Wandering through a new city,
I come upon a bridge:
its rails loaded with locks.
They call them "love locks."
It gets me wondering how many locks
long outlived the love they memorialized?
How many were lust locks --
linked to the bridge before
the couple really knew each other's
vexing peccadillos?
How many were like ill-advised back tattoos,
a lover's name - someone one met in Vegas -
and whose name one wouldn't
otherwise remember,
were it not inked across one's spine
in a 120-point flame-festooned font?
A mongoose crosses the road.
My mind makes it Rikki Tikki Tavi.
Is there a cobra in the tall grass?
Is this a heroic mongoose?
The mongoose disappears from sight,
and I'm left with no answers.
Not by hearing or listening,
but by feeling the rhythm,
body / mind resonating to it,
being effortlessly attuned to it:
That is how the music transports one --
how it changes one's mind.
The city sees like Santa Claus.
Every misdeed is captured.
Every lost soul is whereabouts known --
known but not shared.
The city sees all,
but it does keep secrets...
sometimes.
Seven Sages were spared the sickness
of perceiving the possibility of perfection,
a "perception" of the patently impossible --
in truth, just dim and flimsy imaginings of mind,
and, so, they didn't mind the inevitable
flaws of the human world.
language is liquid;
meaning meanders.
in the long-run,
meanings are meaningless,
untethered and adrift
in an ocean of possibility.
[political words' meanings
don't drift, but tumble with
whiplash violence through
a desert of the possible.
But, predictably, the first variation
of a political word is the exact
opposite of its original meaning.]
Are we Makers?
Yes. We are!
And damn good ones at that.
We can turn a planet
into plastic trinkets.
We can use every last morsel
to make stuff:
bright & shiny
or
loud & colorful.
We can even make ideas:
good or bad,
true or false,
but always 100% believable.
We're the ones who invented Evil.
Yes, that whole toxic notion
is brought to you by us.
And Left-Wing & Right-Wing...
It used to be just a bunch of people
trying their best to understand
and to get by.
But we built mental / conceptual corrals,
corrals good enough that we
could no longer recognize each other
as part of the same species.
We are Makers.
How is being hit by a hard word
different from being hit by
a brick or a bat?
To burn, the spark of a hard word
must find some kindling inside
the recipient, elsewise it can't ignite.
If someone points at me and screams:
"YOU ARE SUBPAR AT ALGEBRA!"
I remain unwounded.
[I'd like to say that it doesn't burn
simply because it's true,
but the truth or falsity of hard words
is -- perhaps sadly -- not a major
ignition factor.
The kindling is a thing that sits inside one --
something that makes one care,
probably a complex mélange of factors.
The truth of hard words?
That is an outside factor.]
Even if I were to discover that,
to the person who issued the insult,
there is no greater disparagement
than to cast aspersions upon a
person's middle school-level
mathematics competency,
I would remain unwounded.
If I were to feel any sort of way
about uncovering that knowledge,
it would be to feel sort of bad
for the person who issued the taunt.
Now, how to burnproof one's soul,
that is the question?
Tiger Riding for Beginners 