The child I couldn't save
still lingers in this playyard
as the baseball tundra echoes condensation
but there's nothing I can save,
he must do this on his own.
The leagues have been suspended,
the bigger kids are grown,
the refreshment shed is locked up like a drum
But children are no longer fell behind
heads filled with festering wounds
crying showing nothing from inside;
the tree limbs only sway,
they are somewhere else.
They're with the hundred stories
that amble into Wendy's,
the homeless monastery with pewter hoodies,
men knocked down in their prime, by life
to Facebook life, now sharing memories
of lobster tails and California winters
as they wait for time to heal the wounds
and friends to share their cigarettes
and talk of joy distractions
where they weren't a none around.
He's waiting with heart open
by a closed door, though they vanish,
his friends, on the other side,
the place where shame will finally go to hide
from those who're only but a half-step behind,
with jobs and homes and wives,
those things that always are the first to go
when lessons need be learned
of living with yourself,
to sit with choices made,
the waiting to be found.
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Friday, February 17, 2012
The Day’s Unexploded Landmines
I’m too deep into the dishsoap to clean the blood off of my hands,
The tragic flaws of all my friends are all my fault
But none of my business
Though I vouch for the Navajos their right to text (“dude” … “dude”)
While standing up (like painting a fresco)
And occasionally with the phone to the sky to be closer to God
And this is admitted to the bar
As long as I let someone come behind
To change it:
“It couldn’t be clearer
“It couldn’t be clearer
The end of the world is near.”
It takes a village to keep the truth from being said
But it only takes one dishwater poor blonde
To draw white spiral monkey paw with her fangs
For my whole concept of free will to transform:
“I’m so fallen on hard times
I’ll do anything at any time”
But then she tells me she is learning how to write like Gertrude Stein
Because the way we’re taught to write as children
Screws us up
The subject and predicate destroy our minds
And I think how sad it is
That I am hanging around with people
Who’d think this was insane instead of
Obvious.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Reverie de Reverdy
I. Translation from the French
Turning Road
It’s a terrible gray with dust over time
Wind from the south with strong wings
Echoes deaf of water in the evening keeling over
And in the wet night that gushes at the turn
voices rough and grumbling
A taste of ashes on the tongue
An organ noise along the trail
The heart a ship that bobs along
All disasters of the calling
When the lights go out in the desert one by one
When the eyes are wet as
blades of grass
When the dew falls barefoot on the leaves
In the morning newly risen
There is someone gazing
A lost address on the hidden path
The stars stretch and flowers tumble
Through the branches broken
And the dark stream wipes her soft lips scarcely unstuck
Where not walking on the clock face counts
to regulate the progress and push back the horizon
All the cries have let slip by the time they’ve stumbled on
And I I walk in heaven’s eyes on the rays
There’s a noise for nothing and names in my mind
Of faces alive
All that has passed within the world
And this gala prize
Where I lost my time
II. 1969 Essay on Pierre Reverdy by Kenneth Rexroth (heavily edited from this)
We still know almost nothing about how the mind works in states of rapture nor why the disjunction, the ecstasis, of self and experience should produce a whole range of peculiar nervous responses: vertigo, transport, crystalline and plangent sounds, shattered and refracted light, indefinite depths, weightlessness, piercing odors and tastes, and synthesizing these sensations and affects, an all-consuming clarity. These are the phenomena that often attend what theologians call natural mysticism. They can be found especially in the poetry of St. Mechtild of Magdeburg and St. Hildegarde of Bingen, but they are equally prominent in the poetry of Sappho, Henry Vaughan, Christopher Smart or the prose of Jakob Boehme.
I am inclined to believe that the persistence of this vocabulary among visionary poets is not an idioretinal and vasomotor defect caused by drugs, migraine, dissociations of personality, or petit-mal epilepsy, but a novitiate. Until rapture becomes an accustomed habit, a trained instrument of apprehending reality, the epiphenomena that accompany its onset will seem unduly important. Since only the intimations of rapture are all that most people are ever aware of, Henry Vaughan’s ring of endless light will always serve as an adequate symbol of eternity. Kerkele saw the same idioretinal vision as a very finite ring of carbohydrates.
We are dealing with a self-induced or naturally granted creative state from which two of the most fundamental human activities diverge, the aesthetic and the mystic act. This idiom of radiance becomes confusing today when art is all the religion most people have and when they demand of it experiences that few people of the past demanded even of religion. But even a visionary poem is not a vision. Unlike a poem, the religious experience is compelled and ultimate. Pierre Reverdy, for all his yearning for transcendence, knew this all too well. He is hardly, in most of his poems, a mystic poet. He simply uses a method which he has learned from his more ambitious poems, which is to distill the field to simple gestures laying bare the heart.
As cette belle époque recedes into perspective, and international literary taste has finally unmasked its shock to learn the idiom and syntax that seemed so new and strange in 1912, Pierre Reverdy stands among poets as the most Cubist of the Cubists, above Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob, and André Salmon, as well as independents like Supervielle, Milosz and Léon-Paul Fargue.
Cubism in poetry is the conscious, deliberate dissociation and recombination of elements into a new artistic entity made self-sufficient by its rigorous architecture. In Apollinairian cubism, as exemplified by his “Zone” or by The Waste Land, The Cantos, Paterson, Zukofsky’s A, J.C. MacLeod’s Ecliptic, or Sam Beckett’s early work, the fragmented and recombined elements of poetic construction are narrative, rhetorical or at least informative wholes. In verse such as Reverdy’s, they are simple, sensory, emotional or primary informative objects capable of little or no further reduction. Thus when subject, operator and object have been dismembered and restructured until the result is sufficiently piercing and tensile to cut through the reality it has reorganized, an invisible or subliminal discourse emerges which owes its cogency to its own strict, complex and secret logic.
Poetry such as this attempts not just a new syntax of the word. Its revolution is aimed at the syntax of the mind itself. Its restructuring of experience is purposive, not dreamlike, and hence it possesses an uncanniness fundamentally different in kind from the most haunted utterances of the Surrealist or Symbolist unconscious. When the ordinary materials of poetry are broken up, recombined in structures radically different from those we have come to accept as logical sequence, they are given an intense significance, closed within the structure of the work of art, and are not negotiable in ordinary contexts of occasion. Isolated and illuminated, they seem to assume an existential transcendence.
The revolution in sensibility that began with Baudelaire became a thoroughgoing syntactical revolution in the later work of Mallarmé, in curious still lifes like “Autre Éventail,” occult dramatic molecules like “Petit Air,” and above all in his hieratic metaphysical ritual, Un Coup de dés. In this tremendously ambitious poem the logical structure of the Indo-European languages was shown organically to be an inadequate vehicle for so profound a change in sensibility. Pierre Reverdy is the first important French poet after Un Coup de dés to develop the methods of communication explored by Mallarmé.
Such exploration was once the future of American poetry, but in hindsight only Walter Conrad Arensberg in his last poems, Gertrude Stein in Tender Buttons and a very few other pieces, Laura Riding in her best work and the young Yvor Winters could be said to hew to the deliberate practice of the construction principles which guided Pierre Reverdy.
Yvor Winters went on, in fact, to condemn all verse of this kind as the deliberate courting of madness. What he objected to in essence was the seeking of glamour, what James Joyce translates "wholeness, harmony and radiance," that effulgence which St. Thomas called the stigmata of a true work of art, as an end in itself. I think what Winters meant was that intense hyperesthesia of this type, when it occurs in modern poetry without the motivation of religious belief, is pathological in its most advanced forms and sentimental in its less extreme ones. It is true of course that any work of art that coerces the reader or spectator into intense emotional response for which there is no adequate warrant or motive is by definition sentimental, but I do not think that this is exactly what happens in poetry like that of Reverdy, Mallarmé or Paul Valéry, who masks only slightly the same unanalyzable transcendental claim with seemingly ordinary syntactical context that can be negotiated through general experience.
The syntactical problems and possibilities of a language peculiar to the poetry of Reverdy makes unusual demands upon the reader and translator. Reverdy himself retired to the Benedictine Abbey of Solesmes in 1930 and lived there as a lay associate until his death in 1960 with only rare visits to Paris on business trips or to see old friends.
Turning Road
It’s a terrible gray with dust over time
Wind from the south with strong wings
Echoes deaf of water in the evening keeling over
And in the wet night that gushes at the turn
voices rough and grumbling
A taste of ashes on the tongue
An organ noise along the trail
The heart a ship that bobs along
All disasters of the calling
When the lights go out in the desert one by one
When the eyes are wet as
blades of grass
When the dew falls barefoot on the leaves
In the morning newly risen
There is someone gazing
A lost address on the hidden path
The stars stretch and flowers tumble
Through the branches broken
And the dark stream wipes her soft lips scarcely unstuck
Where not walking on the clock face counts
to regulate the progress and push back the horizon
All the cries have let slip by the time they’ve stumbled on
And I I walk in heaven’s eyes on the rays
There’s a noise for nothing and names in my mind
Of faces alive
All that has passed within the world
And this gala prize
Where I lost my time
II. 1969 Essay on Pierre Reverdy by Kenneth Rexroth (heavily edited from this)
We still know almost nothing about how the mind works in states of rapture nor why the disjunction, the ecstasis, of self and experience should produce a whole range of peculiar nervous responses: vertigo, transport, crystalline and plangent sounds, shattered and refracted light, indefinite depths, weightlessness, piercing odors and tastes, and synthesizing these sensations and affects, an all-consuming clarity. These are the phenomena that often attend what theologians call natural mysticism. They can be found especially in the poetry of St. Mechtild of Magdeburg and St. Hildegarde of Bingen, but they are equally prominent in the poetry of Sappho, Henry Vaughan, Christopher Smart or the prose of Jakob Boehme.
I am inclined to believe that the persistence of this vocabulary among visionary poets is not an idioretinal and vasomotor defect caused by drugs, migraine, dissociations of personality, or petit-mal epilepsy, but a novitiate. Until rapture becomes an accustomed habit, a trained instrument of apprehending reality, the epiphenomena that accompany its onset will seem unduly important. Since only the intimations of rapture are all that most people are ever aware of, Henry Vaughan’s ring of endless light will always serve as an adequate symbol of eternity. Kerkele saw the same idioretinal vision as a very finite ring of carbohydrates.
We are dealing with a self-induced or naturally granted creative state from which two of the most fundamental human activities diverge, the aesthetic and the mystic act. This idiom of radiance becomes confusing today when art is all the religion most people have and when they demand of it experiences that few people of the past demanded even of religion. But even a visionary poem is not a vision. Unlike a poem, the religious experience is compelled and ultimate. Pierre Reverdy, for all his yearning for transcendence, knew this all too well. He is hardly, in most of his poems, a mystic poet. He simply uses a method which he has learned from his more ambitious poems, which is to distill the field to simple gestures laying bare the heart.
As cette belle époque recedes into perspective, and international literary taste has finally unmasked its shock to learn the idiom and syntax that seemed so new and strange in 1912, Pierre Reverdy stands among poets as the most Cubist of the Cubists, above Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob, and André Salmon, as well as independents like Supervielle, Milosz and Léon-Paul Fargue.
Cubism in poetry is the conscious, deliberate dissociation and recombination of elements into a new artistic entity made self-sufficient by its rigorous architecture. In Apollinairian cubism, as exemplified by his “Zone” or by The Waste Land, The Cantos, Paterson, Zukofsky’s A, J.C. MacLeod’s Ecliptic, or Sam Beckett’s early work, the fragmented and recombined elements of poetic construction are narrative, rhetorical or at least informative wholes. In verse such as Reverdy’s, they are simple, sensory, emotional or primary informative objects capable of little or no further reduction. Thus when subject, operator and object have been dismembered and restructured until the result is sufficiently piercing and tensile to cut through the reality it has reorganized, an invisible or subliminal discourse emerges which owes its cogency to its own strict, complex and secret logic.
Poetry such as this attempts not just a new syntax of the word. Its revolution is aimed at the syntax of the mind itself. Its restructuring of experience is purposive, not dreamlike, and hence it possesses an uncanniness fundamentally different in kind from the most haunted utterances of the Surrealist or Symbolist unconscious. When the ordinary materials of poetry are broken up, recombined in structures radically different from those we have come to accept as logical sequence, they are given an intense significance, closed within the structure of the work of art, and are not negotiable in ordinary contexts of occasion. Isolated and illuminated, they seem to assume an existential transcendence.
The revolution in sensibility that began with Baudelaire became a thoroughgoing syntactical revolution in the later work of Mallarmé, in curious still lifes like “Autre Éventail,” occult dramatic molecules like “Petit Air,” and above all in his hieratic metaphysical ritual, Un Coup de dés. In this tremendously ambitious poem the logical structure of the Indo-European languages was shown organically to be an inadequate vehicle for so profound a change in sensibility. Pierre Reverdy is the first important French poet after Un Coup de dés to develop the methods of communication explored by Mallarmé.
Such exploration was once the future of American poetry, but in hindsight only Walter Conrad Arensberg in his last poems, Gertrude Stein in Tender Buttons and a very few other pieces, Laura Riding in her best work and the young Yvor Winters could be said to hew to the deliberate practice of the construction principles which guided Pierre Reverdy.
Yvor Winters went on, in fact, to condemn all verse of this kind as the deliberate courting of madness. What he objected to in essence was the seeking of glamour, what James Joyce translates "wholeness, harmony and radiance," that effulgence which St. Thomas called the stigmata of a true work of art, as an end in itself. I think what Winters meant was that intense hyperesthesia of this type, when it occurs in modern poetry without the motivation of religious belief, is pathological in its most advanced forms and sentimental in its less extreme ones. It is true of course that any work of art that coerces the reader or spectator into intense emotional response for which there is no adequate warrant or motive is by definition sentimental, but I do not think that this is exactly what happens in poetry like that of Reverdy, Mallarmé or Paul Valéry, who masks only slightly the same unanalyzable transcendental claim with seemingly ordinary syntactical context that can be negotiated through general experience.
The syntactical problems and possibilities of a language peculiar to the poetry of Reverdy makes unusual demands upon the reader and translator. Reverdy himself retired to the Benedictine Abbey of Solesmes in 1930 and lived there as a lay associate until his death in 1960 with only rare visits to Paris on business trips or to see old friends.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
A Shorter Version of Yesterday's Poem
The outside world is under glass
Breathing circuits splash the window
The emeralds strung as lights across the bridges
The darkness fends off stars
Breathing circuits splash the window
The emeralds strung as lights across the bridges
The darkness fends off stars
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
The Outside World
The outside world pretends to love you
As you pretend you’re worthy of its love
It shines its priceless daggers
You shine your worthless smile
It feeds you anyway
The outside world has everything
It’s only on one side
The only place the unknown still is real
Its darkness fends off stars
The hand it touches itches
The outside world stays straight faced
As you try to follow its story
You laugh along at the punch line and never know
If that was the real laughter
Or was it the later one at you
The outside world never asks you on a date
But you can tag along if you act stupid
And carry drinks and smile at bragging
And cut it to the quick without real anger
And laugh when you are ribboned in return
The outside world will never quite agree with you
It always has an opposite opinion
And says it doesn’t matter what it thinks
There's no compulsion to agree with it
But still it never comes to quite agree
The outside world wants questions answered
But only with more questions
And only in a certain tone of voice
And never with the truth that is too easy
Harmony the killer must keep her virtue intact
The outside world as a circle talks in circles
It always ends at the place where it began
It calls that proof
And thinks that it defeats you no matter what you say
Especially if you do not care to win
The outside world is never out to get you
It only wants you to think it is
By changing its mind as soon as you’ve accepted
Its earlier change of mind
Which never was a change, it says, at all
The outside world is dangerous
You think it exists
It steals from your collection plate
Makes you pray to be forgiven
And never says if you are
The outside world looks different
When not holding for a photograph
It cannot stop its laughter
Or wear its mask of knowledge
The only way that you are recognized
As you pretend you’re worthy of its love
It shines its priceless daggers
You shine your worthless smile
It feeds you anyway
The outside world has everything
It’s only on one side
The only place the unknown still is real
Its darkness fends off stars
The hand it touches itches
The outside world stays straight faced
As you try to follow its story
You laugh along at the punch line and never know
If that was the real laughter
Or was it the later one at you
The outside world never asks you on a date
But you can tag along if you act stupid
And carry drinks and smile at bragging
And cut it to the quick without real anger
And laugh when you are ribboned in return
The outside world will never quite agree with you
It always has an opposite opinion
And says it doesn’t matter what it thinks
There's no compulsion to agree with it
But still it never comes to quite agree
The outside world wants questions answered
But only with more questions
And only in a certain tone of voice
And never with the truth that is too easy
Harmony the killer must keep her virtue intact
The outside world as a circle talks in circles
It always ends at the place where it began
It calls that proof
And thinks that it defeats you no matter what you say
Especially if you do not care to win
The outside world is never out to get you
It only wants you to think it is
By changing its mind as soon as you’ve accepted
Its earlier change of mind
Which never was a change, it says, at all
The outside world is dangerous
You think it exists
It steals from your collection plate
Makes you pray to be forgiven
And never says if you are
The outside world looks different
When not holding for a photograph
It cannot stop its laughter
Or wear its mask of knowledge
The only way that you are recognized
Monday, February 13, 2012
Pole Shift
This old gray winter very soon will die
And things we thought were dead will spring to life.
The sun will wake us from our hibernations
And melt the phantom playthings in our minds.
We will no longer perish if we’re wrong,
No longer must we master bitter winds
By stacking cords of fragmentary trees
And culling books of names as if important.
No longer will the candles ward off darkness,
Our vision will not be through fogs of glass,
Our frosty breath will be as if invisible,
As structures that we’ve built of ice collapse.
We will not need the armor of bird feathers
Or need to fight for one last scrap of fat.
The gridlocks will be broken, the rivers
Will unthicken, the lakes will fill with sound.
The hardness of the ground will so soon soften,
The doors stuck shut will open, the cabin
Fever canning cellar remedies expire,
The essential oils and dried-out flowers end.
This old gray winter very soon will die
And soon our hearts will open…
We will no longer need our minds at all
And we’ll be terrified.
And things we thought were dead will spring to life.
The sun will wake us from our hibernations
And melt the phantom playthings in our minds.
We will no longer perish if we’re wrong,
No longer must we master bitter winds
By stacking cords of fragmentary trees
And culling books of names as if important.
No longer will the candles ward off darkness,
Our vision will not be through fogs of glass,
Our frosty breath will be as if invisible,
As structures that we’ve built of ice collapse.
We will not need the armor of bird feathers
Or need to fight for one last scrap of fat.
The gridlocks will be broken, the rivers
Will unthicken, the lakes will fill with sound.
The hardness of the ground will so soon soften,
The doors stuck shut will open, the cabin
Fever canning cellar remedies expire,
The essential oils and dried-out flowers end.
This old gray winter very soon will die
And soon our hearts will open…
We will no longer need our minds at all
And we’ll be terrified.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Land of the Rodeo Clowns
Somewhere in America
there's an Indian
not drunk
who is
laughing
at us
now.
there's an Indian
not drunk
who is
laughing
at us
now.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Friday, February 10, 2012
Visions of Frobisher Bay
All forms on earth
are reproduced in ice,
the craggy points, the wind-smoothed dunes,
the hanging spears like frills of fur,
the ice shines on the water
and water shines on the ice
that melts inside the eye,
where the water turns to crystal.
Men in seal suits writhe
on asymmetrical islands of blue glacier
like modern dancers on the slab
across the incandescent bay
a city of puffins laughing
and a stone-clear sun so far away.
I am part of this, their eyes are mine,
my skin is this with its fissures and canyons,
the desolate end of the world is familiar
as the pavement on my narrow walk
buckled by roots underground.
I must look gently, for the fish
must learn to become the ocean.
are reproduced in ice,
the craggy points, the wind-smoothed dunes,
the hanging spears like frills of fur,
the ice shines on the water
and water shines on the ice
that melts inside the eye,
where the water turns to crystal.
Men in seal suits writhe
on asymmetrical islands of blue glacier
like modern dancers on the slab
across the incandescent bay
a city of puffins laughing
and a stone-clear sun so far away.
I am part of this, their eyes are mine,
my skin is this with its fissures and canyons,
the desolate end of the world is familiar
as the pavement on my narrow walk
buckled by roots underground.
I must look gently, for the fish
must learn to become the ocean.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Addendum
The rich are here to teach us that crime pays,
that shame is what keeps common folk tied down,
to have a conscience clean when you are lying
and they know it, that is how you earn your keep
and win the hearts of men.
These stories of equality, the rule of law and honor
are for the children to believe, and adults to sell
with all the passion and conviction they can muster,
for what else keeps us useful than the sense of ordained order?
What good is any virtue, if it conflicts with the actual?
Lies are more harmonious, because sweeter,
they make the limits that we crave
seem not even of our own making
but the consequence of freedom
on man too flawed to earn it.
that shame is what keeps common folk tied down,
to have a conscience clean when you are lying
and they know it, that is how you earn your keep
and win the hearts of men.
These stories of equality, the rule of law and honor
are for the children to believe, and adults to sell
with all the passion and conviction they can muster,
for what else keeps us useful than the sense of ordained order?
What good is any virtue, if it conflicts with the actual?
Lies are more harmonious, because sweeter,
they make the limits that we crave
seem not even of our own making
but the consequence of freedom
on man too flawed to earn it.
Special Comment on Bank Bailout II
I don’t usually comment (directly at least) on news of this nature, but I’ll make an exception here…
Why has strategically defaulting and living payment free in your home become the new cool trend, like flipping condos in Las Vegas back in 2006? The simple answer is that banks are not foreclosing, and the reason they don’t foreclose is that it would force them to sell the home for less than the mortgage value. If they did this, they’d have to write off that amount on their balance sheet, which determines whether they have enough capital to be in operation (and in the case of the so-called Too-Big-To-Fail banks that own the Federal Reserve, how much money they can create from thin air to lend out at profit). According to ftimes, of the 52 million homes that have a mortgage, over 10 million are currently underwater (worth less than the outstanding mortgage), four million homes are delinquent, and two million have entered the foreclosure process (on top of the four million foreclosed upon since 2008).
That means that of the underwater homes, at the very least about six million are ready to enter the delinquency stage and begin living payment free.
Bear that statistic in mind when reading about today’s foreclosure fraud settlement between the five banks that originated over 60% of U.S. mortgages and the federal government, which has already rescued all five banks from annihilation. The settlement releases the four too-big-to-fail banks (Wells Fargo, Citi, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, along with the old GMAC – now Ally Bank) from liability for widespread and documented abuses in the servicing of loans and the foreclosure process over the past decade. The abuse came about because mortgages were repackaged and resold into investment pools with so little regard for longstanding rules on land recording that they lost track of the true owner on millions of homes. To cover up for the lack of proper title and liens when foreclosing, banks and their servicing units routinely forged, back-dated and fabricated documents at county recorder offices and state courts across the country. Furthermore, they employed “robo-signers,” who illegally signed hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of documents and affidavits without any knowledge of the underlying mortgages.
In addition, investigations uncovered massive servicing abuses, including charging borrowers with illegal fees, putting them into foreclosure while working out loan modifications, failing to honor previous modification settlements, foreclosing without just cause, and servicer-driven foreclosures, where illegal late fees and payments pushed the homeowner into foreclosure.
In return for absolving the banks of liability on the mortgage fraud issues, the settlement creates a $25 billion fund to address the problem of foreclosed, delinquent and underwater borrowers (this figure represents 3.5% of the $700 billion in negative equity in the country). Of the $25 billion, however, only $5 billion is coming from the banks themselves. The remainder is in the form of mortgage principal writedowns, the cost of which is paid by mortgage security investors, which after the government takeover of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae is U.S. taxpayers. The settlement is divided three ways: $5 billion in actual cash, distributed to the states for “legal aid services” to help the 750,000 individual mortgage borrowers illegally foreclosed upon gain access to between $1,800 and $2,000 per family (roughly 1% of the average foreclosed mortgage value of $180,000); $3 billion to go toward refinancing of underwater borrowers; and the remaining $17 billion to go, at the banks discretion, to principal reduction credits for troubled borrowers.
This settlement folds numerous fraud actions at the state and federal level into it, most notably the $8.2 billion suit by Nevada and Arizona against Countrywide (now BoA) to compel compliance with court-ordered consent decrees of that amount in consumer fraud violations. The settlement also stops or at least forestalls most but not all ongoing state investigations, which in the preliminary stages had found evidence of widespread abuses, such as 60% of all mortgage documents examined at random having title errors.
Although an independent mediator has been appointed, enforcement of this decree is left to the banks themselves, based on quarterly self-assessments. Unlike most large consent decrees, this deal will not be monitored and enforced by a court-appointed master under the continuing, active, supervision of a federal court.
In keeping with the Obama administration’s consistent focus on reliquifying the insolvent too-big-to-fail banks at taxpayer (and future taxpayer) expense, the settlement clearly satisfies its primary objective of insulating banks from lawsuit costs by capping liability for fraud, and removing more mortgage liability off of banks balance sheets. The total amount of the settlement represents about 1% of loan balances in the country, less than the price of the title insurance banks illegally failed to get when they transferred the loans to a trust for securitization, and a fraction of the cost they would ordinarily have to pay to defend foreclosure challenges. If the banks were actually held liable through normal prosecutions at the state level, the liability would be between $700-$800 billion. In this settlement, by contrast, no new assets need to be committed by the banks at all, since they’ve long had reserves for such contingencies.
While one might argue a settlement is appropriate to forestall the endless rounds of litigation that will probably in the end be paid for on both sides by taxpayers, such a settlement should not actually help the banks’ bottom lines. Consider the principal reduction credits in the settlement, as one example, which socks mortgage investors (taxpayers) with the cost of paying off the 1st lien mortgage, thus allowing banks with 2nd lien position mortgages (from people treating their home equity as a piggy bank) to press home owners to stay current on those payments. This creates income, removes liability they would otherwise have had to write off, and allows the banks in turn to increase their balance sheets (i.e. print money that they can then lend out for profit).
The financial benefit to banks is so great, the fact they don’t have to face criminal prosecution for what everyone acknowledges are deliberate, systematic and endemic felonies seems like an added benefit!
As clear as the results for the banks are, the consequences for people who had their homes illegally stolen is far from transparent: who’s maintaining the fund? How do they get to it? Who decides what mortgage holder does or does not gain access to the funds? Yet the foggy bureaucratese that addresses these questions is crystal clear compared to the legal issues this settlement raises. Do banks no longer have to prove in court they are in fact the title owners? Will a document that is obviously forged/robosigned be accepted by courts going forward? And what about all the other mortgage lenders, the community banks, state banks, credit unions and thousands of small and mid-sized commercial banks that don’t receive a get out of jail free card? How does this affect the approximately 80% of houses where the chain of title is now clouded? And what recourse do investors in mortgage-backed securities have for over 300 years of real estate contract law requiring property conveyance rights being voided?
More pointedly, why have the law enforcement arms of the federal and state governments in this case surrendered any duty of office to prosecute violations of law or to defend the citizenry from crimes against their property? With such a deliberate and comprehensive violation of laws by the mortgage servicers, one has to ask why should anyone honor a contract or obey a financial statute? No one higher up the food chain thinks ‘following the law’ is in any way desirable or mandatory, so why should ordinary people think so?
In particular, shouldn’t the bulk of the underwater citizenry simply default? And there you have the end game. With the charade of home values coming back up and the dream of home ownership snuffed in a sea of red ink and tape, we have a battle between, on the one hand, banks given more of a free hand to foreclose, illegally and without consequence, and on the other, homeowners who begin to believe that one is foolish for following rules.
The brutal suppression of the Occupy movement is a clear signal of which side will be allowed to win. It is simply not allowed to complain about losing your home and life savings through the fraudulent manipulations of others, because those others must continue to reap new profits with fresh victims using the same criminal methods. To claim the victimhood of the powerless is simply un-American, for the purpose of our justice system is to provide protection for those who steal from the innocent. Those who dare point this out will be forced to confess in shame at show trials while the .001% will boast that they have been unfairly maligned, utterly free of shame. And while the mortgage foreclosure fraud is small potatoes compared to the MERS violations and the securitization frauds that are still theoretically being investigated, the indifference of the public to the bald whitewash lying of the political class and media on this makes the abstract and quaint concept of justice seem further and further away.
I know that’s the way it’s been at least since Plato’s Republic, but I feel I should say something about it while I still have the freedom to speak.
Sources:
ftense
Naked Capitalism
zero hedge
Why has strategically defaulting and living payment free in your home become the new cool trend, like flipping condos in Las Vegas back in 2006? The simple answer is that banks are not foreclosing, and the reason they don’t foreclose is that it would force them to sell the home for less than the mortgage value. If they did this, they’d have to write off that amount on their balance sheet, which determines whether they have enough capital to be in operation (and in the case of the so-called Too-Big-To-Fail banks that own the Federal Reserve, how much money they can create from thin air to lend out at profit). According to ftimes, of the 52 million homes that have a mortgage, over 10 million are currently underwater (worth less than the outstanding mortgage), four million homes are delinquent, and two million have entered the foreclosure process (on top of the four million foreclosed upon since 2008).
That means that of the underwater homes, at the very least about six million are ready to enter the delinquency stage and begin living payment free.
Bear that statistic in mind when reading about today’s foreclosure fraud settlement between the five banks that originated over 60% of U.S. mortgages and the federal government, which has already rescued all five banks from annihilation. The settlement releases the four too-big-to-fail banks (Wells Fargo, Citi, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, along with the old GMAC – now Ally Bank) from liability for widespread and documented abuses in the servicing of loans and the foreclosure process over the past decade. The abuse came about because mortgages were repackaged and resold into investment pools with so little regard for longstanding rules on land recording that they lost track of the true owner on millions of homes. To cover up for the lack of proper title and liens when foreclosing, banks and their servicing units routinely forged, back-dated and fabricated documents at county recorder offices and state courts across the country. Furthermore, they employed “robo-signers,” who illegally signed hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of documents and affidavits without any knowledge of the underlying mortgages.
In addition, investigations uncovered massive servicing abuses, including charging borrowers with illegal fees, putting them into foreclosure while working out loan modifications, failing to honor previous modification settlements, foreclosing without just cause, and servicer-driven foreclosures, where illegal late fees and payments pushed the homeowner into foreclosure.
In return for absolving the banks of liability on the mortgage fraud issues, the settlement creates a $25 billion fund to address the problem of foreclosed, delinquent and underwater borrowers (this figure represents 3.5% of the $700 billion in negative equity in the country). Of the $25 billion, however, only $5 billion is coming from the banks themselves. The remainder is in the form of mortgage principal writedowns, the cost of which is paid by mortgage security investors, which after the government takeover of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae is U.S. taxpayers. The settlement is divided three ways: $5 billion in actual cash, distributed to the states for “legal aid services” to help the 750,000 individual mortgage borrowers illegally foreclosed upon gain access to between $1,800 and $2,000 per family (roughly 1% of the average foreclosed mortgage value of $180,000); $3 billion to go toward refinancing of underwater borrowers; and the remaining $17 billion to go, at the banks discretion, to principal reduction credits for troubled borrowers.
This settlement folds numerous fraud actions at the state and federal level into it, most notably the $8.2 billion suit by Nevada and Arizona against Countrywide (now BoA) to compel compliance with court-ordered consent decrees of that amount in consumer fraud violations. The settlement also stops or at least forestalls most but not all ongoing state investigations, which in the preliminary stages had found evidence of widespread abuses, such as 60% of all mortgage documents examined at random having title errors.
Although an independent mediator has been appointed, enforcement of this decree is left to the banks themselves, based on quarterly self-assessments. Unlike most large consent decrees, this deal will not be monitored and enforced by a court-appointed master under the continuing, active, supervision of a federal court.
In keeping with the Obama administration’s consistent focus on reliquifying the insolvent too-big-to-fail banks at taxpayer (and future taxpayer) expense, the settlement clearly satisfies its primary objective of insulating banks from lawsuit costs by capping liability for fraud, and removing more mortgage liability off of banks balance sheets. The total amount of the settlement represents about 1% of loan balances in the country, less than the price of the title insurance banks illegally failed to get when they transferred the loans to a trust for securitization, and a fraction of the cost they would ordinarily have to pay to defend foreclosure challenges. If the banks were actually held liable through normal prosecutions at the state level, the liability would be between $700-$800 billion. In this settlement, by contrast, no new assets need to be committed by the banks at all, since they’ve long had reserves for such contingencies.
While one might argue a settlement is appropriate to forestall the endless rounds of litigation that will probably in the end be paid for on both sides by taxpayers, such a settlement should not actually help the banks’ bottom lines. Consider the principal reduction credits in the settlement, as one example, which socks mortgage investors (taxpayers) with the cost of paying off the 1st lien mortgage, thus allowing banks with 2nd lien position mortgages (from people treating their home equity as a piggy bank) to press home owners to stay current on those payments. This creates income, removes liability they would otherwise have had to write off, and allows the banks in turn to increase their balance sheets (i.e. print money that they can then lend out for profit).
The financial benefit to banks is so great, the fact they don’t have to face criminal prosecution for what everyone acknowledges are deliberate, systematic and endemic felonies seems like an added benefit!
As clear as the results for the banks are, the consequences for people who had their homes illegally stolen is far from transparent: who’s maintaining the fund? How do they get to it? Who decides what mortgage holder does or does not gain access to the funds? Yet the foggy bureaucratese that addresses these questions is crystal clear compared to the legal issues this settlement raises. Do banks no longer have to prove in court they are in fact the title owners? Will a document that is obviously forged/robosigned be accepted by courts going forward? And what about all the other mortgage lenders, the community banks, state banks, credit unions and thousands of small and mid-sized commercial banks that don’t receive a get out of jail free card? How does this affect the approximately 80% of houses where the chain of title is now clouded? And what recourse do investors in mortgage-backed securities have for over 300 years of real estate contract law requiring property conveyance rights being voided?
More pointedly, why have the law enforcement arms of the federal and state governments in this case surrendered any duty of office to prosecute violations of law or to defend the citizenry from crimes against their property? With such a deliberate and comprehensive violation of laws by the mortgage servicers, one has to ask why should anyone honor a contract or obey a financial statute? No one higher up the food chain thinks ‘following the law’ is in any way desirable or mandatory, so why should ordinary people think so?
In particular, shouldn’t the bulk of the underwater citizenry simply default? And there you have the end game. With the charade of home values coming back up and the dream of home ownership snuffed in a sea of red ink and tape, we have a battle between, on the one hand, banks given more of a free hand to foreclose, illegally and without consequence, and on the other, homeowners who begin to believe that one is foolish for following rules.
The brutal suppression of the Occupy movement is a clear signal of which side will be allowed to win. It is simply not allowed to complain about losing your home and life savings through the fraudulent manipulations of others, because those others must continue to reap new profits with fresh victims using the same criminal methods. To claim the victimhood of the powerless is simply un-American, for the purpose of our justice system is to provide protection for those who steal from the innocent. Those who dare point this out will be forced to confess in shame at show trials while the .001% will boast that they have been unfairly maligned, utterly free of shame. And while the mortgage foreclosure fraud is small potatoes compared to the MERS violations and the securitization frauds that are still theoretically being investigated, the indifference of the public to the bald whitewash lying of the political class and media on this makes the abstract and quaint concept of justice seem further and further away.
I know that’s the way it’s been at least since Plato’s Republic, but I feel I should say something about it while I still have the freedom to speak.
Sources:
ftense
Naked Capitalism
zero hedge
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Voice
"En la ignorancia, esta's
en todo - cielo, mar y tierra - muerto" *
-Juan Ramón Jiménez
Your voice, the only voice
that breathes through these machines,
the only one that's speaking
in the stuttering of tongues,
the one that, saying nothing
has the feel of everything,
as all the heard words added up
are empty, not full.
Your voice, the only voice
that knows things, not their names
and will not separate the earth from hearts
as they spin in opposite directions,
the one that, saying nothing
tells the lives of everything,
as all conclusions only note
the thing as dead.
Your voice, the only voice
that tells me what is real,
the only one not proving
in the multitudes of truth,
the one that, saying nothing
shows we're wrong on everything,
as all the yes's conjure up
the no not overcome.
Your voice, the only voice
I hear above the noise,
the only one not anchored to a sound
that's not my own,
the one that, saying nothing
makes me part of everything,
as all talking makes an opening
I fall through like a crack.
* In ignorance, you exist
in everything - sky, sea and earth - dead
en todo - cielo, mar y tierra - muerto" *
-Juan Ramón Jiménez
Your voice, the only voice
that breathes through these machines,
the only one that's speaking
in the stuttering of tongues,
the one that, saying nothing
has the feel of everything,
as all the heard words added up
are empty, not full.
Your voice, the only voice
that knows things, not their names
and will not separate the earth from hearts
as they spin in opposite directions,
the one that, saying nothing
tells the lives of everything,
as all conclusions only note
the thing as dead.
Your voice, the only voice
that tells me what is real,
the only one not proving
in the multitudes of truth,
the one that, saying nothing
shows we're wrong on everything,
as all the yes's conjure up
the no not overcome.
Your voice, the only voice
I hear above the noise,
the only one not anchored to a sound
that's not my own,
the one that, saying nothing
makes me part of everything,
as all talking makes an opening
I fall through like a crack.
* In ignorance, you exist
in everything - sky, sea and earth - dead
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Sleeping Giants Awake
"Zuccotti Park has been taken over by Giants fans!" – Fox News New York, 2/7/12
Down Broadway, fans line the streets behind the barricades, “a Jints fan
from the cradle to the grave,"
Waiting for their beloved team, cheering everything that moves,
"everyone’s a Giants fan today,"
All wearing big blue uniforms and waving something, usually some kind
of homemade sign:
"King of New York baby," "GMen all day every day," "just wait until
next year, when they win again."
Some have camped out overnight, with binoculars to catch a glimpse
of their heroes,
Toilet paper banners like ribbons in the sky, confetti thrown from
upper-story windows,
Blue grease paint under eyes, a Giants helmet on the Wall Street bull,
The tourist bus is covered with a “Champions” banner, people take
pictures from the top.
Blue flower floats pulled by F-150s roll in to a sea of red, white and blue
stock ticker tape,
To screams of "gi-ants, gi-ants, gi-ants," red and blue balloons explode, American flags wave,
Fans look like babies seeing candles for the first time, throwing
programs at the players
Who wave, beaming, grateful, to the gotham cheers for the champions
of the woyuldd.
They expect winners here, but they treat them just like royalty, people
out of buildings whistling like birds
Just like on the sides of the streets, raising their voices so they can finally
be heard,
To commemorate a victory that can’t be overturned, marching bands
with pink and white hat feathers,
The usual fraternal organizations on wheels, traveling podiums
filled with cheerleaders,
Traffic completely stopped, the asphalt filled with confetti like snow,
The sound like jet engines revving, “they always get written off
and they come back to win,” and then, who shows up but
Police in riot gear behind plastic body shields, they order everyone
to disperse,
Shooting pepper spray from water cannons on the mob,
Arresting any who resist, with zipcuff wire, throwing them headfirst
onto concrete,
Ripping up the tents of those who’ve camped out, taking their pom-poms
and whistles
And crushing them with bulldozers, where they’re swept up by teams
in hazmat suits.
People who complain are beaten senseless and bloody
with nightsticks,
People who try to get away are kettled into side streets so they can be
arrested,
And people who still dare to wave the champions flag are tased.
In the crowd are some city officials, journalists, diplomats from other
countries,
All of them are swept up in the net and handcuffed if they resist in any
way.
Out of the melee, a few reasons are suggested: there are children in
danger, ticker tape is a health violation,
The noise ordinances have been violated, traffic has been blocked,
there wasn’t an official permit,
But the people know otherwise: they played hookey from work or school
for the day,
They dared to believe, and speak their mind a little too freely, they took
over, if just for a day.
A few peeled it back a deeper level: rooting for the giants is anti-patriotic,
Any victories for humanity must be celebrated privately.
Down Broadway, fans line the streets behind the barricades, “a Jints fan
from the cradle to the grave,"
Waiting for their beloved team, cheering everything that moves,
"everyone’s a Giants fan today,"
All wearing big blue uniforms and waving something, usually some kind
of homemade sign:
"King of New York baby," "GMen all day every day," "just wait until
next year, when they win again."
Some have camped out overnight, with binoculars to catch a glimpse
of their heroes,
Toilet paper banners like ribbons in the sky, confetti thrown from
upper-story windows,
Blue grease paint under eyes, a Giants helmet on the Wall Street bull,
The tourist bus is covered with a “Champions” banner, people take
pictures from the top.
Blue flower floats pulled by F-150s roll in to a sea of red, white and blue
stock ticker tape,
To screams of "gi-ants, gi-ants, gi-ants," red and blue balloons explode, American flags wave,
Fans look like babies seeing candles for the first time, throwing
programs at the players
Who wave, beaming, grateful, to the gotham cheers for the champions
of the woyuldd.
They expect winners here, but they treat them just like royalty, people
out of buildings whistling like birds
Just like on the sides of the streets, raising their voices so they can finally
be heard,
To commemorate a victory that can’t be overturned, marching bands
with pink and white hat feathers,
The usual fraternal organizations on wheels, traveling podiums
filled with cheerleaders,
Traffic completely stopped, the asphalt filled with confetti like snow,
The sound like jet engines revving, “they always get written off
and they come back to win,” and then, who shows up but
Police in riot gear behind plastic body shields, they order everyone
to disperse,
Shooting pepper spray from water cannons on the mob,
Arresting any who resist, with zipcuff wire, throwing them headfirst
onto concrete,
Ripping up the tents of those who’ve camped out, taking their pom-poms
and whistles
And crushing them with bulldozers, where they’re swept up by teams
in hazmat suits.
People who complain are beaten senseless and bloody
with nightsticks,
People who try to get away are kettled into side streets so they can be
arrested,
And people who still dare to wave the champions flag are tased.
In the crowd are some city officials, journalists, diplomats from other
countries,
All of them are swept up in the net and handcuffed if they resist in any
way.
Out of the melee, a few reasons are suggested: there are children in
danger, ticker tape is a health violation,
The noise ordinances have been violated, traffic has been blocked,
there wasn’t an official permit,
But the people know otherwise: they played hookey from work or school
for the day,
They dared to believe, and speak their mind a little too freely, they took
over, if just for a day.
A few peeled it back a deeper level: rooting for the giants is anti-patriotic,
Any victories for humanity must be celebrated privately.
Monday, February 6, 2012
Pantoum Number One
Are you alive or already dead?
The dream states won’t tell you what’s true
All that you hear is all you want said
All you can see is the view
The dream states won’t tell you what’s true,
What is awake and what is asleep
All you can see is the view
At some point you must make the leap
What is awake and what is asleep
Nobody wants you to know
At some point you must make the leap
From the undertow into the flow
Nobody wants you to know
What you cry on the inside for
From the undertow into the flow
To the great imperceptible shore
What you cry on the inside for
Comes revealed in every detail
To the great imperceptible shore
Where the truth only rises to fail
Comes revealed in every detail
Your own uncontainable scale
Where the truth only rises to fail
Through your own imperceptible veil
Your own uncontainable scale
All that you hear is all you want said
Your own imperceptible veil
Are you alive or already dead?
The dream states won’t tell you what’s true
All that you hear is all you want said
All you can see is the view
The dream states won’t tell you what’s true,
What is awake and what is asleep
All you can see is the view
At some point you must make the leap
What is awake and what is asleep
Nobody wants you to know
At some point you must make the leap
From the undertow into the flow
Nobody wants you to know
What you cry on the inside for
From the undertow into the flow
To the great imperceptible shore
What you cry on the inside for
Comes revealed in every detail
To the great imperceptible shore
Where the truth only rises to fail
Comes revealed in every detail
Your own uncontainable scale
Where the truth only rises to fail
Through your own imperceptible veil
Your own uncontainable scale
All that you hear is all you want said
Your own imperceptible veil
Are you alive or already dead?
Sunday, February 5, 2012
A Baltimore Thing
Arabs, they call them,
some macabre African-American tradition,
horses and black carriages
traveling from Mon Roe to Pigtown,
guys with stovepipes hats
selling flowers from the back like My Fair Lady...
Arabs, they call them.
some macabre African-American tradition,
horses and black carriages
traveling from Mon Roe to Pigtown,
guys with stovepipes hats
selling flowers from the back like My Fair Lady...
Arabs, they call them.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
The Reason for Karma
A new wound
heals
the old wound
in theory
but the old is remembered
as loss
and the new wound
turns old
requiring the feeling
of a blade
to remember how God
left it abandoned
and 'cos otherwise
it would not know it
exists.
heals
the old wound
in theory
but the old is remembered
as loss
and the new wound
turns old
requiring the feeling
of a blade
to remember how God
left it abandoned
and 'cos otherwise
it would not know it
exists.
Friday, February 3, 2012
Wistawa Szymborska (1923-2012)
"For others, Death was mad and monumental—
not for these citizens of the sepia past.
Their griefs turned into smiles, their days flew fast,
their vanishing was due to influenza." ["Family Album"]
Commemorating the death of a poet is a bit redundant. When most poets aren't commemorating in advance their own death, they're playing dead, or in extreme cases, practicing being dead. And then there's that whole "afterlife" phenomenon - as if it's not good enough to have glimpses into one's own immortality through the rarefied act of poetry-making, there's this business about being remembered by posterity for one's words. Silly, I know, but fortunately, the muse no likee vanity, and plays all sorts of tricks to keep poets on the up and up. And so when poets give up the proverbial Hamlet, one feels one can say what formerly one could not whisper (for fear of being the subject of a poem about being misunderstood). After all, there were all those words, more than we got out of even the best of our actual friends, and they were so intense, we really ought to believe we really knew them. Unfortunately, unless its some spectacular mythic accident that makes them pretty young corpses, it usually ends up most closely resembling those old Hollywood stars of the 20's and 30's, who expire in Old Stars Homes as distant memories to most people not as old as themselves. We feel we know them too, but after the glamour has left we realize they were only actors reading scripts, not the characters they presented as mirrors to ourselves. In death, the public becomes private, in other words, and in poets the private becomes sealed in what can only be called an articulate crypt.
This essay is supposed to be about Wistawa Szymborska, the great Polish poet who passed this week at 88, but somehow I just know that she would look askance at such memorials, for she's shrewdly memorialized herself on so many occasions that anything I or anyone else reports would be irrelevant. She's written about death as embarrassing ("Report from the Hospital"), lacking foresight ("Letters from the Dead"), falsely confused with birth ("Born"), a matter of decorum ("Beheading"), and reserved in its importance for humans instead of beetles, where it is "quarantined" ("Seen from Above"). She's speculated about suicide notes ("The Suicide's Room"), made a detailed examination of the condition of a life in the moments before death ("Alive"), interrogated people on the details of dead people dreams ("Plotting with the Dead"), and even seen the "joy of writing" as "the revenge of the mortal hand" ("The Joy of Writing"). It's almost like all of this is just so we can finally laugh at death now that she is actually dead.
But death per se is not her concern, so much as its wonderful ability to bring out the absurdity of people. She prizes this quality in all of her subjects, lovingly skewering us at our most vulnerable point, our sense of pathos. How sad that years of closeness makes lovers unrecognizable because undreamable ("I Am Too Close..."), and how sad new lovers can't be seen through the fantasy ("Over Wine"). How sad that Cassandra was actually wrong ("Soliloquoy for Cassandra") and Lot's wife was actually right ("Lot's Wife"). How sad that imaginary kingdoms have to be lost in the dustbin of history ("Voices"), and how sad "history rounds off skeletons to zero" ("Starvation Camp Near Jaslo"). How sad it is to read poetry to a room with only a handful of people ("Poetry Reading"), and how sad it is to be a world-famous Nobel Prize winning poet without the basic privacy that any writer needs ("Some People"). How sad indeed it all is, but I always laugh. How sad that she died, but still I laugh. She's like the Ellen De Generes of the poetry world, finding that thing we all know but never think rises to the level of communication, and unpeeling it with excruciating slowness and raven-like cleverness, showing in the process how even the most commonplace thing actually makes absolutely no sense.
Properly appreciating such a mind is an impossible -- albeit humorous -- task, because when the tiny thing becomes so enlarged that it is incomprehensible, the distance becomes too great. And that's the fun, laughing through the tears.
On that note I'll close with one of my favorite Szymborska poems, "Vocabulary":
"La Pologne? La Pologne? Isn't it terribly cold there?" she asked, and then sighed with relief. So many countries have been turning up lately that the safest thing to talk about is the climate.
"Madame," I want to reply, "my people's poets do all their writing in mittens. I don't mean to imply that they never remove them; they do, indeed, if the moon is warm enough. In stanzas composed of raucous whooping, for only such can drown the windstorms' constant roar, they glorify the simple lives of our walrus herders. Our Classicists engrave their odes with inky icicles on trampled snowdrifts. The rest, our Decadents, bewail their fate with snowflakes instead of tears. He who wishes to drown himself must have an axe at hand to cut the ice. Oh, madame, dearest madame."
That's what I mean to say. But I've forgotten the word for walrus in French. And I'm not sure of icicle or ax.
"La Pologne? La Pologne? Isn't it terribly cold there?"
"Pas du tout," I answer icily.
Note: all titles and quotes come from Poems New and Collected, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.
Regret Over Things Once Thought As Important
To see what can't be seen
Know eyes that can't be known
For its own sake
To love what can't be loved
Feel love that can't be shown
For its own sake
To think what can't be thought
Believe what can't be true
Trust it like a stone
For its own sake
Know eyes that can't be known
For its own sake
To love what can't be loved
Feel love that can't be shown
For its own sake
To think what can't be thought
Believe what can't be true
Trust it like a stone
For its own sake
Thursday, February 2, 2012
To Susan
The orange blossoms on the vines
Between our separate worlds
Are all I care to recognize
Of how my life unfurled.
Immortalizers' thickenings —
In hindsight no surprise
Against the love I let — for you
Dissolve in private skies.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Orcadian Hymn
“The closer I come to knowledge of myself, the more certain I feel I am immortal, and conversely, the more certain I am of my immortality, the more intimately I come to know myself.” – Edwin Muir
The recently discovered ruins in Brodgar, Orkney, thought older and more complex than Stonehenge, remind us of Orkney's mythic status as a lost paradise, one elucidated by its two greatest poets, Edwin Muir and George Mackay Brown.
From Scara Brae to the Ness o' Brogdar
Fairies play and mermaids appear
With the kelpies and the ghillie dhu,
The finfolk of eynhallow and the seal people
While creels are woven, trawlers battened,
Cold winds hold us to the stone
That holds it all, but never mocks
Our unknowing. The holms all come and go, so too
The smoke from which comes forth the scrying face,
Our own, on the other side, smiling through the salt
And icicles on our nostrils. We are free as gulls
But tethered to the buoys, repairing traps and scaling mackerel,
Trying not to let our pity show, as we haul indifferent eyes in sacks
To kitchens eyed by cats, but everybody else with jaws as final
As the rocks before the sea.
The skerries can’t be seen without the white gull screak,
The tides cannot come in without the creak of wheels on docks.
In the caves sentinel witches converse with spirits drowned,
By the churches clean as drums, with gravestones like teeth broken,
Fallen down, laundry roars in the wind, immortality in every edge.
Endure things long enough you learn to see,
There always is an opening for waves,
So it is with our souls, sustained by
Endless drownings, constant hunger, bone-chilled cold
--And the warmth we find from the other side
Joining us for all we have to give:
Undiminished love, an endless stock of faith,
Gratitude that ferments into grace.
From Scara Brae to the Ness o' Brogdar
Fairies play and mermaids appear
With the kelpies and the ghillie dhu,
The finfolk of eynhallow and the seal people
While creels are woven, trawlers battened,
Cold winds hold us to the stone
That holds it all, but never mocks
Our unknowing. The holms all come and go, so too
The smoke from which comes forth the scrying face,
Our own, on the other side, smiling through the salt
And icicles on our nostrils. We are free as gulls
But tethered to the buoys, repairing traps and scaling mackerel,
Trying not to let our pity show, as we haul indifferent eyes in sacks
To kitchens eyed by cats, but everybody else with jaws as final
As the rocks before the sea.
The skerries can’t be seen without the white gull screak,
The tides cannot come in without the creak of wheels on docks.
In the caves sentinel witches converse with spirits drowned,
By the churches clean as drums, with gravestones like teeth broken,
Fallen down, laundry roars in the wind, immortality in every edge.
Endure things long enough you learn to see,
There always is an opening for waves,
So it is with our souls, sustained by
Endless drownings, constant hunger, bone-chilled cold
--And the warmth we find from the other side
Joining us for all we have to give:
Undiminished love, an endless stock of faith,
Gratitude that ferments into grace.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Changing Cast of Morning Clouds
The clouds have been woven to herringbone wool
and all I do is paint them;
The band plays it funky to rev up the morning
and I fit my soul in the bass line;
I react, like the well-oiled machine I am
to the news and gossip of the day, the terms used
convey me to a place not quite there, not quite here.
Illumination comes as the white sun through clouds.
I was responsible for my own unfoldment once
—I left the scene of the crimes,
demanded my own holy vista,
drove off the clothes and the ideas I wore,
stood alone at a rippling, glistening pond,
but the people I had hurt came back in time
to show me the damage I had done,
responsibility created fault
because I let the childish looking go
to move toward something larger.
My love was not quite strong enough
to overcome condemnation.
So here I am, on rails at fixed times,
providing the insights expected to those
who'd cry every night to be heard—
an intricate fabric, a singular thread
moves to disappear—knowing the sun
rewards failure, and there's always a hope
I can lose everything
again, and the next time
the ruins will be pure
beauty.
and all I do is paint them;
The band plays it funky to rev up the morning
and I fit my soul in the bass line;
I react, like the well-oiled machine I am
to the news and gossip of the day, the terms used
convey me to a place not quite there, not quite here.
Illumination comes as the white sun through clouds.
I was responsible for my own unfoldment once
—I left the scene of the crimes,
demanded my own holy vista,
drove off the clothes and the ideas I wore,
stood alone at a rippling, glistening pond,
but the people I had hurt came back in time
to show me the damage I had done,
responsibility created fault
because I let the childish looking go
to move toward something larger.
My love was not quite strong enough
to overcome condemnation.
So here I am, on rails at fixed times,
providing the insights expected to those
who'd cry every night to be heard—
an intricate fabric, a singular thread
moves to disappear—knowing the sun
rewards failure, and there's always a hope
I can lose everything
again, and the next time
the ruins will be pure
beauty.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Glimpses of Ubiquity
The sun through the trees transmits sacred geometries
turning this place of flesh, in its flash, back to blueprint.
The only part of us not at one with the universe
is our consciousness, yet consciousness is the one entire.
When the ancients painted eyes on stones
it was not so much to help them see
as to remember that they could.
turning this place of flesh, in its flash, back to blueprint.
The only part of us not at one with the universe
is our consciousness, yet consciousness is the one entire.
When the ancients painted eyes on stones
it was not so much to help them see
as to remember that they could.
Behind Door Number Three
Children must leave childish things behind,
they must grow up to find their mothers.
Every human can be free, the key is to surrender,
ask help to be autonomous, to wake up to the dream
by learning the truth from its teacher, the lies that built our world.
The sun through the trees transmits sacred geometries
turning this place of flesh, in its flash, back to blueprint
and we remember how the stories and songs needed a home,
how movement needed a form to measure itself around
like the earth could seem so still hurtling in exponentials.
The only part of us not at one with the universe
is our consciousness, yet consciousness is the whole she-bang.
How can we think of our lives being different from our ideas,
or our planet being different from a black hole or quasar,
or of horses, say, distinct from rocks?
When the ancients painted eyes on stones
it was not so much to help them see
as to remember that they could.
they must grow up to find their mothers.
Every human can be free, the key is to surrender,
ask help to be autonomous, to wake up to the dream
by learning the truth from its teacher, the lies that built our world.
The sun through the trees transmits sacred geometries
turning this place of flesh, in its flash, back to blueprint
and we remember how the stories and songs needed a home,
how movement needed a form to measure itself around
like the earth could seem so still hurtling in exponentials.
The only part of us not at one with the universe
is our consciousness, yet consciousness is the whole she-bang.
How can we think of our lives being different from our ideas,
or our planet being different from a black hole or quasar,
or of horses, say, distinct from rocks?
When the ancients painted eyes on stones
it was not so much to help them see
as to remember that they could.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Turn Black the Mirrors
Turn black the mirrors
to look at myself,
Peeling back layers
of miserable doubt
Before I see how I am held
in the warmest embrace,
From the vantage point of a God
it seems, is what it takes
What would be, if not for the mind,
an instantaneous realization.
to look at myself,
Peeling back layers
of miserable doubt
Before I see how I am held
in the warmest embrace,
From the vantage point of a God
it seems, is what it takes
What would be, if not for the mind,
an instantaneous realization.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Blue Sparks at Dragon Night
Everything can be reconciled from a place of self-loathing;
if one looks enough at the broken hall of mirrors one becomes
what one fears, and says "I told you so."
Ah, the payoff,
the short-circuit vision into heartlessness, so one doesn't
have to think but one's a fool to show respect because
one isn't treated with the respect that one deserves
as one was taught to treat every other
(with verbal and physical scars to prove it).
And so there's the slow burn of frustrated expectations,
the fire that says "it's mine" in a wind that scatters coals,
expecting others to be other than what they are
(and helping them see just how far they fall short),
it's this game of fair play, once given as a promise
in lieu of another hug, it becomes an addiction
with its thumb to the world, where everything's a gift
and justice is not of this realm.
Humans are the creatures incensed they can't get what they want
and the ones who keep forgetting they are royalty
And then the anger comes, and it burns inside the viscera,
the dull aches of another's pain inside
as he feels the whole thing slip away from his grip,
he should get what he gets without pitching a fit,
he knows this, he knows what he meant
was not close to what was expressed, whatever truth
was there is forgotten in his shame. He feels estranged
and paralyzed once again.
Humans are the beasts who maximize their advantage because they can,
and the ones who surrender with the compassion of the Gods
Meanwhile, on the other end of his wrath,
they wonder how far it can go,
how softly they must walk on the eggshells,
how quickly they can mend what's torn,
they dare not say that conversation is inaccessible,
dare not express the confusion of their pain,
time is too short to utter any words, words that can
cut unexpectedly like glass.
They feel like victims, powerless, mute,
as if it's all their fault, misunderstood,
just like that ogre in the other corner,
the one now crying too softly to hear, for love.
Humans are the animals who kill to prove a principle
but mourn a passing they never stopped to know
if one looks enough at the broken hall of mirrors one becomes
what one fears, and says "I told you so."
Ah, the payoff,
the short-circuit vision into heartlessness, so one doesn't
have to think but one's a fool to show respect because
one isn't treated with the respect that one deserves
as one was taught to treat every other
(with verbal and physical scars to prove it).
And so there's the slow burn of frustrated expectations,
the fire that says "it's mine" in a wind that scatters coals,
expecting others to be other than what they are
(and helping them see just how far they fall short),
it's this game of fair play, once given as a promise
in lieu of another hug, it becomes an addiction
with its thumb to the world, where everything's a gift
and justice is not of this realm.
Humans are the creatures incensed they can't get what they want
and the ones who keep forgetting they are royalty
And then the anger comes, and it burns inside the viscera,
the dull aches of another's pain inside
as he feels the whole thing slip away from his grip,
he should get what he gets without pitching a fit,
he knows this, he knows what he meant
was not close to what was expressed, whatever truth
was there is forgotten in his shame. He feels estranged
and paralyzed once again.
Humans are the beasts who maximize their advantage because they can,
and the ones who surrender with the compassion of the Gods
Meanwhile, on the other end of his wrath,
they wonder how far it can go,
how softly they must walk on the eggshells,
how quickly they can mend what's torn,
they dare not say that conversation is inaccessible,
dare not express the confusion of their pain,
time is too short to utter any words, words that can
cut unexpectedly like glass.
They feel like victims, powerless, mute,
as if it's all their fault, misunderstood,
just like that ogre in the other corner,
the one now crying too softly to hear, for love.
Humans are the animals who kill to prove a principle
but mourn a passing they never stopped to know
Friday, January 27, 2012
Redemption Train
For Jesse
The redemption train is already waiting
Waiting for you to take that walk through the rain
There's so many roads but there’s only one station
Where all of us pray you will find the way
The redemption train is forever boarding
With sinners forgiven who wash themselves clean
They fall down to their knees for the power and glory
They’re worthy enough for the grace they have seen
The redemption train has one destination
The place we are waiting with love in our eyes
To share all your tears and sing your salvation
The love of the Lord is just you in disguise
The redemption train is already waiting
Waiting for you to walk through the rain
So many roads but there’s only one station
Where all of us pray that you’ll find your way
The redemption train is already waiting
Waiting for you to take that walk through the rain
There's so many roads but there’s only one station
Where all of us pray you will find the way
The redemption train is forever boarding
With sinners forgiven who wash themselves clean
They fall down to their knees for the power and glory
They’re worthy enough for the grace they have seen
The redemption train has one destination
The place we are waiting with love in our eyes
To share all your tears and sing your salvation
The love of the Lord is just you in disguise
The redemption train is already waiting
Waiting for you to walk through the rain
So many roads but there’s only one station
Where all of us pray that you’ll find your way
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Replacement Parts
Our human stars
that light the night
below the absent sky
give up their secrets easily,
some love they wish you'd buy
displayed behind
the lamps of chrome
that flood the darkness gray
so you can find your way around
the frameworks of the day.
The Pleiades
are liquor stores
to help you stagger home,
Orion leaves its office on
so you can eye its tomes,
and street lamps
are the zodiac
connecting Gods and men
and bedroom lamps the planets glow
as days begin and end.
We bring our essence
closer in
and dance in spacious rooms,
the universes we once rhymed
can safely now resume.
that light the night
below the absent sky
give up their secrets easily,
some love they wish you'd buy
displayed behind
the lamps of chrome
that flood the darkness gray
so you can find your way around
the frameworks of the day.
The Pleiades
are liquor stores
to help you stagger home,
Orion leaves its office on
so you can eye its tomes,
and street lamps
are the zodiac
connecting Gods and men
and bedroom lamps the planets glow
as days begin and end.
We bring our essence
closer in
and dance in spacious rooms,
the universes we once rhymed
can safely now resume.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Two People Talking
The affairs of state are such intimate kisses,
the ravenousness inside only hinted at in the pictures.
We can hear the malnourished mistress but we never see her face;
the concessions that they press are someone else’s pillow talk.
Their wars disturb my sleep but they are merely lover’s quarrels
where neighbors can make out a phrase or two,
and the unreciprocation, their contempt for our distress
is but a whispering note in a high-end dinner date
to complement the wine.
I look into your eyes and tell the history of all that is,
and the total past is prologue for our talking,
and we solve whatever problems there are festering
because we care to understand each other's viewpoint.
As we talk, people watch us eagerly from the aethers
and we smell the scents of heaven that imbue their evening rooms.
What we do seems to matter more to them than public speeches
for the real is the only thing, the only thing that matters,
and no one can forget that they are real.
the ravenousness inside only hinted at in the pictures.
We can hear the malnourished mistress but we never see her face;
the concessions that they press are someone else’s pillow talk.
Their wars disturb my sleep but they are merely lover’s quarrels
where neighbors can make out a phrase or two,
and the unreciprocation, their contempt for our distress
is but a whispering note in a high-end dinner date
to complement the wine.
I look into your eyes and tell the history of all that is,
and the total past is prologue for our talking,
and we solve whatever problems there are festering
because we care to understand each other's viewpoint.
As we talk, people watch us eagerly from the aethers
and we smell the scents of heaven that imbue their evening rooms.
What we do seems to matter more to them than public speeches
for the real is the only thing, the only thing that matters,
and no one can forget that they are real.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Crazy
I walk through the mist
in awe of the glistening snow at night
as the dharma of rain soaks my skin.
While the others are driving, splashing my shoes
I walk the two miles to my home
in my own cold baptism.
There is nothing in these homes for me
with their warm TVs,
there is only this chance
that another word waits around the corner,
a new rhythm to capture from the pleadings of rain,
a different sensation to coax from the winter dark.
in awe of the glistening snow at night
as the dharma of rain soaks my skin.
While the others are driving, splashing my shoes
I walk the two miles to my home
in my own cold baptism.
There is nothing in these homes for me
with their warm TVs,
there is only this chance
that another word waits around the corner,
a new rhythm to capture from the pleadings of rain,
a different sensation to coax from the winter dark.
Monday, January 23, 2012
Grey Day
I. Observations
The blank sheet of snow
Is already turning grey
As the portentous sky
And rooftops of slate,
The now-trodden paths
And the grid of the highway,
The branches of trees
Where the junco birds play,
The fog from the breath
As it billows away,
The smoke on the river,
The stacks and the chimneys,
The switches and platforms
And sides of the train,
The tall office towers
And the window frames,
The fences and pipes
And satellite plates,
The bridges and schools
And commercial displays,
The stacked blocks and wet stone
And graffiti base paint,
The clock hands and tire rims
And locked storefront grates,
Garage doors and steeple tops,
Antennas and fire escapes,
Concertina and chain link,
Derricks and cranes,
Swingsets and air vents
And factory gates,
The water in cylinders
Seen through the rain.
II. Meaning
Grey is the stigma you must overcome,
The mud in the search for the truth,
What are the ashes but what has been?
The elegance of loss, the gunmetal wisdom,
The vicissitudes of sophistication,
A mind too heartless, a spirit confused,
Polarities neutralized, purities soiled,
Sharpnesses scraped away,
To accept without discernment,
The shine that is unyielding, that pulls all inside,
What can, in a moment of sun, be undone.
The blank sheet of snow
Is already turning grey
As the portentous sky
And rooftops of slate,
The now-trodden paths
And the grid of the highway,
The branches of trees
Where the junco birds play,
The fog from the breath
As it billows away,
The smoke on the river,
The stacks and the chimneys,
The switches and platforms
And sides of the train,
The tall office towers
And the window frames,
The fences and pipes
And satellite plates,
The bridges and schools
And commercial displays,
The stacked blocks and wet stone
And graffiti base paint,
The clock hands and tire rims
And locked storefront grates,
Garage doors and steeple tops,
Antennas and fire escapes,
Concertina and chain link,
Derricks and cranes,
Swingsets and air vents
And factory gates,
The water in cylinders
Seen through the rain.
II. Meaning
Grey is the stigma you must overcome,
The mud in the search for the truth,
What are the ashes but what has been?
The elegance of loss, the gunmetal wisdom,
The vicissitudes of sophistication,
A mind too heartless, a spirit confused,
Polarities neutralized, purities soiled,
Sharpnesses scraped away,
To accept without discernment,
The shine that is unyielding, that pulls all inside,
What can, in a moment of sun, be undone.
Sunday, January 22, 2012
A Sunday in Greenwich
Behind the red barn with its rooftop of snow
in the white home older than the revolution
a book of Aeschylus is pulled off the library shelves
to peruse perhaps while the owner is waiting
for an answer to his latest email.
Greece has only so many islands to give
they must offer him something more tangible
if they expect his small claim on their distressed debt
to not be litigated in a favorable court;
without rights at par and a generous recovery waterfall
he can paralyze the global bond market and they know it
or will learn it by afternoon's end.
As he waits, he takes breaks from his monitors
to cheer for his teams, who both make the super bowl
through the most fortunate bounces of the football.
He must make a call, the game will be fun to attend this year,
he resolves as he reads the happy report
how Newt won by running against the elites.
He takes his Xanax and Crestor
And reads briefs before his usual blissful sleep,
unaware that the Black Water Dragon
now emerges in the darkest of skies.
in the white home older than the revolution
a book of Aeschylus is pulled off the library shelves
to peruse perhaps while the owner is waiting
for an answer to his latest email.
Greece has only so many islands to give
they must offer him something more tangible
if they expect his small claim on their distressed debt
to not be litigated in a favorable court;
without rights at par and a generous recovery waterfall
he can paralyze the global bond market and they know it
or will learn it by afternoon's end.
As he waits, he takes breaks from his monitors
to cheer for his teams, who both make the super bowl
through the most fortunate bounces of the football.
He must make a call, the game will be fun to attend this year,
he resolves as he reads the happy report
how Newt won by running against the elites.
He takes his Xanax and Crestor
And reads briefs before his usual blissful sleep,
unaware that the Black Water Dragon
now emerges in the darkest of skies.
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Snowblind
lilac snow
violet sky
white
can't yet
be seen
for the light
inside of us
has not yet risen
we're not clarified enough
to see it
purely
just its fractures
seen uncertainly
as if they were the vapor
of our dreams
stories in the static noise
that make us feel our lives
are not our own
when white
is certainty
the law that is alignment
the pull that keeps us
tethered
to the stars
violet sky
white
can't yet
be seen
for the light
inside of us
has not yet risen
we're not clarified enough
to see it
purely
just its fractures
seen uncertainly
as if they were the vapor
of our dreams
stories in the static noise
that make us feel our lives
are not our own
when white
is certainty
the law that is alignment
the pull that keeps us
tethered
to the stars
Friday, January 20, 2012
Black Angel Suite
First a translation of Eugenio Montale’s “L’angelo nero” (Go here for the original Italian plus an alternative translation by the great William Arrowsmith), then an original poem on the same subject…
I.
Angel of black
restore me in soot
under your wings,
I can scrape past the combs
of thorns, the illuminations of the ovens
and kneel down
on the extinguished embers
if ever there remains some fringe
of your feathers
small angel so dark,
not heavenly or human
angel who is visible
changing different colors
and different forms, the same
then not the same, in the rapid flashing
tale-spinning your incomprehensible
black angel unveil
but do not kill me with your radiance,
do not clear the halo of fog
imprinted in my mind
because there is no eye that can withstand the headlights,
angel of coal that will shelter
inside the chestnut seller’s shawl
great ebony angel
dark angel
or white, if I, tired of wandering
took your wing and felt it
creak
I could not recognize you as I do
in sleep, waking in the morning
because it’s easier for a biped or a camel
to fit a needle's eye
than distinguish the false from the true,
and the burnt part that’s left, the lump
on your fingertips
is less than the dust
on your last feather, great angel
of furnace and ash, miniature angel
chimney sweep.
II.
Angel of black
with invisible wings
fill up my lungs with your flickering
grime, angel hobbling
in vagabond clothes
chanting toothless hymns,
cover the pipe steam too bright as it ascends
mirror my prayers too black
to comprehend, so the thought of death
is overwhelming, the sense of loss almost real,
let the burn of injustice turn the sky to ash
before it reduces
to blue and confusion,
let me know my sins and see in you
their retribution
and mercy in your hideous cloak.
O angel walk past me in fur
skirting the unknown with vampiric gait
and disappear, when your eyes
have laid their eggs in me
to purple smoke, the blackened
acid sweet leaves
of what's no longer
in form
and there's no life at all in the gargoyles
just the thought of you
as if you exist.
Don't desert me, black angel,
I wish to forget
that the world is service and thought
is endless,
let me grovel with turbid fanatics
who all harbor secret doubts
and a thirst for vengeance.
The sulfurous burn
of the paper and names
as the borders get blurred,
encendered,
how you endure the fire’s play, resolute
pit, cast-iron charm.
I.
Angel of black
restore me in soot
under your wings,
I can scrape past the combs
of thorns, the illuminations of the ovens
and kneel down
on the extinguished embers
if ever there remains some fringe
of your feathers
small angel so dark,
not heavenly or human
angel who is visible
changing different colors
and different forms, the same
then not the same, in the rapid flashing
tale-spinning your incomprehensible
black angel unveil
but do not kill me with your radiance,
do not clear the halo of fog
imprinted in my mind
because there is no eye that can withstand the headlights,
angel of coal that will shelter
inside the chestnut seller’s shawl
great ebony angel
dark angel
or white, if I, tired of wandering
took your wing and felt it
creak
I could not recognize you as I do
in sleep, waking in the morning
because it’s easier for a biped or a camel
to fit a needle's eye
than distinguish the false from the true,
and the burnt part that’s left, the lump
on your fingertips
is less than the dust
on your last feather, great angel
of furnace and ash, miniature angel
chimney sweep.
II.
Angel of black
with invisible wings
fill up my lungs with your flickering
grime, angel hobbling
in vagabond clothes
chanting toothless hymns,
cover the pipe steam too bright as it ascends
mirror my prayers too black
to comprehend, so the thought of death
is overwhelming, the sense of loss almost real,
let the burn of injustice turn the sky to ash
before it reduces
to blue and confusion,
let me know my sins and see in you
their retribution
and mercy in your hideous cloak.
O angel walk past me in fur
skirting the unknown with vampiric gait
and disappear, when your eyes
have laid their eggs in me
to purple smoke, the blackened
acid sweet leaves
of what's no longer
in form
and there's no life at all in the gargoyles
just the thought of you
as if you exist.
Don't desert me, black angel,
I wish to forget
that the world is service and thought
is endless,
let me grovel with turbid fanatics
who all harbor secret doubts
and a thirst for vengeance.
The sulfurous burn
of the paper and names
as the borders get blurred,
encendered,
how you endure the fire’s play, resolute
pit, cast-iron charm.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Why I Don't Mourn the Loss of History
"There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago." - J. Robert Oppenheimer
Euripides is speaking in this brook
As is Joy Formidable;
Both are preferable to the no voice that we hear
Contradicting all our yes’s.
Cultura, the tiny leaf off the tree that we saved
Is all we have left of our vanity
In the raw perception of the moment,
Where the rise and fall of countless lifetimes
is now transformed into our soil, our water, what we are,
a mulch where anything can grow
but seeds so precious they must drop from unseen birds.
Euripides is speaking in this brook
As is Joy Formidable;
Both are preferable to the no voice that we hear
Contradicting all our yes’s.
Cultura, the tiny leaf off the tree that we saved
Is all we have left of our vanity
In the raw perception of the moment,
Where the rise and fall of countless lifetimes
is now transformed into our soil, our water, what we are,
a mulch where anything can grow
but seeds so precious they must drop from unseen birds.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Counting Flags
In solidarity with Wikipedia
Stars, watching over the worried homes,
A line of long red bloodstripes from an old war
Before the Rothschilds took control.
The people here take pride in the care and folding,
The angle of ascent, the length of the pole,
Ironing it out like something they would wear
While dreaming of grandmothers new to these shores
And the blessings of this vast last chance Texaco
Large enough to take the most insignificant in,
Where there wasn’t something in the way of being human.
The government can now kill every one of us as it pleases
That’s the law, but mostly reserved for those
Who refuse to be implicated in the slaughter of children
For no other reason than it makes some feel stronger.
The flag thumbs its generous nose at such opposition,
That great symbol of dissent now warns against opinion,
Reminds us we have no freedom because we are not responsible.
The few who remember the way things were are sent overseas
To start their own countries (if they’re lucky) somewhere else,
And the brand is refreshed with each gusting of wind
As the buildings around them keep on crumbling.
The morning sun makes these rippling stripes
A memorial to something more than
The people who gave their lives
So that debt would grow,
It’s an undefiled dream
Waving over the projects,
The shuttered factories,
The foreclosed homes,
And everyone in terror
Stars, watching over the worried homes,
A line of long red bloodstripes from an old war
Before the Rothschilds took control.
The people here take pride in the care and folding,
The angle of ascent, the length of the pole,
Ironing it out like something they would wear
While dreaming of grandmothers new to these shores
And the blessings of this vast last chance Texaco
Large enough to take the most insignificant in,
Where there wasn’t something in the way of being human.
The government can now kill every one of us as it pleases
That’s the law, but mostly reserved for those
Who refuse to be implicated in the slaughter of children
For no other reason than it makes some feel stronger.
The flag thumbs its generous nose at such opposition,
That great symbol of dissent now warns against opinion,
Reminds us we have no freedom because we are not responsible.
The few who remember the way things were are sent overseas
To start their own countries (if they’re lucky) somewhere else,
And the brand is refreshed with each gusting of wind
As the buildings around them keep on crumbling.
The morning sun makes these rippling stripes
A memorial to something more than
The people who gave their lives
So that debt would grow,
It’s an undefiled dream
Waving over the projects,
The shuttered factories,
The foreclosed homes,
And everyone in terror
That they might wake up.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
A Winter Day
Snow dust at sunrise,
Geese honking, the screeching of crows,
slush cracks, shoes muffle, tires shush, drains splatter
The woods have held on to their browns
and the grasses didn't yield without a fight
The afternoon forgets the thought
that breathed down on the real
as our minds are asked to let our knowledge go
White forms will always dissolve into black pools
Wet night
with its luminous coal and clean concrete,
limbs in tubes of light and diamond straw
Geese honking, the screeching of crows,
slush cracks, shoes muffle, tires shush, drains splatter
The woods have held on to their browns
and the grasses didn't yield without a fight
The afternoon forgets the thought
that breathed down on the real
as our minds are asked to let our knowledge go
White forms will always dissolve into black pools
Wet night
with its luminous coal and clean concrete,
limbs in tubes of light and diamond straw
Monday, January 16, 2012
Remembering ML King Boulevard
It was so beautiful in Tinytown
When the sunrise hit the formstone, or the
Moonlight caught the scrapyard storage tanks.
We were proud to drink at Butts ‘n’ Betties
Where you fought or lost your girlfriend every time,
Proud to walk the projects every day
And navigate police tape and well-tossed bricks,
Proud of that fat guy at the liquor store
Who sold us our Chesterfields and Smirnoff
When he shot a robber dead from his perch,
Proud we had no furniture and Goodwill clothes,
Proud we smelled the sulfur and epoxy,
Proud we were insane not mediocre,
With our gizzard and horseradish banquets
And violence on the grass each Saturday…
But thoughts become like a virus
And memory a terminal disease
And I wonder why, as I let this go,
I found such solace in their acceptance,
In the magic of a dying old world town
Where there wasn’t ever any room to build
But plenty of incentive to destroy,
Where pain was a badge best left in the attic
And drinking games the only freedom from shame,
The shame of feeling pain
in a harbor
Of tears,
where the priests lacked all
compassion,
Where they let you see with a kind of glee
What will become of those souls abandoned
But only if you do not bat an eye;
This town that drinks alone but lets you buy.
Ghosts and homeless people were my only friends
Because they said what others merely know:
How every mental fabricating smelter
Goes belly up in the end, and every grace
Must always be contingent, for no one
Deserves a thing, that is the curse of knowing
That before the Marxist hip-hop poseurs
Stapled their flyers to the plywood walls
That once these storefronts held a golden age.
Escaping from such a place with my life
Was nothing, for it was a place to die,
Tho I cry to have pulled two new foals from its clay.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Brittle Words
Sunday morning
laying in bed
letting all the monumental somethings
float by
Once in a while
when it's perfectly still
the occasional all-encompassing nothing comes
what we, with brittle words, call love
laying in bed
letting all the monumental somethings
float by
Once in a while
when it's perfectly still
the occasional all-encompassing nothing comes
what we, with brittle words, call love
Saturday, January 14, 2012
A Fairy Tale for Grimm Times
Once upon a time in a land far away there lived a queen.
A few years later, the queen gives birth to a baby girl who
has skin white as snow, lips red as blood, and hair black as ebony. They name
her Princess Snow White. As soon as the child is born, the queen dies.
In the meantime the king has taken on a new wife, who is beautiful but very vain. The new queen possesses a magical mirror, which answers any question it is polled. The only question that the queen ever wanted to ask, however, was "Mirror, mirror on the
wall / Who is the fairest of them all?" to which the mirror always replies
"You, my queen, are fairest of all."
But one day Snow White became more beautiful, and the mirror told the queen when she asked:
"Queen, you are full fair, 'tis true, but Snow White is fairer than
you."
The queen becomes jealous, and orders a huntsman to take
Snow White into the woods to be killed.
She demanded that the huntsman, as proof of killing Snow
White, return with her lungs and her liver. The huntsman takes Snow White into
the forest, but after raising his knife to stab her, he finds himself unable to
kill her as he has fallen deeply in love with her. Instead, he lets her go,
telling her to flee and hide from the Queen. He then brings the queen the lungs
and the liver of a fairy, which is prepared by the cook and eaten by the queen.
In the forest, Snow White discovers a tiny cottage belonging
to a group of seven dwarfs, where she rests. There, the dwarfs take pity on
her, saying "If you will keep house for us, and cook, make beds, wash,
sew, and knit, and keep everything clean and orderly, then you can stay with
us, and you shall have everything that you want."
Each of the dwarfs had a name:
Dopey, the youngest, most lovable and most mischievous of the
seven…
Grumpy, who found nothing to like in the forest or in the
dwarf family…
Doc, the only one of the dwarfs to wear glasses, so
presumably an intellectual and in charge…
Happy, the most rotund of the dwarfs, who laughs off all the
troubles around him and makes fun of the other dwarfs…
Bashful, who hides his innocent nature behind a classic pose of
shyness…
Sneezy, whose words are often hard to distinguish because of
his propensity for sneezing all the time…
And Sleepy, who apparently cannot get much work done because
of a problem with narcolepsy.
While Snow White travels around with the Seven Dwarfs
putting on shows for the forest animals, the Queen asks her mirror once again
"Who's the fairest of them all?", and is horrified to learn that Snow
White is not only alive and well and living with the dwarves, but is still the
fairest of them all.
Outraged, she makes a poisoned apple to kill Snow White, and
in the disguise of a farmer’s wife…
offers it to Snow White. When she is hesitant to accept it,
the Queen cuts the apple in half, eats the white part and gives the poisoned
red part to Snow White, who eats the apple eagerly and immediately falls into a
deep stupor. When the dwarfs find her, they cannot revive her, and they place
her in a glass vault, assuming that she is dead.
Time passes, and a prince traveling through the land sees
Snow White.
He strides to her vault. The prince is enchanted by her
beauty and instantly falls in love with her. He begs the dwarves to let him
have the vault. The prince's servants carry the vault away, and the movement causes the piece of poisoned apple to dislodge from Snow White's
throat, awakening her. The prince then declares his love for her and soon a
wedding is planned.
The vain Queen, still believing that Snow White is dead,
once again asks her mirror who is the fairest in the land, and yet again the
mirror disappoints her by responding that "You, my queen, are fair; it is
true. But the young queen is a thousand times fairer than you."
Not knowing that this new queen was indeed her stepdaughter,
she arrives at the wedding, and her heart fills with the deepest of dread when
she realizes the truth. As punishment for her wicked ways, a pair of heated
iron shoes are brought forth with tongs and placed before the Queen, but before
she steps into them, Dopey, who has mistakenly eaten a small bite of the
poisoned apple, asks the Queen to marry him. She quickly accepts, and the party
continues as before, with everyone living happily ever after.
Friday, January 13, 2012
The Breaking of the Sun
It's the redness of the fallen leaves
the calico blue of the waterway
the pom pom shaking of the winter trees
the revelation of beige in ragged quills
That makes the homes so far away
and the people on the train no more than scenery
and I wonder whether we are seen at all
or whether we are watched like morning birds
As they harmonize their moves from branch to branch
experiencing up and down, together and alone,
one going to the wires, and one into the woods
in some unknown and vast choreography
And I see the people take the form of beasts
outlined out of star shapes and the visions inside dreams
alighting at the terminal, their creatures hid within,
to disperse in complex patterns only galaxies portend.
the calico blue of the waterway
the pom pom shaking of the winter trees
the revelation of beige in ragged quills
That makes the homes so far away
and the people on the train no more than scenery
and I wonder whether we are seen at all
or whether we are watched like morning birds
As they harmonize their moves from branch to branch
experiencing up and down, together and alone,
one going to the wires, and one into the woods
in some unknown and vast choreography
And I see the people take the form of beasts
outlined out of star shapes and the visions inside dreams
alighting at the terminal, their creatures hid within,
to disperse in complex patterns only galaxies portend.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Poète Maudit
Thinking of Ernest Dowson
Beauty rules her haunted souls,
Her gold transmuting lead,
Her scepter takes allotted tolls
In flames that must be fed
With lives you lived so long ago
Still roasting on her spit,
That feeling you cannot let go,
Like wardrobes that won't fit.
Her perfume phial is empty,
The lipstick faded grey,
The world will never hear your cries
Now that they’ve burned away,
The perfect turns of phrase will bend,
The music will undo;
The kisses will survive them,
The roses will stay true,
The wine will last forever
‘Tho drunkards drain like drops
In death the quenchless river
Where every carriage stops;
The dull words of the girl long gone
Will echo in the caves,
The sound in vain you waited on
Will whisper through the waves
But the sweet silk that you made of it
Has long since now dissolved,
And the dawn you mourned as dimly lit
Will never quite resolve.
The fountain now no longer sings
Its unheard melodies,
But lovers still arrive in spring
With fires to appease,
And only you are absent,
You poet of the clouds,
Who held what was too vibrant,
Too lucent for our shrouds.
Beauty rules her haunted souls,
Her gold transmuting lead,
Her scepter takes allotted tolls
In flames that must be fed
With lives you lived so long ago
Still roasting on her spit,
That feeling you cannot let go,
Like wardrobes that won't fit.
Her perfume phial is empty,
The lipstick faded grey,
The world will never hear your cries
Now that they’ve burned away,
The perfect turns of phrase will bend,
The music will undo;
The kisses will survive them,
The roses will stay true,
The wine will last forever
‘Tho drunkards drain like drops
In death the quenchless river
Where every carriage stops;
The dull words of the girl long gone
Will echo in the caves,
The sound in vain you waited on
Will whisper through the waves
But the sweet silk that you made of it
Has long since now dissolved,
And the dawn you mourned as dimly lit
Will never quite resolve.
The fountain now no longer sings
Its unheard melodies,
But lovers still arrive in spring
With fires to appease,
And only you are absent,
You poet of the clouds,
Who held what was too vibrant,
Too lucent for our shrouds.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
The Golden Years
The age that we live in is the past.
There's no need for librarians, everyone's a wiki on something.
The question of the age is: what age do you wish to live in?
Perhaps the absinthe 90's, the 50's baby boom,
Rome when it fiddled, Paris when it sizzled, Britain when heads rolled.
The hotels are roaring twenties affairs, the pharmacies strictly post-war,
The trains were made in 1970, and the stations a hundred years before.
When the buildings aren't greco-roman, they're soviet modern or deco
with arches from Byzantium and frills from gothic France.
Even the factory ruins are preserved as shopping arcades
where orange-yellow miniskirts and bouffants are all the rage
and no one pretends to make jewelry anymore, or watches or gloves
or drapery or shoes or scarves or cedar chests.
One expects wedding dresses and baby clothes to stay the same
but Harleys and Fenders and Airstreams?
There hasn't been a new kind of lamp in 30 years!
Instead there are fractals and video games,
the cartoons that you think are real,
and gadgets that bring the past that much closer to life
so we can chat about Lucy and the Seventies Bands,
relive Antietam, check the Magna Carta's fine print,
draft fantasy players for the USFL, watch handfishing passed down for
centuries,
reminisce about sit-com families before they all become dysfunctional,
see the guitar in Picasso's studio, and the glory of Monty Python's tomb.
Even the currency slowly turns back to gold
along with old books and gas station ornaments.
It's all we can do to hold on to what we are
like a chrysalis flailing through dust
squirming for the light in a cavernous glue
for some long-dreamt beauty of birth.
There's no need for librarians, everyone's a wiki on something.
The question of the age is: what age do you wish to live in?
Perhaps the absinthe 90's, the 50's baby boom,
Rome when it fiddled, Paris when it sizzled, Britain when heads rolled.
The hotels are roaring twenties affairs, the pharmacies strictly post-war,
The trains were made in 1970, and the stations a hundred years before.
When the buildings aren't greco-roman, they're soviet modern or deco
with arches from Byzantium and frills from gothic France.
Even the factory ruins are preserved as shopping arcades
where orange-yellow miniskirts and bouffants are all the rage
and no one pretends to make jewelry anymore, or watches or gloves
or drapery or shoes or scarves or cedar chests.
One expects wedding dresses and baby clothes to stay the same
but Harleys and Fenders and Airstreams?
There hasn't been a new kind of lamp in 30 years!
Instead there are fractals and video games,
the cartoons that you think are real,
and gadgets that bring the past that much closer to life
so we can chat about Lucy and the Seventies Bands,
relive Antietam, check the Magna Carta's fine print,
draft fantasy players for the USFL, watch handfishing passed down for
centuries,
reminisce about sit-com families before they all become dysfunctional,
see the guitar in Picasso's studio, and the glory of Monty Python's tomb.
Even the currency slowly turns back to gold
along with old books and gas station ornaments.
It's all we can do to hold on to what we are
like a chrysalis flailing through dust
squirming for the light in a cavernous glue
for some long-dreamt beauty of birth.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Evening at the Cyber Café
Chinese warrior monks eat Marco Polo pizza in dishwasher aprons
debating mastadons from Mars to all-night Babylonian oompah music
while off-duty patrolmen nonchalantly play mafia shrooms and shoot-em-up
video games waiting for a slice
and Hieronymous Fresh works on his translation of the lemon jelly donut
into linear b like every archivist from the Pleiades to Alpha Centauri
and a junkyard dog named Iron Fist drinks Mint Romneys with velvet gloves
and a dry cravat remembering how despite it all the Monte Cristos were good.
It was enough to wax nostalgic for getting bushwacked by a tire iron
in the back of a Parisian chop suey joint by men with too much Frenchness.
The clown-nanny wonders why the children are all frightened
and why he can't get service in his hairshirt and order mock turtleneck soup to go,
while the golden thumb piano of justice plays for quarterback Tim Tebow's
elk antlers glimpsed before they retract into His Magnificent Skull.
The organ donor monkey dressed like a Peter Lorre cancer survivor on trial
wants spellcheck now too but not on spellcakes, for his memoirs, that he calls
"Pimping God, the Spanish Johnny Story, or How I Learned the Long Con”
while his pasta grows cold like unrequited love or certain hands in poker.
debating mastadons from Mars to all-night Babylonian oompah music
while off-duty patrolmen nonchalantly play mafia shrooms and shoot-em-up
video games waiting for a slice
and Hieronymous Fresh works on his translation of the lemon jelly donut
into linear b like every archivist from the Pleiades to Alpha Centauri
and a junkyard dog named Iron Fist drinks Mint Romneys with velvet gloves
and a dry cravat remembering how despite it all the Monte Cristos were good.
It was enough to wax nostalgic for getting bushwacked by a tire iron
in the back of a Parisian chop suey joint by men with too much Frenchness.
The clown-nanny wonders why the children are all frightened
and why he can't get service in his hairshirt and order mock turtleneck soup to go,
while the golden thumb piano of justice plays for quarterback Tim Tebow's
elk antlers glimpsed before they retract into His Magnificent Skull.
The organ donor monkey dressed like a Peter Lorre cancer survivor on trial
wants spellcheck now too but not on spellcakes, for his memoirs, that he calls
"Pimping God, the Spanish Johnny Story, or How I Learned the Long Con”
while his pasta grows cold like unrequited love or certain hands in poker.
Monday, January 9, 2012
Tebow Time
"Tebow threw for exactly 316 yards in the 29-23 upset win, presenting an eerie allusion to the Bible’s John 3: 16 passage — whose number Tebow famously wore in the black under his eyes when he led the Florida Gators to victory in the 2009 collegiate national championship game. What’s more, that event took place exactly three years ago on the same day as his latest miracle comeback. And that wasn’t it for the coincidences: Tebow set an NFL playoff record with, you guessed it, 31.6 yards per completion and the TV rating on CBS peaked between 8.00-8.15pm ET with a rating of, say it ain’t so, 31.6." - Glen Levy, Time Magazine online, January 9, 2011
Tim Tebow as John Henry
come to Occupy the Playoffs
sayin' 'tis no game for courtiers and kings
'tis a game for holy children,
no matter all the layers
of anger from abandonment
the giants are as pure
as naked babies underneath.
And while the greatest minds
scheme deep into the night
on how to spring their team
on a blackboard from its prison
he waited late at night
deep inside the locker room
to run to rookie Miller
and tell him of the good news
how Jesus needs this team to win.
He never was supposed to have been born
so physical restrictions don't mean much to him.
He never went to school except to play football
so the thought of himself as an individual makes him grin,
and the game plan always was a form of scripture
with time enough for prayers and gratitude,
the will to win the same as the thirst for heaven.
And when the opening kickoff
bounced right off the goalpost
and landed perfectly still
smack dab on the 20-yard line,
one knew that Jesus was in the building,
that another miracle was needed
in these hard and desperate times,
a miracle that would only happen
when the other team had reached the point
that they could put away the game,
when the last of the non-believers
had given up all hope.
Tim Tebow as John Henry
come to Occupy the Playoffs
sayin' 'tis no game for courtiers and kings
'tis a game for holy children,
no matter all the layers
of anger from abandonment
the giants are as pure
as naked babies underneath.
And while the greatest minds
scheme deep into the night
on how to spring their team
on a blackboard from its prison
he waited late at night
deep inside the locker room
to run to rookie Miller
and tell him of the good news
how Jesus needs this team to win.
He never was supposed to have been born
so physical restrictions don't mean much to him.
He never went to school except to play football
so the thought of himself as an individual makes him grin,
and the game plan always was a form of scripture
with time enough for prayers and gratitude,
the will to win the same as the thirst for heaven.
And when the opening kickoff
bounced right off the goalpost
and landed perfectly still
smack dab on the 20-yard line,
one knew that Jesus was in the building,
that another miracle was needed
in these hard and desperate times,
a miracle that would only happen
when the other team had reached the point
that they could put away the game,
when the last of the non-believers
had given up all hope.
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Truth: Pro & Con
One can either move with the stars or against them.
The correctness of the journey is not what is important.
The correctness of the journey is not what is important.
Saturday, January 7, 2012
149 Degrees
A Tesla infrared machine
like the desert in a box
releasing copper from my blood
in sadness droplets
pen starts crying
black like the foot bath
my fingerprints toxic
my sadness so small
in the face of the endless
quiet at the bottom of my heart -
no one else is waiting there
just my invincible twin
like the desert in a box
releasing copper from my blood
in sadness droplets
pen starts crying
black like the foot bath
my fingerprints toxic
my sadness so small
in the face of the endless
quiet at the bottom of my heart -
no one else is waiting there
just my invincible twin
Friday, January 6, 2012
Epiphany and the Ace of Spades
They talked, at work, of gold this morning,
the difference between base and precious metals,
the former was a bubble, financially speaking,
the latter the last thing of value on earth,
increasing based on its cost in extraction,
the modern variant of the myth in every ancient culture
how the serpents came to our planet for gold
and created us to mine it, and take dominion.
Thank you, Melchior of Babylon
for the gift of empire, in changeless gold,
for the philosopher's stone,
the earth of kings turned virtuous,
the queen that recognizes the divine so gives it birth,
the women of Parthia in the West, in angelic descent
yield their perception to earth, producing form as beauty
the loveliness of all that is endlessly created,
the sculptures, the colors, the bodies
as, from the East, the shamans and brahmins
with sage and papyrus, priests of their captor's religion,
Chaldean necromancers, Egyptian exorcists,
who hold the secrets to conquering earth with their minds
for the betterment of humanity, yield their wisdom
to the earth, producing laws of wisdom
transmitted secretly from races unknown to history,
the 144 magi, 12 messiahs, seven ages.
This afternoon, a different scent in the underground tunnels,
frankincense, strange and familiar, with its opening fragrance
that widens the heart and softens the mind,
the white stone that burns and turns the self violet,
the smoke that is spirit cleansing the air
and calling us inward to God.
Thank you Balthazar of Arabia
for the gift of priesthood, sweet frankincense,
for the fire that burns knowledge into the divine,
that illumines a vision of God the Son,
that we may see through the crystallized sand columns
built from music and plied with cosmic light,
to wear the robes of hierophant as he awaits the Christ
until revealed like an eclipse, out of the infinity of faith,
earth becomes a two-fold star lit by two perfect rays,
the bride and the groom waiting,
the binah and chokmah, the yin and yang
dancing through the skeleton frame
where the constellations, the mighty bull, lion and scorpion
marked in light within the head, high heart and loins
as one aligns with the flowing, the conclusion to the word,
the slow syrup drip of the universe.
This evening, when I came home
my wife put in the diffuser a new essential oil, myrrh,
the most powerful tool of healers, a resin that bleeds red
from the tree, embalmer of mummies
strong enough to resurrect one for the next world,
to if not cure all disease, purify the suffering
in the space between living and immortality.
Thank you Jaspar of Persia
for the gift of prophecy, bitter myrrh,
the divine feminine manifests the divine
virgin Mary in the grotto as the Christ light is born
from the bride and groom of heaven,
the mathematics of love calls down angels
from thrones from dominions from archangels
to densest earth, for heaven to beat in hearts
and vibrate inside skin;
throw the fruitcakes, hunt the wren,
set the Christmas trees on fire, dive into the water
for the cross, let Carnival begin
to celebrate the unification
of what never was divided,
spirit and flesh, earth and heaven.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Father and Daughter Chat
For Veronica
Confusing to know what is right and what's wrong
And everything, all the time, is perfect
The bullies are weak and retreaters are strong
And everything, all the time, is perfect
It's holy to think that the others have won
And everything, all the time, is perfect
It's sacred to feel that that your work is undone
And everything, all the time, is perfect
A comfort to know you have wasted your time
And everything, all the time, is perfect
Losing the time you don't have is no crime
And everything, all the time, is perfect
The greatest of gifts is what hurts you the most
And everything, all the time, is perfect
That thing you're ashamed of is your proudest boast
And everything, all the time, is perfect
The future and past's in this breath that you take
And everything, all the time, is perfect
All that you gather becomes what you make
And everything, all the time, is perfect
You ask how we thrive without a hive mind
And everything, all the time, is perfect
Our strength is in what we can seek and not find
And everything, all the time, is perfect
Confusing to know what is right and what's wrong
And everything, all the time, is perfect
The bullies are weak and retreaters are strong
And everything, all the time, is perfect
It's holy to think that the others have won
And everything, all the time, is perfect
It's sacred to feel that that your work is undone
And everything, all the time, is perfect
A comfort to know you have wasted your time
And everything, all the time, is perfect
Losing the time you don't have is no crime
And everything, all the time, is perfect
The greatest of gifts is what hurts you the most
And everything, all the time, is perfect
That thing you're ashamed of is your proudest boast
And everything, all the time, is perfect
The future and past's in this breath that you take
And everything, all the time, is perfect
All that you gather becomes what you make
And everything, all the time, is perfect
You ask how we thrive without a hive mind
And everything, all the time, is perfect
Our strength is in what we can seek and not find
And everything, all the time, is perfect
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