Shelf Life

My affection is not like a shelf.

            It cannot be stress-tested for load bearing

            and it cannot be so quickly assembled

                        as a Walmart kit with too few screws

            or carefully carved to detail

                        with even the most dexterous hands.

My affection is like a garden.

            A sharp spark of life burst forth from the

            infinitely impossible circumstances rooted

                        in time and space

            hinging on a unique complex of chemicals

                        in that fertile hivemind.

Like the fruits of a garden

            its possibilities are limitless

                        but better to use before end of shelf life.

Alone

A prison built

            by its inmates’

                        doubt and sadness

                        anger and fear

                        values and contradictions

                                    is illuminated by LEDs

                                    and the air hums

                                                with the orchestra of silence.

            One etches into his walls

                        of plaster and bone

                                    a song in a language he wrote

                                                alone.

Translation of Noch Bist Du Da, by Rose Auslaender

Still, you are there

Throw your fear

into the air

Soon

your time is up

Soon

the heavens grow

under the grass

your dreams fall

into nowhere

Still

the cloves breathe scent,

the thrush sings

still you may love,

trade promises

still, you are there

Be who you are

Give what you have

Translation of 1928, by Ludwig Hirsch

One evening, an old man sat next to me and said:

“Do you know my son, some day, shortly

after this powerful, apocalyptic detonation 

when there are only giant, blunt rocks on the 

Earth coated in a layer of thick, black soot,

a grand, white, radiant spaceship will land.

Somewhere between former Los Angeles

and the vaporized Black Sea.

And these strange, lanky beings

will have pills on-board

that they would have given us humans

as a gift, as always, when one visits

any savages,

one gives them small gifts.

Pills against sadness

they’d have given us, as a gift,

if we were still there.

Imagine, my son –”

said the old man mournfully –

“wonderful, little pills against sadness.”

“And these strange, lanky beings

will leave their spaceship, they will look

around and immediately know that a short 

while ago a powerful, apocalyptic 

detonation occurred. And they will sit 

between the giant, blunt rocks,

shaking their heads and breathing heavily.

And each of them will quickly swallow a

pill against sadness.

One of them will even write with their finger 

in the thick, black soot on a giant, blunt rock:

‘We would have loved to know what you are! 

How you look!

How you speak!

Humans!’

And then suddenly one of them will

shout, they will shout that they found something. 

And that will be an old, dented, 

little film projector, with a movie reel.

Sure, why not?” said the old man.

“And they’ll be overjoyed,

the strange, lanky beings will wait

until it’s dark and project the movie

on their grand, white, radiant spaceship.

And they will be astonished because 

they will see a Mickey Mouse movie.

A Mickey Mouse movie with Donald Duck, 

Tom Cat, and Goofy.

And these strange, lanky beings

will climb into their spaceship and say,

‘They were cheerful, these humans.

They looked cheerful,

they spoke cheerfully.

We would have given them our

pills against sadness

in vain.’”

The old man told me this story. I reflected on it, 

and wrote the following lines:

On a particular day in the year 1928,

the dutiful moon stood suddenly to the left,

and on the right the dutiful sun, together in

the same sky.

Appalled, they stared at each other,

and in this short moment of terror 

both forgot for a fraction of a second

to do their duties.

The aftermath was disastrous.

Please, may this day be cursed for all eternity!

On this day, Mickey Mouse was born.

Cupcakes

            The world is full of people unaware of their connections with others. Somewhere a baker prepares a cupcake for a woman who intends to surprise her only son with it, after he came home with a black eye. The careful application of frosting, seemingly in the pursuit of the perfect miniature torte, actually holds a far more significant role, one whose part will be played on a stage beyond the imaginable intent of the baker. Is it so ridiculous to believe that such a cupcake, sprinkles and all, could change the world? Is any formative experience in history not premised on some random combination of events and circumstances, few to none of which were produced with the full intention of the role they came to play?

            For that matter, could not anything fundamentally alter the world? Does it not? If each and every encounter between beings generates some inextricably different experience, the realities of all involved have been irrevocably dented, morphed, warped. Is not the more important question: what does not change the world? If the alteration of this huge, shared reality is inevitable, it must then be everyone’s responsibility to correctly prioritize the kind of ripples they will unintentionally put forth into this pond, teeming with life. But how can anyone prepare, prioritize, and impose order on their link in a convoluted cluster of chains without a visible beginning or end? To consciously contribute to a system successfully, must its constituent parts and procedures not be first understood to the deepest possible degree?

            Maybe reality is the beauty that follows an earthquake at a paint production center. The frantic and barely voluntary responsive movement of everything, everywhere, generating a slick mess, the careless intertwining of self-centric existences whose purposes are never fulfilled to intention, but always fulfilled. At any given moment, the unique juxtaposition of that oily spectrum across the warehouse floor paints a mosaic simultaneously so existentially tragic, yet overwhelming in sensory catharsis, that its full corpus cannot quite be understood. Intentional purpose substituted for reactive motion, but always in creation of something communal and beyond the unit of one. Maybe the failure of this allegory is the temporal nature of an earthquake, as opposed to the timeless turmoil of the actuality it’s meant to represent. The earthquake, not an. 

            Where a cupcake can be frosted with the intent of exquisite presentation and flavor, or with the goal of deep self-development, can it realistically be created with conscious intent of a particular predicted outcome to create our shared existence, our mutual reality? Individual intention in the face of blatant chaos is in this light either a flagrant waste of precious energy, or a beautiful contribution of priceless time to the unintentional project of reality. To accept the former is to don a narcissistic mask of cynicism, where the latter demands only the rosiest of tinted glasses. The acknowledgement of their falsely dichotomous nature, however, demands the rejection of self in the identification of a greater network, being.

Ignore Me If You Can

It’s everywhere

At least, its signs are.

On my car, my laptop

            (But I drive to work, check Facebook)

On my philosophy book

            (Which I read in a dealership, sipping Coke©)

Tucked deep in a fold only dry-cleaners see

            (DO NOT REMOVE UNDER PENALTY OF LAW)

Sprawled for the rush hour traffic of Rt. 9

Even in my deepest, most intimate thoughts, I find it

lurking.

It beckons, calls, allures

Sometimes it attempts a complex, multisyllabic approach to seducing me

Or other times, it’s as little as one, tiny

word.

Maybe, once in a while, I’ll catch it as a letter

P, or sometimes G

What’s worse, sometimes it has the audacity

            to approach me as some silly little picture

                        like a fucking assembly of five rings

                        or semicircles reminiscent of the great flock West

            or an incessant jingle, loud only enough to be heard, not acknowledged

                        (their interpretation of Pavlov)

Doesn’t really matter where, or when, or in what form it finds me

because it will.

They’re everywhere, the signs

And when I see them for what they are,

            tears, blood

            subordination beyond the imagination of someone in our

                        Was it second? Fourth world?

            society could ever imagine

they often make me cringe.

Or, if I’m lucky, the window of understanding will crack slightly more open

            (if they let it)

and I might just shed one solitary tear,

            for those people I don’t know. Won’t know.  Can’t know.

But don’t worry. I’ll forget about it.

Because this is what we ask for.