Old Boy poem – A. Van Jordan poems

If one rainy night you find yourself
leaving a phone booth, and you meet a man
with a lavender umbrella, resist
your desire to follow him, to seek
shelter from the night in his solace.
Later, don’t fall victim to the Hypnotist’s
narcotic of clarity, which proves
a curare for the heart; her salve
is merely a bandage, under which memories
pulse. Resist the taste for something still
alive for your first meal; resist the craving
for the touch of a hand from your past.
We live some memories,
and some memories are planted. There’s
only so much space for the truth
and the fabrications to spread out
in one’s mind. When there’s no more
space, we grow desperate. You’ll ask
if practicing love for years in your mind,
prepares you for the moment,
if practicing to defend one’s life
is the same as living? You’ll
hole up, captive, in a hotel room
for fifteen years and learn to find
a man within you, which will prove
a painful introduction to the trance
into which you were born. Better
to stay under the spell of your guilt,
than to forget; you’ve already released
your pain onto the world; don’t believe
there’s some joy in forgetting.
There’s no joy in the struggle to forget.
And what appears as an endless verdant field,
only spreads across a building’s rooftop;
your peaceful sleep could be a fetal position,
which secures you in a suitcase in this field.
A bell rings, and you fall out of this luggage
like clothes you no longer fit. Now what to do?
You remember when you were the man
who fit those clothes, but you’ve forgotten this
world. Even forgotten scenes from your life,
leave shadows of the memory,
haunting your spirit
until, within a moment’s glance,
strangers passing you on the street,
observe history in your eyes. Experience
lingers through acts of forgetting,
small acts of love or trauma
falling from the same place. Whether
memory comes in the form of a stone
or a grain of sand, they both sink in water.
A tongue—even if it were, say, sworn
to secrecy; or if it were cut from one’s mouth;
yes, even without a mouth to envelop
its truth—the tongue continues to confess.

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Poems in English 

• Poor Mailie’s Elegy by Robert Burns by Robert Burns
• Poem on Sensibility by Robert Burns by Robert Burns
• Pegasus at Wanlockhead by Robert Burns by Robert Burns
• Paraphrase of the First Psalm by Robert Burns by Robert Burns
• One Night as I did Wander by Robert Burns by Robert Burns
• On the late Captain Grose’s Peregrinations by Robert Burns by Robert Burns
• On the Death of Robert Dundas, Esq., of Arniston by Robert Burns by Robert Burns
• On the Death of John M’Leod, Esq. by Robert Burns by Robert Burns
• On the Birth of a Posthumous Child by Robert Burns by Robert Burns
• On Tam the Chapman by Robert Burns by Robert Burns
• On seeing Mrs. Kemble in Yarico by Robert Burns by Robert Burns
• On Scaring some Water-Fowl in Lock Turit by Robert Burns by Robert Burns
• On Glenriddell’s Fox breaking his chain: A Fragment by Robert Burns by Robert Burns
• On Elphinstone’s Translation of Martial’s Epigrams by Robert Burns by Robert Burns
• On Chloris requesting a sprig of blossom’d thorn by Robert Burns by Robert Burns
• Oh Wert Thou In The Cauld Blast by Robert Burns by Robert Burns
• Ode, Sacred to the Memory of Mrs. Oswald of Auchencruive by Robert Burns by Robert Burns
• Ode on the Departed Regency Bill by Robert Burns by Robert Burns
• Ode for General Washington’s Birthday by Robert Burns by Robert Burns
• Note to Mr. Renton of Lamerton by Robert Burns by Robert Burns

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Yandex – the best search engine for searches in Russian (and the best overall image search engine, in any language, anywhere)

Qwant – the best search engine for searches in French, German as well as Romance and Germanic languages.

Ecosia – a search engine that supposedly… plants trees

Duckduckgo – the real alternative and a search engine that actually works. Without much censorship or partisan politics.

Yahoo– yes, it’s still around, amazingly, miraculously, incredibly, but now it seems to be powered by Bing.

 

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