I’m not knowledgeable about poetry, but I love it. I hope you share your favorite poems too.
It’s Poetry Week at The Truth Barrier.
I published both of these at the original Truth Barrier, 2013, and am not sure anybody else liked them.
People think they don’t understand poetry but people do.
It’s the opposite of propaganda. Ok, let’s see what you think:
1.
To Resume
We suddenly got too close to something from which we’d been kept at a mysteriously favorable and measured distance. Since then, corrosion. Our headrest has disappeared.
It is unbearable to feel oneself a committed and impotent part of beauty that is dying through the fault of others. Committed in one’s breast and impotent in the movement of ones mind.
If what I show you and what I give you seem less to you than what I hide,
my weighing is poor, my reaping ineffectual.
You are, poem, a wayside altar of darkness on my too exposed face. My splendor and my suffering have slipped between the two.
I must cast off life’s ugly accumulation and find again the gaze that loved it enough in the beginning to display its foundation. What is left for me to live exists in this assault, this tremor.
—René Char
What They Said: Theodore I. Rubin
“I must learn to love the fool in me–the one who feels too much, talks too much, takes too many chances, wins sometimes and loses often, lacks self-control, loves and hates, hurts and gets hurt, promises and breaks promises, laughs and cries. It alone protects me against that utterly self-controlled, masterful tyrant whom I also harbor and who would rob me of my human aliveness, humility, and dignity but for my Fool.”
― Theodore I. Rubin, M.D.
Small Heart
-–for Jan Jozef Szczepanski
The bullet that I shot
at the time of the great war
made a circle around the globe
and struck me in the back
at the least suitable moment
when I was already sure
I had forgotten everything
his-my faults
after all just like others
I wanted to erase from memory
the faces of hatred
history consoled me
that I had fought with naked force
and the Book said
–it is he who is Cain
so many years patiently
so many years in vain
with water of compassion I washed away
soot blood insults
so nobility
the beauty of existence
and perhaps even goodness
could have a home in me
after all just like everyone
I longed to return
to the bay of childhood
to the land of innocence
the bullet I shot
from a small calibre weapon
circled the globe
against the laws of gravitation
and struck me in the back
as if it wanted to say
—that nothing will be forgiven
to anyone
so now I sit alone
on the cut stump of a tree
exactly in the centre
of the forgotten battle
and I
gray spider
weave bitter meditations
about too great a memory
about too small a heart
—Zbigniew Herbert
(Translated from the Polish by John and Bogdana Carpenter)
My personal style is short and sweet. I mean, the way i write them. This one was published in: POETRY’S NOT DEAD - A Collection of Poems from Southern Punks, published in 2016. (Available everywhere) Where I am 1/6 of the authors:
Hypocrites, Half-Wits
& Hypnotized Heads
have Mastered the Masses
with Mesmerized Meds
Blinded by Bullshit
& Bolstered with Bribes
Tricked all the Treaters
& Tortured the Tribes
- jamie dlux
I write all different kinds though. Heres one of my favorite limericks I wrote around the same time (though not published in book):
There once was a concept called time
Often thought of in linear lines
Though the hands of the clock
Tic around as they Toc
It only exists in our minds
I have many more too. They’re fun to write. Like putting puzzles together. ❤️
No poem has one definative mesning. Its like beauty being in the eye of the beholder. Many are fearful of poems because they are afraid of not understanding its meaning. Pity