Music is a treacherous sound, Seducing emotions and marking Their breathless faces with death. Art is an intrepid mountebank, Enraging philosophies and creeds By stepping into the black space beyond them. Religions are blindly tortured eyes, Paralyzing the speed of imagination With static postures of hope. History is an accidental madness, Using nations and races To simulate a cruel sanity. (In the final dust This trick will be discovered.) Psychology is a rubber-stamp Pressed upon a slippery, dodging ghost, But thousands of centuries can remove All marks of this indignity. Men, each snuggling proudly Into an inch of plausible falsehood, Will hate the careless smile That whitens these definitions. The table has been broken by fists; The fanatic has mangled his voice; The scientist cautiously repairs the room Beyond which he dares not peer. Life, they will never cease to explain you.
Maxwell Bodenheim (May 26, 1892 – February 6, 1954) was an American poet and novelist. A literary figure in Chicago, he later went to New York where he became known as the King of Greenwich Village Bohemians. His writing brought him international notoriety during the Jazz Age of the 1920s.
yes, but these things are re-makers and makers in what they are: “we can perhaps say that poetry is play, or that play is poetry; after all, poiein means “to make” in Greek. We can’t help being makers and re-makers in this world, where everything constantly collapses around us and in us. As grown-ups we continue playing, when we write or read poetry, because poetry saves whatever is true, good, and beautiful. The Iliad is not about war, it is about love: “Whatever is not war, whatever war destroys or threatens, the Iliad wraps in poetry; the realities of war, never.” (Mateusz Stróżyński)
Can't say enough about the last line: the importance of not accepting definitions about 'proper living' presented by the 'scientist' who, weak-kneed with sterility, is afraid to even pull open the dress of life and see what passion abides there.