Poem of the Day #4: Also, #5 and #6

A trip away from the pleasant glow of computer screens, accompanied only by an sadly wireless-less iPad and a growing sense of ennui left me unable to update for entirely too many hours.  Fortunately, no one seems to read these poems.  Still, 30 poems were promised, and 30 poems will be delivered.


#4

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies

Exists as a pleasant yet spiteful lie—

A smear on a window—

Fog on the sea—

Unchanged but always changing

Like a lie

Evolves in telling—

Always rearranging—

Until the truth at last resides—

Only in the

Honesty

Of fading, at last, to die.

#5

I take no sordid story with—

No tales of woe shall pass these lips—

When any ask who did I kiss

I shall speak only of fleeting bliss—

And tell them that I did love thee true

For that is all that I could do—

Though thou didst injure me

I would cause thee no injury.

Nor would I slander thy lovely name

Or spill ash over thy lonely grave—

When they ask who, I shall say 

That she is the beautiful Annabel Lee—

So, from now till the last break of day

Men and women whose hearts will fall

Can know the truth: love conquers all.

#6

Into the night we fly

On strong whispering wing

My memory touching yours

But never here—

We are always some other where—

Where they cannot come

We are together, you and I,

In the russet-clad evening sky,

The morning coming but the night young,

Making music with the moment

You grab and hold it

I struggle not to let go

But I cannot hold because though 

We fly so high above everything

We fly with thick, heavy, lead-filled wings

Burdened by the brevity of the past and the longevity of the future—

We cannot be together while we are held apart

By the force of ten thousand parting words

So we fall back down to Earth—

Two soaring, yet Icarian birds.

The Best Flavor

I am finishing up Michael J Sullivan's Riyria Revelations and am pleasantly surprised by the quality of the story.  While I wholeheartedly endorse the series, the more interesting thing to me is the author's interview.  Most specifically, this:

           "For years now I have heard few...lament that repetitive theme....they are tired of the same old hero-               
            vanquishing-evil and want something new.  Something more real, more believable.  Which to me 
            sounds like someone saying they love chocolate, the just wished it wasn't so chocolatey and that it 
            tasted more like vanilla."


Having an established genre author admit to the feelings he describes is akin to NASA spontaneously admitting that we faked the first moon landing.

"Are you sure the wind rippling isn't going to give it away?"

It drives me insane that every new speculative fiction I pick up spends a thousand pages developing a deep, resonant theme that parallels the real world.  And there will be no MacGuffin.  If I found myself wanting to read Atlas Shrugged again, I would gouge my own eyes out with a rusty spoon.

As seen in the last reasonably tolerable Kevin Costner movie.

So, you see, I don't want to read it, I get suckered in by Tor's shield on the spine.  Then I read 300,000 words of political intrigue, conspiracies, and judiciary debate about the rights of the parasite wurms of Arenon IV.  All I really wanted was a wizard burninating some orcs.

Sullivan goes on to defend his own work, which makes his Oz-like unveiling a little less impressive.  But ultimately, the idea that someone can't just write a boring old hack n' slash novel is depressing.  Joseph Campbell described thousands of concurrent mythologies that all feature similar elements.  They endured because they were entertaining and popular.  We can read them today because they are always fun.  No, KJ Parker's Engineer trilogy isn't better than Brook's Shannara work.  But it is worth spending the few days it will take to finish the books.

Similarly, the constant quest to destroy any hope we might have that our future generations will even know what a poem is has become mindbogglingly stupid.  I've got a list, here's the order of the list that it's in.

It goes Reggie, Jay-Z, Tupac, and Biggie, Andre from Outkast, Jada, Kurupt, Nas, and then me.

1)  Poetry can rhyme

2)  It can even be iambic

3)  Nothing on your tumblr can be considered poetry.

4)  Poetry does not have to be spoken in front of an audience of students with suspect scruples.

5)  If you are doing a "slam" or "reading," keep in mind that talking like William Shatner does not turn your 

     diary into poems.

6)  Punctuation was invented for a reason.*

7)  No one likes an ampersand.

*This.  This is why.

I'm thankful that the bow-legged, greasy, bastardized version of poetry exists at all, but I'm not going to invite it in for dinner, because I don't want it to mess with my kids.  I don't have kids.  I once wrote a fifty page critical evaluation of Frank Herbert's Dune so I know all about sucking the fun out of a good story.  I just don't want that to become the only real way of interacting with a book.

The way the publishers and the market treat stories with too much cliche isn't like complaining the chocolate is too chocolatey, it's like banning chocolate and forcing everyone to enjoy their damn vanilla.

"You will like it, or you will be forced to keep publishing on Smashwords."

The Notebook

I love a blinking cursor and a blank page, but sometimes I wonder how pretentious my notebook appears whenever I'm sitting in a bar or a coffee shop, nursing a glass of whiskey or a hot chocolate I pretend is a macchiato if anyone asks--even though I don't even know what a macchiato is.

This, apparently.

It sounds vaguely like the sort of thing that gets bricked up in someone's wine cellar.

"Vinyl Just Sounds Better" by John Keyes

The old man wore a dusty leather overcoat cinched around his waist and a wrinkled shepherd’s cap fit snug on his head.  Considering that most of the customers who frequented the shop preferred gaudy counter-culture tye-dye and peasant blouses, it was safe to say he made an impression on anyone who saw him there that day.  This was not to say any of them saw him do it, which would be too easy.  They all were sure that he had, though, since in their own words, “Who else could it be?”  As if the whole lot of them weren’t repressed anarchists who flirted with retro-paganism in order to eat shrooms and cavort with pleasantly loose men and women who reassured them that the bruises and rashes were the result of too many trysts conducted by moonlight in a poison ivy patch.