Poems

"I was friends with a guy named Delmore Schwartz, he wrote great poetry and he was an incredible man and he died. Before he died he was on a drunken binge with me, he had his arm around me and he said: 'You know, I'm going to die one of these days...', he was one of the unhappiest people I knew, he said: 'You can write and if you sell out and there's a heaven from which you can be haunted, I'll haunt you'. And maybe people will get tired of Lou Reed songs, but I'll always write poems."

- Lou Reed

Playing music is not like athletics:
One may improve with age.
The untrained mind with natural talents
reflects the part and never the whole
it is too narrow to perceive itself.
Its goals erase themselves.

May I have your ear, that
curlicued receptor of sound?
(If this were Rome we could be so grand).

The movement from instinct to calculation is quite profound
You've listened and been more than a tape recorder.
Talent carries its own weight;
the intellect it weds determines greatness.
Our age is such that we must fight off fat.
One hopes the mind outlasts the skin.

Sometimes when I'm all alone
I feel a type of fear
dawn's descending, dusk is breaking
creep my darling near.
I see my life before me
as a seamstress sees her pins
fulland linedwithfailure
and coated then with sin.
An education gone to waste
talent left ignored
imagination rent with drugs
someone who's always bored
scared to death of life itself
but even more by death
not fit company for anyone
let alone a wife
no example for a child
therefore no sun for me
I am told never to think these thoughts
for they make me unhappy.

The sin was craziness you see
don't blame yourself for that -
a strange childhood, wel1 that is true
but nothing can be done about that.
The future is the same for all
we face it as we can
and there is nothing wrong with fear
it proves that you're a man.

We can learn to murder in the early hours
mulling over dour fate
technology offering its endless alternatives:
poisons, boxes spewing chemicals.
And yet
in murder
we return to the odious spectacle of physical expression -
I'll break you neck;
I'll break your back
thinking unacquired savagery.

Karate is a special kind of dance.
Who pulverizes someone else's bones
has lifted violence to the level of
an art,
which, unlike ballet,
does not require the total man.