Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: anachronism, Dante, Heidegger, Michelangelo, Nietzsche, philosophy, Rainer Maria Rilke, Socrates, Stoicism, the Crusades, water
In the face of great art,
I am mute.
I could not stand before the statue of David,
could not say,
“You must change your life.”
I have not transcended this Being,
the petty existence we woke with
and wake with every morning.
Though nor am I a Stoic.
I have not accepted this state,
could not accept it;
I won’t float downstream
in the face of this bloody river.
I am not the type to establish
some Kingdom in the Desert,
nor some City of Dis.
In the face of everything I’ll fly,
until I am picked from the world’s
Teeth.
A horse can’t see its own behind.
The gadfly’s best work is done while the great beast
watches only the path ahead.
If I am an arrow,
I await my bow.
Until then,
I will remain in my quiver,
and show the others
what rotten wood they’re made of.
Filed under: poems | Tags: anachronism, hats, modern man, paranoia, prostitution, solipsism, television
Milady,
dost thou think me a donner
of old hats?
A spinner of ancient tales?
I am not as anachronistic
as all that;
I am a modern man,
with modern tastes:
I like my days filled
with paranoia,
delusions of grandeur,
like any other man
or megalomaniac of
today’s world.
The TV has taught me,
just as well as it has taught
others,
that if I believe strongly enough
that I am the center of the universe
then cameras will follow;
I have learned much about new
ways of living
with existentialism
or the side effects
of psychiatric medication.
And what I don’t know,
you can teach me –
I am not so old a dog yet
that I can’t a few new tricks learn,
or, for that matter,
turn.
Filed under: poems | Tags: airplanes, AJB, anachronism, books, cliffs, films, God, His pipesmoke, my mother, the ocean, the Old Testament, the stars, the sun, Thomas Pynchon, traffic, trees
I can depend on my mother’s charity
and the stupidity of mankind…
Relying on the tides to rise and recede
and the birds to chirp
and the squirrels to nibble noisily on things
sitting in the branches of some tree
is infrequently rewarded with the opposite.
Even counting on the improbable
to occur
is safest, sometimes;
and most things tried are true;
and most lying words do
nothing but strike at reality’s flint
in futility and are doused by their own
unshakable impossibility.
Traffic will always mean dominoes of flaring taillights,
muttered curses and blaring horns
like kites of weathered strings and polymers
that carry the fumes and the din
and any doubts as to Man’s lot
up into the maw of the sky,
to float alongside God’s pipesmoke
and be returned to the earth
by great silver birds
that can be expected to land
but never on time.
These are things I can predict;
causes and effects with no affection
for quantum physics.
The short straw will always poke its head out above the others for us.
First breaths shall have their last breaths,
and good things their ends,
and millions of tiny absurdities shall assert their common nature
and shall certainly nibble noisily on certainties
dangling from our ears like great silver talismans
that can be expected to land at our feet
but only when least expected to.
I know that footsteps
can only lead to a corpse or a cliff
if they are followed to their good ends,
and I can tell you that if a screaming comes across the sky
it’s unlikely we’ll hear the sound when its great silver tip parts our skulls
like the Red Sea.
These are things I can safely predict
because I have read about them in books,
because I have watched them,
because I have induced them into forming patterns,
and made them into sensible accounts, and dependable things,
kites on strings
and great silver wings
and the years of a tree
spelled out in rings
and plain on the face of a tenth-generation squirrel
nibbling noisily on some things he stole off the abacus
I use to count off the animals I’ve seen on the backs of clouds,
the probabilities,
things I expect that never arrive on time,
the good endings of movies, the cliffhangers,
all our short straws,
all the patterns picked out from amongst storms of uncertainties,
and all the things I hate but know to be true.
And I count here on these fingers what I’m sure of:
the sun,
the stars,
and you.
