purpose

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NO EYELIDS

 

though i have yet to fully find it

i believe i have a purpose in life

and it is becoming very clear to me

that that purpose is not to be

a dishwasher or some slave of strife

i feel more pleasure, pride and gratitude

literally starving myself delirious

as a disciple of deprivation than i do

smashing rocks in torturous pits

there is never a real need for profit

dead diamond chains hold us down

in deepest despair of dark delusion

 

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S74RW4RD's picture

This poem reminds me very

This poem reminds me very much of how I felt, when I entered the workweek world after my time in school had run its course.  I started out working on painting roads (center stripes, edge lines, etc), and then became a low-level clerk in a financial firm.  I knew that Wallace Stevens had worked for decades busting files for an insurance firm; and that James Dickey wrote advertising copy for a soft-drink company.  Paul Claudel had served as assistant consul in one of France's least remarkable consulates in the Far East.  Eliot was a numbers analyst for Lloyd's Bank; and Richard Hugo worked as a technical writer at Boeing for twelve years.  Stevens was very vocal in his belief that poets should have ordinary, even mundane, job; as poetry, he said, was not a vocation but an avocation.  Stevens' example helped me come to terms with a world that was nothing like the school at which I had become too comfortable.  Later, having learned the lesson while it could still do me some good, I also learned that one of my favorite Welsh poets had been manager of a small railway depot on a local line, and another was the janitor at an elementary school.  I do not mean to sound like I am lecturing you, or telling you what to think or who to read.  But your poem reminded me very much of what I could not, at that age, even articulate; and I wish someone had informed me of these facts in a time when I could really have used the information.  It would have spared me quite a bit of grief in those early days.

 

Your purpose in life, I believe, is already in your sight and grasp:  to write as you have been writing, to be one of postpoems' finest, and to continue using the language of poetry in your inimitable and literate style.


Starward

Pungus's picture

Endless Action

I've been thinking much about escaping everything by slow, steady elimination, to deny the ways of the world today. I fancy myself eventually, when the time is right, drifting away in some untouched sanctuary---meditation in a calm, quiet cave near a freshwater stream where forgetfulness flourishes as the stress of this common existence all dwindles to the point of pure being and inevitably, of course, a death of zero dread.


bananas are the perfect food

for prostitutes

S74RW4RD's picture

You are certainly not alone

You are certainly not alone in that desire.  I think some poets are able to find it in their poetry.  I believe that your poetry will provide you that same shelter---when the time is right.  I will be sending you a link by PM.


Starward