Introspection of the Dark Side

Poetry by James Allen Peacock

Nervous frustration,

Delusions of grandness,

Self-condemnation,

Don’t give a damnedness,

Frivolous, ambitious,

Perplexing, silliness,

Precocious, viciousness,

Awkward willy-nillyness,

Troublesome, quarrelsome,

Lots of self-sorrowing,

Vain and pretentious,

Always tomorrowing,

Irritating, argumentative,

Over-active imagination,

Exacting, unrelentive,

Rampant self-congratulation,

Contentious, shameless,

Stubborn, frantic,

Sometimes aimless,

Sometimes erratic,

Irreverent, irrelevant,

Often presumptuous,

Ungrateful, intolerant,

Restless and bumptious,

Scornful and sneering,

Hopelessly formless,

All of these things;

Nonetheless harmless!

Reviews

[JohnL]

Oh I do like this - what would-be wordsmith could resist it? And as poets and writers, we could expand to 'Extroversion of the Bright Side', or 'Emotionalisation of the Love Side'. The sky's the limit and think of the vocabulary we'd build up! Loking at this from a reviewer's point of view, I like the rolling gait of the words with rythmic hiccoughs giving emphases and a general feeling eventually of - to heck with the rules - let's enjoy! Wonderful. Speaking of words, have a look at this - I love it:

The following is a passage from the memoirs of Pablo Neruda, translated from the original Spanish. Neruda was a Chilean, a winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, Chilean Ambassador in Paris at the time of the Allende regime and a poet of rare excellence. He wrote on a wide spectrum of subject matter, his poems on love, travel, injustice and the Spanish Civil War being exceptional.
"THE WORD:
. . . You can say anything you want, yessir, but it's the words that sing, they soar and descend. . I bow to them . . . I love them, I cling to them, I run them down, I bite into them, I melt them down . . . I love words so much . . . The unexpected ones . . . The ones I wait for greedily or stalk until, suddenly, they drop . . . Vowels I love . . . They glitter like coloured stones, they leap like silver fish, they are foam, thread, metal, dew . . . I run after certain words . . . They are so beautiful that I want to fit them all into my poem . . . I catch them in mid-flight as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives . . . And then I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them, I let them go . . . I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves . . . Everything exists in the word . . . An idea goes through a complete change because one word shifted its place, or because another settled down like a spoiled little thing inside a phrase that was not expecting her but obeys her . . . They have shadow, transparence, weight, feathers, hair and everything they gathered from so much rolling down the river, from so much wandering from country to country, from being roots so long . . . They are very ancient and very new . . . They live in the bier, hidden away, and in the budding flower . . . What a great language* I have, it's a fine language we inherited from the fierce conquistadors . . . They strode over the giant cordilleras, over the rugged Americas, hunting for potatoes, sausages, beans, black tobacco, gold, corn, fried eggs, with a voracious appetite not found in the world since then . . . They swallowed up everything, religions, pyramids, tribes, idolatries just like the ones they brought along in their huge sacks . . . Wherever they went, they razed the land . . . But words fell like pebbles out of the boots of the barbarians, out of their beards, their helmets, their horseshoes, luminous words that were left glittering here . . . our language. We came up losers . . . we came up winners . . . they carried off the gold and left us the gold . . . they carried everything off and left us everything . . . They left us the words.

Pablo Neruda, 'Memoirs'"

* Spanish, of course but doesn't it apply to us all?

[KieraCrimeScene]

wow. I don't think that I've ever seen anything like this. I reallly liked this alot. I have to say that this is just plainly amazing. haha. I really liked the "Don't give a damnedness" part. I thought you did a really good job with getting the reader into your poem. I was reading it, and while i was my father was telling me that i needed to take my medicine. ( i just recently broke my finger) I was in extreme pain, but was to involved reading your poetry to care at all. This is phenomenal and i hope to see more.

[Anna]

well done!