The Young Man’s Reply

Dear Will, these pretty sonnets that you sent
Were ordered and created all in vain;
I’m of a downcast, melancholy bent—
All thoughts of procreation I disdain.
Though some do say I’m blessed with looks and wit,
The dullest blade might bear a burnished hilt;
Within me, there’s a gloom I can’t remit,
That swamps the praise of those who prize mere gilt.
I’ll not supply another girl or boy
To brave life’s ceaseless turmoils and deceits,
To struggle in a world I don’t enjoy,
Whose fruits are shallow triumphs, deep defeats.
Let’s leave the risks and toils of screeching birth
To those more prone to nurture hope and mirth.

Children of Darkness, Children of Light

Children of darkness,
Children of light,
Children of one cryptic womb;
Dancing together,
Concealing the spite,
Furtively watching the room.

Children of darkness,
Children of light,
Glances won’t tell who is who;
Follow the fiddle,
And have some more wine,
Everyone’s looking at you.

Children of darkness,
Children of light,
Waltzing in endless dispute:
Which is the parasite,
Virtue or guile?
The benefactor or the brute?

Children of darkness,
Children of light,
Everyone toeing the line.
How will the balance
Be broken at last?
Will it be chance or design?

Children of darkness,
Children of light,
Speaking their piece to the court:
Light gets the blessing
And solemn acclaim,
But darkness wins all the support.

Knock Me Down With a Feather

You could knock me back down with a feather,
Or shrivel me up with a glance;
I feel a bit under the weather,
But people still want me to dance.
So, just let me know what your wish is,
Enough with the hullabaloo;
Or send me to sleep with the fishes,
I really don’t mind if I do.

Just grind me to dust with your pestle,
Then blow me away with one breath,
Or lead me where rattlesnakes nestle,
Below in the valley of death.
I haven’t a reason for crowing,
Or even a wing for my prayer;
Today, I don’t know where I’m going,
Tomorrow, I won’t even care.

My body is clumsy, not agile,
My mind gets more spongy, less crisp;
The life that we lead is so fragile,
We waft in the will-o'-the-wisp.
But though I’m all hat and no cattle,
I do what I can, by and large,
So, prop me back up for the battle:
The enemy’s ready to charge.

Corridors

Corridors are tunnels
That we build above the ground,
Between the present and the future,
The known and the unknown.
Corridors are rooms to which Time has been added:
They must be passed through, endured.
In dreams, we find ourselves inside them,
Panicked;
Running against the clock;
Trapped between the observable and the hidden;
Bewildered by constantly shifting connections,
While striving desperately to reach some crucial goal.
Time is always of the essence—
Time that lurks in corridors,
Clutching its silver baseball bat.

Awakened,
We have clocks to remind us
That we are late for something,
But not what we are late for.
The second hands move too fast for us;
The hours too slow.
The satanic, black minute hand is the worst,
With its tantalizing, almost perceptible movements,
Which seem to say that Time is barely out of our grasp,
Like water in a nightmare of thirst.
The brutal Time that persecutes us in our dreams
Is the deranged henchman
Of this dull time that regulates
The monotonous tick-tock of our days.

Yes, all clocks say only one thing:
“You are late!”
But there’s ultimately nothing to be late for,
Except the clock itself,
With its circular reasoning.
The Earth turns and makes its way around the Sun:
There is no late in Astronomy.
Clocks lie to us.
What tyrannizes us is not Nature’s time but civilization’s.

Another dream.
Now we are in a mineshaft—
A different kind of corridor.
We trudge into pitch black,
Toward gold, or disaster.
We see a light:
Is it daylight,
Or something massive hurtling toward us?
What we really want it to be is a lantern,
Swung by a friend.
Miners withstand corridors far worse than ours.
Why is it that they do not all go mad?
Camaraderie.
Brotherhood.
Fellowship.
Those who walk gentler corridors—
The air-conditioned, well-lit, antiseptic
Corridors of power—
Lose their minds quite often,
For want of the same.

Corridors are rooms
In Halloween dress up.
Are we going to let them frighten us,
Or are we going to party?

Walking on the Sun

If you and I were to hike around the perimeter of the Sun,
Covering thirty miles a day,
It would take us 250 years;
By the time we returned to our starting point,
Everything would have changed.
We can never really know the Sun.

A photographer out on the sea
Records only fragmentary glimpses.
Observing his photos, he might imagine that he knows the ocean,
But that would be foolish:
It is too vast.

With a powerful enough microscope,
You could spend your whole life
Studying a single dust mite
And never be finished.
Even the tiniest things are too big for us.

The brain collects snapshots of the self,
Which it tapes together,
And declares, “This is me!”
It isn’t.

Our mind cannot fully apprehend itself—
It is too small,
And too big!
We are bigger than the Sun,
Bigger than the ocean.
We are infinite.
You can never know yourself
Because you are too big for yourself.
The oracle lied.

It’s well known that we only experience reality indirectly,
As our consciousness recreates it.
Go to the Grand Canyon and what do you see?
Only you.
Look up at the night sky—
That’s you out there.
Under that microscope—
More of you than you could ever explore.
The Sun?
You too, every mile of it.

The smell of fresh bread,
The taste of honey,
The softness of cotton,
The notes of the scale,
The colors of the rainbow,
Are all you—
The legacy of millions of years of evolution.

Just as you can never see anything on TV except the TV’s own light,
You can never experience anything in your mind except the activity of that same mind.

Yet, we intersect with others,
Whose senses derive from the same origins.
On different screens,
We can all watch the same events;
In different minds,
We all see the same stars.
Your Sun is my Sun.
The waters of mighty oceans mingle.

We can never know ourselves,
But we can spark others,
Who are also infinite,
Igniting flames of mutual recognition and celebration.

Peace of Mind

Though peace of mind is everyone’s desire,
With calm and cool reflection it would seem
That hope of its attainment must require
A basis of sufficient self-esteem,
And this in turn on character must rest—
On wisdom, kindness, fortitude, restraint—
So, those who view contentment as their quest,
Should try to keep their conduct free of taint.
Wherever in this lifetime you might go,
There’s just one simple precept to employ:
The honest life’s the only way we know
Of nurturing a lasting sense of joy.
At any cost, stay faithful to your virtue—
Your dignity, in that case, can’t desert you.

The Banks of the Nile

The ancient Egyptians investigated contraception.
If only they had mastered it!

We could have lived happily under the sun,
Along the banks of Mother Nile,
Adjusting our crops and our numbers
According to her magnanimity.
We could have stayed there forever,
Contentedly,
Blowing south with the wind,
Sailing north with the current.

Now comes our final chance
To flourish within the boundaries
Set by Mother Earth—
Generous boundaries at that.
We could stay here,
Empowered by the sun and wind,
Not deceiving ourselves into thinking
That there’s somewhere else to go,
Or that there should be more of us,
Infinite as we are:
An easy choice,
But so hard to make
As long as superstition masters us.

To Know What Life Is

To know what life is,
In all its burgeoning splendor,
Look at the evolution of birds.
To thrive in all climates,
They have developed a bewildering variety of forms:
The penguin, the vulture,
The hummingbird, the dodo,
The chatty green parrot, the mute white swan.

They are newcomers to Earth,
Long predated by mammals and reptiles,
But the diversity of birds is staggering.
Study their anatomies, social networks, reproductive strategies, building techniques, travel habits, songs. . .
Profound mysteries await.

Consider our quick-witted neighbor, the crow:
Her rapid adaptation to complex modern environments;
Her precocious tool use;
Her puzzle-solving skills;
Her mimicry of human speech—
All with a brain weighing only half an ounce.
What efficiency!

In the race of life,
The mammals have a head start,
But the birds are faster.

We have the overconfidence of the hare
And the speed of the tortoise.
We’ll probably have to cheat.

More of My Limericks

The crew of the famous Thor Heyerdahl
Lamented, "We're just far too teyerdahl
Why on earth did you hire us?
We can't sail a papyrus!"
But he shouted, "Shut up, or you're feyerdahl!"


There once was a man from Prestatyn
Who plagiarized poems in Latin.
Titled In Nocti-bus
Albo Serico— thus
Was his rip-off of “Nights in White Satin.”


Paul Gaugin declared to his sweetie,
“Oh, why did I come to Tahiti?
I'd rather reside
On the Lower East Side
And devote my best years to graffiti.”


Said X, a Cartesian coordinate,
"Oh, Y, damn this graph! We're both boredinate.
Another dimension
Would break up the tension,
But we don’t have a way of affordinate!"


There once was a nurse with a lamp
Who wandered all over the camp.
Though it gave little light,
She remarked: “That’s all right—
It will look fucking great on my stamp.”


There once was a learned tomato
Who lectured on Dante and Plato.
All the shoppers said, "Gee!
You should be on TV—
What a waste teaching greens and potato!"

The Great MacGuffin

My life is a film noir.
I’m the protagonist,
Investigating the mystery.
I don’t want to kill anyone,
But I didn’t write the script.

I’m out on the street.
Can’t afford a taxi,
So following that car is out of the question,
Even in the rain.
The MacGuffin disappears around the corner.
I have to find out where,
But the police in this town are all corrupt.
They’ve never forgiven me
For the last case I solved.

I elbow my way through China Town,
Sweet-talk amiable young baristas,
Flatter jaded bar tenders,
Hunt down the usual suspects,
Keep one step ahead of the protection boys.

A woman with a shadowy past and a black future
Steps out of the fog.
Am I looking for some place?
She will lead me to the man
Who holds the MacGuffin’s secret.
For her there’s no hope,
She'll never know that the genre itself is
The reason why she can’t form healthy relationships.
She smokes. Little wonder.

Another whiskey,
But from my own bottle.
Cheap, local blend.
Hollywood got some things right:
The drinking,
Piano music,
Darkness,
Smoke,
And a few bright specks of light peeking through.
I’m wrapped up in a white, tipsy haze,
MacGuffin my Holy Grail.

Maybe the blind man selling newspapers has the answer,
Or maybe they took the MacGuffin down to Mexico,
Where I’ll never go,
There being a limited budget and no chance of a sequel.

Eventually, I realize that it’s only a B film.
Nobody expects it to amount to anything,
Except me,
Because the lead actor in a B film
Must take it seriously,
Even when nobody else does,
Like the teacher on a school trip.

Frankl says we must have a MacGuffin in order to flourish;
Hence, temples and churches,
Ideologies, football teams.
They won’t even let you into a twelve-step program if you aren't looking for one,
Because its better to remain an addict than go MacGuffinless.
Blessed be the Great MacGuffin!

The conclusion is trite;
My enemies are vanquished.
I watch the credits scroll by,
And realize that it was all about the chase.
The MacGuffin was superfluous,
Like that incongruent dance number in between the murders.
Take it away
And all you have left is actors and scenery.
Oh, and infinite possibilities for actual enjoyment.

The Twelve Step programs lied!
What people need is not meaning
But one another.
People need people,
Love,
And love has one great advantage over meaning:
Love is real,
Unquestionably so.
Just look into a few recent suicides,
There’s your proof.
But I’m never in that kind of movie.

We are not looking for some thing,
Or some place,
But some one;
Better still, a community, a home.
Well, ain’t that sweet?

Break out from the screen,
Like Mia in the Purple Rose of Cairo,
Or Buster in Sherlock Jr.,
And, if you capture the Holy Grail,
Drop it.
Smash that sucker! For there is no MacGuffin,
No thing,
No idea—
Only you
And me.
That’s what I think.
And that’s why they don’t give me better parts.

Some of the Best People

Some of the best people are psychopaths.
Nothing to worry about there!
They are great achievers,
Big spenders,
Economy stimulators.
Psychopaths make the world go around.
What would we do without them?
They come in all colors,
Shapes and sizes,
Worship all religions equally badly,
Attend PTA meetings,
Most of all, give to charity – hooray!
Our friends the psychopaths:
Clean-shaven, suits and ties,
Impeccably tasteful eveningwear,
Manicured lawns and sheepskin slippers,
American flags flying everywhere,
Picking up the groceries,
Running the kids to school:
Nothing to see here, citizen!
Leaders, mentors, role models,
Solid pillars of superficialdom,
Sunk deep in the shifting sands of respectability.
They touch the bedrock
And they are the bedrock,
Or so they tell us,
And we believe them,
Because
Some of the best people are psychopaths.

The Good Deaths

When the dying one is encircled by loved ones,
The sting of death is blunted.
He is entangled with life
Even as it vanishes,
Engulfed by itself,
Like candlelight swallowed up by the Sun;
He slips into silence,
Surrounded by good will,
Merging love with love.
He is gone, but his heart has already been distributed,
Long before the scattering of ashes.

Death shouldn't feel like death:
It should be tranquil—
No struggle,
No fear,
No promise,
No god,
No need.

But more noble still
Is to die alone
On some obscure mountain,
Or in a hopeless, sterile room,
Yet to still die well,
Borne up by the absent arms
Of those whom one has never known,
And never will;
To die alone but not lonely,
Smiling gently,
Not from faith,
Or resolve,
But actual contentment;
To die with clearheaded insight,
Yet with imagination —
That’s the way to go!
See us all,
Gathered around you.

Nobody dies completely
When there is someone there to say goodbye,
Even if only in his mind’s eye.
The candle is out,
But every color,
Every shape,
Every movement,
Remains,
Ready to flicker
For another flame.