2025 As a sitcom. (Proposal)
If you asked people 20 yrs. ago
who overestimated their intelligence
how accurately they could predict the state
of things as they are now is
I would put a reasonable, though
handsome wager
that their prediction
would be terrifyingly accurate.
Welcome to the brave new world.
Take your leisure weighing your fear.
****
To the Hypervocal Members of Our Species~
ReplyDeleteOn behalf of myself and introverts throughout
the cities and deserts and jungles of the world,
I've compiled a few notes for our extroverted
neighbor's convenience.
We mean you little, if any serious harm,
despite our lack of interest in your second-to-second
updates of immediate surroundings, the expansiveness
of your voices in every public place you should enter,
despite the urgency and steadfastness of decision spared
from none of your thoughts or feelings.
We introverts see more in the austerity of moments & things
than perhaps your hurried eyes will allow you (and your perpetually
self-renewed need for justification and verification in each
of your racing decisions seems to've disproved itself of any true longevity).
You know, the way subtle humor (the best humor) begins to wither
under explanation and how trust is soiled with doubt when someone asks,
Do you trust me, do you trust me, do you trust me?
Indeed, humor may reside at the very center of your condition.
Those trite jabs of comment you insert to curb you petty insecurity:
those little toothpicks holding in place what would've never
had the integrity to stand regardless: they add nothing.
And if we introverts seem inconveniently or unnaturally shy,
refrain from assuming we've lost all capacity for speech. Remember
the odd exceptions to things. That silence can indicate more than defeat,
that desperate laughter doesn't indicate victory,
that fast doesn't always mean ready and patience
isn't obligated to side with hesitation.
We see you. We hear you. There are words
in our brains we like to use very much
and many more we'd as soon just leave out
in the wind & rain for cats and feral animals
to relieve themselves upon if they chose to.
It's a preference for the few & dear over the
flashfires of popularity.
On behalf of my fellow introverts (and especially for me)
I'd encourage you not to take this too personally...unless you want to.
Consider, however briefly, you don't have to do
any fucking thing at all.... Mahalo.
****
ReplyDeletesay it like Charles Portis
~
as Charles Portis has perfectly and sharply said before me:
"A quarter century is a long time." here, it's the very end of April, the
police enforce for their paychecks, the people generally
do what has come to be expected of them
anyway, while criminals get ready for work
and the nocturnal music of the frogs rumbles
through the natural oscillations this, our
borrowed home...
elsewhere...t.v. screens fill with captivating, absorbing
images, stories, the chorus of the day that
doesn't quite belong to anyone forever...mortality
as part of or aside from: I think I would appreciate
them more than some of the people who
own them...but careful to limit yourself to only
stealing intellectual property (and what is stealing
if the bereft should demure from the flattery?) I'm not
breaking into anyone's house this year. 25 years is a long
time, even outside jails and prisons. oh, no: I'll
be dining outside this afternoon. this single day
with
so much freedom.
****
bad spirit
ReplyDelete~
Jesus simply beckons
you
to forfeit your neck, your head
to the dominantly powerful blade
of His vision, His axe of judgement
glistening with the self-righteousness
of its name.
Jesus only means
to build His heavenly house with
the ephemera of your bones,
to render your life a landmark
upon arriving at His.
Jesus, Holy Jesus, Sweet Merciful
King Jesus,
sailing
high
with
the hot dose
of
Your agony,
tongue quenched
with a self-pity
that shines
in the lie
of its majesty.
****
a century and a half
ReplyDelete~
yes: if I swam to one-hundred and fifty years of life or
further, I would persist at writing poems. (at that point,
of course, it would be the year Two-thousand one-hundred and thirty-three,
and perhaps an unforeseeable-yet-unstoppable spate of events will
transpire and make it so nobody on the face of the whole earth still
still reads in English, or it doesn't matter half a fuck if you do
or you don't...) the desirable intention of a sangha
shouldn't
prohibit the student from closing that door
or declining the greetings of legitimately unwelcome
interloping-visitors. if a sangha doesn't have respect,
it will be twice as hard to earn/find dignity...it will
be twice as impossible to unearth integrity...
search the will of your bones in splendid concentration, tattoo
Buddha's generous contemplation with the deed of your own synapses,
let its quick light demolish the anti-prayer of suffering.
****
*slow heart. gentle heart.
ReplyDeletelet me fall into the trickling caves
of semi/permanence, the quick fire of
suffering,
lie to the gravity and obedience.
think of police officers crying
like an ugly Niagara Falls, or
the gift of retirement
insouciable as smoke
drifting
over the gold & silver of badges
committed to an effusive,
confidently hungry animal
winking
at the
gods,
the
fates,
the shadow
of your leg
climbing the stairs....
****
entitlements stripped away
ReplyDelete~
something that is menacing
by accident singes the western rocks &
trees, ferality of this ice cream balloon
sample of living scenery. the sky
governs quietly as a buried horse whose
name will be remembered, be spoken
long after his departure from this river
that tosses constant fatalities upon the shore,
year after year after year.
birds can identify psychopaths, you know.
keen as bathroom scales. well: impermanence,
they didn't outlive the dinosaurs just to turn out
passed over by the fates of the godforsaken shared
universe...trust the birds to remember.
they, too, began in an unlikely fire of collapse
and submersion. indeed: remember the birds
that saw fire before they saw the first human,
and that even ducks can be rather mindful
in their intoxicating lethargy.
****