|
SHALL WE DANCE?
Posted by Hello
Blog: The Landlocked pirate
intriguing & witty with titles like The Dead
Don't Tip & other oddities.
But I was unable to re-find it. Did it disappear into the ether.
If the author of the post or someone else knows the Blog address drop me a line.
I wanted to share the intriguing lyrics of the song American Dreaming by Dead Can Dance.
We can hear the echo of Baudelaire & Robert Lowell. So I juxtaposed the poem SkunkHour by Robert Lowell. Robert Lowell
began as a more traditional poet who later began to write highly personal poetry or confessional poetry like that of Elizabeth
Bishop & Sylvia Plaith, etc..
Dead Can Dance LYRICS
www.Dead-Can-Dance-lyrics
American Dreaming
I need my conscience to keep watch over me
To protect me from myself
So I can wear honesty like a crown on my head
When I walk into the promised land
We've been too long American dreaming
And I think we've all lost the way
Like some somnambulistic maniacal in the dark
I'm in love with an American girl
Well she's my best friend
I love her surreptitious smile
That hides the pain within her
And we'll go dancing beside desert waters
Where love is so wastefully spent
& dine upon the crumbs of faith
most lovers often reject.
spare a thought for the unfortunate man
who must choose between love and desire
We've been too long American dreaming
I think we've all lost the way
Like some somnambulistic maniacal in the dark.
Robert Lowell
Skunk Hour
(for Elizabeth Bishop)
Nautilus Island's hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son's a bishop. Her farmer is first selectman in our village;
she's in her dotage.
Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria's century
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.
The season's ill--
we've lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.
And now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for fall;
his fishnet's filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler's bench and awl;
there is no money in his work,
he'd rather marry.
One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town....
My mind's not right.
A car radio bleats,
"Love, O careless Love...." I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat...
I myself am hell;
nobody's here--
only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their solves up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.
I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air--
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail.
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.
http://www.poemhunter.com
Robert Lowell
And now here is a poem which I wrote in 1993 as a tribute to the poet Charles Bukowski entitled
FOR CHARLES BUKOWSKI
NO. I:
For Charles Bukowski NO. I
And here's to Charles Bukowski
I raise a glass of cold beer
I will not shed a tear
for his death
I know he lived
as best he could
gave as well as he got
living on skid-row
becoming a barfly
never wanted pity or love
scribbling away late at night
on bits of paper on liquor store receipts
with the remains of a broken chewed up pencil
listening to symphonies of Gustav Mahler
on a creaking scratchy little old record player
always drunk or hung -over
taking his chances on the horses-
for years I only heard about him in rumours
having lost everything myself
having hit rock-bottom
stumbling over his broken raggedy lines
they toched me to the bone
raw ragged & passionate
abandoning all I had written before
all of it barely touched the surface
all of it too abstract-
I raise another glass of cold beer
for Bukowski who called himself Hank
some days I give thanks to Hank
sometimes in the middle of a dark lonely
insomniac night facing the blank page
which stares me down I curse his name
I know he probably feels smug
but he is not to blame for the road I am on
I didn't want to be as desperate as he was
I just wanted just a bit a tad a smidgen of his talent-
I raise another cold glass of beer for Hank
a most unlikely poetic genius
a miserable cynical mystic
wrapped up in a gargantuan ego
& we'd probably hate each other on sight
for him I raise another glass of cold beer
as the night wears me down
as I sit here in Café Apollinaire
for his eyes I tell you were open
even in his drunkenness
his lines little flickering flames
attracting would-be-poets
& suicidal moths
so join me & we'll drink
another glass of cold beer to ah...
you know don't give me that blank look
the one you know who wrote about love
yeah...that's it love is a dog from hell
& the days runaway like wild horses
over the hills
his stupid thick as a brick father
beating him with a strap
his face like the moon
covered by craters
looking like an old man at seventeen
living as an outsider
writing a couple of thousand poems
finding fame & fortune late in life-
So let us raise another glass of beer for Hank
& another one for Baudelaire
to hell with it I down a few more beers
for a dozen more poets
just to blacken out the fear which comes to me
night after night -
|
