More stuff

Just a quick post, I wrote two more poems to submit along with "Dear Atticus" for this contest. I didn't explain "Dear Atticus" in the last post. I just kind of threw it in there. Well, Cicero used to write copious amounts of letters to his best friend, Atticus. He'd sort of fill him in on what was going on in his life, as well as tell him all his personal thoughts. You know, it might have been the first blog. Atticus would then send letters back (Kind of like comments!). I always thought their correspondence was touching. SO, in light of that, I wanted to give it a dark, cynical spin. In my poem, the narrator is sort of this friendless, lonely guy. At the end, there's this biting dramatic irony that seems to say, "Yeah, friends don't exist," because the fact is Cicero WAS executed, alone and confused, the victim of fate. Sorry dead Atticus, I'm sure you were a great friend, but I couldn't resist turning you on your head for the sake of a really depressing poem. You're sort of the non-existent, fantasy wish of someone getting "executed" by crushing loneliness :/. "Always be the best..." was sort of Cicero's life motto. It's a line from the Iliad, actually. That stanza just sort of says that the ambitions and the glory that Cicero realized in his political career meant nothing by themselves. He measured his life by his happiness, something he found with Atticus, his buddy. This stanza-and also the one where the narrator gets a tentative but very wrong feeling that Atticus is actually out there, which shows you just how crazy the narrator has become- sort of sets you up for the crushing irony at the end, where you have to listen to the narrator while knowing he's being duped. Sad. For the new poems, yeah, they're both rough (I think the deadline for the three-poem submission is like January 30), but I wanted to post them anyway. The first one is a fun poem about the loss of innocence, and the second is sort of a humanist manifesto. I tried to draw parallels between Judgement Day, especially its depiction in Yeat's "The Second Coming," and the events in the poem. In my poem, the Day of Reckoning becomes the Day of Awakening- a far more hopeful and redeeming kind of day, don't you think? And that's really the point of the poem and humanism, from what I understand of it: believe in man and his science; they are good things.

“The Last Stick of Gum”

A pack of gum purchased
For less than a dollar
Is all one needs daily
To get through the hours.

Your senses ignite on each
Minty fresh, flatly pressed
Slice of relief-
Tasty, stretchy, bright blue
Cushion for teeth.

All thoughts soon lose shape.
Your words are now muffled in
The pulse of the chewing.
Consciousness, blissfully
Sleeps.

But darkly it clings to the tin foil-wrapped, paper-sheathed
Sliver of transient ecstasy,
Bound for the liver where it will reign hell
With the machinery of madness on
All of your cellular shells-
Alive or dead, ordered or not.
Put down the phone, are no use the pills.

It slips past the microscopes,
Prisms and X-rays,
To invade the chewer,
Who smiles with abandon,
Noting the sweet flavor.
Hey, Is that cinnamon?

Eyes closed
Mouth open
Mouth closed
Then open
Pop!
Suck!
Laugh!
SHOCK!

Rumbling furnace chills
Spread from the gut.
Maybe this gum package
Wasn’t quite shut?

Face pulled tight against the worry of sickness,
No longer adding more sticks just for thickness,
The tongue unfurls, blue as can be,
To let fall from a pale grimace
The gum and its deadly refugee.

But the deed is still done,
The pleasure forgotten.
Even the blue tongue tinge
Seems like it’s rotten.

But, oh, this day had to come.
That gum had been waiting
Lurking, clock ticking,
While you relished and savored
the New Longer Lasting.

One can’t chew forever.

“Novus Homo”

Coruscating brilliance from every direction comes
The thunder of mind-fire from the chorus of one-
Song draped in tragedy, anointed in pain,
But beautiful, touching, and pure as spring rain.

Tears glisten at the corners
Of eyes on old men
As the last missile is incinerated, engineered into pens.
Babel’s languages snake through the currents of foam;
Connected, respected, the world is their home.

Up to the sky rear the heads of the children
To greet a new protecter, a sovereign, a savior.
“At last,” they cry. “The Day of Awakening is at hand!”
His voice carries no harshness or burden or lash.
Instead, his words pour forth like dreamy quicksilver.

“‘Round the Alchemist’s fire the abacus did run,
Leaping and dancing,
Landing on the sun.
A Rosicrucian revelation,
A Renaissance revolution,
The dissemination of knowledge
Will spear every nation.

I give you the secrets these staff serpents have whispered
through centuries of ignorance, piety, and fear.
Hear the music of the spheres,
Oh you glorious apple eaters!
Watch the life force split and swirl,
You valiant pilgrims!
Bend earth's fury to your will,
Oh you beautiful fire stealers!
Plumb the stygian depths
Of this planet so fair.
Note the subtle effects
Butterfly wings have on air.
Build tall and build grand.
What great things for your hand!

Opposites, reflections, complements, patterns-
All weave in and out of the fabric of matter.
Here are the keys to the real and the right.
This is your destiny, the one that’s been formed
From centuries immemorial, from atrocities unmatched.
Blood spilt and tongues slashed and stakes set to burning
Cannot stop this holiness that you have been learning.

Take reason and justice,
Natural extensions of my miracles,
And remold the clay
Of your souls.”