. It is a
majestic and fertile river.
It is only by admitting the night physically that we have managed to
do it morally. O Young nights! you gave me a lot of
migraines!
We only dream when we sleep. It is words like the dream one,
nothingness of life, terrestrial passage, the preposition perhaps, the
disordered tripod, which have infiltrated into your souls this damp poetry
of languors, like rottenness. Going from words to ideas,
there is only one step.
Disturbances, anxieties, depravities, death, exceptions
tions in the physical or moral order, the spirit of negation, stupefactions
, hallucinations served by the will, torments,
destruction, reversals, tears, insatiabilities,
enslavements, digging imaginations, novels, what is
unexpected, what not to do, the chemical peculiarities of the
mysterious vulture that awaits the carrion of some dead illusion,
the precocious and aborted experiences, the
bug- shell obscurities , the terrible monomania of the pride, the inoculation of
deep stupors , funeral orations, envies, betrayals, tyrannies
, impieties, irritations, acrimonies, pranks
aggressive, dementia, spleen, reasoned fright,
strange worries, which the reader would prefer not to experience,
grimaces, neuroses, bloody channels, through which we make
logic pass at bay, exaggerations, absence of sincerity,
the saws, the platitudes, the gloomy, the gloomy, the childbirth worse
than the murders, the passions, the clan of the novelists of the courts of assizes,
the tragedies, the odes, the melodramas, the extremes presented in perpetuity.
death, reason whistled with impunity, the smells of sissy,
fading, frogs, octopuses, sharks, the simoun of the
deserts, which is somnambulist, fishy, ​​nocturnal, sleeping pill, night owl,
slimy, talking seal, equivocal, consumptive, spasmodic, aphrodisiac
, anemic, one-eyed, hermaphrodite, bastard, albino, pederast,
aquarium phenomenon and bearded woman, the drunken hours of
taciturn discouragement , the fantasies, the acridities, the monsters,
demoralizing syllogisms , garbage, what does not reflect like the child,
desolation, this intellectual mancenillier, the scent cankers, the
thighs of camellias, the guilt of a writer who rolls on the slope
of nothingness and is despises himself with joyful cries, remorse,
hypocrisies, the vague perspectives which crush you in their
imperceptible meshes , the serious spitting on sacred axioms, the
vermin and its insinuating tickles, the insane prefaces, like
those of Cromwell, Mlle de Maupin and Dumas fils, the caducities,
the impotences, the blasphemies, the asphyxiations, the suffocations, the
rages - in front of these filthy mass graves, which I blush to name, it is
time to finally react against what shocks us and bends us so
sovereignly.

Le Compte De Lauetremonot- Maldoror

The Value of Sparrows

Meister Eckhart—Five Poems

When I Was The Forest
When I was the stream, when I was the
forest, when I was still the field
when I was every hoof, foot,
fin and wing, when I
was the sky itself,

no one ever asked me did I have a purpose, no one ever
wondered was there anything I might need,
for there was nothing
I could not love.

It was when I left all we once were that
the agony began, the fear and questions came,
and I wept, I wept. And tears
I had never known before.

So I returned to the river, I returned to
the mountains. I asked for their hand in marriage again,
I begged—I begged to wed every object and creature,

and when they accepted,
God was ever present in my arms.
And He did not say,
“Where have you
been?”

For then I knew my soul—every soul—
has always held
Him.

Why So Many Souls
When were you last really happy?
Let that experience ferment,
bring it to mind once
in a while.

Surely in the genesis of that past moment, when you danced,
you would not have wanted a constable
to have knocked
on your
door,

or have said, “You just entered
a restricted ground.”

Why are there so many stars and souls,
with no end in sight for
them?

Because nothing can interrupt God
when He is having
fun,

creating!

Jerusalem
A hand in my soul can reach out and touch Jerusalem
as my other hand tastes the beauty of the Rhine.

And my bare foot can stand upon the holy ashes of rain—each drop a
fallen Phoenix—that sang out from the fire of union
with clay.

The hills, the valleys, the beasts, the vineyards, the sacred meadows
on our earth and body—they shall pass and ascend as all form does,
tiring of the space within a cage;

for all crowds the soul but the infinite. Ascenders to God we are.

Look though how we enrich this planet with our melting organic
shadows, wondrous shadows are all but He.

What a womb God has—what wild love He must have made to
Himself for days and days without stopping

to have given birth to all you can imagine, and to all you cannot conceive.

Draw a circle around the frontiers of space, barely can God fit a
toe there.

All language has taken an oath to fail to describe Him;
any attempt to do so is the height of arrogance and will
always declare some kind of war:
the inner ones that undermine our strength, and the outer conflicts
that maim red.

I cried out one night in the madness of separation from love,
in the madness of doing, of trying to add to the Perfect;
for Perfect is All.

The awakened heart is like a luminous sphere—just giving without
thought to any who may come close or gaze at it.
The soul becomes blessedly lost to all
but its own holy
being.

When we cannot be who we are our divine senses become mute,
mute and sick from the insanity of judging
what He made Immaculate.

Who must God have made love to in order to have given birth to all this sound,
to this sacred spectrum of color, scents, and music from the
wind’s body and existence’s plea for mercy—that
plea for the real mercy, unbearable joy?

Once we had four legs and tails so useful to balance our raid into
heaven, and I found them again.

I am a swimming galaxy tonight. Angels prowl around me
hoping I will toss them a fresh piece of light—
here dears, here, my sack is full.

The universe rents space from me, and oceans are drawn
from my well. How can that be?

For I can touch Jerusalem while my other hand tastes
the beauty of the
Rhine.

Yes, I can kiss Jerusalem while my mouth
tastes the wonders of
the Rhine.

Always Kissing
They are always kissing, they can’t
control themselves.

It is not possible
that any creature can have greater instincts
and perceptions than the
mature human mind.

God
ripened me.
So I see it is true:
all objects in existence are
wildly in
love.

Intimate
Knowledge always deceives.

It always limits the Truth, every concept and image does.

From cage to cage the caravan moves,
but I give thanks,

for at each divine juncture
my wings expand
and I

touch Him more
intimately.

Meister Eckhart

<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>><<>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Behind Me — dips Eternity –
Before Me — Immortality –
Myself — the Term between –
Death but the Drift of Eastern Gray,
Dissolving into Dawn away,
Before the West begin –

– Emily Dickinson (Behind Me – dips Eternity)

“Behind Me — dips Eternity –
Before Me — Immortality –
Myself — the Term between –
Death but the Drift of Eastern Gray,
Dissolving into Dawn away,
Before the West begin –”

– Emily Dickinson (Behind Me – dips Eternity)

Rattle Logo

Rattle: Poetry… WITHOUT PRETENSION SINCE 1995.

“Ask” by Thomas Mann

ASK

ask for forgiveness again the man with the dark skin
sat in the crevasse of the building and asked for spare
change and you lied again his dry face turned open like
a palm and smacked you with shame and you should feel
ashamed you saw on his face distorted features you still
recognized as human he was no animal other than the
animal each of us is despite the lie we tell that we are not
that lie is a cruelty which you hope dissolves with the wave
of a forgiving god a god who must face you as you faced
the man there but your god appearing within you will also turn
away and will leave you speechless won’t he just as this man
in his rags is speechless to you.


Thomas Mann: “I am by training a theorist and social scientist. And however much this training claims to get to the quick of experience and relation, something inevitably remains untouched. Poetry, I find, attends most seriously to affective resonances that are so important to human life. Poetry, in other words, is that attempt to utter the impossible thing.”

Notice: © 2020 Rattle Foundation.

Why does almost everything seem to me like its own parody? Why must I think that almost all, no, all the methods and conventions of art today are good for parody only?★★★★★This longing for the bliss of the commonplace.★★★★★Because it often happens that an old family, with traditions that are entirely practical, sober and bourgeois, undergoes in its declining days a kind of artistic transfiguration.★★That swamp of impropriety … in … which two civilized beings will behave like cannibals.★★★★★The writer’s joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.

Thomas Mann

I know my lot. One day my name will be linked to the memory of something monstrous [etwas Ungeheueres]—to a crisis like none there has been on earth, to the most profound collision of conscience, to a verdict invoked against everything that until then had been believed, demanded, held sacred. I am no man, I am dynamite.

Nietzche , Ecce Homo

Kublai Khan

Samual Taylor Colridge

Kubla Khan

Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

BY SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
Constancy to an Ideal Object

Ways apt and new to sing of love I’d find,
Forcing from her hard heart full many a sigh,
And re-enkindle in her frozen mind
Desires a thousand, passionate and high;
O’er her fair face would see each swift change pass,
See her fond eyes at length where pity reigns,
As one who sorrows when too late, alas!
For his own error and another’s pains;
See the fresh roses edging that fair snow
Move with her breath, that ivory descried,
Which turns to marble him who sees it near;
See all, for which in this brief life below
Myself I weary not but rather pride
That Heaven for later times has kept me here.

Petrarch

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us-if at all-not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.


                          II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer-

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom


                III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.


                  IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.


                        V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
                                For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
                                Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
                                For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

TS Elliot

How can we have survived so many generations,
with so much happening in so many directions,
with so much being hidden and so much unsaid,
with so much being forgotten and so much deliberately destroyed,
and yet still come back to the tinkle of a spoon in a china bowl?

Every moment a birth, a death, a failure, a success,
a murder, a creation, a theft, an offering,
an irreparable loss and an inestimable gain,
a banality and a masterpiece,
a revelation and a disappointment —
every moment absolutely complete and the definition of void.

Richard James

Stuck In The Middle With You ( You Being Me )….

Well, I don’t know why I came here tonight

I got the feeling that something ain’t right

I’m so scared in case I fall off my chair,

And I’m wondering how I’ll get down those stairs

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right,

Here I am, stuck in the middle with you

Yes, I’m stuck in the middle with you,

And I’m wondering what it is I should do

It’s so hard to keep this smile from my face,

Losing control, and I’m all over the place

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right,

Here I am, stuck in the middle with you

Well, you started off with nothing,

And you’re proud that you’re a self-made man

And your friends they all come crawling,

Slap you on the back and say,

Please, please

Trying to make some sense of it all,

But I can see it makes no sense at all

Gerry Rafferty - the Steelers

“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

Wallace Stevens,

The problem is all inside your head she said to me
The answer is easy if you take it logically
I’d like to help you in your struggle to be free
There must be fifty ways to leave your lover

She said it’s really not my habit to intrude
Furthermore, I hope my meaning won’t be lost or misconstrued
But I’ll repeat myself at the risk of being crude
There must be fifty ways to leave your lover
Fifty ways to leave your lover

You just slip out the back, Jack
Make a new plan, Stan
You don’t need to be coy, Roy
Just get yourself free
Hop on the bus, Gus
You don’t need to discuss much
Just drop off the key, Lee
And get yourself free

She said it grieves me so to see you in such pain
I wish there was something I could do to make you smile again
I said I appreciate that and would you please explain
About the fifty ways

She said why don’t we both just sleep on it tonight
And I believe in the morning you’ll begin to see the light
And then she kissed me and I realized she probably was right
There must be fifty ways to leave your lover
Fifty ways to leave your lover

You just slip out the back, Jack
Make a new plan, Stan
You don’t need to be coy, Roy
Just get yourself free
Hop on the bus, Gus
You don’t need to discuss much
Just drop off the key, Lee
And get yourself free

Paul Simon

1 “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”

2 “Fear, after all, is our real enemy. …

3 If it’s going to be a world with no time for sentiment, it’s not a world that I want to live in.” …
4 "The past is just something that’s over.”

Christopher Isherwood

"Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.

Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears. …

The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers. …

The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards."

Arthur Koestler

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Tags: language, new-year, voice, words
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden.

Tags: missed-chances

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.

Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres-
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholy new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

In my end is my beginning.

Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,

Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

Footfalls echo in the memory
down the passage we did not take
towards the door we never opened
into the rose garden. My words echo
thus, in your mind

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

The houses are all gone under the sea.

The dancers are all gone under the hill.

time past and time future
what might have been and what has been
point to one end, which is always present.

TS Elliot Four Quartets

Stefan Anton George

Come to the park they say is dead, and view
The shimmer of the smiling shores beyond,
The stainless clouds with unexpected blue
Diffuse a light on motley path and pond.
The tender grey, the burning yellow seize
Of birch and boxwood, mellow is the breeze.
Not wholly do the tardy roses wane,
So kiss and gather them and wreathe the chain.

The purple on the twists of wilding vine,
The last of asters you shall not forget,
And what of living verdure lingers yet,
Around the autumn vision lightly twine.

Stefan Anton George

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

Salvador Dali