Hidden steps (Mitchell)

The world's a headmaster who works on your faults. I don't mean in a mystical or a Jesus way. More how you'll keep tripping over a hidden step, over and over, till you finally understand: Watch out for that step! Everything that's wrong with us, if we're too selfish or too Yessir, Nosir, Three bags full sir or too anything, that's a hidden step. Either you suffer the consequences of not noticing your fault forever or, one day, you do notice it, and fix it. Joke is, once you get it into your brain about that hidden step and think, Hey, life isn't such a shithouse after all again, then BUMP! Down you go, a whole new flight of hidden steps.

David Mitchell, Black Swan Green

Is it worse?

Is it worse to become not what I am,
not what I want to be, or nothing at all?

Never stops (Mitchell)

The world never stops unmaking what the world never stops making.

David Mitchell, Black Swan Green

So many

There are so many more answers than there are questions
(and there are so many questions!).

Relentless (Sontag)

Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.

Susan Sontag

We are

We are what we do
when not compelled.
And when.

True poetry (Mitchell)

True poetry is truth. Truth is not popular, so poetry also is not.

David Mitchell, Black Swan Green

Just don't

Don't settle for interesting where true is available.

New poems

+10

On violence (Mitchell)

I hope you will note who initiates violence, who conducts the violence, and who must pay the price of violence.

David Mitchell, Black Swan Green

One can

One can want, one can consume,
without proceeding directly to gluttony.

On war (Mitchell)

War's an auction where whoever can pay the most in damage and still be standing wins.
...
War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers it's a lottery.

David Mitchell, Black Swan Green

Divergence

Though we depart our sphere standing side by side,
our trajectories assure divergence, and disparate destinations.

Error

Our greatest error
is deciding things matter
that shouldn't matter.

The if

We live by the if, not the is.

Doesn't

Wine doesn't shatter its glass.

We are the masters of the secret (Dickey)

Flaubert says somewhere that the life of a poet is a hell of a life, it is a dog’s life, but it is the only one worth living. You suffer more. You are frustrated more by things that don’t bother other people. But you live so much more. You live so much more intensely and so much more vitally. And with so much more sense of meaning, of consequentiality, instead of nothing mattering. ...That is what is behind all the drugs and alcoholism and suicide—insanity, wars, everything—a sense of nonconsequence. A sense that nothing, nothing matters. No matter which way we turn it is the same thing. But the poet is free of that.

For the poet, everything matters, and it matters a lot. That is the realm where we work. Once you are there, you are hooked. If you are a real poet, you are hooked more deeply than any narcotics addict could possibly be on heroin. You are hooked on something life-giving instead of destructive. Something that is a process that cannot be too far from the process that created everything. God’s process.

You can say what you can of God. I don’t know what your religion might be. You can say what you want as to whether this is a chemist’s universe or a physicist’s universe or an Old Testament, New Testament God’s universe. Whatever you might want the deity to be.

Those are things that he might be. What this universe indubitably is is a poet’s universe. Nothing but a poetic kind of consciousness could have conceived of anything like this. That is where the truth of the matter lies. You are in some way in line with the creative genesis of the universe. We can’t create those trees or that water or anything that is out there. We can’t do it. But we can re-create it. We take God’s universe and make it over our way. And it is different from his. That is where our value lies. Not only for ourselves, but for the other people who read us. There is some increment there that we make possible that would not otherwise be there.

I don’t mean to sell the poet at such great length, but I do this principally because the world doesn't esteem the poet very much. They don’t understand where we are coming from. They don’t understand the use for us. They don’t understand if there is any use. They don’t really value us very much. [But] we are the masters of the secret, not they. Not they. Remember that when you write.

James Dickey

Luck? (Hafez)

And, such is my luck, everyone I said
"Dear friend" to loathed me by and by.

Hafez

Wheels

Reinvent as many wheels as you must until you make something new.

The dowry (Hafez)

The world displays herself to us as such
                                     a charming bride,
But life's the dowry that men pay to lie
                                     at her sweet side.

Hafez

Knowing and knowing how (Riggs)

Just because they knew it was lost didn't mean they knew how to let it go.

Ransom Riggs, Hollow City

Ever noticed?

Drink privileges feeling over thought.

Human beings

Many ideas about human beings do not survive meeting one.

New poems

+18

Fragments of Sappho

Per this prompt from The Guardian, I have attempted my own "translation" of two fragments of Sappho:

48
The moon is gone—the Pleiades—
now midnight, and still time goes.
I lie alone.

65
But you are dead and shall forever BE dead,
forever forgotten, with no immortal mark to record
the memory of you, even among your fellow dead,
beside whom you'll lie forever, dead, remembered
never by any who knew or did not know your mortality,
even those already equally forgotten.

Mushroom casserole

Adapted from this recipe, substituting the purple rice variety that my father developed and patented.

Where, when, what (Hafez)

I see no love in anyone,
Where, then, have all the lovers gone?
And when did all our friendship end,
And what's become of every friend?

Hafez

Wrong

Being wrong is a natural state.
Embracing, enjoying being wrong,
choosing it, refusing to be right,
is unnatural, perverse, evil.

Mud Pie

A combination of several recipes I read online.

Always

We pay the most to those who make us feel,
always have, always will.

The humanist's plea

"May everyone get no worse than they deserve."

About history (Lewis)

"More and more, as I think about history," he pondered, "I am convinced that everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever. But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and of silencing them forever."

Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

The selling-campaign (Lewis)

Once...governments had merely let themselves slide into a war, thanking Providence for having provided a conflict as a febrifuge against internal discontent, but of course, in this age of deliberate, planned propaganda, a really modern government like theirs must figure out what brand of war they had to sell and plan the selling-campaign consciously.

Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

On balance

Balance is always precarious.

Borrowed

Whiskey Island Magazine, published by Cleveland State University, has accepted my poem "Borrowed." Can't wait to see this one.