and you and you and you Options

[Guest_circumsolar_*]

and you and you and you


too soon, too soon, the eagle flew
while you were busy drawing down
the moon into your icy hands,
purchasing one-eyed wisdom
to crowd your poppied mind,
until you could no longer stand
but gently tumbled tousled thoughts
to fall asleep in twilight lands
- asleep in the laps of legends.

and as you dreamt, a river of woe
washed over you and carried you down
to those blasted banks, where the rocking stone
could be toppled by the gentlest touch:
you stroked the smooth-skinned serpent's egg
and, though asleep, you cried real tears
for emotions that somehow eluded you
and for the names of the faces you seemed to remember
with a distant and palsied anxiety.

and you dreamt you wrote a mystic piece
where vague and shuffling demons danced;
where Odin cast aside his mask
and settled on your shoulders round
a mammoth task...
a burden irredeemable -- a lance:
a lance to bear in diamond jousts,
advancing through the teeth of fear
to seize that chance to win the soured prize.

Methusulah, with his long grey beard,
whispered in your sleeping ear of
fools and wise men, sons and daughters;
of the Devil's love for holy water;
of a single, human footprint in the sand;
of the perils of duplicity,
the rigours of respectibility,
of such passions as can tear apart a man.

and on the sharp infliction of
such sorrows' textured wounds, you woke
with knotted hair and eyes still chasing phantoms...
and even though the darkstream coursed
still dully in your veins, you spoke
of fields of blood and lonely death's cold tantrums;
and lifelong cravings threatening to choke --
to strain and break the slenderest of throats:
with that distempered mind you reached
for lightless needles littering the floor;
and as a stray dog to its vomit, warm,
to poisoned dreams did you return, once more.


{published in Epiphanies and Other Absurdities 2005
 and also in Cold Eels 2005}

[Guest_Nina_*]

Hi Jan

Firstly, many congratulations on your success with this poem.  Having a work published is quite an achievement, well done.

I like the perspective taken with this drug addict, looking at the affect of the opiate on the MC's mind as he/she sleeps, the vivid nightmare which doesn't stop the craving  You have used some wonderful imagery, I especially like:

while you were busy drawing down
the moon into your icy hands,
purchasing one-eyed wisdom
to crowd your poppied mind

a very clever way of describing her satiating her craving temporarily.

and as you dreamt, a river of woe
washed over you and carried you down
to those blasted banks, where the rocking stone
could be toppled by the gentlest touch:

the fragilty of the MC's life or his/her hold on sanity.

you cried real tears
for emotions that somehow eluded you
and for the names of the faces you seemed to remember
with a distant and palsied anxiety.

drugs block the issues that are too painful to deal with but only add to the problem.

and as a stray dog to its vomit, warm,
to poisoned dreams did you return, once more.

a disturbing but powerful image to end on, that stays in the mind.

Thanks for sharing this

Nina

[Guest_Jox_*]

Hi Jan,

Well done for this fascinating take on a trip. I know I have not understood it all but what I have grasped has been most interesting.

Congrats from me, too, for being published.

One of the main things I failed to understand was "One eyed wisdom" - would you mind explaining please?

At first I thought of Cyclops - but I'm not sure he had much wisdom! (Then, again, maybe that is precisely what you mean). Next I thought of someone who cannot see / think stereoscopically. Then there is the hole in the syringe / eye of the needle? and so on.

Thank you for the read.

PS Do you mind also explaining the smooth serpent's egg? Why smooth especially?

J.

[Guest_circumsolar_*]

and thanks for reading and commenting, Nina, much appreciated  :grinning:  Although this sprang from 'drawing down the moon', a pagan theme where the goddess is called to the people in a ritual, I took that and made it into this piece about drug abuse. I wanted to avoid the run-of-the-mill visuals/phrases, so it just went this direction. It was also the first time that I really tried hard with rhythm and rhyme as opposed to free verse. I think too that I wanted to show that intelligent, educated people can just as easily succumb to the power of heroin and how it ruins lives. Mind you, these are all the things I think about after the fact of writing it.

Hi Jox,

cheers man for your congrats on this, and I hope to help you out here with a couple of explanations. One-eyed wisdom is a reference to Odin, the Scandinavian name for Woden (Anglo-Saxon). He was a god of wisdom, poetry, war and agriculture. As a god of the dead, he presided over banquets of those slain in battle. He became the all-wise by receiving Mimir's severed head or by drinking from Mimir's fountain, but had to purchase the distinction with the pledge of one eye, and is often seen represented as a one-eyed man wearing a hat and carrying a staff. His remaining eye is the sun.

The smooth-skinned serpent's egg refers to something magical, something dangerous, full of knowledge... in other words, the serpent represents (in mythology) deity, eternity, renovation, a guardian spirit, wisdom, subtlety and the devil. So the egg kind of embodies all these possibilities. There's another (linked) explanation and that's the Druid's egg, which (according to Pliny) was hatched by the joint labours of a number of serpents and was buoyed in the air by their hissing. The person who caught it had to escape at full speed to avoid being stung to death,but if they did they were assured of prowess and popularity with the leaders of thier times. So I put both ideas together. Smooth-skinned? that was just as I wrote it, being a fan of alliteration and imagining the egg would be smooth and almost impenetrable, yet so highly desirable as to feel almost erotic being stroked. Kind of like skin. It's all to do with the main character being highly educated yet still overcome by the drugs, and so these are the sort of visions she might be having.

[Guest_Jox_*]

Hi Jan,

Thank you very much for your most interesting explanations. I have never studied mythology and, apart from oddments which I have picked-up (many on MM) and I totally ignorant about all mythologies - so your new notes are most helpful. Appreciated.

You are, of course, right, addiction is unrelated to intelligence per se. Many medical doctors are addicted to drink and other drugs, whereas many less intelligent people may not use drugs or may just use them recreationally.

Education does help greatly but - in the end - it comes down to psychology and then, when hooked, to physiological dependency, too.

Thanks for the read and the interesting ideas.

J.

[Guest_poeticpiers_*]

I totally enjoyed your work with its plenitude of legendary references You captured the altered mind states achievable by use of drugs and ot other methods so well. Ivor