{"id":13959,"date":"2021-12-15T07:45:45","date_gmt":"2021-12-15T05:45:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/egophobia.ro\/?p=13959"},"modified":"2021-12-15T07:49:19","modified_gmt":"2021-12-15T05:49:19","slug":"poems-by-askold-skalsky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/?p=13959","title":{"rendered":"poems by Askold Skalsky"},"content":{"rendered":"

Already seeking a foundational bedrock in the golden age<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A gaspingly impatient hominid<\/p>\n

clinging to a sea-wave battered rock,<\/p>\n

just an isolated promontory jutting<\/p>\n

into the vast and wine-dark vacancy<\/p>\n

while the dense filaments of some<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

watery creature underneath lashes him<\/p>\n

with spray and brine and the un-fastening<\/p>\n

power of the depths. But you, Odysseus,<\/p>\n

flinging the ductile filament out into<\/p>\n

the void of your own making, as it were,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

trying to hook something or someone\u2014<\/p>\n

to catch a persona over which to hang<\/p>\n

your precious s\u00e9ance of a self, a dose<\/p>\n

of substantializing serum from the vats<\/p>\n

of space where no autobiographies arise,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

only a cinerarium of watchful spider-eyes<\/p>\n

turned on themselves and spinning an-<\/p>\n

other gossamer tale while reeling toward<\/p>\n

an elusive home with all its beckoning fires<\/p>\n

and buried axe heads in ancestral soil.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Reality check<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

After a brew of wild orchids<\/p>\n

everything was forgotten.<\/p>\n

We lived together for a year,<\/p>\n

copulating like hot kernels<\/p>\n

on a hearth. Afterwards the dense<\/p>\n

crystals of our habitual wants<\/p>\n

sorted themselves like skips<\/p>\n

and slides on playground sand,<\/p>\n

then disappeared in our door\u2019s<\/p>\n

shadow while we struggled to<\/p>\n

retain an optimism without<\/p>\n

illusion amid walls of shining<\/p>\n

marble and wide streets where<\/p>\n

people gathered for passionate<\/p>\n

debates about the meaning of life,<\/p>\n

like the surrealists at their urinal,<\/p>\n

flirting with oppressive creeds<\/p>\n

in the manifestoes of their dreams.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

The Ploie\u0219ti raids <\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Why believe in old and semi-beautied Bucharest?<\/p>\n

Or the Ploesti fields in their drear-drilling labor,<\/p>\n

sucking up the oil under planes, subject to obliteration,<\/p>\n

the erasure from materiality, so many years ago?<\/p>\n

The booming phosphorescence irradiating the night<\/p>\n

skies conferred a flaring confidence that something<\/p>\n

would still remain on the generally unturbulent<\/p>\n

and semi-solid dirt that turned within its globe.<\/p>\n

What need was there for god to save us from the shaking<\/p>\n

shards, the intolerable bursts resounding on the ground,<\/p>\n

so long as there was firmity, its usual semblance<\/p>\n

underneath our feet. We ran among the screaming<\/p>\n

and irrefutable certainty of other bodies moving<\/p>\n

in the din, as real as the already dead behind us.<\/p>\n

We had no doubts in matter and what it could do<\/p>\n

for us\u2014or to. The seven days with their grand finger\u2019s<\/p>\n

touch were pulverized among the trembled surging<\/p>\n

of our blood, feeling the world\u2019s undeniable enormity\u2014<\/p>\n

and it was good.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ataraxia<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 An undisturbed state of mind and feeling <\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 held to be ideal by ancient philosophers.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Those old pyrrhonists, their tough lizard<\/p>\n

elbows brushing against the tent posts<\/p>\n

of the marketplace, or living in a tub<\/p>\n

near the dead bones of the sea<\/p>\n

to practice quadruple remedies,<\/p>\n

formularies against fear, battering<\/p>\n

proud stoics with the five tropes<\/p>\n

of anti-knowledge (infinite regressions<\/p>\n

on their way to unprovable initial affirmations<\/p>\n

via the eclectic gardens of discordance),<\/p>\n

when all they really wanted was a posit<\/p>\n

of happiness, the quietude of a school<\/p>\n

like any other, free of dogmatic vex<\/p>\n

and unsinged by Heraclitean fire<\/p>\n

in the interstices of the wide Cyclades,<\/p>\n

which stopped drifting long ago,<\/p>\n

birthing beings with the blank poise<\/p>\n

of inner logos, a wide scoop of serenity<\/p>\n

in every tenor of their marbled face.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Naked singularities in the 70\u2019s<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Even then there were black holes,<\/p>\n

the gravity fields shoving their matter<\/p>\n

inwards and downwards like a loose sphincter<\/p>\n

while the pressure of radiance pushed up<\/p>\n

and the star furnaces sputtered and gave out\u2014<\/p>\n

something imploded, something belched.<\/p>\n

Zen Master So-En-So told a tale<\/p>\n

of hungry giants with demented minds<\/p>\n

that ate up cities, mountains, tracts<\/p>\n

of dark ferrite as they rose from the deep<\/p>\n

to battle the sky gods, then collapsed,<\/p>\n

their masses squished like soft, enormous<\/p>\n

bugs that wake one morning from bad dreams.<\/p>\n

To be a little crazy is not enough<\/em>, he said.<\/p>\n

You must become completely crazy<\/em>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Already seeking a foundational bedrock in the golden age   A gaspingly impatient hominid clinging to a sea-wave battered rock, just an isolated promontory jutting into the vast and wine-dark vacancy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1516,77],"tags":[1536,1517,1123],"class_list":["post-13959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-egophobia-69","category-english","tag-askold-skalsky","tag-egophobia-69-70","tag-english"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DakB-3D9","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13959"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13959\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13962,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13959\/revisions\/13962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}