You can't multi-task when you're a Buddhist monk

All the acid trips in the world
couldn't compare to the monkish throat music
rising from his diaphragm like
vibrations dancing high wire Charlestons
between tin can phones.

He said, “I can take all the sorrow in the world
and make a snowball out of it with
grade A, one hundred per-cent cognition;
something all your multiprocessors
and your supercomputer mother tongue can't compete with.”

And people congregated around him
like black-smudge sparrows huddled on telephone wires
and knelt at his feet as if he was some
neo-Jesus,
some latter day Messiah.

But pretzeling yourself into lotus positions
like titans doing calisthenics
is easier said then done. He preached that the secret
was knowing when to listen.
The ambiguity of this wisdom bled from the ears of the people

and coagulated in the form of
iPod earbuds and they reverted to vaguely contemplating
the Berlin walls running through their
cerebral hemispheres;
mortar bricks constructed of a trillion

lols and rotfls and lmaos.

Comments & reviews · 6
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User avatar
nixonblitzen
Comment

bravo, my friend. you create the most interesting images without confusing me. you make me use my brain in a way that i like. i think your stuff is genius.

I loved this poem, really gorgous images. I got the impression of the confusion between the spiritual world against the modern world, how people just can't comprehend spirituality any more because it clashes so much with their lives - shown by him preaching to them and it just turns to ipod earbuds and internet talk. I especially like the second stanza.

Very nice. The language of the poem was amazing. It just worked.

I will say, the title of the poem was what caught my attention. I looked at that and just had to read it.

I don't have much by way of critique (not so much the poetry writer myself) but I couldn't let it pass by without saying a few words of praise.

Great stuff! <- the few words of praise

*thumbs up*

~GryphonFledgling

That was really clever. You may have a star sir.

User avatar
Eimear
Review
Eimear wrote a review · Mon Jun 09, 2008 12:49 pm

Bravo my good friend. Excellent, you seemed to hit nearly all of my boxes with this piece. There were some fabulous concepts raised that made me sit back and go, 'that's good!' I loved this:

All the acid trips in the world

couldn't compare to the monkish throat music

rising from his diaphragm like

vibrations dancing high wire Charlestons

between tin can phones.


'Monkish' is great, good showing style to reel the reader right in. 'Between tin can phones' is also very intelligent indeed, whether I've interpreted it right or not is another question, but then again everyone receives poetry differently. This is definitely a deep, often glossed over theme you've picked, so well done you for pinpointing a gap and going for it. Poetry is all about taking risks, and it's the ones that pay off which make us successful.

A word of caution though. In some places your language is overly- complicated which deviates from the norm of your seemingly effortless narrative of the situation. I understand of course, in the poem's entirety that you need to maintain philosophical ideas through certain words but some stick out like sore thumbs. I've said it once, and I'll say it again. The beauty of poetry is constructing something that people will receive on different levels, that is, it is the art of balancing simple and complication. Just bear that in mind when editing. I loved this bit at the end especially:

The ambiguity of this wisdom bled from the ears of the people

and coagulated in the form of

iPod earbuds and they reverted to vaguely contemplating

the Berlin walls running through their

cerebral hemispheres;

mortar bricks contructed of a trillio


However there are, obvious spelling mistakes above. I'll let you look over it again and recognise them for yourself as I think it would be disrespectful to point them out.

Anyway, I hope my insights have helped. Great title, great work- this earns a gold star.

Eimear xx

Hahaha! Very original. Loved the ending especially, but you mistyped "constructed".

I'm not quite sure what some of it means...the second stanza's meaning was completely lost on me, for example.

But besides not understanding half of what you wrote, the way you wrote it was good. There wasn't much order or pattern to it at all, but things like this have a tendency to just flow.

Overall, I think I need to have a second look at it some other time, but it was good.



In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.
— Robert Frost