"Favourite" Poet?
Mar. 29th, 2005 07:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormSo it's always gonna be TS Eliot, but this guy is a close second.
lj-cut to avoid people ascending to heaven or whatever on the spot without at least taking the effort to click. :)
from The First Straw, Jeffrey McDaniel
from The First Straw
for Christine Caballero
And lately -- with this whole war thing -- the language machine
supporting it -- I feel betrayed by the alphabet, like they're
injecting strychnine into my vowels, infecting my consonants,
naming attack helicopters after shattered Indian tribes:
Apache, Blackhawk; and West Bank colonizers are settlers,
so Sharon is Davey Crockett, and Arafat: Geronimo,
and it's the Wild West all over again. And I imagine Picasso
looking in a mirror, decorating his face in war paint,
washing his brushes in venom. And I think of Jenin
in all that rubble, and I feel like a Cyclops with two eyes,
like an anorexic with three mouths, like a scuba diver
in quicksand, like a shark with plastic vampire teeth,
like I'm the executioner's fingernail trying to reason
with the hand. And I don't know how to speak love
when the heart is a busted cup filling with spit and paste,
and the only sexual fantasy I have is busting
into the Pentagon with a bazooka-sized pen and blowing
open the minds of generals. And I comfort myself
with the thought that we'll name our first child Jenin,
and her middle name will be Terezin, and we'll teach her
how to glow in the dark, and how to swallow firecrackers,
and to never neglect hte first straw, because no one
ever talks about the first straw, it's always the last straw
that gets all the attention, but by then it's way too late.
The Quiet World ~ Jeffrey McDaniel
In an effort to get people to look
into each other's eyes more,
the government has decided to allot
each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.
When the phone rings, I put it
to my ear without saying hello.
In the restaurant I point
at chicken noodle soup. I am
adjusting well to the new way.
Late at night, I call my long
distance lover and proudly say
I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.
When she doesn't respond, I know
she's used up all her words
so I slowly whisper I love you,
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.
lj-cut to avoid people ascending to heaven or whatever on the spot without at least taking the effort to click. :)
from The First Straw, Jeffrey McDaniel
from The First Straw
for Christine Caballero
And lately -- with this whole war thing -- the language machine
supporting it -- I feel betrayed by the alphabet, like they're
injecting strychnine into my vowels, infecting my consonants,
naming attack helicopters after shattered Indian tribes:
Apache, Blackhawk; and West Bank colonizers are settlers,
so Sharon is Davey Crockett, and Arafat: Geronimo,
and it's the Wild West all over again. And I imagine Picasso
looking in a mirror, decorating his face in war paint,
washing his brushes in venom. And I think of Jenin
in all that rubble, and I feel like a Cyclops with two eyes,
like an anorexic with three mouths, like a scuba diver
in quicksand, like a shark with plastic vampire teeth,
like I'm the executioner's fingernail trying to reason
with the hand. And I don't know how to speak love
when the heart is a busted cup filling with spit and paste,
and the only sexual fantasy I have is busting
into the Pentagon with a bazooka-sized pen and blowing
open the minds of generals. And I comfort myself
with the thought that we'll name our first child Jenin,
and her middle name will be Terezin, and we'll teach her
how to glow in the dark, and how to swallow firecrackers,
and to never neglect hte first straw, because no one
ever talks about the first straw, it's always the last straw
that gets all the attention, but by then it's way too late.
The Quiet World ~ Jeffrey McDaniel
In an effort to get people to look
into each other's eyes more,
the government has decided to allot
each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.
When the phone rings, I put it
to my ear without saying hello.
In the restaurant I point
at chicken noodle soup. I am
adjusting well to the new way.
Late at night, I call my long
distance lover and proudly say
I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.
When she doesn't respond, I know
she's used up all her words
so I slowly whisper I love you,
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-03-29 04:04 pm (UTC)I'm not sure I get the first one. I'm lacking a context for it.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-30 02:59 am (UTC)As for the first, these are the lines that do it for me: "because no one/ever talks about the first straw, it's always the last straw/that gets all the attention, but by then it's way too late."
no subject
Date: 2005-03-30 10:43 am (UTC)A lot of the other stuff was confusing for me, because I lack the background knowledge to make it relevant. Jenin? Terezin? I have no clue what that is. And some of the metaphors don't make sense to me either.
The Quiet World totally makese sense to me.