Poems XVII

Arctic Sun:

You put yourself low in the sky, and yet You
Warm all the small things, and warm me too.

You have no need to scatter shadows
Or make the snowdrifts melt,
Your beauty brings out their latent hues,
In brightened souls Your work is felt.

Without the Sun there is no lichen,
No lichen, no caribou,
The wolf needs meat and I need meat,
the cycle worships You.

The darkest days, when You're not here,
Feel as if they last all year,
But long winters lead to longest summers,
Bathed in light when you are near.

Fuck Thoreau- A Guest Author, This Time

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/pond-scum

"The hypocrisy is not that Thoreau aspired to solitude and self-sufficiency but kept going home for cookies and company. That's just the gap between aspiration and execution, plus the variability in our needs and moods from one moment to the next- eminently human experiences, which, had Thoreau engaged with them, would have made for a far more interesting and useful book. The hypocrisy is that Thoreau lived a complicated life but pretended to live a simple one. Worse, he preached at others to live as he did not, while berating them for their own compromises and complexities."

I love that Kathryn Schulz called the piece "Pond Scum."

Pizza and a Seal

"What I really learned from being a Navy SEAL," he said, "was to be humble, and confidence."

Uh-huh, I thought. Which is why you just showed me a video of you jumping out of airplane. Why you prefaced the comment on your humility with "I didn't just learn to kill people, or to make kill shots with sniper rifles from miles away." You said and did these things because you're obviously humble. You're so incredibly confident that the only reason we're having this conversation is because you wanted to act macho when I started talking to your girlfriend.

I could have said those things out loud. When you pretend to be a Navy SEAL, though, you might just fight a man ten years younger than you for daring to illuminate the truth. And though reality is on my side, an impervious head and fighting reflexes are not. So I kept my mouth shut and instead tried a different tactic: Sycophancy.

"Dope. I'm gonna go eat that pizza."

Ah, the pizza. The reason I went over to his girlfriend and her friend in the first place. That Domino's crust had wafted into my nostrils from across the bar, and I had nothing to lose. I waltzed over there and my wish was granted: a steamy slice. Veggie, but whatever. I paid nothing. I almost thought I might pay with my face- a Navy SEAL boyfriend? This could get ugly.

Not with this guy. I doubted his credentials when he was my height but not noticeably athletic in any way. He came in so hot to talk to me when he noticed me saddle up to the ladies. I noticed that and immediately played friendly, over-the-top in my obsequiousness, and smoothed over the situation. When you're smart, play oblivious. Strangers don't know you're not really dumb. Simpletons gain leeway.

That leeway worked its way into more pizza. I called Jason over to Gary and me, when the women were gone, and said we each wanted another slice. Well, Gary had never had one to begin with and I don't think he truly wanted one, but I wanted two. Channa called Gary up to sing. Leaving me to be asked by Navy Sea Lion, "Who's Gary?"

"Uh, that's Gary."

"Yeah, but who's Gary?"

"He's that guy? Who you just met, Gary?"

"I mean, I've killed people." Ok, sure dude, really relevant to the conversation. "Who is Gary? What's he do, where's he from?"

"Well, he crushes it at karaoke." That's as far as I got. Mr. SEAL got fed up with my inability to put two and two together, I guess, and just let me have the whole box of pizza. Straight up.

Then he showed me the video of him jumping out of a plane, real Smoking Gun evidence of his war record, and we wind up at the beginning of the story. A small, aggressive man. And a smaller, more aggressive but only in the pursuit of pizza, me. What a strange night.

"The separation of the races is not a disease of the colored people, but a disease of the white people." -Albert Einstein

Poems XVI

Many a girl there were, there; But none of them were you.
I can sing "She's A Lady." I can sing "Delilah." And only in that order- 
Because of you.

I had no attached notions of grandeur
To see where we were going,
Whether bold, guarded, wickedly demure,
What was best in you was the unknowing.
Eila,
Though I said it wrong or spelled it poor,
Thy name held so much hope.
Either Fate could've been knocking at the door,
Blissful garden, or knotted rope.

And I didn't know! But
It's what I wanted to see,
But in the end you nixed us,
No love, no heartbreak, no
Sordid passions- for, soon,
The ocean shall be betwixt us.

Poems XV: Sonnets

WORD SONNET

Paradise

is

sitting

abeyant

in

a

new

friend’s

tent-

the

slapping

rain

plunging

down.

ITALIAN SONNET

I approach, rudderless, the darkened moor,

Where the crooked lighthouse normally sits,

Be there it may, but completely- unlit!

Yet I must set my course on her shore.

The coward caretaker trembled at the door,

The storm hammered in hellish, ghastly fits.

The mad tempest ran away with his wits,

His initiative drowned at the floor.

But hot winds have pushed the thunders away,

Brought new clouds that surrender to the moon,

Beautiful mistress! She dapples the bay-

Renders my damp night a glorious day-

Some cloud puffs are friends, some winds are a boon,

And fools full of fear should never hold sway.

SHAKESPEAREAN SONNET

I scoffed as I heard of love at first sight

Thinking it’d never happen to me-

I tried to reason with all of my might

Love with calculation, not fallacy.

But logic be damned, it’s every time,

Exponentially harder and faster.

It is reason I shun instead of rhyme,

My pupils dilated in disaster.

That’s what my brain claims, but maybe he’s wrong,

For although eyes see superficially,

The nose sniffs out hormones subtly strong,

Chemical love coming naturally.

I’ll let this infatuate garden grow!

Plant yellow Dutch tulips as Cyrano!

COURTLY LOVE

I.

I have a Platonic love, of a different sort-

My Pallas Aphrodite, Goddess full of wisdom and beauty both,

She is the ideal

The rest of us poor reflections

The only Form to Grace our Earth with unveiled presence

A shapeliness no circle can equal

Perilous to my sanity to behold the face of my abstract Everything

To marvel, quake in awe,

Wail and quiver at not having

Plato’s Athenian,

Come to us mortals in Troth.

No man can harness the sun or even stare too long ‘fore going blind

Blind as love

Part of perfection sits in me and raises me up,

Eudaemonic,

For even daring to dream of loving Forms of You.

II.

He who is not jealous can not love.

I am not jealous.

I am envious.

For I do not have.

I covet but do not covet love, which I hold in brightened, dark secret.

My passions invisible and obvious,

My Guinevere!

I am tired, tired of being ashamed,

For who I am is a lover.

A deep devoted fool,

Knight of motley and bells

That jingle for you, no errancy,

And herald a maddened gladdening heart.

I am more me because I don’t have you.

Poems XIV

"Page 113, January 2015"

A myelined-up Milky Way
Tendrils of dendrites lead galaxies away.
The dark matter of thoughts
Though they may be light, free or neuronic,

He thought to himself-
"We're just the electrons of a giant's brain."
A fifth-dimensional beast
As we have threes and twos and ones in our heads
The cycle ends sometime
Just as it began with a bang
It ends with a 5D suicide.
A self-inflicted gunshot
Because sheheit asked "what does it all mean?"
And didn't understand
That the universe'll never answer
Because in itself already had.

The search for meaning
       beautifully Incoherent as it struggles
               versus Inherency
                         Truth: subjective
                                  Also: meaning
        "But that's an objective fact."
His fists too heavy to lift
(His hands were made of ham):
High as all that loftiness,
A ha-ha heart beating a rhythm that seems unique
Until it searches the scope of infinity to find
Liberation in a speck and a number.

A Spoonful of Sugar

Makes not just medicine go down, but raw eggs as well. I have discovered that with a sprinkling of sugar on the top, I can down a raw egg in one gulp with no nose plugging, and no retching, and no bad aftertaste. The trick is to go one at a time, with a new shake of sugar each time. It's surprisingly easy and I'm very happy. Thank you Miss Poppins.

Accuracy

I've said this before, verbally to real people, but I'm going to set it in stone. Meaning the internet which could explode at any moment because who caches a random blog.

The glass is half-full if you have been filling the glass and stopped.
The glass is half-empty if you have been drinking the glass and stopped.

You might counter by saying that I have stumbled into a room with a glass at 50% capacity and have no way of knowing how it got to its current state.

However, to reach this state of 50% capacity the glass would have either had to be previously filled or emptied. The objective truth of how the glass reached this point exists regardless of my having witnessed it. There is an objective truth, it is just impossible for me to know.

No matter whether I was there or not, a thing happened. The universe started somehow. Will I ever know? No, because I wasn't there. But I can see its aftermath, i.e. me and everything around me, and know that some thing did occur at one point.