of spotless ways of despair

[riverrun]

to dry out in loneliness, in broken little ideas,
to burn the body mass all those dreams of self

substance

without eradicate it completely: intoxicated by
our almost feats while unable to rebound across
midnight, of what is real in our reverse angels
flight; their over-deliberated exposed bones do
conceal adjacent skies which our eyes no longer
know how to believe and falling asleep without
any homecoming trace while an everlasting drive
bends to the infinite in short range categories,
unintentional ocean shores withdraw from our
heart where all these water flows doesn't meet.

the wasteland maintenance that renew us and by
inherent dissolution living within dawn gestures,
to assume that there are only overnight gears of time,
forgetting this impenetrable wall made of our debris.
that this latent pain is peripheral, to then spring frailty
on this effort, in our unconcealed prayings for heartless
beliefs.

here then, where nothing else stands,
the sun was restricted to the size of
our window frame, upon the surge to
feel something else: in the asymmetry
extant in anonymous shouts,
that forego upon the walls of
our home caretaking some unit,
to then shatter between objects
of our memory that after all still
arises.

[bjondon]

This is quite something river - I have never seen anything
like it but then I am not that widely read. Do you have any
specific influences?
Elsewhere you have mentioned your interest in the no-man's-land
between languages - presumably Portuguese and English.
I like the relentless tone, the inventive phrase-making and most
of the syntactic violence and ambiguity.
The subject seems to be the ineluctable crushing and limiting of
spirit and soul somehow inherent in the deep paradigm of our
civilisation (necessarily requiring our complicity) - To make any
headway with a subject like that I think it is a valid poetic strategy
to 'break' the language, to make the reader work quite hard to
retrieve and speculate meaning.
If I have enough energy I will try to come back to discuss some of
my retrieved understandings and puzzlements.
But excellent stuff!
Jules

[riverrun]

First I really thank your comment. For me the world's most unstable and pure religion is the reading. The reader, this entity which after centuries of violence and confusion remains intact. Like you I think that poetry has much more to do with the history of ideas than just the compaction of verses and stanzas, although there is in that effort a lot of past ressonance and folk wisdom of our ancestors. If I had to say my main influences I would say there are four: Hölderlin (I have never met such a poet with a vast classic knowledge who voluntarily threw himself into the streak of madness); Teresa of Avila (her passion would influence half the world, including and avowedly Cervantes and his Quixote); Wassily Kandinsky (all russians artists have an astounding sense of composition); Giambattista Vico (a philosopher, philologist, and historian who had the wisdom of not separating facts and imagination).

"To make any headway with a subject like that I think it is a valid poetic strategy to 'break' the language, to make the reader work quite hard to retrieve and speculate meaning." I agree. We all have the cultural background that bring us consensual imagery, such as "clouds", "heaven", "ocean", etc and also a consensual meaning attached to them. All important poets in every country break linguistic consensus (the way peopel are used to think), not because they knew how to, but out of necessity, an uncontrollable drive.

thank your for your post Jules

[Gorgonshead]

Riverrun -

A few thoughts.

This piece is very complex to my eye. I’m afraid I haven’t scratched the surface after about 10 readings. I see remarkable language in it — marvelous and unique phrases: “to burn the body mass”,“our almost feats”, “our reverse angels”, “unintentional ocean shores”, and many others. I feel inadequate to the task of critiquing the poem. I am impressed by its beauty even if I struggle to understand it. It’s worth another 10 reads.

Peter L

[riverrun]

Hi Peter thanks for your comment. I'm also amazed by the mystery of simplicity/complexity of events and things. We never know for sure when is when. If I tag something as "simple" that exactly things will turn to be complex; if I do the opposite, the complexity slips through my fingers. If we talk about all human knowledge (science, art, philosophy, religion) and their expressions -- it's just a feel, probably a bias -- but I think that poetry has this unique ability to syntetize both worlds: of simple things, of complex things, because it does not need to punctuate anything explicitly, so it does not need to detail all the complexity that science (for instance) must do; also the simplicity can be placed in subtle ways, by the the arrangement of the verses/stanzas and their sonority, their flow.

best