Love Life

Misunderstand this one correctly. 'She' is life, for me, and this is a metaphysical statement about the nature of life - although, as always, any poem of mine is open for whatever interpretations one might see.

between her legs
life is wet and smelly
lap it all up

Nature lost.
The victorious ape
launches into his final battle
- the bloodiest of them all:
that against himself.

clouds pass
chop wood, carry water
clouds pass.



* * *



many die
who wish to live
many live
who wish to die
- most are never born.



* * *



on a walk
I notice an ant I stepped on
- will time notice me?



* * *



butterfly
swallow
*swallow*



* * *



dusk rolls across the fields
feasting on
light



* * *



the oak tree
finds its size and is done growing
- there are no oak trees on Wall Street.

zen has been lonely a lot of late
with za busy somewhere else.
tonight they unite
in a true dynamite
explosion of silent peace.

today
I had a taste
of mental health.
ahh...! the savour...!

awww :')

Glad you appreciate my black humour, Noor

Originally Posted by OrchestraInside

Glad you appreciate my black humour, Noor

Black is the new black they say.

Whispers reeking of unreality chase me around
tasting of half-remembered promises.
Then the gentleness of time
punches a hole in this ballooned-up dream
and I plummet through the stratosphere
like a man from the moon jumping home.

The wind whistles in D minor,
that cloud looks suspiciously like Yehudi Menuhin
(I always preferred Itzhak Perlman)
and the cumuliform Guameri is blown apart
by a jet roaring past at breakneck speed.
The pilot doesn't see my thumb.

I catch a ride with the raindrops instead.
We all aim to smash hard against
whatever or whomever we happen to find.
But first I need to figure out
this strange throbbing temple of mine:
like a thousand templars slashing their way
through a googolplex years of pain.

The last hundred feet.
Someone's life flashes past my eyes.
First wife? Second?
I can't recall,
though I recognise the scent of the Hitch -
he must have paid a visit...

The first leaves of the oak
bend gently in the nanosecond I take
to make contact with them.
I remember now:
there is no oak.
Gone are the leaves, alas.
Infinity holds to love, and my nothingness
hasn't even himself to smash against.

And all this nonsense just because
I
was born tomorrow.

I vote for a love button.

Thankee, *bows*.

I know this is a poetry site, but forgive me this once for posting prose. It is, after all, my major trade. And I like to think that my prose is ever so slightly poetic.

* * *

There is an absolutely gorgeous beach in the North-Western corner of the island of Koh Pha Ngan in the Gulf of Thailand. They call it the bottle beach because of the bottles that often float ashore there. It is not easy to access by road, and used to be inaccessible by anything but boat. I had taken the precipitous jungle trail marked by empty bottles and, sweaty, tired and sore in the feet, sat on the beach one wonderfully balmy night in May contemplating the fine, white sand between my toes. I went to wash my hands and stooped down to pick up just one grain of sand.

It was such a tiny thing. There must have been not millions, but billions of them in just that one bay, with endlessly more on all the other beaches of the island. Not to mention on the planet! Somewhere I had heard that our solar system is, on the scale of the universe, less than a single grain of sand compared to all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the Earth. Such a tiny little thing, right there on my fingertip.

The scale of it reminds me of something else, and I imagine that this one minuscule speck of dust is the combined knowledge of all of mankind in the year 1650, at the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment. The groundbreaking work of the likes of Sir Isaac Newton, Spinoza, Voltaire and Rousseau slowly adds another grain of sand over the span of some 150 years. The doubling rate stays at about 150 years until the beginning of the 20th century, when it goes down to about 50 years. After the ravages of World War II, I will hold a grand total of eight grains of sand on the tip of my finger, and the doubling rate of our knowledge will have plummeted to 10 years. Since 1960 more or less, it has been estimated to be 5 years on average, and today, I am holding some 16,000 grains of sand, weighing probably just under half a pound – still enough to fit in my cupped hands. At this rate, we will have a few buckets by the time I die.

I stretch myself and look around. The beach is beautiful, but not huge; probably half a mile long and a hundred yards wide. Will we have dug up all this sand by the time my children are 80, towards the end of this century? Maybe all the sand on all the beaches on Koh Pha Ngan will be gone the next century, and Thailand devoid of sand soon after. It is an odd pursuit in some ways, self-explanatory somehow, like it was programmed into our DNA to collect grains of sand. I feel a touch of wistful something pass like a light breeze; I like the beach as it is. There’s a ma-ha-cha-no mango tree growing just above the grass line, my favourite kind with the elongated, strongly orange and red fruits with that irresistible butterflyish scent of rich, flowery sweetness. I like to sit under that tree and watch the waves come in and go out, and I cannot help but wonder where all this sand-collecting will lead us. Would Alexander the Great, had he managed to conquer the entire world, have finally joined Diogenes on the beach? ...the Diogenes who did not need to conquer the world, his beach already there.

ETIK, Everything There Is to Know, beckons at me with the eyes of stars long dead but whose light only now reaches my eyes. Do I desire him? Evidently, a lot of my fellow humans do, or they are at the very least incredibly busy collecting their grains of sand, tiniest little fractions of the almost endlessly vast ETIK, who encompasses all the grains of sand in the entire universe. Ants also scurry around collecting all manner of tiny things, and they probably seldom sit under ma-ha-cha-no mango trees and wonder what the point of all the scurrying around really is.

Perhaps we are like them, too busy collecting tiny grains of sand to wonder why. Maybe those of my paleolithic ancestors who did sit around, wondering what the point with all this hunting and gathering was, had little success with the ladies, their genes seldom passed on while the swift and strong were busy copulating when not out hunting. The toolmaker who crafted his weapons without an afterthought successfully fought off the lions, while the philosopher was eaten alive.

I think to myself: the toolmaker’s offspring have come far. From stone axes to spaceships and advanced computers. The philosopher is trailing hundreds of generations behind him, with little hope of catching up; the parachuting cats are raining over Borneo, evidence to the toolmaker’s brilliant ability to create aircraft, pesticides, parachutes and flying cats. The philosopher could have told him that skipping the pesticides in the first place would have spared the trouble of airlifting 14,000 cats into Borneo, but he was nowhere around; he was several hundred generations from being born.

I wipe my hands clean and watch the moon set over the sleeping sea. Hundreds of fishing boats dot the ocean, row after row of bright, shining lights, like giant fireflies in red, green and white colours, busy catching the night’s haul as the tourists sleep. The lights, I am told, attract certain kinds of fish while keeping others away. It took many grains of sand to figure that out, and to build the technology capable of creating those lights. The ants are busy picking up the fish, and the philosopher is too busy thinking under his ma-ha-cha-no tree to tell them that the fish will not multiply forever, like the fishing boats do.

I sigh. The toolmaker is far ahead of me, and his grains of sand flow at an ever increasing speed into the buckets gathered on the beach. He fascinates me, as do his sand grains. I wonder if he will ever attain ETIK, and if he does, I wonder if he will then join me under the ma-ha-cha-no tree. I would love to share a bowl of mangoes with him.

My life doesn't have a meaning.
Can I have yours?

Why do you do
the things that you do
why don't you those that you don't?

Why do you write
in the font that you do
your story?

What if you won't?

What if you die
alone in a hole?
Your soul little more
than a bowling goal?

What if some future kid has a game
your lame life's a part of,
Max Payne-like,
confined in a kind of
2D-world where yours is
a 1D-life?

I know what you think
but the ink with which
your life was writ
is a pitch-black shade
and made of self-deception,
of fiction you wrote yourself.

I saw a daffodil.

Hesitantly peeping
out of comatose soil,
briefly bathed in sunlight,
spreading its petals wide...

in January.

*petulantly refuses to like*

Capriciously accepts
defeat.

Originally Posted by OrchestraInside

Why do you do
the things that you do
why don't you those that you don't?

Why do you write
in the font that you do
your story?

What if you won't?

Originally Posted by OrchestraInside

I know what you think
but the ink with which
your life was writ
is a pitch-black shade
and made of self-deception,
of fiction you wrote yourself.

I love the start and the final paragraphs

...but it's the in-between where life generally occurs, Noor

Okay okay, I'll admit, I love the likes. What's the point of being a cat if you don't like being stroked.

Me and life arent really the best of friends yet

and finally. You've taken the majority of my likes, I'd hate to think they were wasted