Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,
London has swept about you this score years
And bright ships left you this or that in fee:
Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,
Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price.
Great minds have sought you - lacking someone else.
You have been second always. Tragical?
No. You preferred it to the usual thing:One dull man, dulling and uxorious,
One average mind - with one thought less, each year.
Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit
Hours, where something might have floated up.And now you pay one.
Yes, you richly pay.
You are a person of some interest, one comes to youAnd takes strange gain away:
Trophies fished up; some curious suggestion;
Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale for two,
Pregnant with mandrakes,
or with something elseThat might prove useful and yet never proves,
That never fits a corner or shows use, Or finds its hour upon the loom of days:
The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work;
Idols and ambergris and rare inlays,
These are your riches, your great store;
and yet
For all this sea-hoard of deciduous things,
Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff:
In the slow float of differing light and deep,
No! there is nothing!
In the whole and all,Nothing that's quite your own.
Yet this is you.
and i thought i should post it if i was gonna reference it in my title. is there nothing in the world that is quite our own when our bodies are borrrowed property and our minds have been flattened out to open books? who the hell knows.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
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Thanks for the new poem. <3 I can never figure out how to draw internet hearts, there's got to be a support group for this.
ReplyDelete"All I own is me" - ani
I like when you say, "our bodies are borrowed property and our minds have been flattened out to open books."
I think people start thinking less of themselves when they realize they don't really own anything. but that icky kind of self-centeredness is replaced by the idea that regardless of how much you think you have or don't have, to some extent you still have a place in things. and even our ideas aren't our own, because they're replete with influences. What would we think about without all of them? Would we be more or less intelligent, if intelligence has anything to do with it at all.