untitled blog post

I think [metaphors are] a way out of loneliness. If you use even a very worn-out metaphor or simile - for instance, you are beautiful like a rose - you are not alone. The rose becomes an equal, and it’s like stretching a hand out.

…

So I think metaphor is a reaching out, We are groping for words. We say, "Ah, I'm looking for words. I can't express myself." So we need something, again something real Because if I want to say, “He's such a cruel man,” I might say, “His heart is stone,” which is also an over-used expression, but you are groping for words. You want to keep your head above water, so words become a kind of, I would say, solid thing, which you can hold on to in order to make yourself understood.

Yehuda Amichai, in An Interview by David Montenegro in The American Poetry Review, November/December 1987

I went to a poetry open mic last night. It was a good showing, one wherein the clear theme, for me, was not death. But perhaps loneliness. I imprint my meaning on something as anyone else does.

One poet paraphrased WCW when someone came to us expressing their first connections they were finding in the art. They had just read the work of their passed-on “partner in poetry”. Another remarked that they didn’t want the death of isolation that Van Gogh came to. The first poet opened his last poem with Harjo’s “Death is a woman”.

You are dancing with Death now, you were dancing with her then.
And there is nothing I could ever do about it
Not then, or now.
I have nothing to prove your fierce life, except paper
that turns back to dust.
Except this song that plays over and over
that you keep dancing to.

I don’t think that was the stanza but we’ll pretend.

Someone else showed their stripe with Who By Fire, another with letters to a reader we were not. I don’t believe I have my Chelsea Hotel poem anymore, one that flopped at a slam years ago.

In short, we reached out. There’s a remark that ***** has made back to me a few times, wherein I stated that we are creatures of reference to what we have interacted with. Our new songs are dedicated to our favorite old ones. Our lives live fuller when we upkeep our graveyards. This is an obviousness, probably. Perhaps just because the addage is overused doesn’t make it lesser. A resistance towards the competition of originality and a strive towards finding ways to connect in a coffeeshop after-hours.

The only poem I read that shared this history of recalling, barely let it stand. A variation on a Frankenstein poem idea that I did not save the scrap of in a workshop. I suppose it’s funny to have something reference but be lost. To not even remark the scar on my forehead that granted me a youtful nickname. To share a different poem of how I got it with no clear directive words. Here it is, for future reference.

Franken- green hued
a ghoul stitched up inside out

for tonight by body
tomorrow by heartbeat

no sliding apparati
parts fit neat
no oblong motion
farm to table
hand to mouth

in the sunken earth, rise swindled one
God may have cursed you at birth but
he gave you free choice to dismember