Dispatched From The Lounge #4

The days go by far too fast when you let them, and the next thing you know, the muse has abandoned you and left you. In my case, I'm not sure who looked the other way first, but the muse is gone and replaced profanely, yet oh so seductively, by a new MacBook Pro laptop. It's deadly. I sound like a consumerist fool when I write that, and I make a dear offering to you, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, although HST always understood the joy of well-made explosives, and this thing is a fire in my lap. Literally and figuratively.

Bah. Anyhow, if you want to know where I'm coming from these days, get Ferlinghetti's "How To Paint Sunlight" and read it closely and carefully. Especially the first poem. And read this interview with the man: http://www.sanfranciscoreader.com/interviews/ferlinghetti%20interview.html
Yes, I am little more than an overgrown fanboy. Lawrence Ferlinghetti has platted one of the most beautiful roads to old age that any of us can imagine walking. I need that map. I think I have it.

Anyway... interesting events afoot in Portland and the Northwest... stay tuned... the revolution stirs in unlikely places....

One day I will get a few more pages into Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe". I began reading it two years ago, and I'm now roughly 210 pages in. You read a few pages, digest them, make it part of your life, and move on to the next few. Physics is best taken in slow, delicate bites.

Two selections today- one from a week ago, when I was still possessed; and the second is my second-ever poem, rediscovered a week ago as previously explained.

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You write so much that you no longer
live in your mind or your soul
or any of those imaginary places
where things have no weight and
time never has to be so certain
instead, you start to live here, in these
books and pages, and just like Portland,
you show up alone, naked, poor, and cold,
but you spend enough time there, and you
start to see that between letters and
on hundred year old tree broken sidewalks,
you're not so alone even though you're
more alone than ever, you feel the
rain and eventually you just don't
care anymore,
you wander through the middle of sentences
like a party with old friends,
you meet the same memories again and
again, it's never as exciting as
that first year,
when you figure there's magic in every
door and depth in every word,
eventually you learn to dissolve into
it, to love the comfort, to
pretend that rain makes you smile
when all it does is wash more
words off these slowing years,
and that's when all the real surprises,
realized dreams and dead underground nightmares,
that's when they all tear you to moss,
stale cigarette butts, and too many empty coffee cups.

(written 3/27/2006)
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(and now, back to a much different life, the second poem I wrote on 10/16/1990...)

It is a long, dark path
On which the men of words walk
No, they tread lightly,
For they shall not harm
Nature's gifts, laid out before them
Dry, as the sun bakes the earth
And the men of words
And they sweat

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Peace to all of you from the lounge, where the iPod's been playing prehistoric music for me- The Smiths and Aztec Camera. Well, maybe not prehistoric, but certainly pre-Revolutionary, before I sold my soul to pop in 1986 at the altar of Howard Jones. That's for another time and a story only a true connoisseur could enjoy.

Where's the poetry in your Poetry Month? Ted Kooser, Robert Pinsky, and Billy Collins are Bush stooges who took money from this administration and pretended to be "poets". These soldiers of Bush's anti-human army are true terrorists of the mind. Demand apologies! And then remember, 'tis better to forgive than to seek revenge. Sometimes. But would you rather be in Inferno or Paradiso, especially now that Purgatorio has been rendered fiction?