verily_poetic

words: where i am

2008-12-14T05:49:10Z

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Writing again

2008-12-05T04:12:58Z

and I will use this live journal as a place to jot down thoughts that drip down the window pane.

bad night

2008-12-04T12:08:06Z

Coming back in here like this. Dragging in mud and dog shit. Terrible. No I don't rhyme words anymore just to string sayings together I believe I've graduated to painting pictures of scenery and hopefully soon something with more meaning. I could've come here tonight with all of the none of you and written at least a rant about the human condition but I did not. I'm ill here. I don't write anymore. I come here to make pathetic confessions. I have sinned. I lost a little of that purity that we all start with and which is so difficult to retain. A man could get weak in this world and not know it.

What Do You Have To Say? - Writing: Makes Me A Better Writer

2007-09-08T00:28:32Z

What's been your biggest influence in making you a better writer?

Brought to you by HP | Answer to Win! > Contest

View 167 Answers

Reading. Experiencing. Practicing. There is no other science behind good writing, and there never was.

verily_poetic @ 2007-07-20T00:22:00

2007-07-20T05:37:06Z

I read a poem telling me how to reconsider the human condition,
doubt but dont doubt
reconciliation
face value
talk about it
talk about you

vivid mystics switch your system

what you think "is"
isnt

forget self politics inter regional scholarships given weekly
send your self addressed envelope quickly

forget self

dont get picky, you dont have the options, cant grab the knowledge, life is the real career you cant study in college, and to what degree do you make your passions public?

we have: laughter, love, hate, and violence
See also--existential nihilism, crimes of passion, vows of silence
and if you're into pretense
we can also
throw an artist in the line-up

See also: Cliches--silver linings, till the end of timings, nickel/diming and suffix rhyming

turn off the
fucking
radio

turn off the
fucking
cable

turn off the
fucking
apathy the apathy the apathy

you are going to be
turned off
by
this.

Today

2007-07-01T06:47:23Z

Too many crews envy
dudes ask

"who sent me"

their emotions run
luke warm
file their questions
under

"too many"

Drama fit for the news

spittin in ridiculous
hues
few know the words sewn
in-credible blues

experience
the natural talent
tethered to the third world
peasent in you

what kind of present are you?
impeccable decadence

or

discover

the definite meaning
in truth.

verily_poetic @ 2007-06-17T14:55:00

2007-06-17T22:04:57Z

There is a cup
of precious
water

filling the dying
house plants
with exhausting
cold life

drowning
the sweet soil-
each black grain

you will see.

And it isn't
the way we tickle
these rolling grey
bellies

on black nights
like red wasps
and crawl into bed
like fat, sick
larvae
gelatinous

and deaf until a
hot yellow morning.

A Playground

2007-03-10T21:29:51Z

It was in the studio apartment on Bellows Street that my bookcase filled with literature. On early mornings I walked into the kitchen and saw it blue eyed from the sun light passing through the painters tape around the rim of the back door window they hadn't painted and I'd see it tinted like this every morning I walked into the kitchen before work. I would soak in hot water after that. I would sit there soaking for two and three hours the water as hot as anyone could stand until the apartment walls sick from half a century of cigarette smoke would well steamed tobacco and then cry brown soot down the cracked paint of the yellow tooth walls around the rim of the tiny ceiling. I used to watch myself growing a beard in the mirror.
I would think back to the house I grew up in and how I watched myself in the mirror there while the bath tub filled before school. My face was young and round and pale and indifferent. A beard and dirty walls now. Just outside the back door was the parking lot and then the alley and across the way a playground for the catholic school children to play during recess from which I heard them scream fanatically as if they knew what they were quickly giving up.
I liked the blue kitchen and the children.
Though, the neighbors in the next apartment argued. They moved out and new neighbors arrived different then the others: a couple, young, the girl deaf, the man very large shaved bald tiny blue eyes and much teeth. They argued too and I could hear them every morning I bathed. The man however I didn't hear much. Just the inaudible grunts of a tiny deaf woman in the late morning and it peaked off until after work and even later into two and three AM but it was nothing I hadn't slept through. Though at one time it did finally happen and I woke up to the noise of a bitch being kicked in the street or some thing on fire. It was the deaf woman I realized and now I heard the man clearly. He was beating her joyfully it seemed. I layed in bed and thought about my beard, calling the police, a white fungus growing out of a mirror, killing my neighbor, the bookcase, and dead birds in the street.
I desperately wanted to go back to sleep and I was sweating.
The next night I came home late from work and he was there waiting for me standing with a lit ciggarette and his shirt off with a baseball cap on backwards seeing through me and the parking lot to the empty playground.
"Didya hear us bitchin at each other last night?"
He smiled.
I told him yes some time around 3.
"She doesn't know how loud she is man sorry."
He heard me say some thing about her being a strong woman as I walked past him into my apartment through the back door.
I didn't hear them argue that night and the next morning before work I opened the bath room window while the tub filled and listened to the children play.

Discourse

2006-12-25T20:47:47Z

Life is one long conversation; one very long string of conversations and token agreements writhing from the dull thud of clunky words exchanged seemingly, agreeably, meaninglessly. Many picture themselves atop current tribulations: victorious, shining, at peace. And thus many do little to change their life and express mostly through task and toil and account for much less than they hope and account for being content rarely.

Its daunting and if you don't believe what I say ask someone

"How are you?"

for three days in a row and see if the answer changes
in pitch
or tone
or enthusiasm
or diction.

Even though, we are all fully in control of the answer.

Its time to turn the knob down to "reflect"

2006-12-16T09:57:54Z

I feel the stillness and quiet of the present. I have been awash in literature and spiritual deepthinking contextualized conceptualized gobbledygoop.

Life is the pursuit of pleasure. The past will hold a mirror up to your regret and the future is planting your seeds on the path before the clearing. Pleasure exists in the present. This is no secret and unfolds in many forms to many sects cultures and anyone. I'm not so anxious these days just contemplative. I've written a book. I want to put together a manuscript.

I want to travel.

Knowledge is a currency, something you pocket and save: it accumulates. Wisdom is learning as a direct result of experience. You can be knowledgeable and unwise. So I shed my knowledge and start down the path to wisdom. How little we know. This goes beyond words and I cannot say more about it.

When you open yourself up to what you can be, truly, you shed the unneccesary particles of social constriction. This means little to most but everyone will feel this tinge this craving to stop in the middle of one thought and remain there until the noise of a crowded room only amplifies your own concentration on nothing and nothing at all. Silence, in fact, is golden.

What else...

The law of magnetism. Think. Attract. Attain. What you dwell on, you recieve.

What is a poem? What makes a poem good? What the hell are these people talking about when they write? I feel very alone in the dark-room of my writing and I'm beginning to wonder if I write only to read it later and identify with what it means. I will write and write and commune with the experience of poetry until I die. My favorite poet is a persian tent-maker from the 1600's. who will I be to someone in 400 years? And as this consumes me I keep my focus on being the oasis among contemporary poets. I might die unknown and that has finally become a settlement no-less my goal.

"Here lies a man who's name was writ in water"

It might say. If you see me around these days I won't say much.

I try to keep contemplative.
I admire many of you for what you do.

The Itinerant Poet

2006-12-09T20:23:39Z

I want to travel. I want to write poems.

I want you to buy my poetry.

To fund a long and dramatic excursion to the east and beyond I have begun the slow process of finding avenues of revenues and revenues of avenues.

Two dollars a poem. They will come on a clean piece of paper as an original piece written specifically because you wanted it. You will be the only person who has it. I send via snail mail and if you would like to pay you can write a check or send money orders or give me dirty dollar bills on the street corner but you might just want to use Paypal and send two dollars to Matt_Merlino@hotmail.com.

You will like what I send you.

Humble beginnings turn into mediocre finales.

2006-11-16T07:50:45Z

Remind me

I could write
just to write
with or with
out

the tropes, the
veins in my forehead,
the throbbing, desperate
gulp of a young writer
with or with
out direction.

I want to write
a poem about a
tall man with gray
features, scruff, and
a short broad
nose.

He walks his tiny
irish setter at night
tapering
in and out
of street light

past clean patio
walkways and clean
well-lit houses behind
geometric lawns
well-cut and trimmed
at the edges.

Watching him turn
the corner away
from a street lamp

reminds me
of nothing
I can
remember.

Looking Forward

I discovered long,
long ago the passing
attraction of
women.

Their vibrance
so illusive
and decorative
the need

to pick apart
their thin blackened
eyelashes so to sport
them across
my open
chest
like medals
lingers with me.

And once watching
her work,
the light
bent her into wrinkles.

Watch and watch
and watch.

Its Simple

Working, paychecks,
lousy sleep,
and sex.

The poem I read
and re-read
for
its simplicity
hoping
to find a metaphor
to explain
the blinding
mediocrity.

It's tepid hell finds me when I don't write about it.

My Writing Career

You've seen it--
the last few twitches
of a tiny animal
bent
and matted-pink on
the highway. A few
electrical impulses usher
it to expire.

It didn't mean to
be hit, after-all, it
just wanted to
cross the road.

Creativity & Suicide

Many people confuse
their thoughts as
original
and by doing so
continue
to have them.

When they become
famous for articulating
them, the degrading
simplicity that no-matter
how-holy
the quest, this life
will never prove your
importance.

At its cusp only a teeming
formality.

Its all too much.

2006-10-22T08:26:21Z

whatever other questions I needed to ask faded into the back of a sun spot memory;
A temperature flare or otherwise strong devotion to romance.

I love you as I love me as I love only.

All else is vanity.
Shed it,
warm us.

I love you.

The Regiment

2006-10-21T06:09:02Z

A topical fluid applied to chaffed areas.
A train whistling through a small town.

What is a poem but an appartition of the senses?

what does that make a poet?

Yes I'm alive and using my brain

The end of the beginning

2006-10-21T06:02:15Z

Life is a stanza full of impenetrable metaphors of future experiences. What else could we be? The sum of experience culminates into the energy of our spirit. A soul. A stanza. What else? I have this theory or a feeling or a philosophy. Have you ever experienced death and felt growth throught pain?

When I release into the atmosphere I hope you see me and smile.

Is there something in this water?

2006-08-18T01:16:55Z

besides a brick pill to swallow?

why else does everyone mope and feel de-valued?

Just an update --

2006-08-17T10:55:17Z

You're killing and abusing this space.

Stop it right now.

Who's got it?

2006-07-25T10:51:20Z

ANXIETY: Eager, often agitated desire

As People Tend to Do

2006-07-24T03:36:43Z

I returned. I'm here to stay.

I'm here to work on myself.
I'm here to fall in love
again and again and again.

Most of all right now,
write now,

I want to organize a writing/poetry group.

@$#!

2006-07-08T02:32:21Z

If you motherfuckers wanna fall victim to reason be my guest.

Punk bitches.

Cloud Coverage

2006-06-13T05:18:06Z

Sitting on the porch--

Mahogany veined fingers shivered
tear ducts under the incense
of a pale sun.

Rain has come--
spreading across tenemants
soaking them fetal.

It dropped like windows
diving without a breath
into the granite below.

And when it stopped,
all was calm.

Left Ventricle

2006-06-10T07:12:21Z

Im at my parents house. With both of my sisters. My niece. I sleep on a blow up bed. I dont have a job.

My ego lays beside me as a pool of shredded sinewy viscera.

I need to get over this.

Back on the scene

2006-05-31T03:44:28Z

Back- at my parents house. To the drawing board. To here. My car has brakes now atleast. I have a couple hundred dollars, a camping trip ahead of me, and a job to find. All is well, and calm.

Back-words-assocation

2006-04-30T08:41:10Z

*EDIT* This is the jumbled talk that comes out when I drink too much

My soul rejoiced at once

knowing there was nothing new
under the sun.

Technology is humanitiy's attempt at replicating nature. Wireless communication to recreate ESP.
Rivers and creaks became concrete. Hard steel and glass buildings to oversee forests and trees.

We are animals of ego.

We love nature, and in our own psyche, creators of such environments.

We pluck amazon forests like dandelions and spread new seedlings like diseases.

Life is a grim fairy tale--the earth is a giant superconductor-and everything is within grasp.

I love you.

I love all of you

2006-04-21T13:44:27Z

I worked until 6 am and biked home 3 miles in the rain.

It made falling into the frontroom sopping pieces of the atmosphere all over the rug that much better.

plus, when else can you justify collapsing onto the floor and stripping out of your wet clothes?

went downstairs in my underwear and my favorite song was playin on itunes.

holla at it.