Poetry

Epic and Autobiographical (A Versified Finale) An Autobiographical Narrative: 1980s 6

by Carl Halling
08/27/14
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A Perfectly Foolish Young Man I Wanted Part Two Book Five Epic and Autobiographical (A Versified Finale) An Autobiographical Narrative: 1980s 6

An Autobiographical Narrative: 1980s

Both The Destructive Disease of the Soul

And The Compensatory Man Par Excellence

Possess as their starting points

A novel written at an estimate around 1987,

With one Francis Phoenix as chief protagonist.

Its fate remains a mystery,

But it may well be it was completed,

Only to be purged soon after

I became a born again Christian in 1993,

With only a handful of scraps remaining.

The versified pieces below

Were forged out of these scraps

In September 2011, although initially,

They'd taken shape as prose pieces,

Only to be edited and versified at a later date.

The Destructive Disease of the Soul

No amount of thought

Could negate

Suffering in the mind

Of Francis Phoenix.

That much he had always believed,

That humanity is a sad, lost

And suffering race.

Sometimes he felt it so strongly

That the worship of a Saviour seemed

To be the only sane act on earth,

And then it passed.

It was not increasing callousness,

But an increase in the number of moments

He felt quite intoxicated with compassion

That had soured Frank's outlook.

During those moments, he wept

For all those he'd ever been cruel to.

He could be so hard on people,

So terribly hard.

To whom could he ask forgiveness?

It was his sensitivity

That bred those moments of Christlike love,

When he cared so little for himself,

For his body, even for his soul

When it was the soul of his father,

The soul of his mother,

The souls of his friends and relatives

And everyone he'd ever known

That he cared about.

That was truth, that was reality,

That was the purpose of all human life,

That love, that benevolence,

That absolute forgiveness.

Otherworldly love is painful,

But it is the only true freedom known to Man.

Too much thought eventually produces the conviction

That nothing is worth doing.

Thought is a destructive disease of the soul.

The Compensatory Man Par Excellence

I seldom indulge in letter writing

Because I consider it

To be a cold and illusory

Means of communication.

I will only send someone a letter

If I'm certain it's going to serve

A definite functional purpose,

Such as that which I'm

Scrupulously concocting at present

Indisputably does.

It's not that I incline

Towards excessive premeditation;

Its rather that I have to subject

My thoughts and emotions

To quasi-military discipline,

As pandemonium is the sole alternative.

I'm the compensatory man par excellence.

Deliberation, in my case,

Is a means to an end,

But scarcely by any means,

An end in itself.

This letter possesses not one,

But two, designs.

On one hand, its aim is edification.

Besides that, I plan to include it

In the literary project upon which

I'm presently engaged,

With your permission of course.

Contrary to what you have suspected

In the past,

I never intend to trivialise intimacy

By distilling it into art.

On the contrary, I seek

To apotheosise the same.

You see...I lack the necessary

Emotional vitality to do justice

To people and events

That are precious to me;

I am forced, therefore,

To at a later date call

On emotive reserves

Contained within my unconscious

In order to transform

The aforesaid into literary monuments.

You once said that my feelings

Had been interred under six feet

Of lifeless abstractions;

As true as this might be,

The abstractions in question

Come from without

Rather than within me:

My youthful spontaneity

Many mistrustfully identified

With self-satisfied inconsiderateness

(A standard case of fallacious reasoning),

And I was consequently

The frequent victim

Of somewhat draconic cerebrations.

I tremble now

In the face of hyperconsciousness.

I've manufactured a mentality,

Riddled with deliberation,

Cankerous with irony;

Still, in its fragility,

Not to say, artificiality,

It can, with supreme facility,

Be wrenched aside to expose

The touch-paper tenderness within.

With characteristic extremism,

I've taken ratiocination

To its very limits,

But I've acquainted myself with,

Nay, embraced my antagonist

Only in order to more effectively throttle him.

Being a survivor of the protracted passage

Through the morass of nihilism,

Found deep within

"the hell of my inner being,"

I am more than qualified to say this:

There is no way out

Of the prison of ceaseless sophistry.

There are many things I have left to say,

But I shall only have begun to exist in earnest

When these are far behind me,

In fact, so far as to be all but imperceptible.

I long for the time

When I shall have compensated to my satisfaction.

I never desired intellectuality; it was thrust upon me.

Everything I ever dreaded being, I've become

Everything I ever desired to be, I've become.

I'm the sum total of a lifetime's

Fears and fantasies,

Both wish-fulfillment

And dread-consummation incarnate.

I long for the time

When I shall have compensated to my satisfaction.

I never desired intellectuality; it was thrust upon me.

I'm the sum total of a lifetime's

Fears and fantasies,

Both wish-fulfillment

And dread-consummation incarnate.

I'm the compensatory man par excellence.

An Autobiographical Narrative: 1980s

An Aphoristic Self-Portrait

Was expeditiously versified

In September 2011,

Using a series of teeming

Informal diary entries

Made in various

Receptacles in the late 1980s.

And as such may provide

Some kind of indication

As to my psychological

And spiritual condition

Some half a dozen

Or so years prior to my

Damascene conversion.

An Aphoristic Self-Portrait

As a writer, people are my vocation.

As for humanity, men, women

And other abstractions,

Their interests constitute little more

Than my hobby; I can only deal in people.

As soon as I start dealing in sects

And sections, I am either an insider

Or an outsider, and I feel lost as either

And as soon as I feel lost,

I make no attempt to find myself,

But simply retrace my steps

And return to the people.

You can call me detached if you like,

But you see, the only way

I can remain sane as a person

With such an all-consuming instinct

For attachment, is to be detached.

The world of subjectivity

Holds no sway over me,

Because it is paradoxically impersonal,

Being affiliated to partisanship,

Sentimental causes and other such abstractions.

I couldn't possibly belong

To a school of orthodox thought

That accepted me as a member.

I don't believe in myself

Other than as a crystal clear container

For the freshest cream of human individualism.

When I was younger,

I ached to be famous for the sake of it,

But now it occurs to me

That anyone can be famous

Provided they are sufficiently audacious

And thick-skinned, and I desire fame

Not so much for the vain satisfaction

Of being seen and known and heard,

But in order to guide others

Towards a happier way of being,

The only precept for celebrity,

Indeed for being in general, as far as I can see.

Adversity seems to be my fate,

As well as fortune.

The meek ones gravitate to me.

I'm the prince of the hurt ones,

The damaged ones.

I resent all success and authority.

I'm so affectionate one moment,

So icy and evasive the next.

I'm in love with many people at present.

I over-accentuate my individuality,

Because sometimes I look at myself

In the mirror and I say:

"Who's that pathetic wreck?"

The more complex you are,

The less you like yourself,

Because you frighten yourself.

The more I find myself liking someone,

The more I doubt us both.

Liking someone negates them for me.