30.4.09

slam poetry

Gedichte des Donnerstags! Here's "Amet", the second poem I did at the last slam. Enjoy. If you have questions about references, feel free to ask.

Creativity
Is not the same as creation.

Man
Is not the same as existence.

Every second I form new life
As the skin on my hands is shuffled
By cards to table
As I shuffle card
To card to hand
To play,
To make my own luck.
I can make my own skin.

I can build houses with muscles and sweat
I can build muscles with weights
And with words I can turn sweat
Into a panting exhilarating
Experience.

But I am not a poet
No, I am a creator

I write poems by leaving bit-wise impressions
Between the pores on my skin
So that you can run your hand up my arm
And feel the truth of existence underneath your fingertips
In binary.
I let the feeling of goosebumps like braille
Dictate the form
And the meter is as long as the page itself:
Sleeves of prose poetry,
Interrupted by the non sequiturs of veins and armhair
There's a six and a half foot poem burned the length
Of my body that contains the necessary
Rules to live this God,
And I scrawled the word truth
In Hebrew on my forehead
So that I could bring myself to life.

On my thigh,
Tattooed in magnet so that you can only read it
With a laser shining light,
Is 17 lines of iambic pentameter.
When you trace them around it spins and skips
like an old Sony walkman cd player,
Because ever since they were spoken in act 2 scene 2 it has been true:
Yo boy Hamlet had it right when he said

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god!

And yet and then act 5.

You see,
The A side gets all the good tracks
And this one lasted for seven days.
And the B side of every album is
Always shorter.

These hands that built buildings
Can just as easily tear them down.
Cards can be undealt and reshuffled and luck can be lost
On purpose

And I will beat bricks with hammers
I will call out in prayer to Gallow's God
And let faith guide my slander,
I will let the Declaration be the rag to my match and bottle
And I will drown the first folio under dirt.
I will stumble through sand looking for mirages in grottos
And when I finally find that something that never existed
I will demand of the Earth
What is this quintescence of dust?

And when everything I've had
is unhad
When everything I've valued
is dereferenced
When everything I preached
is forgotten
Then I will raise a smile well met
And a muddied hand
Will dust away the aleph.

would it be so bad, to know weightlessness, carelessness this time?

Oh, gtk. If only you could locate your own header files, or your own dependencies, or ... I don't know, work. I can't make any headway on this, and I'm still putting quite a bit of time into trying to get it to work. This is starting to get very frustrating. I've tried everything I've thought of, except for hacky object oriented code bypassing, which my professor suggested I shouldn't do, since this should work. Hypothetically. I'm less sure every day.

In case anybody was wondering, the power level of the teapot at Tea Garden is over 9000.

As slow going as I feel all my projects are at the moment, I'd say Poetry is actually accruing rather nicely, and Digital Electronics is going the slowest. I only have one more lab of structured time to complete it, and I have a LOT to do. I have a lot of other time though, as long as I can find somebody to open the door to the lab. Also, microcoding can be done outside of the lab. Said microcoding would be much easier (and much more done, I'm guessing), if I knew how to do it... I have pseudocode done, it's really easy pseudocode, I just don't know how to represent it in microcode anymore. I may have known at one time, but I took the class containing that information over 2 years ago. My book is...somewhere? Who knows?

I found Khayembii Communique, finally. Turns out the second page of google results are always more useful. This time it led me to a hardcore/screamo blog with m***afire links, and reviews. If you're into that kind of thing, check it out, it's current and updates pretty often. As for Khayembii Communique, it turns out that they broke up shortly after forming and recording. All they really got done was make some awesome hardcore/emo and record it on a self-titled 10" and a split 7" with The Vida Blue, also/later known as Ten Grand. "AM1200" by KC is still one of the most interesting/contradictory hardcore songs I've ever heard. That actually seems to be their general style.

Anyways, to quote, "musics been good". Speaking of good music, hello blacksmith should be doing stuff this summer, like recording a third demo take (you don't want to hear the first two. well, they're funny so maybe you do), and trying to get an actual gig, hopefully at Eclipse Records. But don't worry, fans of free basement shows, we will still be playing those. We're also thinking of taking a new approach to them which I'll talk about later, most likely. We're still discussing amongst ourselves, so we'll see.

Lastly, the guys on my desktop in the picture on the last post? Totally MGMT. KITTIES. That is all.