Ghetto Questionnaire

Notes from Underground

What can a decent man speak about with the most pleasure?

About himself

So then I too will speak about myself.

Who can take pride in his sicknesses, and swagger about them besides?

Some fatal slops have accumulated around the wretched mouse, some stinking filth consisting of its dubieties, anxieties, and, finally, of the spit raining down on it from the ingenuous figures who stand solemnly around it like judges and dictators, guffawing at it from all their healthy gullets. Of course, nothing remains for it but to wave the whole thing aside with its little paw and, with a smile of feigned contempt, in which it does not believe itself, slip back shamefacedly into its crack.

Nobody knows what and nobody knows who, but in spite of all the uncertainties and stacked decks, it still hurts, and the more uncertain you are, the more it hurts!

You're laughing? I'm very glad. To be sure, gentlemen, my jokes are in bad tone-uneven, confused, self-mistrustful. But that is simply because I don't respect myself. How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself?

No, how is it possible, how is it at all possible for a man to have the slightest respect for himself, if he has presumed to find pleasure even in the very sense of his own humiliation?

Oh, gentlemen, perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I've never been able to start or finish anything. Granted I'm a babbler, a harmless irksome babbler, as we all are. But whats to be done if the sole and express purpose of every intelligent man is babble-that is, a deliberate pouring from empty into void. 

Fyodor Dostoevsky- Notes from Underground (Pevear and Volokhonsky translation)

Musical Trilogy

WHO OWNS MY HEART?

Who owns my heart

Is it love or is it art?

Or is it a shy sad distancing

A forever standing apart?

To seek is to leave behind

To question is to be marked

knowledge won through contrast

shadings of light and dark

slanting sideways, separated

is our only hope to see

beyond clear eyed simplicity

to the hidden catastrophe

We have mastered making pretty

Dressing up, studied satisfaction

We can create the urge and sate it

We can forget through ceaseless action

We have lost the art of dying

And the science of memory

We have forgotten the work of generations

And cruise adrift upon the sea.

OTIS

It feels so mournful,

don't you agree?

When you fail to meet

demands of reality.

When your fears are confirmed

When your nightmares come true

less painful than you thought

it would be.

Don't you see

the part you act

to partially please

will always be

an empty gesture?

Insincere artistry

a snickering smile

wasted words

already burned in your heart

easy to forget

what once you believed holy and highest

the search for hidden secrets

undeniable truth

that remains true

that does not have to be lived

If only it did not have to be lived.

I might know exactly where I erred

Instead of knowing only

that the farce I watch unfold

Is sad.

Funny and sad.

Enough to fill a spirit

give it depth, dimension

Something to think about

until the next upheaval

until wise silence

goes wrong no more.

QUIET STORM

I put my life-time

in-between the paper's lines.

I am the quiet storm.

He who fights with rhyme.

Writing prescriptions

For my own strange disease.

Why do I place my life here

In this paper prison

peering out through the bars?

To what end is each line sentenced

to life, brought to life to wonder

why, do they suffer the same doubts

and pangs of guilt that plague me?

A criminal who wont take responsibility,

blaming the whispering demon

that animates the hand.

These words and I, both trapped

tangled in each others non-sense

crumpled tight in your fist

as power squeezes sense

out of the screaming soft shadows