People sometimes tell me
they have trouble understanding poetry.
That's because they consume it
as they would a banana,
starting at one end and chomping
down to the other.
Poetry has to be consumed like
corn on the cob.
One should start at one end
and work down to the other,
but then one has to
go back to the beginning --
change one's angle of perspective --
and - again - go from one end to the other.
I can't
emphasize
this point about changing
one's angle of perspective
enough.
There is a difference:
with corn on the cob, one rotates the corn,
but, with poetry, one has to rotate something
within the reader.
Otherwise, one is just chomping into
an empty rut -
a track devoid of sustenance.
Then, one has to repeat the process
until every last morsel has been consumed.
That's how one ingests poetry.
Human nature is a raging river
which a few shitty sandbags of common sense
will not detour.
Some people stand on the bank
and shout at the river.
I will admit, I've done the same.
But those words neither soak in
nor bounce off that raging river --
they're made silent,
dying in air.
Some people try to steer
the river by splashing at the lapping waters
near its edge,
But none of them is Moses,
not one can dam a river by force of will.
And - even if one could --
eventually, that person would have to let go,
leaving a backed up and angry river
to rage onward.
One burning moment --
taffy-stretched to the edge of reason:
stretched so broadly that one
can't fathom escape -
like Monkey on the Buddha's palm
One burning idea --
cloned, and then carved
to make infinite variants,
and painted infinite shades:
the dark tone of each
darker than the last
Burning ideas populating
the vast expanse of a
burning moment,
until the urge to escape
insists that one carve a hatch
into living tissue
But what is it that does
the stretching of the burning moment
&
the cloning of the burning idea?
Can't that stretcher and cloner
be wound back,
scaling all to proper proportions?
And can't it be done before
that terminal instant
is carved in jagged stone?
I
A young man set his ex-fiancé on fire.
(Or, so the story goes.
[He claims she self-immolated.])
She succumbed to third-degree burns...
but not right away.
She lived long enough to know
the agony of third-degree burns.
They'd met in college,
both studying to be engineers --
I mention that because
at the heart of the issue was caste.
It seems absurd enough
to murder a fiancé over
some imaginary mark of superiority,
but even more so when one considers
that they would have had the same qualification --
possibly similar jobs --
but for the boy's bigoted parents,
who insisted he call off the engagement,
and the boy, himself,
who took things that extra murderous mile.
So, it wasn't even about who the couple were,
it was about what their grandfathers
did for a living.
What a world.
II
The war is still burning.
Among the latest questions are:
Will Belarus be forced to join in the fighting?
&
If so, will having another set
of soldiers who are completely uninterested in the war --
other than as a trial to be survived, that is --
help or hurt Putin's position?
A related question is whether Putin
would rather watch the world burn
than to lose face?
What a world.
III
The Pandemic said, "Psyche!"
This means America will roll the odometer
on COVID deaths.
We had things almost back to normal,
and then the virus caught its breath,
got it's footing,...
whatever viruses do.
What a world.
***
I think I'll check the news, again,
maybe sometime next year.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 