Poem #1. Man macht ein Gedicht

OK and now
everything that isn’t
will be lost
– so then?

 

2 puddings & the nut butter
– no reason not to eat
and don’t those children still need feeding?
all this white hair
– time to cut it off?

 

How we might begin to answer such questions
a lyric paradigm that beneath resides machinery
oh, this is a poem of duplicity
to keep trying that legacy of flesh

Sam Ladkin, “Problems for Lyric Poetry”, in edited Brian Purves & Sam Ladkin, Complicities: British Poetry 1945-2007 (Litteraria Pragensia, 2007), pp 281-284 (final quote citing Andrea Brady, “Displaces”)

 

Man raucht. Man befleckt sich. Man trinkt sich hinüber.
Man schläft. Man grinst in ein nacktes Gesicht.
Der Zahn der Zeit nagt zu langsam, mein Lieber!
Man raucht. Man geht kacken. Man macht ein Gedicht.

Bertold Brecht, “Über die Anstrengung”, Manual of Piety (Die Hauspostille) (translated Eric Bentley) (George Weidenfeld, 1991), p 98

 

repetitive always
as the doings of small animals

 

starting again in a late spring
– oh god! what escape
from this banal actuality of metaphor

 

fine & clear at last on may day
jazz trumpeting thru the high street
good day then to plant more poppies
perennial, sanguinary, disordered blossom

 

oh words
just words?
no never more
gnarly & basting
determined must overthrow
high status elites
they just piss

 

next poem: 2. Out of Order I Said This (The Eternal Delusion)

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