Thursday, March 13, 2008

fragments of poetry cited in a facebook wall war

"the babies in the tomatoes."
~allen ginsburg, "a supermarket in california"

"babies in the tomatoes? what about wives in the avocados! hubba hubba!
here's the real question: what would you buy in a neon supermarket?"
~josh schwartz, adapting from allen ginsburg

"Fortune plango vulnera
stillantibus ocellis
quod sua michi munera
subtrahit rebellis!"
~carl orff, "carmina burana"

"If anyone asks you
how the perfect satisfaction
of all our sexual wanting
will look, lift your face
and say -
Like this."
~Rumi

"but we were dark:
a girl
whose hair is yellower than
torchlight should wear no
headdress but fresh flowers."
~sappho

"The hero there,
diverting his gaze
from mine,
in shame and awe
his eyes cast down.
Tell me, how does he strike you?"
~richard wagner, "tristan & isolde"

"If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead,
don't try to explain the miracle.
Kiss me on the lips.
Like this. Like this.

When someone asks what it means
to die for love, point
here."
~more rumi

"I have torn speech like a tattered robe and let words go;
you who are still dressed in your clothes, sleep on."
~even more rumi

"If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori."
~wilfred owen

"It is now refound!
What? eternity.
It is the sea commingled
With the sun."
~rimbaud

"Poetry leads to the same place as all forms of eroticism — to the blending and fusion of separate objects. It leads us to eternity, it leads us to death, and through death to continuity. Poetry is eternity; the sun matched with the sea."
~Bataille