Your life is offline

The lines are busy, please call again
Feeling disconnected, there’s nothing left to gain
Those dreams you had came true
except for the ones that mattered, those silly few

Please leave a message after the beep
Just don’t make it too deep
There’s nothing more to life than work from nine to five
And you don’t even know if you’re alive

So why don’t you take my hand and jump down
from this tower of safety; don’t worry, you won’t drown
The world is a wonderful place
Just don’t hurry, slow down your pace

Breathe in the sun, the moon and the morning dew
I am breathing, I am living, so I’m asking you
smile, quit wandering in the mist
Do you want to live or merely exist?

Uninspired

The mind of a poet never sleeps and
his world is never trite
But his rationality and, oh, his hand
it does not always write

Yearn, O man

by Eino Leino. (First two stanzas not displayed)

Dost thou ever long to be beyond time,
beyond place and death,
Sitting in the evening,
feeling thyself slowly returning to the soil,
As everything beautiful disappears,
thy noble purpose
Slowly evaporates,
however high thou still dost aspire?

Dost thou weep, O man,
for the lost beauty of knowledge and feeling,
The finest feelings of thy heart,
thy greatest ambitions and strength?
Canst thou hear the sands
measuring thy time running out?
Canst thou see the hoary sword
poised to cut down the flower of thy days?

Yearn, O man,
beyond time, beyond place and death!
On this shore of sorrow see thy sacred star beyond
the night and waters!
A golden string forever resounds in the human soul,
and the yearning lives,
Though those content with what they had moulder
in the ground.

Sad city

There is something sad about a man
standing on the sidewalk, watching
the cars zoom past
Hugging his twelve-pack of beer
on a cold Sunday morning

Something sad about a woman
standing in a street corner, leaning
against the wall
Shivering in her fishnets and heels
on a snowy day

It’s a sad city of gray walls
houses falling apart, trashed streets
But for some it’s coated with sugar
and colorful veils that seperate them
from the cruelty of it all

Noise

I am an outsider to this Earth
Surrounded by great walls
silently crying out for forgiveness
A savior to release me
from the prison that is my mind

And the people live their lives
holding their heads up high
As light as air they walk
The burden of the world is
not on their shoulders

Ignorance is bliss
only to the ignorant

Umbrella Weather

by Rachel Wetzsteon.

To be drawn out of doors by the first sign
of rain on the window, to be happier drenched
than dry, to go out in weather
that others come in from, warrants a stare
from passing faces, and i know what it means:
there goes someone with serious problems.
Problems I have, and a nasty stammer to prove it.
But when I run into streets that are shiny,
my love of the downpour doesn’t mean
I’m courting sorrow, or getting sick on purpose.
Umbrella weather, though people who flee
seem not to know it, soothes wounds
by making them bigger:
if pain must come, it might as well be
dripping on bricks and blowing through trees
rather than staying in and turning paler.
None of this happens in calmer weather.
To be sobbing in sunlight, groaning on dry land
always leaves me feeling as if
I’m foreign, I’m freakish, I’m out of the loop
until a storm comes and I’m in it again
only deeper now, with a smile no news can ruin.
I throw up a curse and it comes back a blessing;
I look around and my love is pouring
all over the city—crude sighs, small tears
are larger and finer than they first appear
when they come rampaging down, as wind and as rain.

Who would set me free?

The songbird is tired
fighting the quiet all alone
note after note

No rest, no rest
caged and long forgotten

Singing her last song
at least once more
in an endless moment

No end, no end,
caged and a hundred years old

The colors have faded
the burning turned into stone
and the heart has been silenced

So cold, so cold
caged and long forgotten

The Panther

by Rainer Maria Rilke.

His gaze, from pacing behind the bars that stand before him
has grown so exhausted that there’s nothing it can hold
It seems to him as if there are a thousand bars before him
and beyond these thousand bars no world.

The soft footfalls, the supple muscular canter
that goes about in ever-smaller turns
is like a dance of power around a fixed center
in which, like dazed, a greater spirit burns.

And only at times the curtain that obscures the sight
silently parts -. Right then an image shoots through the eye
goes through the limbs - then strained quiet -
straight to the heart only for it to die.

Hush

I belong nowhere
My dearest friend is my loneliness
and the silence in this dark night
Such solitude

All my dreams slowly moving
on the walls like shadows
and the candles burn so faintly
like ghosts
of a past long silenced