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My goal: to be able to write about anything I know nothing about.
For instance, great African run up Kilimanjaro in barefeet.
For another instance, to converse with a Korean kimchi take-out hostess:
She: (pointing at the taoist yin/yang circle on my t-shirt) You?
Me: It helps me to sleep.
For a third, to analyze Fred Astaire's dance partners.
So far as I know, these mags don't exist, but they should:
Sharky Baby
El Locoloco
Young Churchill
Zooz
Candypants
Talldunker
Norman Conquest
Kris Kane
Smooth Jabbilist
Muffinbowl
Finer Trinket
Bluerblack
Some Guts
Girl Fatale
Label At Risk
Think about it. To be somebody and nobody at the same time.
At once, both about to decompose and to ripen.
Ignored by the universe and be its justification.
If I carry the water, carry my weight
not carry a grudge or a torch,
I carry the day and
carry it on home
What can be said about Brazil that isn't encapsulated by fine beach, samba, and Jobim?
One of my incarnations will be as the tall and tan me in a white tropical linen jacket, light-weight trousers, a plastic card with no credit limit, a small cigar, and rhythmic verve to my walk. Am I Orfeo? Vadinho? Or simply a well-tailored Fernando Lamas?
Where's the casino, namorada?
Well! I certainly don't intend to spend the remainder of my life in this century!
She was 'alone in a crowd' those last years.
Of course, I was just a lad -- 15, 16 -- as she approached her self-chosen death. But she did befriend me; I did learn the offerings of 'full living'.
The Kennedys? She, not they, would be the one likely on call.
I: a puppy.
Tyranny of the tasteless.
Dictatorship of the duped.
When I scan the lay of the cards before me, do I see a full ten years?
The idea of 'future' has been with me for as long as my 'past' remembers. At the last moment of consciousness, no doubt, anxiety will focus on 'future after the gone body'. So: ten full years?
What about ten minutes?
That seems a surer bet. I'm home. No road excursion set for another half-hour, so auto accident, a feral threat always, can be kept at bay. Morning hour, sleepy suburb -- the best time for coffee and musing, for poetry, for imagination, for taking stock, for stocking up, for a clean start.
Next to nil are the chances of a misplanned bank heist to occur on this spot. Very far is this from a main transport road with suspect trucks loaded with fertilizer and chemicals designed to blow buildings into world headlines. Extremely low in priority is this place on al Q'aeda's 'Top Ten Target' list.
No. Not near enough to the urban anomie, either, that can break a skull and leave you deaf or tube-fed in an expensive care bed.
Here. Hot coffee. Muffin-cap, a Danish, rugalah, the scone. Today, a 'classic pastry': sugar-crumble on soft cake whose layers split by a cinnamon goo.
What about ten minutes? It eats me up as I digest.
(whisper it)
(surprise tartness of a tangerine wedge)
(hide all my reference to it from the surprise knock)
Looking into scientific assuredness, we have complication after complication of combines and disassemblies, dissolutions and reattractions, appearances and escapes. Beyond those -- and they are numerous and vast, both minute and gigantic -- beyond those, we, as 'scientists', know nothing.
The grand question, one that spurred the scientific project in the first place, remains: is there 'nothing' outside the physical combinants which include the impulses that cause even this very writing by this very person?
Science itself rightly claims modest silence.
So, we either hold ourselves satisfied with the 'unanswerableness' of 'Why', or we're left with the abdication of our leading scientific types of inquiry or with the arbitrary creeds that preceded them.
If there's no discernible (large 'P') Purpose to the ever-more discoverable (small 'p') process, is there then a suggestive (small 'p') purpose that might give rise to a (large 'P) Process? That is: 1) out of nature, consciousness; then 2) out of consciousness, purposeful reordering of nature.
We may have the notion of (large 'G') God, because what we see as the ordering power -- inordinately, indefinably, impossibly (!?) Other (note the 'O') -- that ordering power really belongs to (small 'g') godlike us. Because we alone have conceived it. We, in our physically-grounded neural system, may be among (or, as yet, the pinnacle of) the most creative of chance complications.
And if there is indeed a (large 'P', large 'G') Purpose or God, we may be its vanguard.
It may be, therefore, that everything we do does have tremendous consequence just in its creative trials.
Elvis: the White Man's Black Man.
No wonder they didn't like his hip gyrations. It wasn't so much the 'sexual suggestiveness', the 'improper motion', the 'lewdness'.
More than that, the importation of Black relaxation about such things. By 'Black', of course, we don't refer to the ministers and Christian church goers whose propriety was as buttoned-down as any Danbury, Connecticut, White Episcopalian -- even though the Gospel enthusiasms did sweat and did sway and did yearn for promised release.
The 'Black' providing worry in the 50s meant those cut loose from any White regard -- born into that disregard, that use-value-only, that exploitation, that mean spot. Their movement seemed a psychic danger, for sure.
How far a racist imagination from musical body motion, dance, wild dance, to other body motions? What would slave holders have bequeathed and their embittered scions carry in terms of past power? The seigneurial fruits of 'first coition', the jiggle and wiggle of lynchings?
One thing to muse over such heritage, glass of Jack in the hand, another to see it brought to light, dance-released, vinyl-repeated, toyed with joyously by your children.
Elvis: the Black Man's White Man.
A sense of self-importance no one finds but only remotely justified.
An overlooked prophet becomes a prophet of the overlooked.
Cassandro.
THE DROP OF RAIN
water matter
wet as a kiss
eyes up, mouth too
heaven lover
heaven's water
the lover's kiss
the matter that's
its own spirit
What in the f___ are we as creatures?
Are we creatures?
