…And the award for best sentence I read today goes to…
*drumroll*
Patrick Rothfuss, Iconoclast, for his phenomenal submission to the common discourse by means of his blog, which reads as follows:
“Semicolons are for wankers.”
Congratulations, Pat, on yet another stunning creation. You, sir, are a sir, and your beard is a masterpiece.
Your name is a love poem
on the tongue of the sky:
A song in broken tones
arpeggiating the wind
While you whisper the shape of your dreams
Into the tangled web
of where you stand -
Holding hands with sundown
On the cusp of some magnificent now
Which is always here and always coming anyway.
He used to walk down the hall
Every day in his navy blue sweater, covered in cat hair,
But now there is an empty place he used to fill
With his furtive glance and yellow-toothed grin.
He had a certain indefinable charm
If one could get past the exterior.
He inspired greatness in the few of us who knew
What it meant to be ourselves - as he taught us -
In the late-night soda-guzzling
Of a few teenage boys and their trite,
Crying-for-attention dreams.
He expired at last,
A broken car, and tree, and him.
Wood and metal screaming agony into the night
And the rain.
The sting of sudden loss, and then…
Dry wind through cracked walls -
I remember breathing, once…
But that was before.
Do you remember when we were born?
Out of the soft clay on the banks of the river,
raw and unrefined
we reached out our eyes
and tasted the glory of the sky for the first time -
we sat motionless for hours,
swallowing the whispers on the wind.
Do you remember what it was like to be naked?
I can still feel your heat,
your chest on my chest,
I can still see the universe peeking out at me from your eyes
and the cavern of my breath
still seeps out your voice through my throat.
Do you remember how we sang?
Without words,
without chains,
we put our ears to the earth
and sounded its melody from the pines,
your voice, and mine…
we cried out different notes of the same air,
even our dissonance pleasing
when the earth called it back to us from the rocks.
Do you remember?
1. She was beautiful- like God.
She - craven and destitute,
A severed-heart angel;
The tears I wept when she left…
Could’ve cured cancer.
She was beautiful- like God.
Sweet and nervousness,
Some severed-hand angel.
The life I bled when she left…
Could’ve caused cancer.
She was beautiful- like God.
Ugly in sin
Severed-head angel…
The words I spit when she left
Could’ve cured cancer.
2. An angry mob sits alone in a room
Contemplating the gears.
A neon star shines when Ragnarök comes.
3. This…is not a poem.
This is an epistemology of the Sanskrit
Sleeping giants.
The discourse of monotony as metonymy-
I love the sound of my own voice,
And this - not my radical philosophy about cultural rape
And intolerance -
Qualifies me to be a critic.
A Manifesto of the ways in which
Liberal humanism is as repressive as
The most sadistic fascist regimes
Falls on deaf, picketing ears.
You can’t free your mind by reading Foucault…
Or Baudrillard, Derrida, Žižek, Althusser, Gramsci, Harraway, Sedgewick,
Freud, Lacan, Bhabha, Barthes, Moi, Spivak, Eagleton, Kant, Marx, Hegel,
They are the system! And their new system is as violent and inescapable
As the thesis they reject in a flawed dialectic!
Keep turning cog! Keep turning!
And round and round the murder machine goes!
You can’t preach tolerance.
I know your secret -
You sons of bitches are as selectively tolerant
As Godwin’s Germany
I can be as inconsiderately inscrutable
As the worst cultural theorist.
Expose the flaws by
Misreading them.
Defend your atrocities with Žižek and Baudrillard!
Only in an altruistic justification for acts of unspeakable evil
Can you get away from the discourse.
Who wants to help me turn the countryside into a glass bowl?
4. I cried “Rape!” once
On a city bus, unprovoked,
And I believed what they told me
About the best way to become a martyr.
Somewhere a grizzled veteran sits,
Opium-starved on a sidewalk,
Homeless and insane-
He sings songs all day about hegemony and miracles.
In red, gleaming blood wash away,
Under the graffiti are ten interlocking circles,
That tell a story of the oppression of gods
And the heroism in not being human.
There is a baby
In the bay of bombs
Crying for her mother.
“Please, Momma…”
5. 01010100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000
01101001 01110011 00100000
01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000
01100001 00100000
01110000 01101111 01100101 01101101.
01010100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000
01101001 01110011 00100000
01100001 01101110 00100000
01100001 01101110 01110100 01101001 01110100 01101000 01100101 01110011 01101001 01110011.
01001001 00100000
01110111 01101001 01110011 01101000 00100000
01001001 00100000
01110111 01100001 01110011 00100000
01110011 01110000 01100101 01100011 01101001 01100001 01101100.
01010011 01101111 00100000
01100110 01110101 01100011 01101011 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01110011 01110000 01100101 01100011 01101001 01100001 01101100.
Follow me down
to these roots in the rocks
at the bottom of believing -
To this echo
in the cavern of my chest
To this boil
in the labyrinth of my blood
Through the cracks in my skin
seep the weeping scars of god
And the reverberations of the screams of creation
burst out in the pulse of my voice at the top of my lungs
I am the secret world inside the mask of myself breaking out
I am more than the cage of my flesh
Than the bondage of my blood:
I am the dreams of dying stars,
the regrets of Colossus
the sins of my father
I am the days when the sun stood still,
when my life made sound
when I tasted the edge
I am the broken tongue in the mouth of the wind
the tree of birds at the top of the world
the whispers in the soft earth
I am the dreams in the dust.
There would be some beauty in that,
This life, with its cacophonous details
Overwhelming – The way her hair glints
In the sunlight through the window
Toddlers screaming laughter at anthropomorphic
Monstrosities
On the other side men with combed hair
Miles away ramble on about nothing
But how we are doomed, which is everything,
And there are radio waves to be sent to space
And back
Coded keystrokes to be translated
From nothing into nothing more
And for some reason these things weigh so much.
Too much.
We’re all afraid –
“It will hurt;
I have so much left to do;
What if they were right?”
This violence of being - weighed against
This maybe violence of ceasing
Do I go on because I am brave
Or because I am scared,
Like as a child when she beat
My father senseless and
I could see the red in her eyes
Turning on me in my dreams?
So full of sounds and furies
These are other people in my self,
And I’m just a vessel
Made of clay.
She’s still there
Wondering at my silence
And the somewhere-else
Reflected in my stare
I don’t tell her about the secret tin
I keep locked in my chest
Where I’m sometimes not afraid to admit
I’d gladly die to be free of this.
There would be some beauty in that.
We have bred ourselves into the dust.
Ghosts, whispers of our former lives,
croon lullabies to our dying cities –
Houses founded on sand.
They crumble, and men are
Men in their brokenness.
Shuffling, lonely men wearing
all they now possess –
None are left to
fling wide their arms
and comfort them…
Here we stand, on the
Ashes of progress
Breathing embers and the Bones
of the Old Ones.
Faint, chalk figures sing
God into the smoke
Somewhere behind our eyes
We hear the singing,
calling each by the secret name
We only call ourselves in the rare moments
when We know We will die
Its voice resonates in our chest
It is our Voice
We stand atop the progress of Ashes
Singing the lament spilled from our lips
at the dawn of Man.
Spilled with our blood
at his end.
We have bred ourselves into the dust.
-David McFarlin
(This poem was published in the Spring 2012 issue of Gardy Loo magazine at James Madison University)