Posts tagged ‘psychosis’

July 10, 2010

shifting rock, unable to roll.

by jhon baker

I really want to stick with yesterdays poem for the remainder of the weekend.
find that here: poem to Richard Daley

Today we shifted a lot of rock around the yard. Tomorrow I will do little as this has left me in visceral agony. I intend to complete my study into the psychology of Gerog Trakl tomorrow, I am tied to this poet though his malady and mine are different and of different intensity. The question remains – is good poetry only written after the poet has suffered the break – the full force of his/her psychosis if there is one. I believe no but there is an overwhelming amount of evidence suggesting that I am wrong.

I will continue to work on part two and post some of it on Monday if it is ready, If it is not I will post something else.

I use to leave milk and cheese out for the neighborhood cats when I was about 6. I didn’t know then that it was bad for them or that the raccoons were the ones probably eating it.

April 30, 2010

why don’t they shoot more poets?

by jhon baker

I have normal aspirations mostly. Maybe.
Normal: not wanting to be rich just successful in my own view, as a poet/writer mostly poet though.
maybe not so normal: the extreme of that success is being assassinated for being a poet, for aligning words in such a way that we are found to be dangerous. My example would be Lorca. I admire his poetry and plays, spent a summer translating a few of the poems. I envy his death tho it is not envious.
Normal: to write about what I experience and see others experiencing.
hummmm: to have large portions of my memory erased so  I can be in a pure place with my madness and write from there. It’s the view of the world a poet has that drives him/her to write, the more that view is abstracted from the society the better the work to a point and I don’t know where that point is and given enough time all artists cross it.
these are my examples for today, all questions will be fielded after the poem.

 on 04/30/1945 the world was rid of a monster, exactly six years earlier another monster made it’s debut and has ingratiated itself into the normal consciousness.
the former being the suicide of Adolf Hitler and the latter being CBS television made it’s first broadcast at the worlds fair. I don’t mean to pick on CBS alone as they are all a conglomeration of pushers with their junk easily spread into the veins of children and adults. I almost never watch television programs or television itself anymore. I had my fill over a three year period where I could not do much more than lay on a couch and observe the box. I mean to pick on Hitler though and acknowledge that his mosterousness is incomparable to any contemporary person.

This is how I view ECT:

poetry doesn’t have to make sense to be good
poetry doesn’t have to cure social ills
poetry doesn’t have to __________________

electricity is always running through us – we just
don’t care for increasing the amperage.

what man does to man
man does not do to one self less he
be considered insane

poetry doesn’t have to comment
poetry doesn’t have to describe
poetry doesn’t have to be well written

Electric chairs can be wired badly and still
kill with efficiency.

 – Hoc Scripsi (right now, so forgive if it is poorly written or not ________)

 I had intended for this to be a different poem. Something from my back stock about poets be assassinated for their good looks but it is now going to be the above write. 

yesterday I cleaned my .38 and 30 aught 6, today I get the scope mounted and dialed in.
I load my thirty-aught-six to board the downtown train…


but that’s another poem…

April 24, 2010

not about xxx porn on the internet

by jhon baker

Happy birthday Willem de Kooning. Love your stuff. 

no matter how long I live, life will be painfully short.
at times it has been painfully long.
even if I live to be  centurian, then dying of
old age,
how is life regarded and why is death not our inevitable friend.

– Hoc Scripsi

the fine art of the mea culpa

as I try to right my life
and hone my influences
there seems less to write about.
plenty of the ol’ inspira
but none of the drama.
none of the cascading
disappointments or pie unreachable.
no more life without happiness.

hard to admit,
that so much poetry can
only be written by the
chronically dissatisfied.

harder to admit
that this is preferential
to the former,
or that the former is
not missed.

and I am waiting for
my shoelace to break.

 – Hoc Scripsi

I wrote the above poem not from personal view as at the time I was slipping into a deep depression where I would subsist for several years but from the one where the writer can only write about being sad and never from the perspective of any other emotion. Like death would always bring about the birth of bards. bullshit.
On writing – the clearer my mind gets the better the writing gets, the easier it is to do. It may be that I write only because I have mental instability, diagnosed mental illness, that I am able to write but but but, I take medication to curb these effects so I am not affected – only inflicted.
Basically what I am saying is that most other writers are full of shit.
maybe I am too.

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April 19, 2010

creative drought

by jhon baker

I keep thinking that I am in the middle of an existential crisis and am existing through some kind of creative drought. Neither are true, which gives credence to the former, but even still, existentially I am already aware I am wholly responsible for all my actions. Or I should say I already understand and accept as it conveys the proper truth that simply saying ‘aware’ does not.
As for the creative or Literary drought, I can look and see the output – it is higher than any previous year except when I was a teen and early twenties when I mostly wrote crap and was going out of my mind, delusional and electrocuted. Mostly then I excelled at being an asshole – a reflection of my surroundings which the insanity was also or maybe not but probably.
It is that I want to be writing more, I want to be creating constantly, the two finished stories and one nearly so along with forty some pages of poetry and a handful in the works all go to state my creativity is high then in those moments where I am not writing I start to think that I need to be. It is that my mind used to teem with ideas and now it does not. It comes up with an idea and then dedicates it to paper and works it out.
The ideas are still there, they just no longer scream, I should have said noise instead of ideas or go back and correct it now but I am not going to.
There is little noise now, and it makes creating easier. I don’t require the chaos but thinking now that it is enjoyed to some degree. They were surprised when I said I felt I was getting better when they say most people report they cannot create on similar medications. I think that there is a genuineness behind an ability to perform while on multiple medications. I think if you cannot be creative on things that stabilize you and quiet the noise to a degree then maybe you really ought to stop trying altogether and try something else.
I was going to qualify that and am not now, it needs no explanation.

margins

   I find poems in the
margins of books I’ve read
   or tried reading
only to find them
poking out and asking
to be recognized.
                 and I may.
such as…
I run to catch up to you
tho my hair is mussed
and I’ve forgotten my glasses.

   well,
I’m left now to wonder
if I caught my presumed lover.
   I don’t know.
should it be recognized that it
may have been
someone else?

 – Hoc Scripsi

Published today at Literary Tonic. The poem – ‘dying roses are not broken promises’ – I am obviously going to support the site but I thought it was a great one before I submitted there, otherwise I wouldn’t have submitted. Go there, comment, don’t comment, light the candles, put on the incense, and give yourself a hard time.