This poem makes me think of coming back late from a party and discovering that the phone has been off the hook for a least half the day. Those of of us with nerves even the sniffling drivel of bad poets at sparsely attended open readings cannot rattle know the anxiety of the phone off the hook, the screaming, whining, whirling sirens of hell filling an empty room from shag carpet to cob webbed ceiling corner, satanic variations within the monochromatic scale, bristling fingers on a blackboard amplified with Glen Branca's Fender Twin Reverb, a sonic variety of nerve gas that is nothing less than the hungry ID demanding more pie, or that you bake one right now if no slices remain.
This is sound intended to kill appetites and interest in community affairs; all one needs are books from which to paraphrase metaphors and contextualize the evidence of one's life until there are only footnotes and marginalia where a pulse used to be. There is the scraping of fingertips across a page of paper irritating to the touch, there is a click, a rattle in one's throat as instinct commands you to say something to void the emptiness, but there is only phlegm, a congealed incoherence suitable for a celebrity wedding.
This poem is a compost heap of vowels and their modifiers that was left in back of the garage in the wan hope that they'd be rich with meaning by the time spring air altered the way clouds form on the morning and evening horizons. Often enough we write things down so we would have ad libs and occasional poems to utter when the plumbing groans and the siren rhyme of the cold water streaming to tub and basin obscures the pleasant voice of a lover you remember through the concrete of missing minutes in the day.It is a series of disjointed gestures only a keyboard and monitor could create ; the screen fills up with words quickly as would a glass held under a drooling spigot. There is little to savor in the nonsequitors that abound, as each sentence doesn't end but rather just changes its mind; these stanzas have short attention spans, the music is the grinding of a mind taxing itself until each Hollywood Ending that didn't come your way regardless of prayers and demands to powerful resources becomes blurs and then dissolve, like frames of cheap film stock on an over heated camera.
This poem fails in ways far too ugly to bring into mixed company. This poem is like that noise, a constant string of phrases that are a constant noise textured with static and prickly heat. I would prefer to listen to someone continually busting open the Velcro fly on their old Members Only jacket. I imagine the being someone who would find placing his thumb on an old record turntable to be great fun, a reminder to himself and a warning to the world that entropy trumps ambition, needless ejaculations of fear and panic beat a massage and after dinner sex. The poem is finally about itself, not who ever he might have been addressing in whatever simulation of a life there is on the other side of his apartment door; we cannot, of course, escape the prison house of language, but there is a point where self reflexivity is merely a dodge, a distraction that we have yet another poet who is tone deaf to the art of collage, cannot construct an ear worthy pastiche, is unwilling to abandon the disguises and borrowed phonics and consider his future as an author of writing with uneven line breaks.
This poem is the test pattern staring at you after you come out of a black out. The national anthem has been played and the stadium is empty, like this poem.
Friday, March 2, 2012
A pointless encounter with Davy Jones
I met Davy Jones and Micky Dolnez during the 70s in the men's room of the main stage area of the Sacramento State Fair, where they were performing as the Monkees with their songwriters Boyce and Hart. I noticed Dolnez teasing his Fro in the mirror while Davy Jones washed his hands. I went up to Jones and grabbed his damp hand and shook , telling him it was great to see them together again. I was schmoozing of course, thinking it more appropriate to lie to a minor celebrity rather than remind him that he was years beyond his prime.
"Yeah," said Jones in a dazed monotone, "it's really great to be back together".
He looked like he was waiting for a firing squad to arrive. Dolnez finished fluffing his frantic billowing bouffant and walked up to Jones. He looked like someone who'd been handed a note written in a language he couldn't read. He was in a hurry. He and Jones had to get out of there.
Thursday, March 1, 2012
ANDREW BREITBART
My condolences go out to late conservative agitator Andrew
Breitbart’s family and friends for their
loss, but he was, in truth, a hyped up and generally unlikeable sociopath who
had enough media savvy to know how to make a living and keep his name in the papers
by being a vindictive and ugly little troll. It was show biz with him, not
politics, and what he did was a shtick that was no more elevated than what
we've seen for decades in professional wrestling: he was willingly,
purposefully being the Villain, the Man You Love to Hate. He was ruthless in
making already repulsive Conservative talking points even uglier, and no amount
of righteous indignation coming his way could slow him down. I go with what Lawrence O'Donnell said last
night in that the private Breitbart and the public Breitbart were two different
things. According to him , and others who recalled their friendships with the
deceased, AB was someone who got "into character" when the cameras
were on him.There is , however, evil in the world; doing what he did in the
media regarding public policy , turning it into a carnival, was an evil thing
to do.His biggest asset was his lack of the capacity to be embarrassed or feel
shame. Him dying so young is, in itself, a tragic event, but the loss of him
his presence robs us of nothing . His death only reminds the rest of us that
we've allowed our political discussion to be reduced to a geek show.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Essays I Haven't Written
Poetry is about saying it as it seems. Saying it "like
it is" assumes the Romantic trap of thinking that the final state of
things can be deigned by the poet’s sense of what cannot be accurately or
concisely phrased. The permanent significance some poets attempt to capture is
an illusion: word meanings change, cultural habits change, reading habits
change, world views change, the meanings of what was formally thought to be a
settled affair changes as well. Or rather our attitudes change to the subject
changes. The object is inert, bereft of meaning. The poet, attempting a verse
that reaches years , decades beyond it's time, is better served getting his her
own properly and artfully qualified perception of events and ideas right. One
might not trust met narratives anymore, but brilliant individual responses are
always illuminating.
__________________
__________________
Barry Alfonso, noted essayist and Traveling Man, had this to say in a note regarding the manufacturing of Hip Consensus:
It seems to me that the heyday of rock criticism almost
precisely followed the arc of the counter culture of the late ‘60s/early ‘70s,
when the exalted arrogance of The Young (or at least the “hip” segment of it)
believed in a unified code of ideals and ethics, built around misty notions of
revolution, self-liberation and hirsute hedonism. There was a cleanly-drawn
line between Cool and Uncool in those days and the leading rock critics of the
time fell in line with the prevailing ethos. The rise of the underground press
rewarded the music scribes with small change, psychic cachet and innumerable
promo albums, creating an ambiguous symbiotic relationship with a music
business that didn’t want to change the world so much as make lots and lots of
$$$. It became something of a Ponzi scheme of the collective mind, crashing
somewhere between the rise of Jimmy Carter and the fall of disco. The rhetoric of
Marsh, Nelson, etc. did get seriously inflated and hyperbolic, straining to
pump up a few hirsute entertainers into the reincarnations of Byron and Keats.
The work of too many of these critics seems myopic, jejune and often
pretentious by current standards, the detritus of a time when the economy was
booming and youngsters could afford to imagine something as unsustainable as a
Woodstock Nation. Still, there are moments of colorful, cogent writing to be
found as well. The golden era of rock criticism was more than a make-work
project or a sustained act of wankery – in fact, I think the first Rolling
Stone Record Review anthology is just as good a read as your typical WPA Guide.
________________________
I’d agree that Costello has
spread himself too thin in his efforts to become the most versatile rock
songwriter of his generation, but what has diluted his later work isn’t variety
so much as ambition. His work was already diverse in the styles it
employed—Motown, gospel, Brill building power-sob-ballading, folk traditions,
guitar-centered rock power chording, effortlessly melodic and melancholy
ballads—a habit gained from his other principle influence, the Beatles, and as
the wide swath of approaches has given him to write an amazingly solid set of
poetic/obscure/ brilliantly hard nosed lyrics that could accommodate several
themes and subterranean intellection in
the space of a compelling song. Doubtless the dips, curves and marvelously
detailed turns of the songs forced him to work a mite harder with a lyric. Some
of it was, of course, a grueling strangeness that was more alienating than
alienated, but the records he produced from My
Aim is True through Imperial Bedroom
were overall a dazzling array of stanzas and catchy choruses that would seduce
the sensibility in a masterful variety of styles. Costello, though, is a pop
songwriter for all the subtlety his music contains, and he been seduced by the
notion that he should be an artiste— as the pieces got longer, the styles taken
from a broader sample, the variety more dress-up make believe than convinced of
its own primacy, the good man reveals himself a talented musician in a hurry
for a more impressive reputation. What I think Dylan would have benefited from
is the sort of range the earlier work of Costello shared; his lyrics would have
been sharper more often.
_______________________________
_______________________________
Most popular music is theme
songs for losers and their moron cousins, dreamers. Dreamers just haven't yet
received the memo. Who would listen to it if it were a winner's game. A room
full of Bud Collier clones in Groucho glasses.
___________________________
___________________________
The basic flaw in the auteur theory is that it preferred
hero worship over art, which was a convenient way to overlook the wooden set
ups otherwise hack directors presented audiences. There was the misconception
that just because someone would film situations similar from film to film , it
constituted an aesthetic and constituted a style; some were artful in their
familiar scenes and scenarios, but far more were merely fashioning a way to
work quick and under budget.
Friday, February 24, 2012
Vowel Movement
“Movement”, a poem by Wyn Cooper, is that frustrating species of a poem that starts off well enough, full of promise and intrigue, that chokes to a close. It begins as a smooth ride with effortless transitions between speeds suddenly becomes a lurching, jerking collapse. We are to make note of all the movement that occurs in this narrative, the countryside the narrator speaks of to his unknown companion. The tone is nostalgic, the recounting of annoyances fondly recalled. But time goes on, life advances from one neighborhood to another, one terrain for another completely unlike it. One moves and attempts to be quickly assimilated by something more urban, bustling, impatient, impolite, a city that the narrator doesn't want to discuss, not for long.
This is the pun contained in the title, an obvious ploy from the get-go; the irony, I suppose, would be that the weather, the relative stillness, the lack urgency in the bucolic ruins of fading America are not, in fact, cursed with inertia, as the speaker addresses the particulars with telling, nearly idealized detail. An implied sigh accompanies the pause between first and second stanza; this is the part of the conversation where the speaker is lost in thought and averts his eyes, falls into a melancholy that dares him to speak what he is not able to find words for. The poem goes from being fairly specific to vague and euphemistic. The effect is spoiled by Wyn Cooper's need, to sum up, the inchoate morass seething under the surface of these well-mannered images;
"...before wesettled in a city of other movements,found new rhythms that suit us better,we tell ourselves over and over. "
The poem is a nice if other unremarkable presentation of the low-level anxiety that haunts the suburbia of John Cheever, who was a master short story writer and novelist who explored a generation of the white middle class that had to distract themselves with drugs, adultery, and workaholism. The aim of those who lived in Cheever's New York's outer communities was a continual effort to dull a collective suspicion that the lifestyle and manicured neighborhoods they chose for themselves are lifeless results of preferring Bad Faith over singular authenticity. Cheever, though, was much subtler and more lyrical as he wrote of his characters attempts to fill an emptiness that will not be healed. Cooper had some more writing to do to make this idea work; the poem just quits suddenly and the screen one imagines this monologue being played against goes blank. The last sentence reveals an unwillingness to see this thing through. The poet is unsure how he wants to talk about this string of related icons.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Nolan Finley is a big fat meanie
Nolan Finley is editorial page editor for my home town newspaper, The Detroit News, and he writes an opinion column that reflects the terse bluntness of someone who does not give a righteous rat's ass about the welfare of others. He is a seriously constipated White Guy who prefers his anger to facts, compassion. His Bible, it seems, are the numbers appearing the Bottom Line. Today he equates "Obamacare" with an historically unprecedented attack on the rights and liberties of American citizens. He only seems content when is in a foaming lather.
Finley seems to think that the capacity of the American people to contract catastrophic diseases with no medical resources is a Constitutional right and that Obama is being a bully in seeking to make sure that the great number of the uninsured have coverage they can afford. This upsets Finley no end and writes himself into a perfectly illogical snit: what's really being argued for here isn't anything like Liberty, Freedom or Individual Rights, but rather a thinly disguised rant for the sick, the injured, the poor and the homeless to die off faster than they already are. This is just mean, in plain fact, the reactionary , paranoid ravings of someone who is afraid that he is going to have his toys taken away. Rather than discuss what needs to be done about health care, Finley drapes himself in the flag and red-baits the issue. That is cowardly, it is cheap, it is disgusting and self centered.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Pound Cake
While discussing the aching , seemingly inexpressible pain and confusion that profound states of love and infatuation can create within a soul, poet Robert Pinsky brings up the touchy subject of Ezra Pound. Pinsky, to be sure, qualifies his praise for the late bard appropriately, stating emphatically that his treasonous broadcasts against the American war effort in WW2 and his racial theories are gross perversions. One had to concede his gift, though, the ear he had, his seemingly flawless ability to join t high falutin' , archaic and colloquial language into a new poetry that could touch the deepest , most inaccessible cords within the human soul.
This is Pinsky's belief, and he makes a good argument, but I don't hear the same music he does. I willI concede , though, that Pound was Modernism's premiere talent scout;
problematic as T.S.Eliot's own anti-scepticism and conservatism are, his genius
as a poet and critic make him Pound's principle gift to 20th century culture.
Otherwise, I find Pound's own work, in large parts, to be an unsatisfying ,
lumpy mash up of styles, ideas and techniques that are finally doomed, despite
bits of real brilliance, to a nostalgic ambivalence preventing his work from
truly catching fire, as the work of Eliot, Blake and Yeats had done.
There is,
too often, a sage tone that is emulation, constructed, not actually inspired,
created perhaps in ironic parody of the older forms Pound sought to separate
modern poetry from. The effect, though, is that he seems tethered to the past,
as he spent a lifetime trying to create something of equal genius on the terms
of past masters. This , I think, contributes to the blow hard I hear in is
writing, a smart man , not a brilliant one, who cannot distinguish between his
good ideas and his bad ones.
Eddie Van Halen Shreds
Sunday, February 12, 2012
A goddamned shame
To be sure, after the shock of Whitney Houston's death wanes a bit and we can again feel the chill in the air and the heat emanating from the desk lamp, a professional sourpuss or two will attempt a cultural post-mortem on the event, excoriating media commentaries and fan reaction alike for reducing the singer's abrupt finale as "a tragedy" and "a shame" or ". There but for the grace of God go I..." The upshot of the objection will be that the gadfly (or two) loathes clichés and platitudes and that it's pathetic all we can do is mutter "ain't it a shame”, tsk-tsking instead of DOING SOMETHING!! Fuck those guys.
The irrefutable fact is that Houston's death is a shame and it is a tragedy. Let's be more emphatic: it's a goddamned shame and a goddamned tragedy. There is nothing else you can call the early death, brought on, no doubt, by a long-term addiction to crack cocaine and other chronic party favors, of someone as gifted as the suddenly deceased Whitney Houston. Hers was a voice that was, when all is said and the note cards are shuffled and rubber banded together, an instrument that was singular in her heyday, a voice that remains singular years after that day has passed, and will likely be one of those voices fans, old and new, and writers will refer to in glowing terms no less than what's happened to Frank Sinatra's reputation as a vocalist. Sinatra was a punk and a sociopath much of his life, but his voice and his songs made the stream of personal offenses forgivable ; Whitney was a train wreck for years who couldn't hide the effects of a drug habit, but her voice and her material will be enough, I suspect, for the lot of us to turn up the volume on her tunes when they play. Everything else that happened will be as if nothing happened at all.
The best one can do is hope that her talent, amply represented on her albums and hits, will outlive the infamy of her last decade or so, a time of stupid, inane, inexplicably moronic behavior driven by drugs, a period where the brilliant and beautiful Whitney was turned one of the least appealing people to make the gossip programs; she became less appealing than chewed pizza crust. Her death is a shame and the horror of it all is that there is NOTHING ANYONE CAN DO ABOUT IT! Those who obsessed with celebrity culture and those obsessed with grousing the masses lack of more profound reaction have the momentary wish that they, whoever "they" happen to be, should pass laws against these terrible things, that being brilliant people dying "before their time”, and the banality of the collective opinion about celebrities that unbelievably few of us have met, let alone know anything about besides what's allowed on a press release.
My wish would be for us to turn off our television and computers for a day and instead take a walk along the beach, with a book, a pair of sunglasses, a nice box lunch, grateful that this day, this hour, this minute that we are alive with the full of our senses are working just fine, that we are engaged with a world that is phenomenal even without the metaphors we try to assign it, that we are not this day, this hour, this minute dropping dead from whatever is waiting for us and which we'll meet eventually, date and time undisclosed.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
The shiny lights of the season
It was a room full of things like broken radios, wood furniture, rusted patio chairs, paintings of paper boats on Central Park ponds, newspaper stacks and boxes full of cleaning supplies and parts of battered reed instruments. It was a room full of thing she was interested in, as the years that have gathered behind her took with them a large share of the sum of her interests in the life she passed through as though she were a mist settling on the hours and minutes in the lives of other people. She looked out the window at the neighborhood that sprawled street by street , perfect blocks of homes, drive ways and detached garages, each doubtlessly hiding mute dramas behind the line of trash cans and compost heaps. This is where all the bottles are buried, she thought, this is where he daughter learned about boys and the zip less seduction, this is where her husband gave her secret names under supermarket signs, this is where decals with insane eyes gave the corroding silver trim of American cars a signal that age comes to any set of machines and animal limbs, that things pile up and become nothing at all when memory flickers or is distracted by strings of fire crackers or the shiny lights of the season
Leonard Cohen’s Old Ideas, and the genius of his lyrics. - Slate Magazine
Leonard Cohen’s Old Ideas, and the genius of his lyrics. - Slate Magazine:
Jan Swafford essentially argues in her Slate article that Leonard Cohen is a better lyricist than Bob Dylan, or anyone else for that matter who has bothered to compose rhyme to melody. A broad premise , typical for Slate and internet magazines where deadlines often drive good argument. Still, the story has a point I think Swafford tip toes around; Bob Dylan is, in essence and in fact, a song lyricist who has a particularly strong gift for the poetic effect, while Cohen is a poet in the most coherent sense; he had published several volumes of poetry and published two novels prior to his taking up the guitar. Dylan's style is definitely the definition of the postmodern jam session, a splendid mash up of Little Richard, Hank Williams, Chuck Berry and a long line of obscure or anonymous folk singers who's music he heard and absorbed. His lyrics, however arcane and tempered with Surreal and Symbolist trappings--although the trappings , in themselves, were frequently artful and inspired--he labored to the pulse of the chord progression, the tight couplets, the strict obedience to a rock and roll beat. This is the particular reason he is so much more quotable than Cohen has turned out to be; the songwriter's instinct is to get your attention and keep it and to have you humming the refrain and singing the chorus as you walk away from the music player to attend to other task. Chances are that you are likely to continue humming along with the music while you work, on your break, on the drive home, for the remains of the day. This is not to insist that Cohen is not quotable or of equal worth--I am in agreement that Cohen , in general, is the superior writer to Dylan, and is more expert at presenting a persona that is believably engaged with the heartaches, pains and dread-festooned pleasures his songs take place. His lyrics are more measured, balanced, less exclamatory and time wasting, and exhibit a superior sense of irony. Cohen is the literary figure, the genuine article, who comes to songwriting with both his limitations and his considerable gifts. All is to say that Dylan has Tin Pan Alley throwing a large shadow over his work. Cohen, in turn, is next to a very large bottle of ink and a quill.
'via Blog this'
'via Blog this'
Friday, February 10, 2012
Chair
I was
told to have a seat while the managers finished their discussion in the other
room, but I looked hard and long at the chair they offered me, a kitchen chair
with a vinyl covered cushion that was tan colored and creased in an inept
machine tooled method to make the surface appear like leather. The lights in
the room dimmed somewhat and it seemed as if the entire floor of the building
had become one large elevator car; I could feel myself sinking to the depths
below the stomach to where nausea was a brew always waiting at the table you
walked away from in a hope that you could learn new ways to slake a thirst. You
return to where you were continually ill, you return to the place where disasters
occur like the arrival of mail and small teeming insect colonies when the
weather gets warmer. Strange how I got tired of a life that made made sense
without explanation, a life where every decision was followed by appropriate
response , with the results being an equilibrium not unlike a placid like
dreamed of in a passing Idyll, smooth surface, calm waters, perfectly diffused
sunlight . I got tired of that and wanted to lurk around the basement again, to
wallow among the empty boxes and bottles behind the figurative water heater;
life should be a series of pipes that leaked contentedly. So here I was, on the
third floor staring at a kitchen chair's cheap vinyl covering, waiting for the
managers to finish their discussion in the other room.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
There
There is nothing else to do. All you get in return is a bag full of candy wrappers and wads of chewing gum scraped from under school desks. Neither one of us thought of saying a prayer should the elevator cord snap suddenly and send us to a horrible, flattening death, but there we were anyway, staring forward at the doors, waiting fro them to open to a floor that resembled the one we just left, exactly the same but three floors closer to the parking lot.
Red Pennies
There's nothing but red pennies on the table top, tarnished copper coins that have travelled the length of the city with once being drawn out by fumbling fingers seeking bus fare, or that last two pennies offered in a purchase to round out the change to some even, coin-less denomination.
She spreads the coins over the table with the palm of a hand and relishes the feel of industrial metal.
The aroma of the pennies reaches her nose, she can almost taste the bitterness from when she was three, always putting money in her mouth that her parents might have dumped on dresser drawers, empty ashtrays on living room coffee tables, lost between any plush cushion that have a
Her cat, Emile, who is hungry and demands with stares to be fed. She smiles. Enough here for half a newspaper, she thinks, or a single bite from a peanut butter sandwich. She pets her cat, the phone rings.
"
"
A higher power with no sense of irony
I heard during a lecture that Thomas Pynchon had written
somewhere that God is the original conspiracy theory; I haven't found the
source of the quote, but the saying appears in many places around the Internet,
and it seems that the sentiment has resonated loudly with quite a few. Whether
there is an all powerful Deity really isn't the topic of the following poem,
originating, rather, from a frustration of a good number of folks to invoke his
name when the conversation, in print, on a monitor, or in person, touches on
the intangible, the unanswerable, the unknowable.
It's a mystery, it's god's will, it's part of a plan not revealed to us--all these, in variations both subtle and dumb, emerge when the chasm yawns before the assembled.The stark differences in God's persona between Old and New Testaments had changed his mind as to what to do with the world he created, and it's reasonable to think of him as a Deity who is constantly changing, evolving. Otherwise we'd have a God who is static and incapable of changing; he'd be someone who'd be incapable of dealing with an continually unfolding cosmos which he put in motion in the first place. The Prime Mover, I'd think, must by definition be able to move again, and yet again, as needed , as his vast mind assesses, discerns and decides. But iti may be a mistake to think of God as omnipotent ; if we are made in his likeness then our weaknesses are his as well, and this gives a vital clue that God is less than all-powerful and that he doesn't know the outcome of each and every matter before him. It's an attractive notion that God remains teachable by the very things he creates.
It's a mystery, it's god's will, it's part of a plan not revealed to us--all these, in variations both subtle and dumb, emerge when the chasm yawns before the assembled.The stark differences in God's persona between Old and New Testaments had changed his mind as to what to do with the world he created, and it's reasonable to think of him as a Deity who is constantly changing, evolving. Otherwise we'd have a God who is static and incapable of changing; he'd be someone who'd be incapable of dealing with an continually unfolding cosmos which he put in motion in the first place. The Prime Mover, I'd think, must by definition be able to move again, and yet again, as needed , as his vast mind assesses, discerns and decides. But iti may be a mistake to think of God as omnipotent ; if we are made in his likeness then our weaknesses are his as well, and this gives a vital clue that God is less than all-powerful and that he doesn't know the outcome of each and every matter before him. It's an attractive notion that God remains teachable by the very things he creates.
I understand the reluctance venture forth into things where
there is nothing concrete and all else is supposition--it would be a tacit
admission that our daily lives are guided by habits of behavior not directed by
natural, embedded imperatives and mandates from heaven, but are rather
instinctual/species behavior which we conveniently decorate with a language
capable of turning our thoughts into fine arts, culture and technology. Ours
would seem to be a species with an alphabet, nothing more, a variation from the
gene pool which, in the meantime, could be developing an even more intriguing
species to supplant our loud presence on the planet. who wants to think that
they are merely passing through , merely in line on the evolutionary chain of
happenstance? Invoking god's name would be the fastest way to block out the
sun.There's a reason that it's written that God blessed/cursed man with Free
Will; I actually believe that FW is central to his Divinity, in the
sense that he could choose to battle his creative power and simply do
nothing. The existential nature of God, though, would become bored and
ill-tempered simply existing in a vacuum, and so he decided to create
meaning for himself, much as we do in this realm. Free will is that
thing that allows us to associate together and determine and define
right and wrong, good and evil, and it is also that inspire given
instinct, I believe, to empower us to fight the baser desires and
instincts.
Ah well. I say that we have the capacity to think and may as
well do so, chasing every loose thread and inconsistency we happen upon. We
can't just call the problems of existence acts of Providence and leave it at
there. Thinking, discussion, analysis, poking at eternal mysteries are the Acts
of Providence each us are the recipient of. To lie down is to deny a miracle,
and that can't be good for anyone. .
How God Created The WorldNo god I know
waits for a chat
as he waits
in a garden ripe
with words that
are first in line.There is no garden
until he desires fruit
rich in the taste
of particular soils,
there will be no desire
until he creates hunger
and the need to sit down,
there will be no table or chair
to put anything
that belongs on them
until he contrives the
things that go there
and makes it all look
like they've been present
for the ages.There will be no ages
unless he makes things
with tongues, mouths,
tastes of all sorts,
something alive
with a memory of what's good
in this life they discovered along
the way as they experimented
with ways to talk to a god
who seems so busy
thinking things through,
he realizes
nothing will age
unless there are creatures
that die.
The god I know
thinks of big words
and broad strokes,
he's been asleep
since the beginning
time, which he invented,
he will wake up
and create, I think,
the cell phone, on a lark,
and will notice
at once
that his voice mail is full.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
-
here