Seminar Poetry

In seminar my group was supposed to to a presentation on poems that we read. My group presented, and I read The Army of the Dead (and people liked it...yay!), and then we passed out four papers and set it up in such a way that the person writing could only see the line immediately ahead of the one they were writing (folded the paper so that they couldn't see the lines above that one). In essence the class wrote four poems together, and did it so that they didn't really have much input from other people. The idea was to demonstrate that it was poetry and that even though so many people with so many different ideas/views/lives wrote it, that it was still poetry. It was pretty cool. (They are named according to the way we color-coded them to keep track of who had written on which paper.)


Yellow

The wind sings through the trees like time
The sound makes me want to mime
If only, only there were more time
And if only I could see the previous line
Everything would probably make a lot of sense
But right now it just does not
Will we survive without this precious thing?
Will we survive with this precious thing?
Hope wills us to survive through the darkest times
We only see this as a dark time because of our lack of hope
Where this came from, the pope only knows
Unless if they pick their nose
Mmm…boogers….
Go climb a tree
Or eat a good chocolate chip cookie
Then swallow the cherry flavor laxatives
No one likes laxatives
If only they could see
But is it for the best?
Why do we seek to know?
Maybe we are better off not knowing


Green

The sun shall never rise as high
The sun never set as low
The sky so full of light
The mountain is so high
It spirals above us so mighty and so pure
Then it fell, and crashed on the cold dry earth
It broke into a million pieces of nothing
The nothing made of something
There is no such thing as nothing
Nothing is the embodiment of everything
And everything tends to get confusing
When no one cares where they are going


Pink

The sheep slips on the snow an falls down the mountain
And yet he does not notice
In the middle of the dance floor he stood
He began to dance like a mad cow
Jumping and flying as if he weighed nothing
The pigs ate the apple in the midnight sun
Not if it was creamy ointment
Personally I like chunky
Chunky things smell funny
And funny things are like palm trees
That smell like our feet
But nothing ever smells bad if you don’t want it to
Although sometimes it does
Sometimes it does not make sense
But all you have to do is trust
Trust in yourself
Trust in others
As you would in yourself
Find this to be true
Nothing is true
Except that my favorite color is blue
And all you had to say was
Yes sir!


Orange

I love oranges and banana cheese
Yes, cheese is good and oranges are juicy
Both feeding everything but the soul
Neither have a heart the color of coal
But do either have the makings of a soul?
To make sprits rise or fall
You need to know spirits
How can we know spirits?
How can we not?
It’s so temptatious
How did we live without it?
Why must we know how?



Pretty cool, no? I like Green the best (no, not because it's my favorite color). I almost wish I could turn them into songs.

Paradies

Wer kann schon sagen, was mit uns geschieht
Vielleicht stimmt es ja doch
Dass das Leben enie Pruefung ist
In der wir uns bewaehren sollen
Nur wer sie mit "Eins" besteht
Darf in den Himmel kommen
Fuer den ganzen deckigen Rest
Bleibt die Hoelle der Wiedergeburt
Als Tourist auf Ibiza, als Verkehrspolizist
Als ein Clown in der Zirkusshow
Den keiner sehen will

Um diesem Schicksal zu entfliehen
Sollen wir uns redlich bemuehen
Jeden Tag mit ienem Gebet zu beginnen
Anstelle von Aspirin
Nur wer immer gleich zum Beichtstuhl rennt
Als waer's ein Wettlauf
Und dort alle seine Suenden nennt
Der handelt einen Freispruch aus

Ich will nicht ins Paradies, wenn der Weg dorthin so schwierig ist
Ich stelle keinen Antrug auf Asyl, meinetwegen bleib ich hier

Wer Messer und Gabel richtig halten kann
Und beim Essen gerade sitzt
Wer immer "Ja" und "Danke" sagt
Dessen Chancen stehen nicht schlecht
Wer sich brav in jede Reihe stellt
Mit geputzten Schuhen
Wer sein Schicksal mit Demut traegt
Dem winkt die Erloesung zu

Wir sollen zuhoeren und aufpassen
Tun, was man uns sagt
unterordnen und nachmachen
Vom ersten bis zu letzten Tag
immer schoen nach den Regeln spielen
Die uns befohlen sind
Wie sie im Buch des Lebens stehen
In Ewigkeit, Amen

Ich will nichts ins Paradies, wenn der Weg dorthin so schwierig ist
Wer weiss, ob es uns dort besser geht, hinter diesen Tuer
Ich will nichts ins Paradies, wenn der Weg dorthin so schwierig ist
und bevor ich auf den Knien fleh', bleib ich meinetwegen hier
Ich will nichts ins Paradies, wenn der Weg dorthin so schwierig ist
Wenn ich nicht rein darf, wie ich bin, bleib ich draussen vor der Tuer


"I don't want to go to heaven if the way in is so hard. Who knows if it's better for us behind that door? I don't want to go to heaven if the way in is so hard. And before I kneel on my knees, I'll spend my life here. I don't want to go to heaven if the way in is so hard. If I don't make it in the way I am, I'll stay outside the door."

Why do I bother? No one cares about what I do. Why do I write in my blog? I think it's some way to make myself feel important. But it unfortunately doesn't work.

But that realization makes me wonder: why do people feel the need to make themselves important? There isn't any particular reason that everyone needs to be the most important person in the entire world. Yet everyone I know, including myself, feels that it's necessary. Why are people so conceited and self centered? I think that I've been over this exact question several times in seminar with the Berry paper, the King paper, and Night by Elie Wiesel. But I still wonder. And you know what? By writing this in my blog, I'm doing exactly what I just implied I shouldn't do, and I'm modeling precisely what any hypocrite like myself would do: write about it in my blog, assuming that the many people who avidly read my blog will be fascinated by my rambling, and will reply with thousands of elucidating comments to help me.