[Locked to people who like poetry]

[superiorspectre]

This is more or less a test of just how specific one can get with these locks. Psychic journal system and all. I'm still getting used to this. And if nothing else, I wanted to have this here, just for myself.

Shattered Head

A life hauls itself uphill
through hoar-mist steaming
the sun's tongue licking
leaf upon leaf into stricken liquid
When? When? cry the soothseekers
but time is a bloodshot eye
seeing its last of beauty its own
foreclosure
a bloodshot mind
finding itself unspeakable
What is the last thought?
Now I will let you know?
or, Now I know?
(porridge of skull-splinters, brain tissue
mouth and throat membrane, cranial fluid)

Shattered head on the breast
of a wooded hill
Laid down there endlessly so
tendrils soaked into matted compost
became a root
torqued over the faint springhead
groin whence illegible
matter leaches: worm-borings, spurts of silt
volumes of sporic changes
hair long blown into far follicles
blasted into a chosen place

Revenge on the head (genitals, breast, untouched)
revenge on the mouth
packed with its inarticulate confessions
revenge on the eyes
green-gray and restless
revenge on the big and searching lips
the tender tongue
revenge on the sensual, on the nose the
carrier of history
revenge on the life devoured
in another incineration

You can walk by such a place, the earth is
made of them
where the stretched tissue of a field or woods
is humid
with beloved matter
the soothseekers have withdrawn
you feel no ghost, only a sporic chorus
when that place utters its worn sigh
let us have peace

And the shattered head answers back

And I believed I was loved, I believed I loved
Who did this to us?

-- Adrienne Rich, from Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995-1998 (1999)

Comments

[elashte.livejournal.com]

I saw a famous man eating soup.
I say he was lifting a fat broth
Into his mouth with a spoon.
His name was in the newspapers that day
Spelled out in tall black headlines
And thousands of people were talking about him.

    When I saw him,
He sat bending his head over a plate
Putting soup in his mouth with a spoon.

~Carl Sandburg, Soup

[superiorspectre]

Sandburg was never a particular favourite of mine (that's reserved for Dickinson and Whitman), but random poetry in response is always welcome. Thank you for sharing it. :)

...I never did apologise for what happened before. I really didn't mean for everything to go so wildly out of control.

[elashte.livejournal.com]

I discovered an appreciation for Sandburg after moving to Chicago, actually, though I think the term "favorite" may be reserved for certain Dutch and Polish poets. Unfortunately, I think they lose something in translation.

Please. Apologies are unnecessary. I know how volatile sotuations can be, especially when one adds the Doctor into the mix.