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-13d'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-Led [in Chrismation, Januarius]

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.


peace, pot, tequila shot

Jesus loves us, stoned or not

S74rw4rd-13d'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-Led [in Chrismation, Januarius]