Talking Poetry

after a dream

You must change your life fourteen times.
Change your way of living like writing.
You must change your method and your mind.
You have to transform life fourteen times.

Change life. It has become necessary to change your life.
You need this change. We need to change your life.
And now you'd better change it: you, yourself.
It's up to you to change your life. Change, change!

Alter your life, patch and reshape your life.
‘A change come o'er the spirit of your change’.
You might shuffle the cards spin wheels change wheels.

You must convert resolve revolutionize your dissolves.
You might change life itself. And you might change.
You must change. You must not outlive your life.

(in: House (Blown Apart), p. 28)

*this title alludes to Rilke's poem Archaic Torso of Apollo

**the poem formally resembles a sonnet even though it doesn't rhyme

Henry Hudson turned to me and said:
Be expressionless and strong as me,
Be grim and green, stout as Cortez,
Double lock yourself within
Like a warning wife, and be divorced
From nothing, at last be a statue
Of a self, and threaten at night like a landing,
Turn to your river, like a monist on a raft,
And always found your river on a fault,
Be blind and copper, a mania on a column,
Obscured, finally, by a single cloud of brick.
I love you, that is why I do not talk
About your humorous desire to appease.
Rather complain, like a man, that there is no river.

Copyright ©: David Shapiro