Inflection (to be graffiti)
“I fear the toll of a quiet man”
-Dose One
I look around my borough and see:
Restoration and Innovation,
Songs and Tricycles,
One night wild shouting passion improvisational energy!
The next, a respect, for meditative solitude.
Love is real. I’ve felt it.
If not, it would have been innovated by now.
Restore it lovelyicans, restore it.
The American Standard,
Here I question you.
Have we forgotten how to be ourselves?
When’s the last time you saw a man cry?
And he ain’t gettin’ any younger.
And you ain’t gettin’ any younger.
Put some poetry in your enterprise
Put some gypsy in your hooker
Put some endless in your end.
Place yourself under construction.
Let the lawyer be a lawyer,
And a construction worker do construction,
Since when do we know all and all?
He knows more about law than you
Cause the other can build a better garage than you.
We must respect each others education and study in special fields,
Myself inside of an Ourself.
The power of a community is a mass compound of individual powers.
Recognize in another man,
your likeness or opposite fate,
Respect both.
An Ivy League educated civil servant would make a better politician than you
Face it,
The Mirror.
Everywhere the murderous shame of ignorance.
Humble masses, not daring to nurse in their mind-souls
Dreams or inclinations.
Stuck
as they stick to
Some beaten comfortable path
leading to empty gourd graveyard
parking lot.
Step out of the sandbox!
not into a Hollow car.
Six million ways to take that step, to take any step, choose from the lot.
Throw some mandolin in your music.
Mix blue in your gray
And gray in your blue
Don’t you feel that big thing inside you?
It prefers the poor reader’s paradise to Synonym factory.
My Generation,
bought and sold.
(Adidas Armani Calvin Klein Christian Dior Diesel Dolce & Gabbana Ecko Hugo Boss Kenneth Cole Lacoste Levi’s Marc Jacobs Fucking Nike Perry Ellis Prada Puma Ralph Lauren Rocawear Sean John Swatch Tommy Hilfiger Versace)
That cha-ching sounds more like a chain gang.
If you throw those things in the fire,
And then yourselves,
You’ll see the difference.
If this is what beauty has come to, a new word is needed.
Uniquity is beauty.
Those clothes reach no deeper than your thin skin,
Cut off your arm,
Perhaps it will make you more grateful for the rest of you.
Perhaps blood will drip into the Big Pearl.
You raindrop of a man
Your more blade of grass than woman, slice your tongue out!
You’re an insult to it.
Why? What? How? When?
“Love does not consist of gazing at each other,
But in looking together in the same direction.”
-Antoine De Saint-Exupery
6 comments:
Shane, this is powerful stuff - it seems full of passionate observation and a sense of urgency - but what stands out the most for me is that it also contains a lot of love, in that it seems to wholeheartedly embrace the confusing diversity of society. Does this remind anyone else of Walt Whitman? "Song of Myself"?
I also agree with Corey. This is truy a powerful piece. As i read it i myself began to wonder on some of the issues discussed here. Such examples are the absence of uniqueness and image of self. How our whole generation is based on how we dress and the different companies that represent us. It does sort of remind me of Walt Whitman's piece in terms of it pertaining to aspects of American life such as the differnt name brands that make up a person these days in Shane's writing. Also the search for the boundaries of the self was a key issue in "Song of Myself" as shane demonstrated here as he looked in the mirror...I really found this poem to be not only creative but VERY well written.
I agree with both Corey and Nadia when they say this piece is powerful. It's not just powerful but it's very true. I read it as you, Shane, trying to tell us that in the world we live in today is very materialistic. Like when you list the names of brands one of my favorite lines in the poem was when you said "That cha-ching sounds more like a chain gang." I read that line as if all those expensive designers are just in it together as a gang to take your money. The way you ended the poem with the quote by Antoine De Saint wrapped up the whole poem for me in a nice way, gave it some closure. Nice job Shane, I truely enjoyed it!
Very moving piece. It seems that you are sick of conformity and are trying to escape. I also feel the urgency that the professor mentioned. I also feel that the quotes you used are very apt for this piece. Is this poetry or just standard prose? I feel that this piece is almost like a poem/song waiting to happen.
Like Lydia Davis, who says so much with few words, you manage to touch upon so many things in society, especially that of American society. The line "An Ivy League educated civil servant would make a better politician than you Face it, The mirror" gave the piece a sense of irony, because right before that line you say that people should respect another's fate and education if different from theirs. I really enjoyed this piece, because you talk about so many things that are relevant to our generation.
I think that you touch on so many different aspect of todays generation, and you did it in a really nice way, I mean although you have all of these ideas going on they all seem to fit together. Nothing is out of place, and I think that it was very well written.
Also, I have to say that I got more out of this piece when you read it in class then when I read it to myself. You put more passion into the piece and I think that was great.
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