Getting lost at the carnival involved disregard for authority. I’d gone there with my seedy, antisocial high school pals. In the haunted house ride I leapt from the car and hid behind a Frankenstein’s monster. As I fought to keep upright what with the cables around my feet I saw how capitalism creates fetish-commodified screams with pasteboard and volts.
**
Boston never looked more brilliant: aloof, magisterial and vaguely hostile—which is to say it looked like itself.
**
I have to hurry
Rain in the mind is coming
Windows are open—
A field of flowers
Is waving
This man
Misshapen
Inside the dusk
Is waiting
When he should be running
He’s going to flower into song
**
The old heart
With its black napkin
Waving in my chest
The bus passes the funeral home
Tonight I’m half soul, half body
I must be doing something right
**
“But there is another, deeper reason why even atheist inhabitants of the postmodern world must take account of Milton’s ideas. To return to a point made in the Introduction, our world is ruled by a force that everyone now recognizes as supernatural: money. Having finally abandoned its material manifestations, money appears only in symbolic form and truly exists only within the mind. What we get from Milton is an understanding of that force and, even more vitally, a comprehensive explanation of why the particular, peculiar way in which money behaves today is evil.”
Excerpt From: David Hawkes. “John Milton.” Apple Books.
**
What is a family after all but a stand of trees in an open field?
**
But there’s much more to think about.
Dancing for instance.
**
“In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a fifteen-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.”
Excerpt From: “Bullshit Jobs.” Apple Books.
**
Buddha said: “Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant with the weak and wrong. Sometime in your life, you will have been all of these.”
**
I once translated a poem from Finnish which contained the lines: “sometimes I see a child/ see in him what I was like/and I want to say I’m sorry.”
**
A friend wrote…
He didn’t sleep
Not even in the dark.
He walked in leaves
Lay down
Beneath the moon
He thought he’d catch a nap
But in America
it was
A bad time
So he gathered straw
For sleeplessness
Made himself
A poet nest
While the wars
Went on and on.
**
“Such terrible coughing, as if someone was breathing live birds.”
—Paavo Haavikko
**
No one can describe the happiness of others. We’re like dogs barking at hieroglyphs when we talk about emotion.
Christ I spent years studying poetry and I know its all a dream, this business of inter-personal comprehension. I hardly know myself. About my life I recognize only a few bare details.
**
This morning
I shake the green leaves down
For I’ve nowhere to go
Autumn already
**
“The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger.”
Excerpt From: “Bullshit Jobs.” Apple Books.
**
Poetry isn’t a bullshit job once you inure yourself to building and maintaining your own invisible steamboat.
**
I’m walking home after a night of carousing. I’m 25, heartily youthful, so in love with the world my lips twitch, and in the coming years I’ll often talk to myself.
“You’re horse is beautiful,” I say to a cop, peering upward in rosy air. The horse is very tall and the man is tall and they are far above in emerging light.
Planet of the Blind 