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Poetry
Poems I've written or am writing
READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
Jugador, son tus apuestas
el casino y nada más;
Jugador, no hay casino,
se hace casino al apostar.
Al apostar se hace el casino,
y al lanzar las fichas en el fieltro
se oÃa el dinero que nunca
se va a poder recuperar.
Jugador no hay casino
sino monedas en la mar.
(Note I posted a revision in comments that I think is a much better poem)
by Jeremy Osner
Think of time as a river of events
think of time simply as a river: Events the features
of the landscape the river flows through.
The river erodes the landscape. The landscape
is formed, created, given shape
by the river. Analogies for time.
Time shapes you but does not abide, abiding
that's an action to be taken. Swim upstream.
The analogy here is imperfect. Swim
upstream/ float/ swim downstream/ bob
in the current.
The surface of the river.
The landscape here is reality
in its spacial dimensions
as they may appertain
picking a scab
Reality cannot be---
analogized because the analogy chosen
must of necessity itself be a part of reality
cannot get a foothold, perspective
outside it
Picturing reality
mapping reality
Map is analogy
Cartographer/ poet. Poems, their varying
degrees of realism, they blossom forth:
construct a universe immaculate in conception corrupt in execution
a map
which deconstructs/ creates the world
around you reader, "pulls you in",
so to speak. You scratch your head
and look up at the clock,
your eye zooms in
on a fly that's buzzing around the 7.
It's half past 8 and down the street a dog is barking.
posted morning of September 21st, 2013: 3 responses ➳ More posts about Projects
Wednesday, September 11th, 2013
by Jeremy Osner
The dead of 9/11
are photographed
and silent
and the crater they fell into long since filled
with detritus of 21st C. dreams in America
and ragged strips of newsprint
without any columns of ink,
they're blank and they're torn. and the
names of the dead
scroll by beneath the image
of America.
Dream is not a revelation. If a dream affords the dreamer some light on himself, it is not the person with closed eyes who makes the discovery but the person with open eyes lucid enough to fit thoughts together. Dream — a scintillating mirage surrounded by shadows — is essentially poetry.
El sueño no es revelación. Si al soñador un sueño lo permiterÃa ahorrar algún luz sobre si mismo, no realice ese descubrimiento la persona de ojos cerrados sino la de ojos abiertos y lúcidos suficientamente para los pensamientos juntos a unirse. El sueño —entre las sombras chispea el miraje— en su esencia es poesÃa.
I have been writing a lot of poetry lately, much of which has not really taken any shape yet, in both English and Spanish. Here are a couple passages in English that seem worth expanding on.
Act out this savage pantomime
in the distance
crickets
in the distance
the voices of your
subjunctive
saviors
and you stumble thru the steps
of some long forgotten scene
of some brutally ironic
forgotten scene.
and sometimes it can help to be brutally honest
to tell the truth I mean
and to deceive
deceive with honesty
so to speak
deceive with savage apathy
passivity
liquidity and self-congratulation:
conflating
to seed the pastures
of some chaotic Babylon
imagined.
and the insect hum behind the melody
pervasive rhythmic ambiance
Not a form of beauty but of void, this binary
now, so what--
Void is imperceptible when it's cloaked in a mask of being
Void here should be taken to mean Nullity
and our Reality/ is riddled through
is torn asunder by infinite
void and void and voids/ impossible
to pluralize this empty heart
of being.
and the minutes are like hours, like idle, carefree hours
forgotten as they pass.
Forgotten as the second hand
ticks by on some imagined sundial
as streams/ evaporate
into desert
as protostellar nuclei condense
volcanic
intrinsic to our nature/ even
as the void repulses us
¶ and the insect hum behind the melody pervasive
and basic to nature
intrinsic
to meaning.
to say the minutes pass like hours predictable creeping by
o verminous horde, to say
to say you've said all this before, to call the riddle
meaningless and petty
To get behind the riddle to its source, to its creator/
interact for God's sake
and call it growth, and chalk it up
to destiny
so sliding frame by frame by
these episodes and episodic memories
of our ill-spent youths
and current circumstances
different pathways and strands of meaning surround you
encroach on your experience of the moment
your sense of reality
so to speak
you've come unstuck in time and out of luck
so walk your pilgrim's path
so celebrate your misfortune
grin
at the indeterminate slices
of subjunctive structure that enframe you.
The optimal discipline consists
in self-awareness, self-negation
in a parody of cleanliness.
The optimal discipline consists
in self indulgence, self-correction
in a parody of obediance
obeisance,
and the optimal level of discipline
the one we seek
but never quite attain
a balance
calm condolence
over situations we never asked for
were taxed for
avoided all semblance of discipline
in meditation
like a form of recreation
resurrection
and ultimate truth.
AND IT'S NOW! so
why not do it? With a
howl you pounce
into the fiction before you
teeming fiction where you're jostled
cheek by jowl they crowd you
louder now they're grumbling
and muffling you with their scowls
now you're struggling to escape
to leave this sea of narrative
to lift your glance
to glance away
and break your concentration
and not worry about the implicit snub
to your host the author.
These little stars, stars setting in the rivers and the streams,
working their way loose from our fingers and our wallets, stars flowing out like water;
and there will be no one to pay the check
nor to tally the coins.
His ashtray has a leak in it,
it's a little cardboard cup with water in it from a bottle.
You can picture the scorching agony of the fire -a little scream-
that split its fibers.
Green is the green, and leaden all the gray.
The girls are playing, they're laughing, out on the deck;
the women are waiting - just a few more minutes-
for them to come back in without a scratch, as big as life.
We were not sleeping.
I know it because I could hear them out the window
fumbling, impatient
those shapes in the dark. Maybe that's how cows dream,
but us, no.
Us, we weren't sleeping.
So many times, I could swear
he just snubbed us;
indifferent to the whisky
and to the electric skillet,
to the mint tea and the conversation.
Cold reigned
like the silence that volcanoes impose.
And the stairs,
stairs shy and ominous in the night,
downstairs to the morning -- sleeping still,
she's ready to arise.
(Note I posted a 
se forma la palabra. Se concibe
