An End and a Beginning

Fever Dream

I enter and my dog takes in his jaws
The heel of my left shoe, a grip of steel,
Portis my dog has seized and holds my heel

Captive, best left bestial greeting this
Domestic mammal in a captive room
Reminds me of my promise and of his
Fulfilled in homage to a bestial groom.

What's this behavior of beavers building
A dam without wood in a barren cage?
Is this like that, a beaver in a cage
Building a dam in a pantomime and yielding

An eerie satisfaction on the page,
Act of a blind mime on an empty stage?
Who is the audience? Who watches from
Beyond the footlights, or is no one there?

What naked truth descends this ornate stair
Accompanied by some lugubrious drum
Into a scene with trees all wildly burled,
A faery tale forest from a childhood world?

In this place we strike poses, we pose them
To ourselves and suppose, assuming this
Position and that in an ultimate
Yoga of concept, asana of ear.

In this place I am Mexican and then
More Latinate, less literal since when
A feral man whose bark bites sharp with wit
Breaks vaguely over peachy cheeks in tear:

Only the wind at last and nothing lost.

I am sick. KLK

then perhaps it's time for a little something from my juvenilia: "Sick in bed with a stuffed up head/ Walking dizzy/poor little Lizzy" - I have always cared for myself either too much or not enough! I hope you feel better and please send me the poem if you'd like to.
17 hours ago - LC

I really like that poem, Keshav. The images, ideas, questions, statements and rhymes work so well together. I especially like the burled/world stanza. The concern about artistry, beavers...remind me of this Yeats poem for some reason:

The Fascination Of What's Difficult by William Butler Yeats
The fascination of what's difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There's something ails our colt
That must, as if it had not holy blood
Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road-metal. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day's war with every knave and dolt,
Theatre business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I'll find the stable and pull out the bolt

I sent you a note I didn't mean to through chat - repetitive one about your poem. In case you wonder what I meant by the name "Buzby" it was a reference to Busby Berkeley - the musical directot/choreographer from the '30s. Something about t...he staircase stanza in your poem evoked one of his shows. I'm all prone to evokation...it's tiresome even to me! Hey - did you ever read Nicholson Baker's "The Anthologist"? I gave it to Nick Johnson and he liked it and he usually hates everything!
7 hours ago - LC

An End and a Beginning

I'm glad Nick liked a book at last. Have you or he read Freedom by Jonathan Franzen? The use of prose and the portrayal of character are interesting. The long middle section of the book and the choice of the pose are a bit tedious. Was there someone sitting over him with a stick forcing him to adhere to this odd form within a form? Also I dislike the characters somewhat which didn't help. I like some of the other minor characters better but perhaps if I'd spent more time with them I'd have liked them less. How is your brother by the way?

The Yeats poem I like. Typical twentieth century curmudgeon stuff. They really didn't know what to make of what was going on around them or even with themselves, not unlike us. I'll act out my own confusions and insights in obscurity, gratefully.

Busby Berkeley, certainly. Have you seen the number, "The Tourist Trade"? I recommend it, in Romance on the High Seas, directed by Michael Curtiz. Have we been in this place, any of these spots, before? There's a Busby's sports bar in Santa Monica on Santa Monica. The nearest cross street is Berkeley. Merely coincidental, unless you subscribe to the notion of the terrorist V, V is for Vendetta, that there are no coincidences.

You! So many pressures from different quarters in your formative years! Even my sister pressuring you, and Debbie, and See! Kristen, that revels long o' nights, is notwithstanding up. If you go to a rush party wear a cuirass beneath your toga to shield against what daggers others may in an unrestrained moment of envy flash out even as a smile at a favorable quip.

The changes in ratings of US Treasury issues, like the rise of attitudes more suited to fringe crazies in the very center of political discourse, are of no more concern to me than the destruction of our star, the sun which gives us life and light. Why should I be concerned when millions think a sensible answer to the problems we face in the street is to gather in a large stadium normally used for sporting events and live music, and there together join in prayer for our nation and our individual well-being? This further being led by the governor of one of the largest states, who may run for president, is no more cause for alarm than the fact most of us do not understand why it is better now for the government to spend, to print money so to speak, to run deficits, for the same reason interest rates have been kept low -- in order to keep the wheel turning, lest the entire economy stop irrationally.

The Great Depression was a failure of understanding. There was nothing special in the regular dynamic of demand and supply. People still needed goods and services, and matter had not suddenly vanished removing either the items or the means of bringing them to market from the face of the planet. What happened was a failure of systems, of institutions, of will, and the artificial links, the means of getting things to people, were blocked as if a word could stop a hurricane as easily as it stops the human heart; a rating, a set of letters, makes the world tremble more than a change in the weather boding immediate death.

Kristen accosted me at my reunion last weekend and asked what the purpose of life was. She wanted some spontaneous answer. I didn't recognize her for the first part of the encounter. That was how it was much of the weekend for me but then the recollection pulled itself together while talking and watching the other move, the mannerisms, so by the end I knew perhaps more than she herself recalled of what I knew. My answer to her question at first consternated but my persistence gave rise to an expressed admiration at last. My answer was simple. The purpose of our lives changes over the course even as our understanding of ourselves and our purpose changes. However, I had to preface it with the key connection which unlocks the often unhappy truth of all matters: It is not what we say or think which defines us, not what we believe of ourselves or anything, but what we do. Our behavior indicates what we really are, how we really think and feel and what we value.

There are other implications one must sort through for oneself. Do so at your leisure as your own energy allows. The fundamental disconnection between what is in the mind what happens in the world begins with the failure to acknowledge first and foremost there is nothing in us, no a priori. There are only capabilities -- avenues for sensing, perceiving, apprehending, the plethora of words for calling these faculties, like the web of blood and flesh which encases us in this morbid state of uncertainty, and beyond those the further faculties for processing, responding sentience, associating, interpreting, analyzing, of those we make a model of the outer world too often confusing the imagination with the power over things beyond the obvious means. I move objects with my mind by thinking I would like to do so, then by reaching out and picking them up and moving them, thus, but not by the imagining alone. However, sometimes it's better to imagine more first, recalling known consequences of acting on impulse.

I further increase the power of my mind over matter by understanding principals observed and defining them in the terms of my mind, in language and the language of math, and so doing then create the means to move even larger objects, sometimes merely by persuading a strong friend with a truck to come help, or several friends, and other times by using principals I have observed and others over generations have refined in order to create great engines or even merely to take advantage of latent circumstances favorable to my purpose.

Our own incompetence at moving from the outside to the inner world and then back again, in learning and then incorporating that learning in our little hypotheticals and preconsiderations, is what causes confusion. Our inchoate state of understanding, not to mention our lack of mastery of our faculties and drives, causes us to confuse and rationalize rather than reason, to respond emotionally alone without the added component of logical thought and previous learning. It is a false dichotomy between emotion and reason, a remnant of an earlier time and an inferior paradigm. I will be the master of my animal as certainly as my fingers will type what I would have set down, but sometimes the manner of expression is better suited to a juvenile seeking attention for no other reason later regretted and seen as shameful. Ah, developmental stages! How does that work in this rudely delineated model of our beings?

Some things must wait for another time. This is too long and lacks a proper barbing or shape.

It's enough to say
even at so late a moment in the play
there is a strong reason why
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern must die.

Let the lights be brought up even as we ourselves were raised by wolves of this little world, the theater of great actions and small. Have you hugged your 401K today?