SATCHMO

Thank you. I'm figuring on maybe one a day, just to keep things well paced.

ravenRAWRRR

sounds good im excited for more

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"Flip my world inside out, honestly I like it better this way. When I mesh the night through the back of my eyes."

SATCHMO

ravenRAWRRR

^^^ this sir, is your best writing BY FAR!!!

so enlightening, so moving, so.... **eyes begin to tear** GENIUS!!!!

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"Flip my world inside out, honestly I like it better this way. When I mesh the night through the back of my eyes."

VEGANGELICA

Since Janszoon mentioned "arsonists," I'll go ahead and mention "formaldehyde!" Nasty stuff, that.

SATCHMO, your first poem reminds me of the movie "Natural Born Killers," which I like a lot because of the horrible ferocity and sadness in it stemming from raw urges to hurt others partly in retribution for child abuse and neglect.

I am confused, though, why these people in love in your poem would do such destructive acts like bombing establishments. What is their motivation? Not all that they destroyed was a symbol of government and domination. Maybe I'm taking it too literally? They sound so justified in doing what they are doing, and I don't understand why.

Your poetry reminds me of the spoken poems of a man, an oral bard, whom I met here in Iowa. He performs poetry for people on the spot, making it up as he goes along, which gives a random feeling to some of the word choices and combinations, similar to your "unicorn games in your basement" in your final poem. Of course I have a sexual translation for what that means, but I'm not sure if you intended that!

Do you have a strong, specific, intended meaning when you write these, or are you more interested in opening people's minds by using unconventional images?

Here, I've added some images of "Natural Born Killers" in honor of your "Love Story" poem. If you haven't seen the movie, I recommend it!:

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SATCHMO

The poem deals, partly, with the dichotomy of creation and destruction (artists and arsonists), life and death, the sacred and the profane, and pretty much just the unification of opposites, there is an overtone of sadness which is juxtaposed with the idealistic notion of being in love, which anchors the more passive positive side of the equation. I used violence and death as a metaphor for the passion of being in love and the transitory nature of all things, which is kinda' the same thing that comes across in Natural Born Killers, and of course, there is a sort of nihilistic euphoria that balances it all out too. They're just some concepts that I was playing with at the time that I wrote it.

It was the product of me lying in bed half asleep about 6 months ago and making up some silly song in my head as I'm prone to do. It's not hard to miss what the implication is, but it's definitely not a huge fixation of mine, or a serious poem.


I just like playing with words and using alliteration, allusions, the connotations that certain words are saturated with etc.. A lot of what I've written has been for performance, so much of the emphasis is on the tone, pace and rhythm of delivery. Usually in situations like that, unless someone in the audience is paying very close attention and knows a lot about what I'm alluding to, they're not not going to catch much of the symbolism or allusions that are in my poem. For example, formaldehyde is used as an embalming fluid. For it to be "second-hand" implies, not a rebirth, but a re-death, again a concept that works with the life/death dichotomy. Most listening to it probably wouldn't catch that, especially considering how quickly and forcefully the poem is delivered.

VEGANGELICA

Thank you for explaining all that, SATCHMO. The poem makes more sense now to me.

For example, I had seen the difference between the pyramids (the sacred) and the roadside shop (the profane) and the scew-top wine (the profane), but I hadn't thought of that dichotomy as running throughout the poem.

And I saw the destructiveness and felt the sadness of it (especially with the pyramids being destroyed), but I didn't see why the people felt they were artists. I didn't connect the passionate, transient nature of being in love with the violence and destruction.

I think I was thrown off because I didn't see much *creative* art that the artists were doing, just the destructive. Since I usually think of artists as creative, I felt the poem leaned to the side of arsonists much more than toward artists. However, like in the Natural Born Killers movie, there is the creative aspect of destruction...because you *are* creating the non-existence of something! So that makes sense. It is a little like the Da Da artistic movement.

The wild force of that poem probably really comes across in your delivery, which I assume is often loud since you said forceful.

Have you considered recording your pieces, like Jello Biafra (the spoken word artist and former member of the Dead Kennedys) has with his speeches?

Since it sounds like you have a lot of these poems if you are planning one per day, I'd recommend recording them as spoken word art. You could quickly have quite a body of work that people could really enjoy listening to with less loss of your original intent.

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SATCHMO

The creation is in the energy that is created between them, it is love. It's that which is greater than the sum of their parts, but you don't get that until the very last line. Creation and destruction are two sides of the same coin, but in highlighting the destructive elements, the creative is seen through it, as is the transitory nature of everything. There's also the dichotomy of power and weakness because of what their love endows them with, (we didn't genuflect to nobody and It was too much to stay alive sometimes, we were dying), there is a carelessness towards the rest of the world and a reckless abandon in their actions which is implicit of the impetuous nature of being love and of youth, another element in the whole living/dying dichotomy.

I know the performance was videotaped, but I'm pretty sure that I have little to no chance of getting a hold of a copy.

VEGANGELICA

Ahhh. I see.

I also see that you moderators have the secret power to actually be logged in without your green light going on!!! Ah-HA! I thought I had noticed that happening once before with a moderator, but now I KNOW it does!

Yes, the carelessness towards the rest of the world and the reckless abandon come across in the poem. Maybe when I was young and in love, I just didn't react the same way as your love story people, so it was hard for me to recognize their reaction as love!

I will read your future poems more carefully to see what is in them. I like that you invest this one with many concepts, because this lets me chew on it for a while, which I like doing. Your "Love Story" poem feels like a pear saturated and poached in wine:



The pear in the front is the first time I read the poem. The pear in the back is the second!

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SATCHMO

Damn, I always forget to take myself off of invisible mode, that explains a lot. It's not a feature that's exclusive to mods though. Go to Edit Options on your control panel and it will give you the option to go invisible.