Larry Lies

[larryrap]

Laurie, Brian, and cookalada - lots and lots of thanks.

[larryrap]

8th - ASMR

Cooled by gloss,
warmed by breath and softly muttered,
whispered close
as one might whisper to a sweetheart –

I partook
not with the rancor of the famished
or the sick
whom desperation has diminished

but like a man
who left his wallet on a table
is called back in
to find his revenue has doubled.

[larryrap]

9th – Stump City

We have no hands
for hands, like rapists,
never stop.

Thin as flowers
we've sworn
against the dark.

Our babies,
born in error,
must bleed twice.

Feet are donkeys
too ridiculous
to rise.

Oh guillotine,
reflection:
purify.

Sharp editor,
snip this blubber
to the poem.

[prooftheory]

"ASRM" gets at the sensation well. "Stump City" seems angry to me. My reading of it is that there is resentment of not doing work with our bodies in the modern world or something like that. The images are vivid.

[larryrap]

Hi again proof. It's partly a riff on a cultural trend I despise, so I guess yeah.

[larryrap]

10th – The Great Extinction

Friday has multiplied and like animals that can only count to two
we've slipped out of time, treading footpaths
that hold the earth together like cords.
The day seems weightless, cobbled of dreams
and half-memories of a sunny breeze.
We rest by the trunk of a low-leaning tree,
and sift through the dregs of old songs.
A boat splashes by, past irritations shrink to gnats,
and the future which clamors for space among the reeds
is left out, less urgent than a bicycle bell
clearing the slow to one side.

[Donner]

Hi, Larry,

This goes on all day long. That, for me, is the crux of your thread so far. I have wondered how much influence the place in which we have been plopped has on our outlook on life/experience/relationships (how does anyone who lives in Israel escape an apocalyptic view, for example) or whether our personalities filter all that for us regardless (maybe an eternal optimist, to answer my own question?).

But I digress. "Daily News," "The Detour" and "The Great Extinction" stand out for me, in part for lines like:

I've often offered to cast them into a poem,
but they settle and say: "Leave us alone, we're legion." .

Donner

[larryrap]

Hi Donner, I love having you over here. It's nice that you pinpointed an unassuming line which I like enough to wonder if it's inadvertently stolen.

In Vermont I'd possibly write more about trees and snow and less about Jihad. I enjoy reading about trees but feel my viewpoint (for all it's worth) is called for elsewhere.

[larryrap]

11th - Why I Left

To discard a caved-in castle for these whipping slopes of grass.
To trade a chorus of mumbles for a song.
To raise a rod of steel and plug into the sky.
To grind a heel in the cereal bowl of a million slurping towns.

My mother and father can't save me.
They mourn at an online temple to the rags I left behind.
Those prison bars crumbled when I touched them with a feather.
Even a counterfeit world can seem beautiful to a child.

The dead don't sing.
The dead have no say in the politics of the living.
The dead endlessly fold and unfold their coupons of excuses.
The dead sit in circles and recite their anecdotes and nod.

I've left a flickering valley glow for the company of hills.
Exchanged the warmth of blindness for a fire.
Should a falcon waste any tears on the shell it once called a nest?
And you who claim to envy the birds, would you give up your fingers to fly?

[larryrap]

12th – Collected Poems

Here are the first years, when he was singled out for skillful imitations,
an unusual imagination, and confidence not often granted to one so young.
Then comes the breakthrough volume, in which he set his mentors aside
to invent his own style, raiding troves of common speech
to storm through the turbulent times. The following years
witnessed his most enduring work: sonnets to his wife,
records of crises and travel, and the much-anthologized poem
about the deaths of family and friends. Rough and increasingly bitter,
the last chapter turns dark, his love for the world
shadowed by despair. Finally, silence: the last decade
lost to writing, cared after by followers, his legacy secure.
One recognizes one's self in these stations
of anger, joy, and surrender. It is a record of our age also,
wracked by cynicism yet somehow intact,
though it would be hard to know from reading
that during the epic struggle to line up his vowels precisely right,
two hundred million were killed by starvation and war.

[GreaterMandalaofUselessness]

Stump City Love the last stanza. Could definitely do with a sharp editor myself.

I was enjoying Collected Poems even before I got the excellent ending. Very nicely done.

-Matt

[Scrow]

Hello,

I love 'The Great Extinction', and 'Why I left'. The way the former reads, with the gnats, reeds and bicycle bell is excellent - oh, and the first line, which really hooks me in, With such an interesting simile. S3 and S4 of 'Why I left' really stand out for me, too.

thank you,

Sarah

[Dunc]

Larry

Hairless - Your political aerial picks it all up, indeed. Neat and nasty.

ASMR (I had to look it up) and how well you've wrapped it up, a kind of serendipity.

Stump City - black vision in that one.

Great Extinction - out of time, treading footpaths / that hold the earth together like cords - wonderful image, sets up the poem right through.

Why I Left - accumulates power as it goes, so that S3 is cold and savage and S4 takes it out to that fine last line.

Collected Poems - Well, on the other hand, more things are wrought by poems than this world dreams of, as Tennyson's King Arthur put it. Or something like that. I'll resist, though not very hard, the temptation to read it as autobiography.

Your thread never reminds me of anyone else. Your voice is altogether distinct.

Regards / Dunc

[larryrap]

Matt and Sarah and Dunc - thank you for being so kind and attentive.

[larryrap]

13th – Hair, Tel Aviv 2015

The week Iran declared our destruction non-negotiable
I went to see "Hair".

Imagine: war is waste. The body
holy.

Youth faking youth,
yet young. And the songs.

Berger, seventy,
asleep near the exit.

Let me go, says the play. This isn't working.
Hasn't been, for a long long time.

Long applause, but scant intention
to let the sunshine in.

Outside, the city still stands –
mass delusion

painted many times over,
silver on sand.

And people moving
out and in.

Here's a spoiler:
nothing lasts.