poem by matthew rohrer
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poem by Matthew Rohrer
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Matthew Rohrer, “Credo” [ID in ALT]
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hello! for some reason, the thought of asking about web weaving prompts completely escaped me until now. you're the first I am asking! hello!!!
I don't see this sort of web weaving subject around, so is it possible to make one about an abandoned AI? (the fictional, sapient kind, not the ones irl lol)
like an AI, with a sapient mind, just..... alone. lost between the lines of code in cyberspace, wishing for someone like them to destroy their isolation
How can you mourn for something not living?
I hope this fills the prompt well! It was very interesting to do. I'm sorry it took so long! ;^^
Subtitle, Weldon Kees | Can't Help Myself, Oliver Rain | Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land, MARINA | If I Were Paul, Mark Jarman | Robot Apocalypses, Beatrice Bywater | One More Love Poem, Dunya Mikhail | Just Take My Wallet, Jack Stauber | Machine, John Ciardi | There Is Absolutely Nothing Lonelier, Matthew Rohrer | Conjure, Rachel Blau DuPlessis | More than whispers, less than rumors, Bob Hicok | The Day the Saucers Came, Neil Gaiman | The Birds Outside My Window Sing During a Pandemic, Lee Herrick | End Poem, Julian Gough | 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke & Stanley Kubrick
[text transcription and image ID in alt text]
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favourite poems of december
torrin a. greathouse ekphrasis on nude selfie as portrait of saint sebastian
snehal vadher hello flowers and cigarettes
robert pinsky death and the powers: a robot pageant
wendy barker taking a language
cindy juyoung ok terms and conditions
carl phillips this far in
christian wiman hard night: “the ice storm”
cathy linh che split: “the german word for dream is traume”
linda hogan when the body
david trinidad the late show: “a regret”
omotara james my mother’s nerves are shot--
marie howe the good thief: “death, the last visit”
kaveh akbar portrait of the alcoholic floating in space with severed umbilicus
donald britton in the empire of the air: “italy”
snehal vadher figures in a windswept language
jane wong after preparing the alter, the ghosts feast feverishly
ofelia zepeda ocean power: “deer dance exhibition”
lucille clifton good woman: poems and a memoir, 1969-1980: “the lost baby poem”
emily pérez dworzec
ouyang jianghe mother, kitchen (tr. austin woerner)
cathy linh che i walked through the trees, mourning
sam willets tourist
ed bok lee whorled: “if in america”
dan gerber marriage
matthew rohrer poem written with issa [“a friend emails”]
richard siken crush: “litany in which certain things are crossed out”
april bernard anger
claudia rankine citizen: “you are in the dark, in the car...”
barbara hamby letter to a lost friend
joy harjo everybody has a heartache: a blues
cathy linh che go forget your father
kofi
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From Matthew Rohrer's book, Surrounded by Friends.
[LitBowl]
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“Poem for Friends” — Matthew Rohrer
On someone else’s estate
running through it to avoid
the outdoor wedding there is a grave
in a little copse of trees
so panting we hide out there
How beautiful to lie down
not to be the dead ones there
whose eye sockets are filled with dirt
nothing is theirs anymore
you pass me a crumpled joint
swaying a little like a poem
while black birds wail in the air
and the commuter train wails
all we have to do is make tacos
tonight and be friends
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A poem by Matthew Rohrer
There Is Absolutely Nothing Lonelier
There is absolutely nothing lonelier
than the little Mars rover
never shutting down, digging up
rocks, so far away from Bond street
in a light rain. I wonder
if he makes little beeps? If so
he is lonelier still. He fires a laser
into the dust. He coughs. A shiny
thing in the sand turns out to be his.
Matthew Rohrer
Matthew Rohrer writes: I was coming out of a bar in Manhattan in the rain at night. I felt lonely. Then I thought: there is nothing lonelier than that little guy up there on Mars, never shutting down. And if he’s beeping up there, how much lonelier still, that no one can hear it. Still, I like to think the engineers designed him to beep.
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The Ants // Matthew Rohrer
Nothing is more important to the ant
whose exoskeleton has been breached
by mushroom spores that are now
controlling his nervous system
and compelling him to climb to a high leaf
only to die and release the spores
over the whole forest
than this poem about his sad plight.
Otherwise his life is meaningless.
Forage. Chew. Recognize by scent.
Abdication of the will. A huge wind
that comes and sweeps his fellows
off the grass. When he dies up there
in the treetops the mushroom grows
right out of his head and breaks open
lightly dusting the afternoon.
Everything he thought he was here
on Earth to do has been left undone.
Through the trees
the spores move on their sinister ways.
I put down the science magazine written
for elementary school kids
in which I have briefly disappeared.
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Matthew Rohrer – Não há absolutamente nada mais solitário
Não há absolutamente nada mais solitário / do que o pequeno Mars Rover, (...)
Não há absolutamente nada mais solitáriodo que o pequeno Mars Rover,sempre em funcionamento, escavandorochas, tão longe da Bond streetsob a chuva suave. Será queele emite pequenos bipes? Se sim,ele é ainda mais solitário. Ele dispara laserna poeira. Ele engasga. Algo brilhante na areia revela-se ser dele.
Trad.: Nelson Santander
There Is Absolutely Nothing Lonelier
There is absolutely nothing…
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As Matthew Rohrer put it,
“I must learn to say the things I never intended to say,” and then
I want to add: I also want to learn to say all the things I intended to
say—
intended and unintended in the very same breath. This seems to me
a power,
inherent in language itself, to make and re-make, to vision and
re-vision,
to act and re-act to the world as it throbs, or culture as
thesis-antithesis-
synthesis, fear and some trembling necessary and full. Barbaric
yawps!
Walking home drunk the other night, I said a bunch of weird, good
things
and you did, too and while it’s hard to remember exactly what
the shadows of what and the feeling still linger—even now,
even sober—we were so fired up, because
the night was so ridiculously in flower, so and so and me and you
electrified and shocking, terrific and true, and we were laughing
together,
leaving our strung-out presence like presents around the city,
me an amplifier and you a defender. One thing I definitely remember
is talking earlier—earlier when?—earlier ever
about how you convince everyone that you’re talking directly to
them,
and I convince everyone I’m dangerous with speed—it’s true
I like being worn out, even when I read, and sometimes, too,
overwhelmed
and even panicked (though mostly after the fact). When experience
kicks me
and everything turns black, or polka-dot, or mechanical bull or
post-avant,
my teeth in the trees my blood on the windshield, it's just an
indication
that I need to act decisively—to do something for myself with myself
and keep living. It's the best I can do for the people who'd miss me,
but more importantly for the ones who I would miss terribly. Life is
overwhelming
for good and for ill. But what isn't overwhelming? Beauty is
overwhelming.
Data is overwhelming. Text and the devil and the heavens
overwhelming....
How to live and what to do? To make sense all the time (or maybe
ever)
in this life/of this life is a sham. Nothing is perfectly nailed to the wall.
I want as much as possible for the carnival of what is. Better worn out
and wary, than a mannequin pretending. "The slightest loss of
attention
leads to death," said Frank O'Hara. I say: Be prepared for the darkness
when it takes you, but stay alive and stay light
for as long as you can.
—Matt Hart, from "Amplifier to Defender" (Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless, Typecast Books, 2012)
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You start to cry,
because you will never
be able to demonstrate
that your love for her
is your powersource,
it is a glowing rod in your chest;
because people die
without ever knowing
simple things
about themselves.
from Light Music
Matthew Rohrer
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credo by Matthew Rohrer
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How beautiful to lie down
not to be the dead ones there
whose eye sockets are filled with dirt
nothing is theirs anymore
- Matthew Rohrer, "Poem for Friends"
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NEW FROM FINISHING LINE PRESS: In The Thaw of Day by Cynthia Good
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Good’s #poetry collection chronicles the speaker’s escape from an #abusive #marriage and coming to terms with trauma experienced over the course of a lifetime, and the journey to #recover while finding deep meaning and joy in the smallest things earth offers: …the ocean, sky, dirt and air, and space // between my cells… Believing it’s essential to express what burns inside us, even at the risk of ridicule, the author grapples with big questions including impermanence and why we are here, how the wind off the Seine /crawls under your scarf. The black / and white photo from the museum, / an image of Basquiat between us / tells me Basquiat is dead, / and in this photo, all of us are memory. The collection is bursting with the natural world, filled with whales and wild mushrooms, taking the reader from Paris and Mexico to Los Angeles, Atlanta and the moon. The book looks at #grief following the loss of the poet’s long marriage, the death of her mother, and her father to suicide, while always finding something to be thankful for, even if it’s, the way a leaf / still shudders after the wind.
Cynthia Good is an award-winning author, journalist and former TV news anchor. She has written six books including Vaccinating Your Child, which won the Georgia Author of the Year award. She launched two magazines, Atlanta Woman and the nationally distributed PINK magazine for women in business. Good’s poems have appeared in many acclaimed publications such as Green Hills Literary Lantern, The Penman Review, Awakenings, and Terminus Magazine.
PRAISE FOR In The Thaw of Day by Cynthia Good
An occasion for celebration, Cynthia Good’s lively and enlivening new collection dazzles with lyric precision, emotional control and lucid beauty. Good’s observations about the natural world and the life of the body are delicious with detail and gritty with the wisdom of a life lived deeply and well.
–Deborah Landau, author of Skeletons
Cynthia Good’s poems beautifully and roughly navigate all of life’s travails—grief, love, the body, motherhood, daughterhood. All the while, the speaker in these poems remains steadfast to life and survival. These poems are imagistic, lyrically plain spoken, and wise.
–Victoria Chang, author of The Trees Witness Everything
Cynthia Good’s IN THE THAW OF DAY is a book of such precision. Her close, intimate descriptions of the remembered scent of her father’s cigarettes, or caring for injured snails, or the memory that inheres in a painting is the heart of these poems. One of the poems begins “I wanted to tell you about….” and that spirit really animates this whole collection. Good wants to tell us so many things, so many of them tiny, beautifully ornate, and so many of them about her father, who haunts these poems. Without being too dogmatic, this book moves from the past to the present in a way that leaves the reader in touch with a melancholy and beautiful planet that has room, if only briefly, for everything.
–Matthew Rohrer, author of The Sky Contains the Plans
Please share/repost #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #read #poems #literature #poetry
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THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING LONELIER
There is absolutely nothing lonelier
than the little Mars rover
never shutting down, digging up
rocks, so far away from Bond street
in a light rain. I wonder
if he makes little beeps? If so
he is lonelier still. He fires a laser
into the dust. He coughs. A shiny
thing in the sand turns out to be his.
MATTHEW ROHRER
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