Rules

Every society has its rules. These seem to be the ones for 21st century America.

When evaluating schools of thought,
Go with the one that is
Proudest of its contempt for the others.
Take every disagreement, no matter how minor,
As a personal attack on you and your progeny.
When debating, only use other techniques
When you’ve run out of ad hominem.
When you’re feeling inadequate,
Drag everyone else down until you feel better.
Never investigate a questionable assertion
If it is consistent with what you already believe.
In arguments,
Contradict yourself freely.
Impugn the character of your interlocutor
When it’s pointed out.
A person who has spent a lifetime
Studying a particular subject
Is always wrong.
A young, attractive, charismatic person
Is always right,
Especially when disagreeing with a respected scholar.
The less evidence for a proposition,
The more likely it is.
All statements have an equal chance of being correct,
Unless there is evidence in favor of one.
In that case, it is false.
Define passion as
Willingness to be viciously rude and insulting.
Never make a friend
If you can make a buck.
If you don’t understand it,
It is contemptible.
If you see a bandwagon,
Jump on it.
Get angry when others
Don’t jump on the same bandwagon.
Don’t drive unless you’re texting.
You are too smart for rules.

Our motto: Supra Omnia Mihi

The birth of time

My last post may have seemed rather a dismal prospect, so I felt the need to perk things up a bit. Hence this prequel.

Suddenly, there was suddenly
Suddenly one thing could follow the last
A great thumping cosmos hummed itself
Into being, bits of light chased and clumped

Into riots of color. Suddenly,
There could be succession, a rhythm.
There could be change and season
And the songs the winter writes for summer.

Then came memory, and all the love and loathing
To fill it til it spilled bursting
Into spinning clinging helical again
What was became was

How could I not be born?

I strode along Boulevards of grace-rimmed
Wonder, green-eyed raspberry wet
Racing, lapping my feet, my soul
The color of sweet melting kisses.

A swirl of endless life/death enticed about me
How kind to have this path so under me!
How clear to have such rhyming intense otherness
Calling all about!

I have these charts, these vectors,
This swollen ark to take me sailing.
Here comes a grandfather wind
All a-swoon!

The poet who sang at the end of time

The bland design falls, outward bound.
The swilling beast groans with cheap ecstasy,
Sometimes interior,
Sometimes superior.

What is exterior obliterates me
Until my fragile image asserts its wee voice,
Lost in a chorus
Of wee voices.

I know, I know, I am the only me,
The only conjunction of these points,
But how could you have failed to guide me
Through this hidden path?

Was I supposed to intuit mere chance?

As it is, I’m left to glide along
Waste-bound avenues,
Street grime the color of storm clouds,
Tipping into a middling redemption

Unawares, using old navigation charts,
Useless azimuths, discarded distances,
Captain of a bottomless vessel,
An occidental sailor upon oriental shores.

See there, where no destination lies.
A simple ending, no beyond, no before.
Not even a reason for despairing.
We’d mistaken the moon for a song.

Now

Now I think I’d like
To do something different
Now that I’ve ripped out my heart
And presented it to you on a dinner plate
Now that I’ve stuck out my neck
And left it stripped naked as
A discarded dancing pole
Now that I’ve left my fears flapping
Like so many ragged prayers
Now that I’ve strewn my desires
At your feet like bruised rose petals
Now that my darkest self
is common tattle
I think I’d like to try
Something more personal

This herky-jerky journey

This herky-jerky journey between madness and content
In the slender strand of a lifetime,
This momentary fragment, when a step forward or back
Means obliteration, just kills me.
I mean I am a directionless wisp,
A whim of contingency.

I know, I know, it’s the speed, not the light,
It’s the memory, not the event, but still,
Can my consequence be detectable?
What is the worth of a single bubble, unique but common?
I have the same value as a single mote,
A quantum value.

I am the boson of this boat,
My captain has abdicated
In favor of probability.
What pops in also pops out,
What breeds continuity
Also bleeds continuity.

And yet, here we are, our helices entwined,
Our smear upon history irrevocable.
That shallow basin, barely discernible
– Just ignore it.
It’s your destiny.