Dispatched From The Lounge #2

As my first dispatch seemed to float off into the ether without making a sound or an imprint, I'll blow some more hot air into the atmosphere and proudly contribute to the global warming of the shared consciousness.

As anyone who has spent much time with me knows, I seem to have a divining rod for finding coincidences. I therefore was not too startled when, the morning after sending the last dispatch, my long-lost first page of written poetry, from 10/16/1990, appeared in a binder I was throwing out. This page had fallen off the spiral notebook many, many years ago, and I'd assumed it was lost. Should my lifelong dream of being van Gogh or Dickinson pan out, perhaps that piece of paper will end up somewhere. More likely, it'll just be thrown away with the rest of my possessions upon my death. More proof that there's more than money to this life.

Vitamin D + St. John's Wort may be the best cure for that uniquely Portland affliction, Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Poetry is the real news. I think we should start a poetry daily to be sold alongside The Times, The Post, and the Weekly World News as a source of real and authentic information about the world around us.

On to the main event. One random poem from my recent scribbles, and then at the end, I will print my re-discovered first poem.

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I don't know what it would be like
to be a victim of this, bombarded by
strange thoughts and a phantasm of a man
who slithers by on the edge of your dreams,
but he's not as sly as he thinks, you know
him every time he peeks, every time he pretends
to pass you by anonymously,
and I don't know what it would be like
to be simultaneously fascinated and scared,
to feel this pouring out of someone
who can't be everything he pretends to
be but he certainly believes that he is
and you don't know if you're a fantasy,
a game, a coveted object of desire. the
first, the last, the only, the primary,
you're not sure you even want to know
(the truth is you are all and none and neither)
I've always been the author of these strange
books where the ending is never anything
but a bizarre awkward drop
I've never read one of those books,
never been a real character, just a
delusional omniscient narrator
who ends up not knowing what you
ever thought at all.

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Below is the first poem, from a sheet out of a notebook I carried with me to the Stanford Coffee House on October 16, 1990, and wrote poetry with Melind John. The next day would be the one-year anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake. I'm sure that was on my mind at least as much as the Sappho and Lao Tzu that I was reading for the first time.




The wise man said to me,
"Why?"
And I replied,
"O Wise Man,
I do not know."

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I encourage you to rediscover the physical feeling of ink on paper. When was the last time you wrote a real letter? And I encourage you to rediscover the value of eye contact, of looking into people's eyes and seeing windows into universes existing only in other minds. We've become too trained too the rapid-eye darting of a world we see through video screens. Slow your eyes down and look at your world, and look at each other. You're missing a lot of the tricky and inspiring details of the world.