Filed under: poems | Tags: abandonment, Camus, death, fallenness, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Orpheus, philosophy, Portland, San José, the Columbia, The fall, the Willamette
The Columbia has abandoned us,
the Willamette, too; and the Guadalupe; and
San Jose. And Portland. We’re
abandoned into history. We’re run aground on
a little island,
but it isn’t really a little island — it’s
a sea monster.
Verily.
The sea monster doesn’t want to drink tea
with us; it doesn’t want
to play tennis. In fact the sea monster seems to have no
interest in anything about us, what we do or whatever happiness we’ve managed
to scrape together in this small insignificance we call existence.
In fact the sea monster seems to want us for
lunch. This sea
monster is life.
Heidegger said
we’ve been abandoned into the world.
We’ve fallen
into it.
Does this sound familiar?
We’re falling together.
I smell the concrete
who knows how far down.
“La chute” Camus called it. “The fall.”
I can’t even turn my head to look.
It
doesn’t matter.
You are here
and
it’s wonderful.
We were told the Northwest is a big foolish beast,
no sea monster: a Cerberus
for we sweet Orpheuses
to blanket with sound.
We’ll smile as we play
our lyres. We’ll sing in
harsh voices.
We’ll pluck the breath from each other’s chests
while there’s still breath left to draw.
We’ll live breathless.
Au bout de soufflé.
Is there concrete below?
Has the war started?
I don’t care.
I’m happiest when I’m with you.
You wrote in a little card,
“Coup dedans là. Tout sera OK.“
Hang in there. All will be OK.
Come sea monsters. Come Cerberus. Come fools.
Come fall.
Filed under: poems | Tags: books, capitalism, Cartesian dualism, Fahrenheit 451, Guy Montag, Laplace, mechanism, philosophy, positivism, psychiatry, psychology, Ray Bradbury, the ghost in the machine, vitalism
Lasting contributions of our fathers
to mankind:
iPods,
and high definition flatscreen
televisions;
Bluetooth headsets
and hybrid gas & electric
automobiles;
iPhone apps,
and dual-core computer
processors…
As if we would die
were our fingers to stop;
as if the world were
a list of tasks to be ticked
or a stack of papers
waiting to be filed.
As if to deny Descartes
we need replace the ghost
in the machine
with another machine
and the mind with
Faber’s silver needle
to guide us,
toward logic.
As if the darkling plain
were something inside us waiting
for the incinerator
of science to illuminate it;
as if the heart
is a void to be filled
like a display at a
grocery store.
As if poetry
were a danger
and safety just the staccato babble
of Mildred’s ‘family’ on Montag’s walls.
As if anyone
was home.
As if the house
wasn’t on fire.
As if Clara crying
was little more than a passing humor,
to be diagnosed
and fixed like
a bad internet connection.
As if it didn’t happen.
As if we don’t remember
anything at all.
Philosophy is an examination and attempt at understanding of the multitudinous aspects, characters, and realities of existence, and poetry is an expression of that which philosophy examines.
Filed under: poems | Tags: existentialism, mankind, philosophy, teleology, the Universe
The earth
is some glass bottle spinning
eternally in the cold and roiling waves
of the sea of the Universe.
Filed under: poems | Tags: philosophy, rain, Plato, isolation, unrestricted submarine warfare, the Dead Sea, confinement, shadows, Allegory of the Cave, freedom
We say
to be safe is to be kept from everything,
to lock ourselves within these walls
and listen to the rain drip in the gutters.
I know the dimensions of the cage of security well and
I know the sound of its lock.
But it isn’t
the sharp metallic noise you’d expect it to be;
it isn’t that familiar sound,
that meeting-sound, the child of fear and determination to be released
from fear;
it isn’t how we’ve been told it is;
it isn’t loud, it doesn’t echo out past the prison yard and into nothingness
and it isn’t precluded by the shouts of our jailers.
We know
it is silent,
and its clasp is silent,
its pins and tumblers are silent
and our jailers, too.
We walk in by choice,
and may hold hands with others as they enter, too,
all of us contented as cave dwellers;
we all watch as the bars slide closed,
shutter by like a Nickelodeon,
moving the world by us in frames
like the flicker of shadows.
Light haloes around
these metal bones as they draw
to a close and
we sit.
But we come and go as we please –
they have left the keys to our cells under our pillows,
as before, though
each time we are surprised to find them there.
I have spent many years this way,
as we all must,
and have marked my time in pencil and in pen,
but have not returned in some time -
there,
to know freedom,
to let its light fall on the wall of another’s cell,
to speak of how it may be obtained,
is death,
and any man who returns to his cage
with freedom’s secrets burning in his mind
will surely be set upon
by the others.
To simply sidestep our cell
when the time comes
would be our greatest accomplishment –
for if they discover
the salt of our buoyancy
they would sink us
as surely as German submarines would;
for even the boundaries and bars
of ocean, air, and earth
are preferable
to the tyranny of ourselves.
Filed under: poems | Tags: buildings, city streets, death, Einstein, graveyards, Heidegger, Hemingway, Kierkegaard, philosophy, traffic
What are we paying for?
There is traffic that halves
a man’s life,
that puts a boy in a vise.
There is convenience,
convenience stores of
storied convenience,
inconvenient continental breakfasts
in the lobbies of multi-storied antiseptic hotels.
Expensive motels.
Are we paying for the malls?
Those castles I never enter.
Are we paying for the highways?
That speed us toward the unnecessary,
or at least the nearest
gas station.
I would forfeit them.
I would roll the freeways up
like carpets,
and bury every road sign
in an unmarked grave.
A man on a bicycle kicks
over signs
pointing
to an open house
just over there…
Clap. Clap. Clap.
Every one along the avenue.
Are we paying for the mattress stores?
Are we paying for the car dealerships?
Are we paying
principle
and interest
for these hills like white elephants?
Are we paying for fast food
at every block?
Who gave these things to us?
I can only say
I see Einstein
on the back of a green chair.
Are we paying
for the office buildings
that sit unoccupied?
Or incomplete?
A block’s worth
of gray Swiss cheese
cultured in the sun.
Are we paying for the steel beams
that hold up their heavy backs?
For the concrete that
shuts them off from the world.
Stay a while and listen.
Are we paying for these houses?
Graveyards have more life in them.
Slick city streets seek revenge
for our evils.
We who once laid down the roads
will be laid into our graves by them.
For what are the streets
but the culmination of our travels?
When we may fly a thousand miles
and yet find ourselves home?
We may scream down freeways
and busy boulevards
under overpasses
and over bridges formed like stony
interlaced and arched hands
and see nothing.
Are we living to hurtle ourselves
toward death?
We may drive to escape and to forget,
but the roads are clovers,
curves that inevitably resend us
to the center.
Are we living to die
beneath a metal door,
under the feet of trembling others
looking for a deal to validate
their day?
The cities have killed more than they’ve ever saved.
Filed under: poems | Tags: absurdities, Cambodia, drinking, Everything, Nietzsche, philosophy, war
Everything takes on
a wistful luster
when I’ve been drinking,
as though I’m not watching
the present
but a gay past
be born.
I say to my love,
“This is what I imagine
when I imagine life in Cambodia.”
We are working;
she is painting and I am attempting
to confound myself with Nietzsche.
Everything stinks with this luster.
It’s like watching my life
unfold before my very eyes.
I am sinking.
“This is war, you know,”
I am saying.
“This is nonsense,”
she is.
I can see
everything within the context of my existence
and suddenly everything
is transformed by the light
of its proximity and
its innocence.
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.
