Reviews for The World Doesn't End

The average rating for The World Doesn't End based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-03-31 00:00:00 Sergio Montes Edgar Throw a pebble into the pool and see it dissolve into shimmering currents, carrying burdens of ashen leaves that autumn has swept beneath the silent tremors, teaming to cry their laments; Or hide behind a ripe tree and cast a glance, all the way to that faint window where a boy, on one palm, is counting stars and fanning the other to soothe his bruises and in his eyes, dances the night, like a celebrating comet, about to go ablaze in just a matter of Time; Time' the lizard in the sunlight. It doesn't move, but its eyes are wide open. They love to gaze into our faces and hearken to our discourse. A discourse that Simic held more with his various selves than anyone else, than anything else; like a rigid child who insisted on crossing the river on his favorite boat, he rummaged the sack of his life at random ages, at natural, magical stages, to retrieve a moment of ordinary thread with extraordinary binding; binding dreams with reality, like some hidden scribbling resembling 'Margaret was copying a recipe for "saints roasted with onions" from an old cook book. The ten thousand sounds of the world were hushed so we could hear the scratchings of her pen. The saint was asleep in the bedroom with a wet cloth over his eyes. Outside the window, the author of the book sat in a flowering apple tree killing lice between his fingernails.' The sagacity to hear the stifling voices flapping their wings in various rooms that never opened to the world since they made a poor show of the rebellious soul, that malnourished, fledgling orator who lost his speech often to collective stupidity of the vanity-laden world, gave Simic a sword-sharp wit that with a shrewd demeanor, he slipped into a scabbard of satire, and time and again, scalped it through obnoxious conventions to send a biting message to the society of its vain duplicity; that if evaporation were to be the fate of compassion and goodwill, the same might get extrapolated to man; like that man who exchanged clothes with his dog. It was a dog on two legs, wearing a tuxedo, that they led to the edge of the common grave. As for the man, blind and deaf as he came to be, he still wags his tail at the approach of a stranger. A certain disdain runs deep in Simic's voice, the effect of a bitter tonic of lost time and least treasures perhaps; or the aftermath of bitter winter in life that stood frozen for a long time, much beyond what a child or a teen can bear or attempt to bear. He seemed to have felt the thuds of displacement and animosity, partly due to his destiny and partly, due to his own doing. But he was quick to note that the rigmarole of events wed the counts of breath with an unbreakable vow and swapping places with the occasional offender was but a natural prescription for keeping this bond going. He was vocal about it when He said, 'The salesgirls of Nowhere are going home at the end of the day. I must assure myself of their reality by begging one for a dime. She obliges and even gives me a little peck on the forehead. I'm ready to throw aside my crutches and walk but another wags her finger at me and tells me to behave myself.' He behaved, he raved, he saved the world in the half-inked sheets of his poems; he didn't fill them all up for who knew what might come crashing onto the parched heart and the restless mind some day, shooting a compelling need to accommodate them all in the song swaying life? After all, it shines, it mellows, it changes but this world doesn't end, does it?

Review # 2 was written on 2015-02-02 00:00:00 Shannon Marie "Pudding, why on earth would you roam the streets in a torn skirt?" "Little Lizzie, it's you isn't it?" The woman with purple dye in her hair stood at the tiny iron gate. "Yes, it's me, you wayward child!" An infant cradled among the exposed saggy breasts. "Shssshhh...... my sonny boy is trying to sleep". She shoos the birds from pecking the child's forehead. "What is that you are reading?" " Charles Simic", I say. "Is he that one-legged shorty who rings the church bells?" " Nah-uh! He's a poet, pens prose poetry". "The word you are looking for is "NO", child!". "Read me some...." said the clumsy woman covered with specks of fish scales. The silvery mackerel lies half open, the stench of the fish gut spills from the wet stony plank. "Pudding, wear your glasses!"..... My mother was a braid of black smoke She bore me swaddled over the burning cities The sky was a vast and windy place for a child to play. We met many others who were just like us................ "War is ugly ", winces Little Lizzie who had cut the sleeves from her husband's white shirts. A bow tie no more adorns the wispy collars. The Russians, The English, men with Halloween mask, the spirited chimera devoured, the child running through the gray-brick tenements showing off a mask of comedy, the time of minor poets had come. Thousands of old men with pants lowered sleeping in public restrooms. You're exaggerating! You're raving! Thousands of Marias,of Magdalenas at their feet weeping. A roadside drunk muttering the looming human apocalypse stumbled on his very own Magdalena.It's past 11am. The lanky moustached butcher walks by waving to Lizzie. He scrubs the blood off the wooden board, the steely cleaver restored with his shining glory. The stained cloth neatly tucked at his tiresome waist. Couple hours into the day and the cloth will once again scrub off the blood; his daughter's from the walls of his home. The humble cloth, now a poignant memoir of two lives. The old man trying to pick a pebble is flung off the road by a speeding car. " Say your Hail Marys and read me some more", yells Little Lizzie. The stone is a mirror which works poorly. Nothing in it but dimness. Your dimness or its dimness, who's to say? In the hush your heart sound like a black cricket. Who's to say? The opaqueness of the stone equating the impenetrable hazy mirror of a man's past; the chronological anthologies diffused by the lucidity of time. The heart of a black cricket beating in the darkness of a sullen night. "Hey, Lizzie , will you be making me some Easter Eggs, next month?" "Would you like a purple plump one just like my hair, pudding?" "Could I have five of them, then". "Child, where are your manners?. It's please, could I have some?" " Little Lizzie, are you having fish over rice for dinner?", I ask smelling the rancid flesh of fish splattered on her palm. "I'll just dip the dried piece of bread into the coconut sauce. The fish is for my sonny boy. Suddenly, from nowhere a raven flew in and grabbed the fried mackerel. Lizzie smiled, "There, now I'll eat my bread". "Read me some Shakespeare!"...... "Shakespeare?... It's Charles's prose poem!..... Ah....." And, then I read.... At least four or five Hamlets on this block alone. Identical Hamlets holding identical monkey-face spinning toys. The authenticity of one's self mislaid by the demanding societal responsibility. The reciprocity of human identity destructed by falsehood in a civilization shackled by the distorted patterns of social reflection. The monkey-faced spinning toys were sold at an illuminated street corner where ghostly existence flourished under an inexorable surveillance doomed in the collision of realistic and idealistic puppetry. "These are dark and evil days", the mouse told me as he nibbled my ears. The boy who grew up in poverty nurtured the dream of his father embedded in a faraway land of gold. Born in former Yugoslavia in 1938, he migrated to the land of golden dreams. Famously asserted that Hitler and Stalin were his two travel agents, Charles Simic rebelled the formulated rules of poetry releasing the constrict barriers of stanzas and verses into a boundless scandalous world of prose and honoured it with poetic rousing. Retorting to the selective criticism on his work, Simic articulated, "They look like prose and act like poems, because despite the odds, they make themselves into fly-traps for our imagination." "This is not poetry, child! Just some eccentric ramblings of a man..." mumbled Little Lizzie as she laid the wrapped plastic doll in her lap, signing an afternoon lullaby to her sonny boy. O the great God of Theory, he's just a pencil stub,a chewed pencil stub with a worn eraser at the of a huge scribble. Life brims with a potent blend of beauty and evils, surrounded by tragedies, eccentricities and obscurity drawing a huge scribble with a worn-out pencil fruitlessly erased by the reticent atheist and the garrulous campaigner waiting with a fork and knife at a dinner table for the hypothetical cooked goose. "It's time for me to go home, Little Lizzie." She lets out a faint yawn, "Pudding, when would you visit me again, I would like to listen more of these bizarre poems. This strange man appreciates the insignificant fringes that are taken for granted." " How about tomorrow morning, after my bakery buy.", I cheer. Lizzie nods in favour with a cranked smile. "And, for Heaven's sake wear some clothes, child! You're naked as the day you were born!" My secret identity is The room is empty And the window is open The world doesn't end but commences through the unbolted window releasing a remarkable poet's unabashed imagination illuminating the unobserved traits of life and society in general assembling piece by piece the magnificence of succinct surreal reveries and the sardonic rationalities normalising the vagueness of arcane delusions and possibility of a comforting verbal individuality. Little Lizze died two decades ago, she was 6o at the time. And, I'm no longer a child. Simic asserts the value of using one's imagination to capture the essence of surrealism, a rarity, as many are embarrassed by the baffling flight of their imagination. I, the diligent follower.