Welcome is sleep, more welcome the sleep of stone. Whilst crime and shame continue in the land; My happy fortune, not to see or hear; Waken me not - in mercy, whisper low.
When you get what you want in your struggle for self
And the world makes you king for a day
Just go to the mirror and look at yourself
And see what that man has to say.
For it isn’t your father, or mother, or wife
Whose judgement upon you must pass
The fellow whose verdict counts most in your life
Is the one staring back from the glass.
He’s the fellow to please – never mind all the rest
For he’s with you, clear to the end
And you’ve passed your most difficult, dangerous test
If the man in the glass is your friend.
You may fool the whole world down the pathway of years
And get pats on the back as you pass
But your final reward will be heartache and tears
If you’ve cheated the man in the glass.
It is pleasant, indeed, while the summer lasts
with the mild pheasants' song ...
but now I feel the northern wind's blast—
its severe weather strong.
Alas! Alas! This night seems so long!
And I, because of my momentous wrong
now grieve, mourn and fast.
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
We have done with Hope and Honour, we are lost to Love and Truth,
We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung,
And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth.
God help us, for we knew the worst too young!
"I'm not unmindful of man's seeming need for faith; I'm for anything that gets you through the night, be it prayer, tranquilizers, or a bottle of Jack Daniel's. But to me religion is a deeply personal thing in which man and God go it alone together, without the witch doctor in the middle."
"Woosh" you, you ponce. >>5646 quite obviously meant that god no longer sides with those with the best artillery, as he keeps up with military trends. In the case of the Vietnam war he sided with those who had the best guerrilla tactics, as those were most applicable to that theater.
In the future he may side with those who have the best chemical weapons, or the best computer viruses, or the most dandy haircuts.
In his defense it was, conceptually Jimi Hendrix's dick, although he followed that bit up with a bit about wanting to watch a couple of 13yo child stars' hypothetical sex tape. To be honest, if he wasn't already utterly decomposed Yewtree would be all over the bastard. He was more open about his noncery than even Savile.
Anyway, to keep my post even vaguely on topic, here is one of my favourite quotes from one of my favourite ever athletes:
"I'm the best ever. I'm the most brutal and vicious, and most ruthless champion there's ever been. There's no one can stop me. Lennox is a conqueror? No, I'm Alexander, he's no Alexander. I'm the best ever! There's never been anybody as ruthless! I'm Sonny Liston, I'm Jack Dempsey. There's no one like me. I'm from their cloth. There's no one that can match me. My style is impetuous, my defense is impregnable, and I'm just ferocious. I want your heart! I want to eat his children! Praise be to Allah!"
>>5665 I think I've heard everything Hicks ever recorded, although I haven't listened to him for many years.
I still think that quote tops any of his explanations. Cheers for the recommendation though.
i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite a new thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
–firm–smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like,, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what–is–it comes
over parting flesh....And eyes big Love–crumbs,
love's the i guess most only verb that lives
(her tense beginning,and her mood unend)
from brightly which arise all adjectives
and all into whom darkly nouns descend
she,straddling my lap,
hinges(wherewith I tongue each eager pap)
and,reaching down,by merely fingertips
the hungry Visitor steers to love's lips
Whom(justly as she now begins to sit,
almost by almost giving her sweet weight)
O,how those hot thighs juicily embrace!
and(instant by deep instant)as her face
watches,scarcely alive,that magic Feast
greedily disappearing least by least—
through what a dizzily palpitating host
(sharp inch by inch)swoons sternly my huge Guest!
until(quite when our touching bellies dream)
unvisibly love's furthest secrets rhyme.
it may not always be so;and i say
that if your lips,which i have loved,should touch
another's,and your dear strong fingers clutch
his heart,as mine in time not far away;
if on another's face your sweet hair lay
in such a silence as i know,or such
great writhing words as,uttering overmuch,
stand helplessly before the spirit at bay;
if this should be,i say if this should be—
you of my heart,send me a little word;
that i may go unto him,and take his hands,
saying,Accept all happiness from me.
Then shall i turn my face,and hear one bird
sing terribly afar in the lost lands.
“If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.”
- Charles Bukowski
"It is not enough that I succeed. Others must fail."
- Gore Vidal
"Praeclarum custodem ovium lupum"
-Cicero
"Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit."
-Oscar Wilde
My favourite poem is Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess". Love romantic, lyrical stuff like that.
>>
No. 5928Anonymous 27th January 2015 Tuesday 3:36 am5928I found this in a micro-press book from 2008, might be multiple posts.
I saw the best minds of my generation
destroyed by call centres,
Data entry and misappropriated dreams;
Starving hysterical, souls naked
in the six seconds swing
Between cold-calls that link Monday through
Friday in a loop around the throat
Where screams die, anguish quenched by
pill-popping weekends chopped
Into white powder dawns that defy time with
the stretching of inhibitions and wages.
Dragging themselves through the suburban
streets at dawn
Never wanting for an angry fix, always
available to mainline
If not prescription or addiction,
Then mere cavalcades of enhanced, superseded
glory and infinite division.
Angleheaded hipsters in our minds, burning
for the ancient heavenly connection
To the starry dynamo
in the machinery of night,
But unavoidably severed from its motion,
Blind to the deus ex machina,
Who belly-fat and dream thin
Watch unimagined repetitious attempts
To mount the steaming cunt of destiny
And take her for a ride worth living in;
A life like the one they repeat endlessly
on nostalgia TV channels,
Yet more drugs for the eyes
and for the ambitions.
Medicated until the world is no longer
worth sinning in,
Forgetting all the pent-up energies
of our half-religious parents
In the bare carefree moments of beginning
we call 'week's ending'.
And oh, they end endless,
Always finished just before
the dawn of Monday
Calls us to the factories
in which our minds are chained.
Up chain-smoking in the supernatural darkness
of multiple occupancy flats
Contemplating techno and
electronic abstractions,
Who bared their brains to Michael Moore and
Tony Blair, only to be colonised
By Thatcher from beyond the grave,
forced by guilt
To believe in a passive aggressive liberalism
that hates its own existence,
Those who see Mohammedan angels
Staggering on tenement roofs illuminated
Call the terrorist orange alert hotline,
inspiring dawn riads
And the bloodied, sundered chests
of those innocent, bearded idolators
Who perversely cling to the sacred,
even though we have
Profaned it with our politics,
Our need to stay afloat above extinction:
It does not matter who got there first...
Who passed through universities
with radiant cool eyes
Hallucinating Barthes,
dying to be as cool as Kerouac
Among the scholars of war;
which became everybody's discipline
The moment the need for tragedy
in our own existence
Polarised the blind from the indifferent.
Who were never expelled from the academies
for publishing
Obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
too nervous even to graffiti
All but meaningless phrases,
scrawled importunings and failed seekings,
Who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear,
Worshipping their money in wastebaskets
As debts mounted like
a terror through the wall:
Perhaps another dawn raid,
Who will they come seeking
at six tomorrow morning
Armed with ASBOs and deportation orders?
Who got busted in their pubic beards
returning from Bristol with a pinch
Of marijuana for friends, and perceived
the steel reinforcement behind
The self-reflexive culture,
the facism behind its borders
For us, no Paradise Alley, death!
We purgatoried our torsos night after night
With dreams, with drugs,
with waking nightmares,
Alcohol and cock and endless balls,
Incomparable blind;
streets if shuddering cloud and
Lightning in the mind
Leaping towards poles of London, and beyond,
Illuminating all the motionless world of
Time between
Pointless solidities of halls,
backyard grey life
Turpentine dawns, wine drunkenness
among the degraded vegetation
Peeping between the urban cracks like vomit
fresh from Saturday's carousing,
Storefront displays vandal-crashed
by joyride neon Neds in luminous Pumas
Blinking traffic light, sun and moon,
grey, featureless concrete
Simulated vibrations in the roaring winter,
compact disks
Of Brooklyn hip-hop ashcan rantings
kind verses
Perverted by the fact of isolation
on this island,
Who chained themselves to bus seats
for the endless commute
From one nameless suburb to another,
drained and weary, no longer high
Until the noise of wheels and children
brought them down shuddering,
Mouth-wracked,
Battered bleak of brain
all drained of brilliance
In the drear light of Monday morning,
and another shift
In the mine of information.
Who sank all night in the submarine light
of a million style bars
Pumped with soulless house music,
peopled with cocaine hairdressers
Floated out and sat through
the stale beer afternoon,
Despolate, to Fugazi born, but instead
listening to the crack of doom
On the hydrogen jukebox,
which only displays the manufactured
Inverse images and sounds
of faked perfection.
Lost battalion of platonic conversationalists
without the urge to speak
So dulled, that they cannot see the chains
ever being un-shackled
Un-coupled, and themselves let free to roam.
As though Ginsberg never happened,
and no sixties existed
Perhaps they never did,
Just a collective unconscious hippie dream
Or the reverse mysticism
of misty-eyed parents.
I have a dream where we wake up
electrified out of the coma
By our own souls' airplanes
roaring over the roof
They've come to drop angelic bombs
on the decomposing cities
The night illuminates itself,
imaginary walls collapse,
Oh, skinny legions run outside!
Shock of mercy, the eternal war is here
Oh victory forget your underwear, we're free,
Free to die as the promised nuclear flash
brings oblivion.
In other dreams, a fish walks
dripping from the sea
Upright on un-evolved legs,
and with a glimpse of prescience
Sighting the sightless, deaf dumb,
shut-in existence of his descendants
He flops fish-like back into the liquid
And dares not trouble
to seek the shore again,
His legs diminishing back into protein
And empty seawater, only amoebic thoughts
of cell-bonding ever to occur.
And perhaps we would never become,
for want of ambition,
Slaves to our desires,
yet never bold enough
To take what we really want.
I salute my failed generation,
We are too timid to ever deserve freedom
Our masters know this: it keeps us cowed,
as some imagined apocalypse
Festers in our masturbatory musings.
We await death with breath baited,
always hungry never sated
Our howl is empty, merely sound,
an expression of agony
addressed to an unfeeling moon
That one day shall serve as a prison
for our children,
Moon-bound in lunar offices,
trapped in the six-seconds swing
Between cold-calls that link Monday through
Friday in a loop around the throat
Where screams die, anguish quenched by
pill-popping weekends chopped
Into white powder dawns that defy time with
the stretching of inhibitions and wages.
(Inspired by 'Howl', published with the kind permission of Allen Ginsberg's estate)
You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.
But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.
And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."
'Twas an evening in November, as I very well remember,
I was walking down the street in drunken pride.
But my knees went all a-flutter, so I rested in a gutter,
And a pig came 'round and laid down by my side.
Yes I laid there in the gutter thinking thoughts I could not utter
when a colleen passing by did softly say:
"You can tell a man that boozes by the company he chooses"
And then the pig got up and walked away!
And, then, the pig got up and walked away.
I was always a little in awe of her for sometimes her eyes held a dark, blasted lightning and her face fell into the carven lines of the statue of a philosopher.
a poem by bukowski that has resonated with me for years, about his late wife...
225 days under grass
and you know more than I.
they have long taken your blood,
you are a dry stick in a basket.
is this how it works?
in this room
the hours of love
still make shadows.
when you left
you took almost
everything.
I kneel in the nights
before tigers
that will not let me be.
what you were
will not happen again.
the tigers have found me
and I do not care.
