This is a Fantasy Story

This is the beginning of my story.  The year was 2009.  Everything was coming apart and I didn't want to believe it.  I avoided detection by scurrying beneath the detectable income line, and ate so little it appeared I was in great shape.  I'm sure ill-advised decisions were made, but the greatest decisions I ever made happened too.

Skip years into the future.  I am avoiding failure like I cheated on it, and I am doing so well I am learning new ways to fail.  I don't want to be writing this.  Every time I drive in the car - the old, old, old Animul - I am reminded of my haste, drive a little bit faster, pay a little less attention.  I would like to get home and write.  Write on my typewriter.  Hear the loud, jagged, disjointed keys hit the paper irregularly.  I would like to watch them get stuck.  I would like to watch the letters misfire and hit the paper incorrectly.  I would like to write in a room filled with smoke (I don't smoke) in black and white.  I would like to write the last great manuscript to be sold or hung in someone's parlor for millions of dollars.  In fact, that is what I need to do, and I will do it as soon as I get home.

I seem to like losing my nerve when I need it the most.  I don't want to be writing this right now.  My head, my mind, is so very far away from my body right now.

I have many poems to write on here.  Many poems that need to be put on here.

My computer crashed a few days ago.  For weeks before that I knew it was coming.  My plan was to place them here, so I could have them somewhere.

Thankfully my computer was fixed, so I don't have to do all that copying and pasting.

That would take too much time.

This is as brief an image as we get.  It is as thin a glimpse as we can muster right now.  There is nowhere else for this to go.  There is so much more we have to do.

Try to make me proud.

No One Has E-Mailed Yet!

I can't believe this blog hasn't taken off yet!  It should be soaring through the prevailing winds of cyberspace at this point, invading people's creative minds and conquering their empty souls!...

Haha.  What did I imagine this thing was supposed to be again?  I've only told my girlfriend that this exists, and I'm pretty sure she hasn't read this in a long time.  Partly because it hasn't been contributed to in forever; partly because she reads anything I've written well before it goes on here.

Well, she hasn't read any of this.

The Dream
by Matt Catania

Soul is known in the hole
the time it takes to travel
It's a crime to e inside my mind
Dreams do not unravel.

I thought myself a poet once
Arrogance, Ignorance bliss
I was so much cooler back then
When I knew what I'd do with this

But now the road ain't so clear
Traffic jacked up other minds
Some greater, some later discovered
Most are farther behind

The crux underneath my dilemma
Crutched weakly with wry foundation
Starry lenses stand on a glass fountain
Balance light of lilies and strangulation

Oh, where am I supposed to go now?
I'm years behind earning it
If I start now, how long do I wait
If only I knew, if it was worth it

Stay in stasis in statum oasis
Static and stoic, a stalwart complacence
Statuesque faces sleep in stone cases
What world I live within

An hones hope; mine is simple
enough.  And yet, so hard to believe
In screams filling still rooms to blank faces
Do they clap just to make me leave

If I write for simple, merely my soul
what affirmation do I need
from hollow eyes, empty faces
the heirs and heiresses of the crossroads

And the cheers, they may satisfy
if well wishes fuel the soul;
Boos, rejection are contemporaries
in the halls of the honored dead.

When I stand on stage
and I ask you a question
answer my question
don't applaud me for asking

Your cheer is the opposition 
to what I want the most.
Your lax is my arch rival
but keep the host

For my dream, my dream
to play one warm summer night
in front of a hundred thousand fans
in the park seduced by the city lights

I need you to love me just enough
to make it through one night.
There has to be enough of you
out there to make this work.

Right?  Love is not required
like I require in my life.
Who is the apportioner
of my wife?

Age has come, a coming of age
the age I've reached avails no coming
Fronting the stage, the stage is a front
for a coming of age aging ages in coming

Curtain closes on stage alone
Opportune fortune reaps the reeking
Blind to my backside the band keeps playing
Blasting, air brush, gain wreaking

Delay to the curtain displays an uncertain
relation made of tenuous plans
Lucky for we - we like to agree
we shadows held in shy hands

In high school I learned of vectors
rays, lines, line segments
At infinium is still conjecture
rays aren't always straight.

Rays of the Sun are never unified
yet not one complains of inefficiency.
We make music, diffuse, and grow mystified
why fans don't fawn at the food of the door.

I startle myself until my time comes
My mind will laps and dreams fall
from my blushing mind into my hand.
My greatest mistake was to suffer withdrawal.

Gold is a silly metaphor
in a state of lethal taste
this guy's too kind, he's a killer
with that skin-eating smile on his face

I would alter the deal of my dream
had I not run the others out
My mind is regressing so successfully
an inevitable basement of doubt

Counting heartbeats is not way to live
imagining my organs isn't either
Steeping in the dread of my squishy design
is causing a common fever



(TO BE CONTINUED...)

Charles Bukowski's Advice to Writing Students at EMU

For some reason I can't find the poem "Poetry Readings" by Bukowski in any of the books I have.  Here it is anyway, check it out.  After you read that, you can read this poem.  I love his view on poets and poetry readings, because I find them timeless and all but too relevant to me right now in this place.  If I ever had to do a poetry reading, I promise myself now I will read Poetry Readings first.

For now, I'll put another poem I found from him, that every student I have dealt with at this school should read.  It applies to all of them; in fact it probably applies to most of the staff at this college as well.  Another poem that directly applies to my life right now.

I'm not all knowing, but...
by Charles Bukowski

one of the problems is
that when most people
sit down to write a poem
the think,
"now I am going to write a 
poem"
and then they go on to write a poem
that
sounds like a poem or what they think
a poem should sound like.

this is one of their
problems.
of course, there are other 
problems:
those writers of poems 
that sound like poems
think that they then must
go around
reading them
to other people.

this, they say, is done
for status and recognition
(they are careful
not to mention
vanity
or the need for 
instantaneous
approbation
from some
sparse, addled
crowd).

the best poems
it seems to me
are written out of
an ultimate
need.
and once the poem is
written,
the only need
after that
is to write
another.

and the silence
of the printed page
is the
best response
to a finished
work.

in decades past
I once warned
some poet-friends
of mine
about the masturbatory
nature of poetry readings
done just
for the applause of
a handful of 
idiots.

"isolate yourself and
do your work and if you
must mix, then do it
with those who
have no interest at all
in what you consider
so
important."

such anger,
such a self-righteous
response
did I receive then
from my poet-friends 
that it seemed to me
that I had exactly 
proved my 
point.


after that,
we all drifted 
apart.


and that solved just
one of my
problems
and I suppose
just one of
theirs.

Dylan Thomas

I can't find the Bukowski poem I'm looking for, so I'll start with Dylan Thomas.  In my time at EMU, I have found very few lessons to be learned from the courses I have taken.  One pursuit that seemed worthwhile was introduced to me last semester, by Professor Rob Halpern, in a class I failed by my own design.  It was an inspection into what modernity really is defined as, and how it can be effectively pursued in art.  We examined the paradox of literary modernity (all too briefly, so I cannot claim to know much about it) Baudellaire and de Man wrestled with, and I wrote an essay examining the possibility of Dylan Thomas being the one poet I know of that was effectively modern with his poetry, through his impeccable use of the english language.

I have no idea if I was on the right track, as my essay was so far off the prompt the essay was intended, it was not reviewed.

Though I only followed the instructions of the class - that is, I continued my examinations from my first essay into my second essay.

What looked to be a promising class turned into another class where the students were given the false belief that they were far more clever than they really were, and I guess it was assumed that with such a weighted subject, more than 20 people could understand in a month what it took far smarter writers a lifetime to try to understand.

In either case.

Here is the poem that struck me with its use of language:


A Grief Ago
by Dylan Thomas

A grief ago,
She who was who I hold, the fats and flower,
Or, water-lammed, from the scythe-sided thorn,
Hell wind and sea,
A stem cementing, wrestled up the tower,
Rose maid and male,
Or, malted venus, through the paddler's bowl
Sailed up the sun;

Who is my grief,
A chrysalis unwrinkling on the iron,
Wrenched by my fingerman, the leaden bud
Shot through the leaf,
Was who was folded on the rod the aaron
Rose cast to plague, 
The horn and ball of water on the frog
Housed in the side.

And she who lies,
Like exodus a chapter from the garden,
Brand of the lily's anger on her ring,
Tugged through the days
Her ropes of heritage, the wars of pardon,
On field and sand
The twelve triangles of the cherub wind
Engraving going.

Who then is she,
She holding me?  The people's sea drives on her,
drives out the father from the caesared camp;
The dens of shape
Shape all her whelps with the long voice of water,
That she I have,
The country-handed grave boxed into love,
Rise before dark.

The night is near,
A nitric shape that leaps her, time and acid;
I tell her this:  before the suncock cast
Her bone to fire,
Let her inhale her dead, through seed and solid
Draw in their seas,
So cross her hand with their grave gipsy eyes,
And close her fist.  

My God

It's been too long since I've added anything to this.  Too long since I really wrote anything I've liked.  I've fallen into a pattern of efficient life/time-wasting in Michigan.  I can't wait until I get home.  This place is robbing me of the thinly layered, already shaky sociability foundation I had created back home.  I am becoming more and more like the people I hate here, and it is mainly due to my utter lack of interest, my pure resentment to any social interaction here.  I can't bring myself to engage with any of the people I have met here because they lack something entirely essential that I need in people I can respect, and wish to associate with.  They lack self-awareness, humility, intelligence.  When I can't care enough to provide what I really need to make myself as effective a social entity as I can be - desire - then I come off as an idiot. 

That drives me crazy.

I want to put two poems on here, one from Dylan Thomas and one from Charles Bukowski (real stretch of creative influence and a strong representation of my interest in expanding my library of poets, I know) that have been in my mind the past couple months.  I will do that soon.  Maybe tomorrow.

For now, I must go to bed.

I'm glad to finally be back here though.

Mine and Mine Alone

There is so much to read out there that I don't believe, unless someone can find some merit and it helps them, that these poems will have as far a reach as I would have liked.

I also feel like this is such can be so selfish.  There are far more valuable things I could be doing to offer legitimate help to those who want it, and have to settle for moral support.

I took this prayer and used it for a poem.

On Playing Inkball On My Computer At Beginner Difficulty and Getting 100,175 Points 

by Matt Catania 

“For all we ought to have

thought

and have not thought;

For all we ought to have

said

and have not said;

For all we ought to have

done

and have not done:

we ask thee

for forgiveness.”

 

A Tribute to Edgar Allen Poe

This poem is not mine.  I edited the conclusion of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Poetic Principle" to show people that didn't know that there was so much more to Poe than just the dark, suspenseful prose he wrote.  He was a genius, and most of his poetry and writing celebrated life and its beauty. 

"What the true poetry is...
(excerpt from Edgar Allen Poe's 'The Poetic Principle')

“…by mere reference to a few of the simple elements which induce

in the Poet himself

the true poetical effect.

“He recognizes the ambrosia which nourishes his soul,

in the bright orbs that shine in Heaven –

in the volutes of the flower –

in the clustering of low shrubberies –

in the waving of grain-fields –

in the slanting of the tall, Eastern trees –

in the blue distance of mountains –

in the grouping of clouds –

in the twinkling of half-hidden brooks –

in the gleaming of silver rivers –

in the repose of sequestered lakes –

in the star-mirroring depths of lonely wells.

“He perceives it in the songs of birds –

in the harp of Æolus –

in the sighing of the night-wind –

in the repining voice of the forest –

in the surf that complains to the shore –

in the fresh breath of the woods –

in the scent of the violet –

in the voluptuous perfume of the hyacinth –

in the suggestive odor that comes to him,

at eventide,

from far-distant, undiscovered islands,

over dim oceans, illimitable and unexplored.

“He owns it in all noble thoughts –

in all unworldly motives –

in all holy impulses –

in all chivalrous, generous, and self-sacrificing deeds.

“He feels it in the beauty of woman –

in the grace of her step –

in the lustre of her eye –

in the melody of her voice –

in her soft laughter –

in her sigh –

in the harmony of the rustling of her robes.

“He deeply feels it in her winning endearments –

in her burning enthusiasms –

in her gentle charities –

in her meek and devotional endurances –

but above all –

ah!  far above all –

“he kneels to it –

he worships it in the faith,

in the purity,

in the strength, in the altogether divine majesty –

of her love…”