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Nov. 23, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:55
525 Poems
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All right, my friends.
I did not, in fact, make it home in time to beat Christina's patient who made it there ahead of me.
It is, in fact, Thursday, November the 23rd.
See how good I am with the date when I can actually read it from the computer.
So I have a little bit of time to kill, and I'm going to kill that time and hopefully give you a few moments of pleasure.
I'm going to read some poems that I wrote.
Many years ago.
I've written a few more since, but these are the ones that I sort of happen to have on the notebook, and I think it will be interesting.
I like poetry very much.
It's a very great challenge to write, and mostly because I sort of follow the Shakespearean argument that a poem is a very compressed argument.
So here, without any further ado, are some poems that I wrote some years ago that I think you might enjoy, and I hope that this will lead to people sharing some of their own poetry on the board.
So the first poem we'll start with is called Did?
Did you learn these lessons?
When love came calling, did you burn your tent and follow her flowers?
When your prison walls ran with her scented oils, did you ease your rocks?
Did you find passage?
When beauty called, did you bury your heart's reply?
When bright ships passed your dark harbor, did you fear the night water?
When joy flew past, did you grab the ropes?
Did you ascend or unravel, frowning in passing shadows?
When you dreamed of gifts, were you wrapping or unwrapping?
When children came, did their light fingers pry you free, or did they yearn and turn?
When the world opened its gates, were you a rush of wind, or did you stagger before the light, clenching your eyes in blindness?
When life called for fire, did you flame or burn?
Who did you consume?
When souls opened to you, did you caress these soft strengths, or stitch them as wounds of weakness?
When a lover begged, did you barter?
Was desire a question or an answer?
When pain wept in your hands, did you taste precious tears, or did they dry to salt?
When anger rose, did you speak it simply, or did you turn it on others?
Afraid to rage, did you hate?
When failure wet your wings, did you descend to rest, or did you grin and flutter, false in flight?
When justice called for witness, did you stand and swear or sag and curse?
When kindness fell, did you kneel beside it or smile at your height?
When weariness leaned against you, were you a pillow, or did you fear wrinkles?
When you fell from exhaustion, did you rise with herbs or spurs?
When fear taunted, did you smile once at the mirror of never, or did you spark and spit?
When you lost, did you grieve?
When you wanted, did you give?
Did you learn these lessons?
The next poem is...
Oh woman, sweet shepherd...
O sweet stall of domestication, it is of thee I sing.
O sunny smile of subjugation, I cry little for scratching whatever was itching, or dressing for the couch and TV and chips.
I think in pastels now, shudder at indelicacies, fear germs and rude noise, social slights and relative indifference, hate violence.
My anger is appropriated.
I am sheltered, silent in scorn.
Oh, savage serenity of woman, I shout no earthy songs and think before I speak.
I am etiquette, niceness, cooperation.
I shoulder my duties with a smile.
I am called sugar cubes, fresh tablecloths, beaten rugs and clean closets, shining silverware and vacuum cleaners.
I do not grudge my repainting, for I was in truth an uncouth portrait, stubble, sweat, skids in my underwear.
Now I drink from a glass and cut milk bags with scissors.
I think of the allergies of my guests, warn my children about cartoons.
Save a tithe, consider the future, worry about opinion, and ask about the ill.
My dog wags far from vases.
My home is my world.
My bed, a pen of clean sheets made in mourning.
I sweat when visitors come, speak softly, hang their coats.
What price, love?
I think. I am now a tidy jungle.
I am allowed my predators.
Wednesday nights I play darts, drink moderately, and think of the world.
Party of One.
Oh, these eternal dictators, how they scatter!
Card-tricks in the hands of time, shadow puppets at sunset.
Their lives are empty feasts, conscience in the jaws of cowardice unable to swallow for bitterness.
Dusty tablecloth, broken glasses, dinners from a dead cook.
How they toast their still companions!
I alone can finish my meal, they crow, feasting on their empty hearts.
What treasures do they hold in their hands?
Scratch their nails, what do we see?
Why, precious days of misery, scattered black grains, dark days on an endless beach.
These are their trumpets.
I shall live a little longer.
These are their tombstones.
I grew old by dying young.
Gifts from the robbed.
This is about the fall of the Berlin Wall.
They lay crushed for seventy years.
They cried, LIFE! From the grooves of tank treads, their flailing arms reaching only to be broken.
Suddenly, here and now, they raise their eyes, seeking a shroud, a vision, to cover their dead as they wander the cremation of a charred utopia.
Before these foreheads, branded by truth enforced, we smile in strange nihilism.
Brazen in our lectures, free with our stolen goods, we pass to these stretching hands the blueprints of efficiency and say, your children died for want of a free flow of capital.
What gave us life was not competence, but freedom, the means to man's intelligence.
But we fed freedom to secular management, hard unions and soft currency, and cursed the poor with borrowed blessings.
Gnored with hunger, we offer leftovers from a recipe we lost.
Smile, Tito.
Mankind, tight and united, loose and murderous.
Having torn our chains from the walls, we made them weapons.
Ideally. Oh, no!
Joe! Stalin!
You must believe! It was not what you smoked or ate or did that did you in, but the failure of the shabby hordes to swallow your positive swords.
You know, misguided idealism sure beats cynical pragmatism.
You grew beautiful weeds shamed only by the roses.
Your heart was in the right place, even if no one else's was.
I want to kneel and weep for all mankind, for not being equal to your vision, for you saw like a sword, penetratingly, and sheathed your ideals in the hides of the hopeful.
Still with us, this was in memory of the intellectual pilgrimage of Westerners to Russia in the 1930s, where they praised Communism.
Ah, these happy men are still remembered at the embassy, coming as they did in the arc of the Depression.
Chief trumpeters in the orchestra of gore, they gushed their notes to the conductor's wand, reflecting his sceptre in their ruby glasses.
No famine here, they cried through the metal of their speared sausages.
blind in the glare of their searchlight eyes good and kind and wonderful crested their lips like tumbling surfs as they kneeled on the soaked carpet shifting from the wriggling beneath pulled in the vacuum of their direction
we dug up our clubs of kindness slightly charred from the stake but none the worse for wear and cheering them home swung them over those whose circumstances had survived such organization trial marx came last night In a dream I flew with him over ragged Russian leaves, sodden in a gutter of blood.
We sawed over the gulping gulag, slowed only for want of human grease, and I waited for him to speak.
Look what you have done!
I cried at last, hoping for tears to bead his iron beard.
But he just glared downwards, afire, with future history.
Did they achieve, he asked, the truth beyond life?
I gasped, aghast.
You told them that under the yoke of trade they sold their souls for goods, and that for the sake of the good they must trade their souls for yokes and sacrifice choice reinforced to choice enforced.
He looked at me curiously.
He must have tasted the result in the recipe, for beneath his stately cloak he drew his red book, tapped it, and growled.
Such was my plan, and I stand by it.
For better a purpose of death than the death of life's purpose.
Blueprints or Socialism Well, We said, slapping our plans on the table.
No poverty, no sickness, no inequality.
Grasping our plans, we found them stuck.
Underneath, we found a flat, marbled humanity, squashed to the second dimension.
The third dimension of life, disparity, corrected.
Social Engineers We make haggard graves from uprooted flowers, and call a spade a future rose, while the roses that live and grow from earth to sky transgressing no blood in the fullest blush of virtue Become mutants in a world where crows,
gaunt and hunched, erupt white while pecking for no transparent cause save the guilt of the angels flying pure and high.
saint satan the sliding scales of brotherly love squeeze virtue from the visible madman democracy what vote Robbed of control, we sought the imposition of compromise, and truth enforced.
We paved the way to Eden, enclosed it, made it open to all and worthy of none.
Opening our hands to each other, we closed our arms, hugging our weapons of need and humiliation.
Our laws are now defined in the broaching, and our hearts clogged with the cheap desire to move around what we did not make.
The Lament of Earth.
This is about the seasons.
She came, summer I suppose, sky tumbling to far fields of new wheat.
Her hair a whore's nest of pollen and warm breeze, her dress a sway of bumblebees.
Bitch lover of hope, she wooed.
Long vines and all coo and come hither.
She stirred my cellar with hot scent.
Thick-footed with peaches, she sighed, blowing my snow into flurries of butterflies.
Vapid, she strode, a draping Jezebel.
Stupid, happy, and no smarter suitor of a vacant woman.
Dressed in bouquets, foiled, and petal-bellied, I wallowed in the folds of her gown, stalked her with lilies and daisy-chains, and played to her my begging-birds.
Did she promise to stay this year, this time?
Pleading, I rose from my quiet white tomb, grasped at her green armor, flung desperate orchids at her fading train, and when autumn displaced her wintry heart, wept lonely leaves at the altar of fire and died.
Afterlife Afterlife, the counsellor of, no, not now, for this is passing, speaking softly here, is silent in hindsight.
Arch Under the shade of the spreading tree, where, fruit unseen, starved youth unborn, a church was built by hunchbacks, who lay sad stone on jagged rock, mounting their steps with twisted feet.
Seeing no sun but their shadows, Unable to turn to the sky, they scolded the night born from their bodies, enclosed their worship in skies of stone, and jabbered inside, as the rain fell in tears, soft erosion on their dreams of rock.
When the mists came, they gesticulated their cloaks like the webbed wings of crows.
On their graveyard, a mirrored floor, they spun and grunted on footprints of fog below the reflected perfection of heaven.
When women came, they scattered like pebbles, weighed her with paintings and pages of books.
When tall men came, they were taught to bear fruit, their backs bent with armfuls of apples, their faces gray from the green and the red.
Outside, the crows flapped quiet in the wind, trees bent and dyed, unwatered by droning.
Inside they pinned each other to windows, stained tapestries lit with traces of crimes, and jabbered and wept as the rain fell in tears, soft erosion on their dreams of rock.
A Tourist in the Eye of God What a propulsion!
I gripped the stars, flung them behind, and rising faster than thought could find or momentum follow, flew headlong into the eye of God, grasped the infinite iris, and turned it on the rise of man.
Like guilty squatters the angels fell.
Bearing their robes and scattering feathers, they hauled on the ropes of mankind's well, jerking us up from our beds of heather.
Scratching our hides, we barked with surprise as we lifted our heads to scan the skies, the first mute beasts to lift up our eyes and damned among those who never ask why.
Scalded by thunder and lit by rain, stirred by the echoes of countless years, we clasped our heads in helpless pain, for the source of the sound was no longer our ears.
We fled to our caves, but it wasn't enough.
The burning skies cried out for a name, for the angels had pulled us up from our trough, and we screamed in fear as the skies came again.
When one of us cried a singular sound, the thunder softened and blew away.
We lowered our heads and gathered around, in thanks that he'd found the right word to say.
We built a high hut and kneeled on the straw, and, praising the word, the man had said, heard a woman who'd eaten the heart of a boar had birthed a child and hadn't even bled.
Now this was a deed we all admired, so we left our praise and went hunting for boar.
A healthy child was all we desired.
We seemed to have found the power of law.
Soon our lives were ordered secure, until the day, though sated with blood, a woman had a child most impure, which she buried alone in the streaming mud.
Something was wrong.
There'd been a disruption. We took great pains to understand.
At last we'd found there'd been a corruption.
The right hadn't gone as planned.
The boar she had eaten was pregnant, in fact.
The word disliked such a vice.
So we thought it a useful point of tact to have ourselves a little sacrifice.
Soon it got too complex for words.
This, that, it got hard to tell.
He ate a boar while looking at birds.
She sang a song while ringing a bell.
Our only question was, who was to blame for failing to cause the required effect?
Fights and visions, soon the time came when ordering it all required an elect.
We surrendered the right to set our own laws to the group who had come up with the most.
We little knew they would soon be the cause of turning our best and our brightest to toast.
As soon as we gave them the power, they said,"'There is no more wisdom for you to acquire!' We were silent and shocked, being born and bred to question the world and knowledge admire.
But soon it became abundantly clear the price we had paid for certainty.
Those who obeyed became very dear, and the rest all became inflammatory.
For us who obey, the living is cheap, though we scowl at the depths of the angel's treason.
Our children grow up unable to weep, and the rest of us scrabble in search of reason.
Sometimes I sit and think of the woods where the angels freed us from ignorant cages, and shewed our desires with mustn'ts and shoulds, surely one of our sorriest stages.
For now I know the sky is only the sky.
The clouds care nothing for our incantation, and by praying for power to pour from on high, we surrendered our reason to imagination.
Gift of the Given Beasts may pray for food, sex, and shelter, but if God should say, These I grant you, if you burn your legs, teeth, and heart, They would snarl at the sky and lick the earth their life.
all our prayers inflame our minds to cinders and we lick alone the flames we emblazon syllable the word is god The world is the Word made flesh.
The word, the howling of the phrase, the word of centered eyes in the dark storms of thought.
The word made flesh, webbing the skeleton of impossibility.
The word, a screech of scarecrows, crying for indigestible food from want to is in decibels.
Infinite is the antonym of absolute eternity the antithesis of life for man infinite ethics make good impossible and evil irresistible silence this word all rise let us assume that it is not even a convulsion of sound but of essence A ripple over all that is,
the final exhalation of unseen breath, through starlight, the heart of dark moons, through the pulsing flesh of animation, through all the fissures of mind, twisting, spilling from secret gaps, gone. No dust stirs, no cape sweeps this stage on leaving.
Staring at the silent stage, actor, gone, sets, director, gone, and without even a final bow, theater itself, gone.
All spotlights, now only the glimmer of stars.
Stars themselves no longer spotlights, all metaphors, gone.
Under the battlements of livid imaginings, besieged, All heretics freeze at the sudden convulsion.
Soldiers. Stand, all, stand, all actors rise, all stages rise, all gaze over the dark distance of space, feeling the sudden silence, the faint hissing of reacting matter content with itself.
No longer content, no longer a self, but eyeless, causeless, eternal.
Life its own cup, no longer a cup.
For beyond no hand reaches, no tongue twists to taste, no gaze reflects eyes raised to heaven, not even a mirror.
No eyes raise but remain encased.
On these former battlements, no word for them now, All rise at this sudden convulsion, the universe no longer alive, not dead, not born, but seen, and all choices finally rest in the feathered nest of each heart.
Life, no longer a womb or a passage, but itself entire, stands open for the taking.
All rise!
God of this world? No, sighed the swarthy devil before the silent congregation.
An injustice has been done.
Virulence is the reflection of virtue in an unjust state.
And this shallow God, in fear of suburbs and sunsets and air-conditioned temples, cast me as a shadow of disapproval, to brighten your eyes with blindness.
Your blindness, he said to the staring crowd, prefers geometry to mountains, and flying fast from the caves of your birth, you spread harsh on the dark sky.
Unable to perceive the infinite clouds, you shiver at the songs of earth, the hymns of visible thought." No, said the devil.
You live to see beyond sight, but the walls of death have no purchase, and when life's infinite direction meets death's infinite mass, nature replaces movement with momentum, smashing the eyes of matter, and the blinded atoms shuffle back to her empty workshop to lie once more among her dusty tools.
"'But I,' said the devil, spreading his dark wings,"'I am the love of unwashed footprints,"'of life stampeding towards the light,"'lottery freed, reality bound,"'man's mind the brief flashing purpose of the universe, "'freed to crawl, to walk, to think.
"'This is my domain.' God, you greedy souls!
cried the devil. Your choice is the envy of nature's playthings.
Afraid of power, drunk with hoping, you cry for the gravity of God, and you twitch like grinning puppets, knees down, mind up, statues before the mirror of beauty, Architects of mental physics.
You pray for rain from invisible skies and make the world a desert of faith.
No. Said the devil, his wings falling, his red skin parting to reveal the flesh, his horns toppling, arches without a keystone.
Your knees are to be the corners of climbing up, up, and off them, and let us mount the marble stairs towards the infinite statue of tangible man.
When Elves Rule This is during my religious poetry phase, I guess.
Behold man, born good with a small fatal flaw, a strange corner where dwelleth poppies and ogres and uniformed elves, fairies who dance from leaf to enormous leaf, never eating or falling or aging.
Young in the glass of injustice magnified, deep within us they dance and sparkle like spinning coins over sightless eyes.
No lawyers in their world.
How could there be? Their freedom is not freedom to, but freedom from.
Theirs is the world beyond never.
Where complexity demands legality, their courts are always feasting.
Left alone, their eternal pool lies undisturbed, save an occasional Tolkien jaunt, an Eden retreat, a gap in the spokes of wheels in motion.
Why should we hunt them?
Surely life is hard enough that sometimes a flight to their distant songs to dream in midsummer—it is always midsummer—is allowable.
Yes, when the exception proves the rule, and rest is a cure for eventful labor.
But for some, the elves beckon from cliffs.
Their tinny voices sing from sunlight to broken lives in broken rooms, and the cracks of men widen, eating their senses.
And freedom, poor, sad, and earth-bound freedom, in the face of the freedom to lie, it dies.
And dreamers wake from feasts only to despise their unsown fields under earth-changing skies.
Hunt. Hunt, these fairies, I say.
Pin their hearts to museum tables.
For these dreams strip our bonded flesh, saying those with wings are more family than blood.
And the fairies of duty, honor, country, race, and religion stream forth.
When fairies swarm, crowds roar in joy.
Free from the rods of absolutes, they race around with butterfly nets, laughing, crashing, falling, new gods sprouting from their eager eyes.
They ignore the closing shutters of greatness, and never hear the earth begin to groan under the fear-laden steps of the heaviest elves.
Whose courts always feast on blood.
Obligation To what do I owe my parents?
This sort of poem can be very short or very long.
In short, construct is not contract.
In long, We have seen shelter, food and water, rules, punishment, confinement and reward among arctic snows and barbed wire.
Yet we ask no gratitude from the victims of obligation, no more than we ask that they honour their enforcers or return to what they must escape.
All patriots marry to whom it may concern, and divorce the flesh beyond the image.
Convicts who respect their judges will replace them.
Thus the obligation lies upon the defense.
Face the Curse Her face, a treasure of boating, hoves into view, beeching on powder from a sea of scent.
Her gown, the ark of a waterfall, rises to her neck.
Hung with pearls, the divers bought.
Her liquid lips mask the golden teeth of swimmers, drowned in adulation.
Sea Queen, she walks on foaming praise.
Barefoot and daring, and tickled by noses, she laughs at the breath of kisses on toes.
No, children. Eternal life assured by the blood of the painters below her windows.
Her youth is forever for those who daub.
Unique till the moon rises, she walks in wide twilight alone, armed with the ghosts of passion and space, while on the canvases of the thinning crowd hang the watercolours of impending rain.
morning in jerusalem morning in jerusalem scales the light up the rugged wall in her room past frayed muslin cloth she rises smooth as the sun and heats without humming the water the men stir in the next room patriarchs where the night scratches they heave and groan she brings coffee to their room without windows Reminded of morning,
they scowl and spit.
As busy men, she dresses them.
They talk in code of the world and importance.
She watches them eating, their beards and smell linger as they trudge downstairs.
She shirks and watches from windows.
Down in the market they talk of ships, their colored robes turning like lizards.
In the sun they jabber of distant storms.
Their women watch from under the shutters, then turn to their spices and start to grind.
Well, I think that will do for now.
Thank you so much for listening.
I hope that you've enjoyed these poems.
Do let me know on the board or through email, freedommanradio.com.
If you'd like me to read some more, I would be more than happy to.
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