Caveat: Poem #2083 “Manifesto”

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Spring is unbearable, just like the fall:
seasons do best when they're in one and all.
Likewise the sun shouldn't vary each day:
better to have it a lot, or away.

– a quatrain dactylic tetrameter. Bear in mind the “narrator’s voice” here really isn’t my opinion. It’s a kind of exaggerated, somewhat facetious narrator speaking.
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Caveat: Poem #2082 “While the Men Converse”

While the Men Converse
         Went so. / for Wntr.
         / can y. undstd --
       In spc. mny types
      awt. the end.
        |
        |
      °°° ~ now the
    blue/bk. over / turned
    the eggs of Tps.
    To reveal to me the
       Vrts.
    That man dwells amidst * - c
  ? Id.s. ,,, / (,,,) -- ...
    / / / -- \ °°°
  Tps Vrts -- flowing like
lamposts on dusty grey
bookshelves --
While the Men.
Converse°°° °°

– A free-form poem, a guest-poem from my past. I wrote this poem in the summer of 1983, a point in time when I was keeping a fairly regular journal (a kind of analogue predecessor to this here blog thingy, right?). It was hard to transcribe – I was experimenting with what is called “concrete poetry” I guess. My handwritten letters and the spaces that I filled with bits of punctuation and pseudo-writing were as important as the actual text. I was being deliberately gnomic with my weird abbreviations and omissions of letters – most of them I can figure out, but in fact I’m clueless about the meaning of “Tps” in the above poem. I’m guessing that “Vrts” is “virtues”… maybe? So perhaps “Tps” means “typos” – that would please my notion of meta-referentiality, anyway. Let it be so.

So transcription is quite difficult. Here is the image of the original poem. And the facing page with its accompanying illustration.

MenconverseA_260

MenconverseB_260

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Caveat: Poem #2074 “Cage of lions and I”

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Cage of lions and I we are two things

Secure within immutability
safe inside my sphere
I pound my head against
its walls
begging to be free.
Then a man with silver key
cracks my prison
sets me free.
I grab some glue,
I gasp for breath
I beg the man to take his
key, and go away.
Patching sphere
repairing cracks
I turn around and
pound my head against
its other walls.

I know the answer
I have asked the questions
but no one tells me how

Dog and bug are in a room.
A green plant.

– a free-form poem. This poem is a “guest post” from my own past: I wrote this poem while in high school, in 1982. I transcribed to my “retroblog” in 2010.
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