Originally posted by Charles Bukowski
something's knocking at the door
a great white light dawns across the continent as we fawn over our failed traditions often kill to preserve them or sometimes kill just to kill it doesn't seem to matter: the answers dangle just out of reach, out of hand, out of mind.
the leaders of the past were insufficient, the leaders of the present are unprepared. we curl up tightly in our beds at night and wait. it is a waiting without hope, more like a prayer for unmerited grace
it all looks more and more like the same old movie. the actors are different but the plot's the same: senseless
we should have known, watching our fathers. we should have known, watching our mothers. they did not know, they too were not prepared to teach. we were too naive to ignore their counsel and now we have embraced their ignorance as our own. we are them, multiplied. we are their unpaid debts. we are bankrupt in money and in spirit.
there are a few exceptions, of course, but these teeter on the edge and will at any moment tumble down to join the rest of us, the raving, the battered, the blind and the sadly corrupt.
a great white light dawns across the continent, the flowers open blindly in the stinking wind, as grotesque and ultimately unlivable our 21st century struggles to be born.
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post didn't die in a fire!
Bukowski kind of grated on me, but i liked his poetry a lot more than his prose.
Originally posted by Constantine Cavafy
The City
You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore, find another city better than this one. Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong and my heart lies buried like something dead. How long can I let my mind moulder in this place? Wherever I turn, wherever I look, I see the black ruins of my life, here, where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”
You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore. This city will always pursue you. You’ll walk the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses. You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere: there’s no ship for you, there’s no road. Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.
Clearly i gravitated towards being a moody faggot. But more than anything, this just meant to me that its pointless to believe that if circumstances and place had been different, my life would be better. In one way or another, no matter where I was, i wouldve had to fight the same battles im fighting now.
Call me gay but i like Robert Frost's Fire and Ice.
Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.
I also like Ozymandias by what's his face.
I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust. Frisch weht der Wind Der Heimat zu Mein Irisch Kind, Wo weilest du? “You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; “They called me the hyacinth girl.” —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence. Oed’ und leer das Meer.
