The Flawed Academic

When our work should free the world
It becomes the most self serving

When we need to be soft spoken
Our voices fill with pride

When our work should calm the seas
It becomes its most unnerving

When we need to jump and risk it all
We often run and hide

Our words should be considerate

Yet we taint them with a cynical dose

When we should reach out to help the world

We make ourselves defensive

And when we should be brief and pithy

We find ourselves at our most verbose

When our work should fix and mend

We become the most offensive

-o0o-

Block

Ratcheting the brain to make it work

Sticking up the mindmaps all around

My careful lists

Goals and ambitions weighed up

The deadlines drawing closer

My hands refusing to type

My pen dry

Every idea empty

Every word stupid and dull

I am a good writer

I write a lot

I write often

I rewrite constantly

I edit well

But I'm blocked

For a week now

The literary constipation

Even this is rubbish

-o0o-

Art Haiku

painting and drawing
it is truly lots of fun
except cleaning up

-o0o-

Tool the God

The great god Tool observed the world with a sense of indifference and apathy from his seat on the moon. It was the first day of the week, Toolsday. And though today was the day named after Tool, the lord of thunder did not much appreciate his day of worship. Tool's status among the gods arose out of a mixture of pity among the elder gods and an admiration for how much Tool has accomplished with a bizarre race of evolved apes. These human type things were the exact opposites of the gods, they fought, they ate, they slept, they drank and had copious amounts of sex... well the gods did that too, but the humans did it to the point where they died. His worshippers would gather, as they do, every Toolsday, and they would shout at great length and without a shred of irony, "Praise the mighty Tool! All hail, the mighty Tool!" and so forth. It had become a point of mockery for the rest of the pantheon and Tool would arrive merely due to the fact that the worship of Tool has spawned an industry of religion upon the face of the world resulting in armies many times greater than any other god alongside a very questionable need for these people to build phallus shaped things that ruined them economically and usually involved them enslaving each other. Consequently, Tool became the eponymous king of the gods. Not that any god would be stupid enough to wage war on another god. Even, Paxus the trickster god, knows that a war between immortals is basically just a war of who gives up out of sheer boredom. The human things did enough of the warring and killing and other stuff mentioned before. Tool tried to reason with them. Be nice. Don't be a douche. Don't take each other's stuff. Don't set fire to sheep. He sent them his only begotten son, whom they killed. He sent them some basic rules, which they bastardized, rewrote, lost, found, pirated, plagiarized, embellished, lost again and rewrote out of sheer boredom. Any consequent inconsistencies that arose out of such poetic licence was merely written off as inspired by the never-before-seen imaginary third party spirit of the ghost of Tool, who was Tool, but wasn't, but still was, or something like that. Tool ignored this, as all this waffle, abuse and self confirmation created a beautifully militarised system which worked on paper at the very least. Yes they raped their kids, beat their wives and harassed homosexual people (because let's face it, the religious right has no healthy sex life of their own so they have to get vicariously involved in other people's sex lives), but ultimately, it worked, and Tool was happy, the people were miserable, but Tool decided there's precious little he could do about that, and the other gods were happy that they didn't have to deal with this marauding bunch of morons that spread across the face of this dusty ball in space like a banker that has only recently realized that he's overextended himself financially.

-o0o-

I really should explain what's happening here. I read an article a while ago, the name and source of which eludes me for the time being, but I will source it when I remember. But the article basically said that if you want to improve your writing while undergoing a writer's block, write short burst of microcosmic stories as often as you can. This will improve your writing and your storytelling.

Subjective Lullaby

I'm angry
Angry with you
For no reason
For no fault of yours
I'm angry because you care
I'm angry because you tried
I'm angry because you left me
I know I shouldn't be angry
But I am
And I'm really sorry

-o0o-

Showface

It's time for the show
The people have come
To see you perform
So get your work done

Paint on your smile
It's just for a while
The crowds are all pleased that you've come
In the end of the day
When the crowd goes away
You can cry when they're gone and your done

It's time for the show
Your smile coloured paint
will cover the wounds
and make them seem faint

Put on your smile
It's just for a while
The bold, affectatious new mask
"I'm doing so well
Regardless of hell"
Is all you will say, if they ask

You're done with the show
And the Milk|Mask's gone sour
It doesn't last long
Cry it off in the shower

Throw your old smile
On yesterday's pile
And wash out the show from your head
And wash yourself clean
Get lost in a dream
Curl up with a book in your bed

(Note: A friend died today. Had to perform in a show. You have to be good for the crowds. Re-reading American God's by Neil Gaiman. Rest in Peace M. 14/02/2012.)

-o0o-

Guitar

Tap! Tap! Fingers running
...down the jagged edge.

Calloused fingers stuck between 

...the strings just like a wedge.

-o0o-

Racism

I saw your hatred
And found that...
Arguing with you
Is like punching the floor
First I have to get down to your level
Just to communicate
Secondly, I ultimately hurt myself
Trying to vanquish a foe
That is already as low as you can get

-o0o-

Tree

My heart 

is like a tree

planted 

in my chest.

The leaves 

are really shallow 

and i wear them 

on my sleeves

and the roots 

are really deep 

and complicated and 

fucked up.

-o0o-

Test of Blackberry to Blogger

This is an official test of Blackberry to Blogger :)
Sent via my BlackBerry from Vodacom - let your email find you!

Janus

I guard every door

I protect every portal

No one may trespass

I have two faces

One to see the coming storm

One to see the last

I have seen your birth

And also see your passing

Nothing is hidden

-o0o-

Okay... So I read a lot of other people's poetry as well

Okay... so I read a lot of other people's poetry as well. So! I have decided to create a partner blog to this one in which I can put poetry of people that I enjoy etc...

http://aplaceformypoetry2.blogspot.com/

-o0o-

Haiku

So basically, I'm sitting here with a friend. And she says that I should take my ergonomically designed poem Wash (http://aplaceformypoetry.blogspot.com/2012/02/wash.html) and turn it into a haiku... so I did. Her reasoning was that if I were to be a part of a creative writing class, I would be told by my lecturer that I should condense my poem down into a haiku, containing the same amount of meaning, but with fewer words.

Ship sank. Bugger it!
Lost everything. Fishies! Lol!
I really don't care.

Then she wrote this:

I'm sitting with friend
"Turn poem to haiku," She said.
So I did, and LOL!

-o0o-

Wash

I did not make it through the fatal wave
That pulled me underneath the vicious tides
And lagan there I lay on Neptune's nave
And here it is where all my treasure hides

I kept it scattered on the coral shelves
With morays standing guard before the gate
They sing their midnight dirges to themselves
To keep the hours merry as they wait

The purple crab sits neatly on my right
And counts the coins and bullion and gemstones
He's honest and he works within my sight
And gathers all the treasure in my bones

My sunken vessel crumbles in the sand
The shredded sails are scattered all around
And in my chair I sleep with cup in hand
That only holds the last drink that I downed

The little things that crawl cleaned up my bones
And made them opalescent in the moon
They gave my head a crown of cowrie cones
My feet resting in drachma and doubloon

The whales above sing long and steady psalms
And rays of sun shine down through the mottled glass
The seaweed has become my garden's palms
The coral shelf become my garden's grass

I lie within my tomb of sand and rot
Elysium beneath the crystal sky
All hunger that i knew is long forgot
All worries that I knew have passed me by

-o0o-