TALK IS CHEAP

I've been interested in writing haikus for a while. I started recently to read about the nature of haiku and the different ways of writing them. This four haikus are eclectic in form, subject and rhythm but I think they stand for the simplicity of the haiku tradition.

i
Sage light dancing
in your mind
filling mine.

ii
We are in the same place,
always

our first kiss created an unbreakable bond.

iii
Emerald eyes - glossy lips
looking from my chest up
smiling

together in the bed.

iv
The night calmly
calling us in your room
my hand touching you,
your lips touching mine.

We need to think like wolves,

to move in a pack, together

resisting the cold in our skin;

in this lonely times, we

need to think like wolves

following the secrets of the wind,

surviving, opening paths

taking a rest together, now

we need to think like wolves.

In this occasion I brought you the three main poems from the film Paterson written and directed by Jim Jarmusch. The poems were written by the american poet Ron Padgett and the poem titled Water Falls was written by Jarmusch himself.

I hope you enjoy the poems as much as I enjoyed the film.

Love Poem

We have plenty of matches in our house
We keep them on hand always
Currently our favourite brand
Is Ohio Blue Tip
Though we used to prefer Diamond Brand
That was before we discovered
Ohio Blue Tip matches
They are excellently packaged
Sturdy little boxes
With dark and light blue and white labels
With words lettered
In the shape of a megaphone
As if to say even louder to the world
Here is the most beautiful match in the world
It’s one-and-a-half-inch soft pine stem
Capped by a grainy dark purple head
So sober and furious and stubbornly ready
To burst into flame
Lighting, perhaps the cigarette of the woman you love
For the first time
And it was never really the same after that

All this will we give you
That is what you gave me
I become the cigarette and you the match
Or I the match and you the cigarette
Blazing with kisses that smoulder towards heaven

Another One

When you’re a child you learn there are three dimensions
Height, width and depth
Like a shoebox
Then later you hear there’s a fourth dimension
Time
Hmm
Then some say there can be five, six, seven…

I knock off work
Have a beer at the bar
I look down at the glass and feel glad

Poem

I’m in the house
It’s nice out
Warm
Sun on cold snow
First day of spring
Or last day of winter

My legs run up the stairs
And out the door
My top half here writing

Water Falls

Water falls from the bright air

It falls like hair

Falling across a young girl's shoulders

Water falls

Making pools in the asfalt

Dirty mirrors with clouds and buildings inside

It falls on the roof of my house

Falls on my mother and on my hair

Most people call it rain

A pact

I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman—
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root—
Let there be commerce between us.

A virginal

No, no! Go from me. I have left her lately.

I will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness,

For my surrounding air hath a new lightness;

Slight are her arms, yet they have bound me straitly

And left me cloaked as with a gauze of æther;

As with sweet leaves; as with subtle clearness.

Oh, I have picked up magic in her nearness

To sheathe me half in half the things that sheathe her.

No, no! Go from me. I have still the flavour,

Soft as spring wind that’s come from birchen bowers.

Green come the shoots, aye April in the branches,

As winter’s wound with her sleight hand she staunches,

Hath of the trees a likeness of the savour:

As white their bark, so white this lady’s hours.

April

Three spirits came to me
And drew me apart
To where the olive boughs
Lay stripped upon the ground:
Pale carnage beneath bright mist.

Source: Selected Poems of Ezra Pound (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1957)

To Beatriz Bibiloni Webster de Bullrich

The useless dawn finds me in a deserted streetcorner; I have outlived the night.

Nights are proud waves: darkblue topheavy waves laden with all hues of deep spoil, laden with things unlikely and desirable.

Nights have a habit of mysterious gifts and refusals, of things half given away, half, withheld, of joys with a dark hemisphere. Nights act that way, I tell you.

The surge, that night, left me the customary shreds and odd ends: some hated friends to chat with, music for dreams, and the smoking of bitter ashes. The things my hungry heart has no use for.

The big wave brought you.

Words, any words, your laughter; and you so lazily and incessantly beautiful. We talked and you have forgotten the words.

The shattering dawn finds me in a deserted street of my city.

Your profile turned away, the sounds that go to make your name, the lilt of your laughter: these are illustrious toys you have left me.

I turn them over in the dawn, I lose them, I find them; I tell them to the few stray stars dogs and the few stray stars of the dawn.

Your dark rich life…
I must get at you, somehow: I put away those illustrious toys you have left me, I want your hidden look, your real smile –that lonely, mocking smile your cool mirror knows.

What can I hold you with?
I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of ragged suburbs.

I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked long and long at the lonely moon.

I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts that living men have honoured in marble: my father’s father killed in the frontier of Buenos Aires, two bullets through his lungs, bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers in the hide of a cow; my mother’s grandfather –just twenty four- heading a charged of three hundred men in Peru, now ghosts on vanished horses.

I offer you whatever insight my books may hold, whatever manliness or humour my life.

I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never been loyal.

I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow –the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.

I offer you the memory of yellow rose seen at sunset, years before you were born.

I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about yourself, authentic and surprising news of yourself.

I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.

1934 (taken from El otro, el mismo, 1969)

do not believe in ourselves
do not believe in ourselves
do not believe
do believe
not be alive
not be
not not not
do do do
believe

Remembering the silly walk through the sidewalk, hearing the coins singing the old song of inked news waiting for their moment of transcendence in the kiosk.

***

The touch of my hand with the icy screen of my tablet makes me recall the dry paper and the black marks that it used to left on my finger tips.

***

I can't easily adapt to the new era.

***

I want to read thinkers, not new age prophets. I don't want to read more lists and rankings or abstracts of thinking, I want the full version of thoughts not DLCs.

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About Me

J.L. Poet

I am an amateur writer of poetry. The english isn't my primary language so this blog is meant to show my evolution in poetry as my english skills improve. Here you can find poems and my thoughts about different topics like poetry, cinema and art.