Something

We are meant to do something before life can kill us.
What that is is up to us.

Alone (Lock)

To see nothing in the world is much the same thing as not to be seen in it. Either way, one is desperately alone.

Norman Lock, Grim Tales

Who knew?

Turns out that driving life with hunger
is a recipe for disaster.

The worst thing about death (Nobbs)

This must be the worst thing about death. You miss the end of so many stories.

David Nobbs, It Had To Be You

Too much distance

Too-many-metaphors, while entertaining, introduces too much distance between the thing and the thing said about the thing.

Dislike

One thing I dislike about people is how unaware they are of my dislike.

New poems

+15

Stranger

The more closely you look at anything,
the stranger it appears.

A door (Lock)

He brought a door with him and placed it against the hillside. Then he went in and closed it. What happened to him next is not known, because the door was for him alone. Later when they heard him scream, there was nothing anyone could do.

Norman Lock, Grim Tales

Regret

Regret necessity, but never regret doing what is necessary.

Bonnets and blood (Nobbs)

They deplored the lack of gentleness in modern television drama, as opposed to period television drama. Why was the only choice between bonnets and blood? Was there nothing to say about the modern world that wasn't violent?

David Nobbs, It Had To Be You

Magic

We believe there was magic in the past
because there was magic in our past.

Nashville hot chicken sandwich

Made from this recipe.

New poems

+15

Always divided (Merwin)

what I live for I can seldom believe in
who I love I cannot go to
what I hope is always divided

W. S. Merwin, from "Teachers"

Fast enough

Is it possible to think fast enough
to outrace rage?

Failure

We failed in our failure to persecute stupidity.

The present mode (Cousins)

The present mode of life on earth is madness, which is nonetheless lethal for being legal.  Rational existence is possible, but it calls for a world consciousness and a world design.  People who develop the habit of thinking of themselves as world citizens are fulfilling the first requirement of sanity in our time.

Norman Cousins

On fiction

Is fiction too, or insufficiently, self-indulgent?

On chaos (Dick)

I have a secret love of chaos.  There should be more of it.  Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe.  The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things.

Philip K. Dick

Reaction

The worst reaction to the Nothing
is to worship it.

One

I may be one voice,
but I will not speak one thing.

The ideal of justice

The ideal of justice is that humans should
answer for all misery caused by humans.

Ground Beef & Cabbage Stir Fry

With homemade jalapeno cheesebread.  Stir fry is from this recipe.

On history (Trevor-Roper)

History is not merely what happened:  it is what happened in the context of what might have happened.

Hugh Trevor-Roper

Avoiding poetry

I try to avoid poetry by people who don't like words.

Common

The trait common to all life is desperation.

Self-congratulation

Nothing drains righteousness like self-congratulation.

New poems

+15

No function (Orwell)

For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away.  In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Of generosity

Reading poems teaches me more of generosity—the need for it, the reward of it—than almost anything else.

The nature of things

Much is good, though most can be better.