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The Only Thing Worth Doing is Impossible


dr_con

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The Only Thing Worth Doing is Impossible

 

My poetry wasn’t good enough

so I think taking comfort

In Snyder’s words

‘Long ago I

Stopped

 

believing poetry could change

anything’ Each revolution

needs its scouts to

look ahead

 

to stand in the liminal

wordless inbetweens

carving Wittgensteinian

markers no no no

That isn’t right

 

No one remembers wittgenstein

snyder ginsberg blake yeats williams

those who do don’t need to be reminded

The Buddha was just a man inordinately

afraid of Death and Old Age His great Doubt

medicated by digital distractions now

failing there is always chemical interventions

 

The Great Revelations useless behind

self created curtains all of us Suckers

and Hucksters forever performing

In this emerald blue circus

 

See I say: Mixed metaphors

language broken beyond repair

The damage so deep I looked up

antonym shaky useless garbage

 

Inevitable growing up in a small

town whose Brand whose fiery tattoo

indicated who would be paid

at the slaughterhouse:

‘Where life is worth living’

making it clear

 

nowhere else is

 

being a rebellious beast

I would become a poet

a poser a pedestrian

a pedantic a potential

without egress

my morbidity a substrate

for Zen for Voodoo

for the godless arts

 

as the chattel bray

claiming they own themselves

claiming they choose I moo

we’re all domesticated mammals

after all part of The food chain

with pretenses of civility

 

outside children learn to play tennis

the trail of broken leaves and spoor

now digital fabrications in unseasonal

warm soon the Amazon will start burning

the coral reverts to white calcium the bombs

will start falling the night will blink out and we

need poets and buddhas and orisha and lwa

 

to do the impossible

to become more than cartographer’s

working for the king dividing the world

into resources and hierarchies fooling

the same said they are free within

lines drawn by someone else

Time to become the Land

to be Divine

marked

 

only by yourself

 

  • as an aside as far as I can tell

this is improbable

since the harshest

critic the one who

owns the biggest

nastiest cattle

prod tends

to be

 

me and you.

 

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Your poetry is good enough-- it prompts me to recall the perspective of Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot:

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it every one you love, everyone you ever heard of, every human being whoever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there--- on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

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As I got pulled through the lines and swinging at every line, the mix of references and images to deliver the irony of the title, which rested on "me and you", is an enjoyable ride.

 

The reflections made me recall the utter vanity echoed by Solomon in Ecclesiastes 'a striving after the wind'. Yet here we are still.

"Words are not things, and yet they are not non-things either." - Ann Lauterbach

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Thank You both! I appreciate your commenting on one of my throwaway poems;-) Only published because a visual artist I know sent me one of his Junk Paintings, which I loved so I sent this one out;-)

 

many Thanks!

 

Juris

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  • 2 weeks later...
David W. Parsley

This one really works for me, doc. I don't know where else I could go to find Wittgenstein lumped in with Williams, nor either of them in with the pool that here includes Snyder, Ginsberg, and (heavens!) Blake. The natural place to go from there is Buddha, of course(!?). I would like a few decades to ruminate further on these connections, but through it all comes clearly singing a voice reminiscent of the Ecclesiastical Preacher, as noted by Joel, one of the earliest and most profound of those singers on our pale blue dot. Thanks for finding this particular journey worth doing, and sharing it here, even if it is impossible.

 

- Dave

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