Friday, April 30, 2010

Windmills

Zdzislaw Beksinski

Death by a thousand cuts
Put to sword the prince of cups
Ripples in your amoebic puddle
May never touch the outward moving sides

But paddling yet with every pore
Hoping to never see the impeding shore
His armour rent from inward rust
His weapons out of date

Columns of statistical chemistry
React to the horseman’s sad decline
Track his fall across weathered palms
Where life-lines run in parallel

Here the coconut oil for carnival stalls
A bikini beach for atom souls forgot
Here the diet of food for thought
Leaves silhouettes of everything that I’m not

8 comments:

Yodood said...

What part of this ever expanding, unexceedable silhouette is everything you're not, the light or the dark? The other is what you say you are.

It's all the silhouette, and in reality, all you — can't have one without the other in the dynamo of life.

Garth said...

It is all me for sure - not a good look at the moment ;]

Yodood said...

I know what you mean — that 17 minute tape from 2007 Iraq has put me in a very foul mood for dealing with any Polyanna, even though I know I'm stuck here until something overwhelmingly positive happens to make me feel like the present mood is unreasonably pessimistic.

So waddawe get — Oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and another mine "accident." The cost of our dependence on energy hungry prosthetics is our atrophied helplessness and the thrall of the oil snakes selling their elixir.

Word verification: jeweed - pastramifarian staple

Tom said...

aha, very good. sometimes i need a little help to get your stuff.
Either way, love the imagery and flow.

Harlequin said...

I like your image and flow, too, but I think I like more the whole sense of futility you convey here, and so well. I'm thinking it's the cadence or perhaps the way you are working with the unlikely syllables and how they work rhythmically together and contraposed over against each other as well.
It is strange to " like " a piece that has a terse message, but I do like what you have achieved here. Nice work, as always.

Barlinnie said...

An extrordinary piece, I can even taste the the bitterness of the bile as you put to bed every individual letter.

Garth said...

Sometimes the grim reality blots out almost all of the light, but eventually something will pull me out of the hole - I read a story in the Observer today about a photograph taken in 1940 which appears to contain the image of a time traveller - the article cheered me up no end.

Yodood said...

I saw that. Made me wonder too.

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