Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University

Rain, Early and Late

Before I was a sentient being I was the sentient rain. I won’t kid you: the intelligence of water falling is the pearl of consciousness and there’s no proper wording for this. You can go ahead and talk to yourself: whisper "Hermes Trismegistus" under your breath, throw Latin around—"spiritus mundi" or "illud tempus" (your lips moving as you push the grocery cart past a display of household cleansers). You can be assured that the man behind you with the cart filled with charcoal and lighter fluid is not aware of your misfit mysticism in aisle five at Sam’s Club.

I was the sentient rain and then the sentient stone and today I will carry home the ashes of our beloved black Labrador Roscoe and I will place them beside the ashes of my guide dog Corky and the ashes of my wife Connie’s beloved dog Tasha and I will share, privately, lips moving, some shy, unadulterated heart to heart doggy gibberish with my friends who are falling forever through the pearl of consciousness impelled by the forces of love.

The spindrift syllables of rain are in the ashes and flesh. Try to get out of that. The unconscious and the carbon molecule are all the same. Try to get out of that? It can’t be done.

S.K.

The Party's Over

My father used to say that the trouble with the Republican party was its generalized contempt for the labor movement. He was not original with this but today, thinking of him and of the current flap over George W. Bush’s characterization that recent economic problems in the U.S. occurred because "Wall Street got drunk", I’m mindful of how intellectually bankrupt the G.O.P. has become. Now that there’s no labor movement to kick around, and now that the middle class has been damaged beyond recognition, now that most of the wealth has been sucked out of the republic by the top 3 per cent of the nation’s wealthiest citizens, now that this money has been transferred to Dubai or the Caymen Islands, well, it’s clear to me that the final insult to America is that the plutocrats will trivialize the entire collapse of the financial infrastructure of the middle class. I’m glad my father isn’t alive to see this. I really am. Wall Street got drunk and now it’s having a hangover. What a simpering, cynical ass you are, Mr. President!

S.K.

Contemporary Valhalla, Part Two

You are a coward but Lo! You’re "in" among heroes

In this afterlife

With no signs of poverty.

At dinner you’re handed a gold toothpick

& a wormy poet sidles up

To sing your praises.

(In life you were a varnished toad,

But in Valhalla O you are suddenly blessed

With big teeth and grabby hands.)

Yep. In Valhalla you’re a hero with the others—

Marrow suckers, Colonels, bureaucrats, boot lickers,

All lately of the swamp & if truth be told

You’re all a tad slimy to be sitting at table.

But there you are,

Eating the heart out of something that still has a pulse,

A moral thing,

We’ll call it Philosophy’s lamb.

S.K.

On Distrust

A neighbor cuts wood in the rain

Dragging branches and prodding artlessly

With a cross-cut saw. Rain

Has fallen all summer

& the encyclopedia

Lying open on the table

Has folded its pages like a moth.

Why don’t you do something?

Why don’t you carry painted jars

Under the clouds?

S.K.

Fortune's Talker

Fortune’s Talker

–in memory of "Roscoe" our black Labrador

Some are born to talk and that’s a story,

And some know what to do with the gift

And that’s a different story, "Roscoe"

Born at the guide dog school,

But too sensitive for traffic,

Roscoe was a sweet talker.

(All dogs "talk" but few have nuance)

Roscoe knew. Oh he knew

When you felt rich inside

So he had a word or two for that;

And even yesterday, lame and tired in wet grass

He had encouraging things to say

To our neighbor’s dog who is young and fast.

We should all have things to share

In praise of animal faith

And with some of Roscoe’s luck

May we be wise enough

To find our better calling:

Joy.

S.K.

Who Ya Gonna Call?

Every now and then we receive interesting electronic bulletins from groups and organizations around the planet and this one, from the Orange County Deaf Advocacy Center in California struck us as being quite timely. The goal of the legislation mentioned below is to make it possible for people with disabilities who are currently being institutionalized to return to their communities. Apparently Sen. John McCain doesn’t approve; Sen. Obama is a supporter of the plan.

From the Orange County Deaf Advocacy Center Newsletter – July 17, 2008

THE TOP STORY OF THE WEEK

Denver ADAPT met with the Republican presumptive presidential
candidate John McCain at a Town Hall Meeting today. Six members of
ADAPT, including teenagers from the Summer Youth Program, sat in the
front of the auditorium to listen to McCain’s policies for his
administration. When he took comments from the audience he handed the
microphone to Dawn Russell. She explained the legislation called the
Community Choice Act and asked him why he was not signed on. Mr.
McCain stated he would not support the legislation. He then offered
several poor reasons for his decision and ended by saying we would
have to let the voters decide that one. Having recaptured the
microphone he did state he supported the ADA, but had no interest in
hearing that the ADA was entirely different from the CCA.

ADAPT encourages you to attend McCain’s campaign events and continue
to challenge him to support the CCA! Show him disability rights
supporters across the USA believe in real choice, believe in CCA and
believe he needs to do the same. CCA supports family values, it
supports putting control in the hands of the individual instead of
Government, it supports states’ ability to use limited Medicaid funds
for community services which people prefer and which are more cost
effective. These are all consistent with Republican values, as well
as consistent with American values.

Presumptive Presidential Candidate Barak Obama has signed on as a
co-sponsor to the bill already.

Brought to you by the Orange County Deaf Advocacy Center

Http://www.deafadvocacy.org

S.K.

Contemporary Valhalla

You are a good person who lives among good people and therefore when you are no longer here you will go to Valhalla.

Once you arrive you discover the folks in Valhalla weren’t really all that good before they got there.

"Oh well," you think, "they have fine cutlery and a seemingly endless supply of beef."

They tell marvelous, heroic sagas that make you forget all about time.

No one seems to care much about the sad affairs of humankind. Why, they’ve even forgotten their former existences altogether—imagining they were always in Valhalla.

The whole operation is pre-Christian so ideas like "forgiveness" or "lovingkindness" are nowhere in evidence.

When the long dinner is over and the sybaritic poets have declaimed satisfactorily, everyone stands and in the custom of honorific eternity, they retain their personalized forks.

Etc.

S.K.

Why It Isn't Funny

The New Yorker’s cover depicting Michelle and Barack Obama as militant haters of the United States is a joke. Like all jokes it is likely going to offend someone. And like all offensive humor the people it offends may not be the people who most ought to be offended. I call this principle "Joke Displacement" and you may call it something else, but here’s the point: Baby Boomers have mastered the surgically displaced joke because, well, they haven’t mastered much else.

I first knew my generation was in trouble when Arlo Guthrie got on stage at Woodstock and said with evident satisfaction that the throngs of hippies trying to make their way to the music festival had "shut down the Thruway" and everyone applauded wildly. People were cheering because they’d created a vast traffic jam which meant, in the collective mind set of that moment that something of great significance had happened.

This was like the toddler who was proud of his deposit in the potty. Alas, those are your Boomers, then and now.

"Look what I did!"

The people who should be offended by the New Yorker are instead quite happy with the whole business.

"Look what I made!"

Joke displacement is a form of conceptual art and the great master of the idea was Marcel Duchamp who created art from the commodified junk of the Industrial Revolution—a bicycle wheel protruding from a bar stool, a urinal tipped on its side with a sign declaring "water Fountain" etc.

The idea was that such displays would offend someone and in turn those offended people might have a Zen flash of insight about their existences.

But the problem is that the leisure classes who might have enough disposable income to be edified in this way are not interested in the joke. Only those who are uncomfortable with being middle class will be bothered by the humor and the fact is that Baby Boomers are not sufficiently uncomfortable with their accumulated wealth to feel much of anything.

So the Boomers laugh at the working classes and the working classes know it.

And so Joke Displacement becomes easy decadence and you can take this to the bank.

S.K.