August 23, 2008
Saturday Poem
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Vestibule
Chase Twitchell
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What etiquette holds us back
from more intimate speech,
especially now, at the end of the world?
Can’t we begin a conversation
here in the vestibule,
then gradually move it inside?
What holds us back
from saying things outright?
We’ve killed the earth.
Yet we speak of other things.
Our words should cauterize
all wounds to the truth.
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Posted by Jim Culleny at 07:47 AM | Permalink
Comments
I WONDER WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN
TO THE WORLD WHEN WE DIE
Gone will be the natural world perhaps but old nature tv reels will remain?
Whistle clean. To forget is to abet. Cost Price Value
Explore Explain Examine Experiment -- Most pretentious: least alive
Trapped in the melting pot beyond the source muddy on the horizon
Root Route and Range: will song never return/ muddy on horizons
Then comes the pong, the pong is strong, festering lilies and dreams
To some the stench of peanuts and/or of old banana skins in
a garbage pail is sickening as days old pong of an unwashed person
(Tourmaline, jasper and opal are the stones of the living
Obsidian, chalcedony, flint are the stones of the dead
Herbs of the dead are pepper, oregano, and tar—wrote the poet
Howard McCord p.113, Selected Poems, 1978,Crossing Press)
“Still and all” a phrase I used means now and then maybe again
Allene was from Arkansas or Oklahoma and worked in schools
in San Francisco as a janitor loved by all the teachers she helped
This writing is an art of appropriation “a series of refined filtering
systems” said Robert Rauschenberg—part core sample of an era
and part personal diary—of his 1970 drawings; also “combines”
said the painter & scholar Richard Steger whose sense of connection
made me realize we all live in an assisted living society if lucky
“Oblieux” wrote Ned Rorem in Wings of Friendship about a great
composer we gays referred to as “Aunt Aaron” Copeland saying he
was “very, very famous, and happy, but a wee bit ‘oblieux’”
We must keep watch over absent meaning said Maurice Blanchot
Chateau Graville-Lacoste a Pujols sur Caron, Gironde, France
Albert Ellis, Provoker of Change in Psychotherapy is dead at 93
said the obituary headline in The New York Times July 25, 2007
(most therapy makes you feel better, but you don’t get better: you
have to back it up with action; & neurosis is high-class for whining)
Oyvind aka Irving Molbach wrote at his end “I believe in a future
life. I’m ready for my next job. It’s goodbye-time (to his cave)
Dr Albert Ellis believed people sabotage a need for happiness
Ellis developed “rational emotive behavioral therapy” concentrating
on irrational ideas leading to self-destructive feeling and behavior
Wonder what happens to the world & if reduced when we die?
Edward Mycue
Posted by: Edward Mycue | Aug 24, 2008 2:38:16 AM
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