A Bit of Poetry

A Brief Report On The Epidemic of Living

I love you says the man who runs upstream
at five in the morning yelling for help.

I love you, she says and you try to shake it
off, but you realize that the shouldertip
is broken. Before the sunrise, you are an antelope.

Brownian motion, they say—move around the room,
searching for a light source closer than Venus.

Move around the room and you might still
hear the kiss of a shadow with wings, levitating
slowly. Some call it Providence or Progress

but we both know it’s my dead brother, feeling
inside of my chest for his own flesh and marrow,
light-headed bones, all things that exist but we cannot

explain to the cynics. We are stereoisomers,
I told you, molecules made of the same atoms
but mirror images of each other—

we shine polarized light in opposite ways,
so that when I wake up with the hunger of poems
bouncing in my stomach like hydrophobic stars,

you are sleeping in North Dakota, Wyoming, Arizona
trying to understand what makes us hollow boned
and brittle. Cynicism, I tell you, it’s like arsenic,

vinegar, salt and humoral immunity: we ingest
sarcasm like arsenic, like the kings, slowly building
a resistance to poison, slowly pressing their ears

against their beating chest, watching it slowly gain
electric bile in the heart, refusing to believe that there is

a cure for splitting the atom (the residues of this
experiment are too much for them to consider. What
happens when you split an atom? There’s nuclear
waste, radioactivity that leaves our soul burning alive).

The world isn’t built for us, you’d tell me, and I’d say
You’re lovely, like the aurora. You have a lovely, heavy heart,

and he kept a knife by the bed and told you it was sharp.
He kept hitting the walls and told you next time
it’s going to be your face. And you stayed, your heart
trying to go on by building mathematical models.

It would be easy to end our story here, a heartbeat skipping
but there are things that we cannot avoid, you and I, some
too dark and too obscure to be told as a bedtime story.

You go on, Rimbaud must have left his fingers in the sand—
he must have kept that inkstone of light around,
churning in his guts when he stopped writing at nineteen.

you are 27 and lost in the center of all centripetal
forces and gravity, your own soul counteracting them,
the poets are telling you about the Spanish inquisition,
begging for another color of paint and antibodies.

The world isn’t for us, you repeat. You’ve got to jump
into water sources with your hypocrisy hung from a tree.
You’ve got to have the sarcasm and the poems rewritten.
Yes it is, yes it is. I’m telling you, move around the room
and try to find my missing heart.

A Bit of Poetry

Physiology of Mountains
--------


I love
the way your
heartbeat,
beats,
and I can
feel your
chest rise
as a sunset,
through the sky.
Your lips
open when
you sleep,
as if you want
to say something,
or simply kiss
the air we are
both breathing.

(tonight I feel your
               hair curl down
               like the black hills.)

A Bit of Poetry

I just got the collected poems of Ted Hughes and I have to say it is a pretty amazing collection, for only USD 25. Both purchases I've made in the past month have been just as good (the other one being Kenneth Koch's Collected Poems) so I wanted to recommend it to anyone who likes these two writers.

This is a poem from Ted Hughes' book:

The City
----

Your poems are a dark city centre.
Your novels, your stories, your journals, are suburbs
Of this big city.
The hotels are lit like office blocks all night
With scholars, priests, pilgrims. It's at night
Sometimes I drive through. I just find
Myself driving through, going slow, simply
Roaming in my own darkness, pondering
What you did. Nearly always
I glimpse you -- at some crossing,
Staring upwards, lost, sixty year old.
The crowd piles around you. You stand rock still.
Your face, under the green or orange light,
a desert Indian's, wild, bewildered.
You want to ask something but you can't
You stare into every face
Trying to recognize somebody.
They ignore you. Then the light goes red
And they all surge past you.
Then you see me in my car, staring at you.
I see you thinking: ought I to know him?
I see you frown. I see you trying
To remember -- or suddenly not to remember.

Apart from the new poetry, I am single again and I've been doing alot of thinking this whole week about relationships and the way that even friendships can decay and rot with the passing of time--People just get tired of each other, isn't that sad? I've made it a resolution to not lose any more friends to the grind of life. In this city, where things are always overwhelming enough to get most people to quit, that is a hard thing to do but a necessary one for the survival of your person.

Over and Out,

UG'ster

A Bit of Poetry

This is the last poem that I've written. I wrote up parts of it in my head while in Spain in winterbreak, and decided to sit down and put it all together. Comments appreciated!

Explanations for An Action Potential

"Action Potential: A brief, regenerative, all-or-nothing electrical potential that propagates along the axon of a neuron"
----

Sometimes I feel my skin is a city
in Spain, where you live as a gypsy.
I hate it how you stand in Madrid,

in El Museo del Prado, naked, hunching
over your body with a dolphin at your feet.
Symmetry, Spirituality: the crude-and-cruel

architecture of your breasts, as a statue,
much like you, but refusing to be photographed
alive. All we need is Cable Theory and models

to explain how I woke up in Barcelona,
dreaming about your molecules.
I wanted to wrap you in myelinated sheets

to conserve your signals or maybe open up
my chest and shelter you like a butterfly
in a bullet-proof vest. Back here, in New York,

I sit in the cross-town bus sometimes listening
to others in love, or searching for love, making up
explanations for the concreteness of angels

or theories of how space-time folds over our backs
when we swim together. A scientific theory
can always be proven wrong, so we believe in

astrology, the throw of the dice, our heart
as an oracle. Vividly I remember: awake,

thinking you were pressed against me, and I see
the marina instead, with the boats and the sea,
clumsily imitating your irises—not as grey, iridescent.

Two bodies with one head, our souls collapsed
like childish lungs. Confusion is always present
but never as canine until you are left alone.


Confused as the wall when I drive a nail through,
the same wall upon which I kissed your
necklace, leaving an antiquated aura of glory.

I pick up the phone and dial the number
but then sit still, my hypothalamus is
apologetic. Perhaps because of you; perhaps

the palpitations are simply from the firing squad,
ready to aim and fire before my own confused
cavity. I keep rearranging furniture at night

to be closer to the lights, to see you reflected
in the windows as a maybe-comeback-goodbye,
expanding, smiling, unraveling the arteries.

All Hail West Texas

Sometimes you end up discovering an Artist's oldest material is incredibly good. Take for example today, me and Mr Darnielle of the Mountaing Goats fame. The album called "All Hail West Texas" is so incredibly good, it makes me feel lost as if in west texas and not from there. For those not familiar with his old works where he sang into a casette recorder, this album is a good introduction. John Darnielle makes every song incredibly poetic and sad, and every little witty comment is inserted into the songs. Take the song "Jenny, for example, where i think the CD really starts:

so the big orange sun
positioned at your back
lit up your magnificent silhouhette
how much better, how much better could my life get?
nine hundred cubic centimeters of raw whining power
no outstanding warrants for my arrests
whoa, the pirate's life for me

He continues the incredible imagery in "Jenny" sprinkled with beautiful quotes like "we were the only one thing in the galaxy that god didn't have his eyes on" which shows how this man (who is very familiar with the bible) is as god-fearing and as life-fearing as the rest of us. He is earnest in his singing, I find that one of the best qualities for a singer these days. The bitterness of the couple (the famous Alpha-Omega couple of his songs) is present in ridiculous concentrations in "Fault Lines":

I got a cracked engine block
both of us do
got a house, the jewels, the italian racecar
they don't make us feel better about who we are
I got termites in the framework
so do you

and also the love melancholia, missing a relationship, in "The Mess Inside":

we went to new york city in september.
took the train out of manhattan to the grand army stop.
found that bench we'd sat together on a thousand years ago
when i felt such love for you i thought my heart was gonna pop.
i wanted you to love me like you used to do.

but i cannot run.
and i can't hide.
from the wreck we've made of our house.
from the mess inside.

All in all,I recommend checking it out. A wonderful CD with one of the most original voices in songwriting of the past 10 years...

Yours,

the UG'ster

I've been having a pounding headache for the past couple hours and I just realized it's due to the fact I have not eaten anything. I've been laying in bed naked all day with the lights off, listening to music. I pulled my laptop over and saw "Walk The Line".

Ouch, head hurts

MyPoems!!!!!

I got my poems yesterday on the mail, all 33 of them! The sun was out and it was shining and I had my poems back...

That, however, won't be posted anywhere. I have new material I will put up sometime.
Apart from poetry, I don't know if I can write anything else (creatively). I wrote a story once but it's still waiting to be drafted (you can check it out here

I'm going to go read and write a bit more, then do some actual studying.
I've been fascinated with the lives of two philosophers as of lately. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, two completely different individuals but somehow so incredibly similar. I'm reading "Fear and Trembling", but I have ordered "The Gay Science" and "Human, All Too Human" from Amazon, can't wait to continue reading Nietzsche :)

Wolf Parade

grr I'm incredibly mad they're sold out the day Joe and Mickey are going. Monday is still not sold out, but I have class at that time on monday (Biochem Eng)

I'd like to see them live, but I didn't decide that after last week when I really gave the CD ("Apologies to the Queen Mary") a good listen and liked it enough to want to hear it in concert. Some of the tracks in it are too Modest Mousish for me, but I love "Shine a Light", "Dear Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts", "It's a Curse" and of course, where the subheading of this blog comes from, "This Heart's On Fire"

So I'd like to see them. How do I get a goddamn ticket???

from the weakerthans:

All the actors broke their legs,
and it's too late to postpone.
The producer's getting high,
and the audience went home.
Smile and take your awkward bow.
Turn and stumble off the stage.
Let the rain be your applause,
every encore soothe your rage.
Squint with one eye, hum a show-tune,
and wait
for your ride to say,
"Oh, that's where you
must have lost your way."

Time's Arrow

I woke up today at 2PM after sleeping forever. I think that was incredibly necessary. am so happy I have nothing else due today or tomorrow, or anytime next week. It's so liberating to have that much time and be able to go out and recharge the battery.
I'm listening to a great CD. I had forgotten how much I love this album. I began singing from "Reconstruction Site" by the Weakerthans last night, and I still haven't stopped playing it. I had been awake for 30+ hours when I started listening to it again, and it was like the day after the apocalypse. The day before I had been so sad that I almost didn't want to go on with everything anymore. Quit school, quit at sloan, quit all of this effort. Why go on when you feel empty on the inside? and other demons. But then I heard John K Samsom's CD once again and it reminded me that even in the darkest moments there's hope for reconstructing your life, and that's how life is, not happy or sad but somewhere in between. Dean Young had this poem, "Not in Any Ha Ha Way", which ends by saying that maybe life is either too beautiful not to be painful, or too painful not to be beautiful. That's sort of a dichotomy of thought; some that I have talked to have told me that life is suffering therefore beautiful and some had said that life is beautiful therefore suffering.

I myself have always felt that life is suffering and that's why it's so beautiful. I'm picking up slowly, going back to who I know I am, rising above all of these countercurrents and moving onto the next step in my life.

Last One for the Night

I should probably stop posting now, since I've been awake for the past...well, almost 48 hours...

Computers

Well, even though I hate programming, I actually do have to say that I own a Mac, and have done so for the past 8 months and love it. It has crashed (read: need to restart) ONCE and it was not even the system's fault, but rather MATLAB (read: stupid engineering software) as we were playing with a Hodgkin-Huxley simulator for our homework (Read: complete fucking waste of 40K a year)

Ok, well this turned into a crappy rant but I wanted to tell you that macs are awesome. However I'm still not too keen on the new x86 platform (the intel core blah blah) because I don't know what software will run natively in it in the next two years. I'd rather stick with the G4 and G5 for now, they're nice processors and are becoming cheaper as this whole intel thing goes full swing.

yours,


the UG'ster

Schedule this Semester

Finishing BME at Columbia: 19 credits
BMEN 4002 Quantitative Physiology: Organ Systems
CHEN 4660 Biochemical Engineering
CHEN 4650 Biopolymers
BMEN 3810 Biomedical Engineering Lab, One
BMEN 3500 Biological Transport Phenomena
BIOL 2006 Cell Biology and Physiology

Having a high-demand job: 20 hours (a week)
Paid Research at MSKCC, with T-cells

Current Time spent on leisurly activities per week: 0 secods

Considering to sue TS Eliot for misrepresentation of what the cruelest month of the year is: Priceless

yours,

the UG'ster

First Post

"Hello, world!" a computer scientist would say.
I'd like to tell a story before I introduce myself. I am a current student at a school in new york city. When I applied to school long long long ago, I used to think I'd like to do some computer science. So I took a CS class for engineers in a state university–rather good engineering school, actually–and to my dismay...I hated it.
I hate programming.

So, after that warm introduction, here's the rundown:
College Student.
Likes to Write but between engineering classes, has no time.
Has ridiculous Major with almost no free time.
spends an average of 20 hours a week playing with cancer cells.


Yours,

the undergroundster