i deal within the realm of the currency of words -
words are my currency; sure, you can throw coinage
into the affair, or what i'd prefer to be called:
the gambler's cauldron, the days when history
is not built through will and outside the casino...
these days are built through
chance (luck) and outside the church...
    wasn't ever attending
the church the biggest gamble?
was theology,
ever not inclusive of the notion
of gambling?
   atheists don't gamble,
they have no notion of chance...
they lack the adrenaline junk
bound to adrenaline...
    immobile senile *******
and they know it!
   atheism will not attract
as much emotional concerns
to upset the stance of apathy,
only because atheism has
no degenerate attitude of
capitalism, which is gambling...
come on! people love to gamble!
the more wealth they amount
and can no longer see any use
for it... they won't invest it in others:
they'll waste it! they'll gamble it
away!
   atheism feeds no idea supportive
of gambling...
    even in the dialectical medium:
one side says:
    i know that i don't know,
   but how can you be certain
  that you know?
likewise: i know that i know,
but how can you be certain
          that i don't know?
   theology has so much of gambling
inviting its scarred hearts
and inhibited ambitious ones...
     people talk of western civilisation,
but what talk is there is
western communism,
          serious communism?
people only understand the capital,
and the gamble with it...
          better to gamble,
than to become philanthropic...
             i've never seen days where
money is so squandered...
but you might as well
   throw pebbles into the whole
dynamic,
  wishing for a philosopher's
   stone to come from the other side...
pascal's wager is alive and well...
    atheism can't fathom a worthy reply...
what can atheism provide for
the gambler?
      what's to gamble for?
   what gamble does atheism provide?
pascal? he was smart enough to explain
the human dynamic of a thrill...
   people are adrenaline junkies...
they do un-imaginable feats of danger,
can't theology equal that,
  on a microscopic level or slight deviations
of felt emotions?
     people gambled, gamble,
and will continue to gamble,
  simply because the idea of money is
so limited that it had to fill the vacuum of its
existence with both gambling, & communism...
how can atheism usurb pascal's wager
when atheists can't stop people gambling?
what is the atheistic wager?
      is there a worthy gamble?
     this is why people become so heated
in the theological dynamo...
             they become a tsunami,
a tornado, a hurricane...
             simply because atheism has no
gambling dynamic invoked...
    there's no god, death is certain,
what is there to gamble with?
another hour of a boring stalemate sunday
before the next working week begins?
that's not even a gamble!
           people need to gamble!
  please... please...
you have nothing for the theological gamble...
atheists have no sweet scented nectar
of an argument...
   no dubious fickle state of emotional
turmoil...
                    atheism is just another
boring framework of "revised" boredom...
        say to to people who gamble,
no one in this world wants to live a certain
life,
       and die with a certain truth...
                there's always the quest for
potential, for uncertainity, for adventure...
     atheism is probably the worst assertion of science...
man is born into the certainity of existence,
but lives, and wishes to die
            into / with the uncertainty of essence...
i.e. was war ever essential?
     was love ever the sole purpose of explanation
and worth the crown of above all explanations?
       man is in this affair a quasi-specimen
of the civilised typos...
      strange affair:
             he is alone, the natural world's typo,
rather than the kin of monk chimp & anzzy...
  i find it as follows:
  it will be hard to relieve theology of
the gambler...
                        and therefore gambling itself,
as a worthwhile invitation for
universal socialist philandering with
                   philanthropy...
as i find it as follows:
    atheism is no place for gambling,
   even it be as eloquent as the gambling
of pascal...
                      i suppose atheism does
hold the joker hand of gambling:
   an actual end of gambling,
   and a return to communism,
  whereby gambling is replaced by utopian
philanthropy...
                   here's your god.

I have remained in silence and solitude for quite some time now. Yesterday, I encountered Pascal for the first time. I was so moved by him that I decided to murmur from the bottom of the well in which I currently reside. The following is just pointless minor thoughts about him and, the most hated form of writing. a haiku or two inspired by Pascal.

#1
Hands over your heart
Belly facing the moonlight
Back riding the tide

#2
Where do I belong
Does gravity have family
We get along fine

#3
When I look out past the moon, the things I see have already occurred. From the opposite point of view, have we already occurred? They told us to prepare for our future when we were growing up. Our time here is quite short, to describe it generously. I like to think that staring into the night sky gives my soul a chance to get a head start.  I hope it isn't considered cheating.

#4
We look up to space
It does not look down on us
But we are noticed

#5
Truth is just a definition. I never took the time to look it up in a dictionary. Every dictionary was originally created by a human. That means somebody was the first to define truth. I think I need to read the table of contents, maybe even the foreword. Who has a signed first edition?

#6
The sea pulls me out
Secrets splash into my  ears
The tide returns me

#7
"One pascal is the pressure exerted by a force of magnitude one newton perpendicularly upon an area of one square metre." He wasn't named after the complicated equation. I doubt he even has a water proof calculator.

#8
My rambling will seem utterly pointless to anyone, but myself. Worst part is that I won't even be able to see these from the stars, but I'll still understand my current self at some point. Maybe we can share perspectives, if you ever find me. Please don't search for me, search for yourself.

#9
No double digits
The silence shall continue
Thank you for living

You're probably reading this from the same place I'm writing it
behind a desk
outside the box
trapped in a corporation
free in my thoughts

You're probably reading this for the same reason I'm writing it
because words matter
because it doesn't matter
the way everything matters

You're probably sick of reading
probably
yet we are hardly anything more than what can be proven
we're probably
the invention before probability

The loving  likelihoods of life
like crawling before walking
like falling when learning to walk
like walking into runs

The statistics of confusion
divided for the mystical equation
of adding all things make believe
subtracting all things real
and solving you for yourself

One of many apologetic arguments
is an application of Game Theory,
as defined by “Pascal’s Wager”;
ideas of infinite gain make leery

skeptics doubt a likely existence
of an omnipotent and omniscient God,
Who is worthy of our time and talent.
They believe this premise is flawed,

as they willingly bet against Hell,
damnation and its infinite losses;
the discussion, of rational thought
and atheistic stances, crisscrosses

mental boundaries in search of Truth.
Is finite loss of luxury and pleasure
worth the Christian lifestyle today?
Where are you storing your treasures?
.
.
.
Author notes

Inspired by:
Gen 1; Matt 6:19-20 and

More info on Wikipedia

Learn more about me and my poetry at:
Amazon

By Joseph J. Breunig 3rd, © 2016, All rights reserved.

eph you see kay etouffee if you see Kay tell her a catawampus catahoula hound hog dog crossed bayou levee last night all right what did you say if you see Kay tell her a catawampus catahoula hog dog crossed the levee last night all right i heard what you said the first time why you got to repeat eph you see kay you ******* ****** **** what? what did you say you ******* ****** **** heard you the first time you **** a **** a ***** a ***** hello stop end begin believe conceive create no thank you i already ate what? what did you say begin believe conceive create no thank you i already ate quit ******* repeating yourself  you ******* ******* hello stop end begin believe conceive create eph you see kay etouffee if you see Kay tell her a catawampus catahoula hog dog crossed the levee last night all right

the renown physicist dressed in brown wool suit brown leather laced shoes white shirt burgundy knitted tie wild curly graying hair climbed the stairs walked across the stage stood at the lectern adjusted narrow support pole height reached down into brown leather briefcase retrieved his thesis concerning the relative theory of everything tapped microphone composed his posture made a guttural sound clearing his throat looked out at packed full auditorium it became evident to the distinguished audience the renown physicist’s fly was open and his ***** hanging out it was unanimously dismissed as a case of professorial absent-mindedness

all the creatures of the earth (excluding humans) convened for an emergency session the bigger creatures talked first grizzly bears stood upright explaining demand for gallbladders bile paws make us more valuable dead than alive sharks testified Asian fisherman cut off our fins for soup then throw us back into the sea to die elephants thumping heavy feet stepped forward yeah poachers **** us for our tusks rhinos concurred yes they **** us for our horns wild Mustang horses neighed about violent round-ups then slaughtered processed for cat food whales complained of going deaf from submarine sonar tests then sold for meat many dolphins sea turtles tuna swordfish sea bass smaller fish swam forward pleading about getting caught in long line nets barbed baited hooks over-fished colonies chimpanzees described nightmares of being stolen from their mom’s when they are very young then used in research labs for horrible tests song birds chirped about loss of their habitats land tortoises spoke in gentle voices about being wiped out for housing developments saguaro cactuses dropped their arms in discouragement masses of penguins solemnly marched in suicidal unison to edge of melting icebergs polar bears and seals wept honey bees buzzed colony collapse disorder bats flapped about white nose syndrome coyotes and wolves howled lonesome prairie laments the session grew gloomy with heart-wrenching unbearable sadness sobbing crying then a black mutt dog spoke up my greyhound brothers and sisters and all my family of creatures i sympathize with your hurt but it is important to realize there are people who care love us want to protect us not all humans are ravenous carnivores or heartless profiteers a calico cat crept alongside black dog and rubbed her head against his chest an old gray mare admitted her love for a race horse jockey who died years ago a bluebird sang a song suddenly lots more creatures advanced with stories of human kindness Captain Paul Watson Madeleine Pickens Jane Goodall a redwood tree named Luna testified about Julia Butterfly Hill the winds clouds sky discussed concerns by Al Gore lots and lots of other names were mentioned and the whole tone of the meeting changed every one agreed they needed to wait and see what the next generation of people would do whether humans would acknowledge the cruelties threats of extinction and learn grow figure out ways to sustain mother earth father sky then the meeting let out just as the sun was rising on a new day

there is a cemetery in Paris named Père Lachaise buried there are the remains of Jim Morrison Oscar Wilde Richard Wright Karl Appel Guillaume Apollinaire Honoré de Balzac Sarah Bernhardt the empty urn of Maria Callas Frédéric Chopin Colette Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot Nancy Clara Cunard Honoré Daumier Jacques-Louis David Eugène Delacroix Isadora Duncan Paul Éluard Max Ernst Suzanne Flon Loie Fuller Théodore Géricault Yvette Guilbert Jean Ingres Clarence Laughlin Pierre Levegh Jean-François Lyotard Marcel Marceau Amedeo Modigliani Molière Yves Montand Pascale Ogier Christine Pascal Édith Piaf Marcel Proust Georges Seurat Simone Signoret Gertrude Stein Louis Visconti Maria Countess Walewska and many other extraordinary souls it is rumored at late dusk their ghosts climb from graves gather drink fine brandy from costly crystal glasses smoke fragrant cigars and once a year on November 2 party hard all night culminating in deliriously promiscuous ****** **** it’s difficult to know what the truth is since the dead don’t talk or do they

[Greek: Mellonta  sauta’]

These things are in the future.

Sophocles—’Antig.’

‘Una.’

“Born again?”

‘Monos.’

Yes, fairest and best beloved Una, “born again.” These were
the words upon whose mystical meaning I had so long
pondered, rejecting the explanations of the priesthood,
until Death itself resolved for me the secret.

‘Una.’

Death!

‘Monos.’

How strangely, sweet Una, you echo my words! I
observe, too, a vacillation in your step, a joyous
inquietude in your eyes. You are confused and oppressed by
the majestic novelty of the Life Eternal. Yes, it was of
Death I spoke. And here how singularly sounds that word
which of old was wont to bring terror to all hearts,
throwing a mildew upon all pleasures!

‘Una.’

Ah, Death, the spectre which sate at all feasts! How often,
Monos, did we lose ourselves in speculations upon its
nature! How mysteriously did it act as a check to human
bliss, saying unto it, “thus far, and no farther!” That
earnest mutual love, my own Monos, which burned within our
bosoms, how vainly did we flatter ourselves, feeling happy
in its first upspringing that our happiness would strengthen
with its strength! Alas, as it grew, so grew in our hearts
the dread of that evil hour which was hurrying to separate
us forever! Thus in time it became painful to love. Hate
would have been mercy then.

‘Monos’.

Speak not here of these griefs, dear Una—mine, mine
forever now!

‘Una’.

But the memory of past sorrow, is it not present joy? I have
much to say yet of the things which have been. Above all, I
burn to know the incidents of your own passage through the
dark Valley and Shadow.

‘Monos’.

And when did the radiant Una ask anything of her Monos in
vain? I will be minute in relating all, but at what point
shall the weird narrative begin?

‘Una’.

At what point?

‘Monos’.

You have said.

‘Una’.

Monos, I comprehend you. In Death we have both learned the
propensity of man to define the indefinable. I will not say,
then, commence with the moment of life’s cessation—but
commence with that sad, sad instant when, the fever having
abandoned you, you sank into a breathless and motionless
torpor, and I pressed down your pallid eyelids with the
passionate fingers of love.

‘Monos’.

One word first, my Una, in regard to man’s general condition
at this epoch. You will remember that one or two of the wise
among our forefathers—wise in fact, although not in
the world’s esteem—had ventured to doubt the propriety
of the term “improvement,” as applied to the progress of our
civilization. There were periods in each of the five or six
centuries immediately preceding our dissolution when arose
some vigorous intellect, boldly contending for those
principles whose truth appears now, to our disenfranchised
reason, so utterly obvious —principles which should
have taught our race to submit to the guidance of the
natural laws rather than attempt their control. At long
intervals some master-minds appeared, looking upon each
advance in practical science as a retrogradation in the true
utility. Occasionally the poetic intellect—that
intellect which we now feel to have been the most exalted of
all—since those truths which to us were of the most
enduring importance could only be reached by that analogy
which speaks in proof-tones to the imagination alone,
and to the unaided reason bears no weight—occasionally
did this poetic intellect proceed a step farther in the
evolving of the vague idea of the philosophic, and find in
the mystic parable that tells of the tree of knowledge, and
of its forbidden fruit, death-producing, a distinct
intimation that knowledge was not meet for man in the infant
condition of his soul. And these men—the poets—
living and perishing amid the scorn of the
“utilitarians”—of rough pedants, who arrogated to
themselves a title which could have been properly applied
only to the scorned—these men, the poets, pondered
piningly, yet not unwisely, upon the ancient days when our
wants were not more simple than our enjoyments were
keen—days when mirth was a word unknown, so
solemnly deep-toned was happiness—holy, august, and
blissful days, blue rivers ran undammed, between hills
unhewn, into far forest solitudes, primeval, odorous, and
unexplored. Yet these noble exceptions from the general
misrule served but to strengthen it by opposition. Alas! we
had fallen upon the most evil of all our evil days. The
great “movement”—that was the cant term—went on:
a diseased commotion, moral and physical. Art—the
Arts—arose supreme, and once enthroned, cast chains
upon the intellect which had elevated them to power. Man,
because he could not but acknowledge the majesty of Nature,
fell into childish exultation at his acquired and still-
increasing dominion over her elements. Even while he stalked
a God in his own fancy, an infantine imbecility came over
him. As might be supposed from the origin of his disorder,
he grew infected with system, and with abstraction. He
enwrapped himself in generalities. Among other odd ideas,
that of universal equality gained ground; and in the face of
analogy and of God—in despite of the loud warning
voice of the laws of gradation so visibly pervading
all things in Earth and Heaven—wild attempts at an
omniprevalent Democracy were made. Yet this evil sprang
necessarily from the leading evil, Knowledge. Man could not
both know and succumb. Meantime huge smoking cities arose,
innumerable. Green leaves shrank before the hot breath of
furnaces. The fair face of Nature was deformed as with the
ravages of some loathsome disease. And methinks, sweet Una,
even our slumbering sense of the forced and of the far-
fetched might have arrested us here. But now it appears that
we had worked out our own destruction in the ******* of
our taste, or rather in the blind neglect of its
culture in the schools. For, in truth, it was at this crisis
that taste alone—that faculty which, holding a middle
position between the pure intellect and the moral sense,
could never safely have been disregarded—it was now
that taste alone could have led us gently back to Beauty, to
Nature, and to Life. But alas for the pure contemplative
spirit and majestic intuition of Plato! Alas for the [Greek:
mousichae]  which he justly regarded as an all-sufficient
education for the soul! Alas for him and for it!—since
both were most desperately needed, when both were most
entirely forgotten or despised. Pascal, a philosopher whom
we both love, has said, how truly!—”Que tout notre
raisonnement se reduit a ceder au sentiment;” and it is
not impossible that the sentiment of the natural, had time
permitted it, would have regained its old ascendency over
the harsh mathematical reason of the schools. But this thing
was not to be. Prematurely induced by intemperance of
knowledge, the old age of the world drew near. This the mass
of mankind saw not, or, living lustily although unhappily,
affected not to see. But, for myself, the Earth’s records
had taught me to look for widest ruin as the price of
highest civilization. I had imbibed a prescience of our Fate
from comparison of China the simple and enduring, with
Assyria the architect, with Egypt the astrologer, with
Nubia, more crafty than either, the turbulent mother of all
Arts. In the history of these regions I met with a ray from
the Future. The individual artificialities of the three
latter were local diseases of the Earth, and in their
individual overthrows we had seen local remedies applied;
but for the infected world at large I could anticipate no
regeneration save in death. That man, as a race, should not
become extinct, I saw that he must be “born again.”

And now it was, fairest and dearest, that we wrapped our
spirits, daily, in dreams. Now it was that, in twilight, we
discoursed of the days to come, when the Art-scarred surface
of the Earth, having undergone that purification which alone
could efface its rectangular obscenities, should clothe
itself anew in the verdure and the mountain-slopes and the
smiling waters of Paradise, and be rendered at length a fit
dwelling-place for man:—for man the
Death-purged—for man to whose now exalted intellect
there should be poison in knowledge no more—for the
redeemed, regenerated, blissful, and now immortal, but still
for the material, man.

‘Una’.

Well do I remember these conversations, dear Monos; but the
epoch of the fiery overthrow was not so near at hand as we
believed, and as the corruption you indicate did surely
warrant us in believing. Men lived; and died individually.
You yourself sickened, and passed into the grave; and
thither your constant Una speedily followed you. And though
the century which has since elapsed, and whose conclusion
brings up together once more, tortured our slumbering senses
with no impatience of duration, yet my Monos, it was a
century still.

‘Monos’.

Say, rather, a point in the vague infinity. Unquestionably,
it was in the Earth’s dotage that I died. Wearied at heart
with anxieties which had their origin in the general turmoil
and decay, I succumbed to the fierce fever. After some few
days of pain, and many of dreamy delirium replete with
ecstasy, the manifestations of which you mistook for pain,
while I longed but was impotent to undeceive you—after
some days there came upon me, as you have said, a breathless
and motionless torpor; and this was termed Death by
those who stood around me.

Words are vague things. My condition did not deprive me of
sentience. It appeared to me not greatly dissimilar to the
extreme quiescence of him, who, having slumbered long and
profoundly, lying motionless and fully prostrate in a mid-
summer noon, begins to steal slowly back into consciousness,
through the mere sufficiency of his sleep, and without being
awakened by external disturbances.

I breathed no longer. The pulses were still. The heart had
ceased to beat. Volition had not departed, but was
powerless. The senses were unusually active, although
eccentrically so—assuming often each other’s functions
at random. The taste and the smell were inextricably
confounded, and became one sentiment, abnormal and intense.
The rose-water with which your tenderness had moistened my
lips to the last, affected me with sweet fancies of
flowers—fantastic flowers, far more lovely than any of
the old Earth, but whose prototypes we have here blooming
around us. The eye-lids, transparent and bloodless, offered
no complete impediment to vision. As volition was in
abeyance, the ***** could not roll in their sockets—
but all objects within the range of the visual hemisphere
were seen with more or less distinctness; the rays which
fell upon the external retina, or into the corner of the
eye, producing a more vivid effect than those which struck
the front or interior surface. Yet, in the former instance,
this effect was so far anomalous that I appreciated it only
as sound—sound sweet or discordant as the
matters presenting themselves at my side were light or dark
in shade—curved or angular in outline. The hearing, at
the same time, although excited in degree, was not irregular
in action—estimating real sounds with an extravagance
of precision, not less than of sensibility. Touch had
undergone a modification more peculiar. Its impressions were
tardily received, but pertinaciously retained, and resulted
always in the highest physical pleasure. Thus the pressure
of your sweet fingers upon my eyelids, at first only
recognized through vision, at length, long after their
removal, filled my whole being with a sensual delight
immeasurable. I say with a sensual delight. All my
perceptions were purely sensual. The materials furnished the
passive brain by the senses were not in the least degree
wrought into shape by the deceased understanding. Of pain
there was some little; of pleasure there was much; but of
moral pain or pleasure none at all. Thus your wild sobs
floated into my ear with all their mournful cadences, and
were appreciated in their every variation of sad tone; but
they were soft musical sounds and no more; they conveyed to
the extinct reason no intimation of the sorrows which gave
them birth; while large and constant tears which fell upon
my face, telling the bystanders of a heart which broke,
thrilled every fibre of my frame with ecstasy alone. And
this was in truth the Death of which these bystanders
spoke reverently, in low whispers—you, sweet Una,
gaspingly, with loud cries.

They attired me for the coffin—three or four dark
figures which flitted busily to and fro. As these crossed
the direct line of my vision they affected me as forms;
but upon passing to my side their images impressed me
with the idea of shrieks, groans, and, other dismal
expressions of terror, of horror, or of woe. You alone,
habited in a white robe, passed in all directions musically
about.

The day waned; and, as its light faded away, I became
possessed by a vague uneasiness—an anxiety such as the
sleeper feels when sad real sounds fall continuously within
his ear—low distant bell-tones, solemn, at long but
equal intervals, and commingling with melancholy dreams.
Night arrived; and with its shadows a heavy discomfort. It
oppressed my limbs with the oppression of some dull weight,
and was palpable. There was also a moaning sound, not unlike
the distant reverberation of surf, but more continuous,
which, beginning with the first twilight, had grown in
strength with the darkness. Suddenly lights were brought
into the rooms, and this reverberation became forthwith
interrupted into frequent unequal bursts of the same sound,
but less dreary and less distinct. The ponderous oppression
was in a great measure relieved; and, issuing from the flame
of each lamp (for there were many), there flowed unbrokenly
into my ears a strain of melodious monotone. And when now,
dear Una, approaching the bed upon which I lay outstretched,
you sat gently by my side, breathing odor from your sweet
lips, and pressing them upon my brow, there arose
tremulously within my *****, and mingling with the merely
physical sensations which circumstances had called forth, a
something akin to sentiment itself—a feeling that,
half appreciating, half responded to your earnest love and
sorrow; but this feeling took no root in the pulseless
heart, and seemed indeed rather a shadow than a reality, and
faded quickly away, first into extreme quiescence, and then
into a purely sensual pleasure as before.

And now, from the wreck and the chaos of the usual senses,
there appeared to have arisen within me a sixth, all
perfect. In its exercise I found a wild delight—yet a
delight still physical, inasmuch as the understanding had in
it no part. Motion in the animal frame had fully ceased. No
muscle quivered; no nerve thrilled; no artery throbbed. But
there seemed to have sprung up in the brain that of
which no words could convey to the merely human intelligence
even an indistinct conception. Let me term it a mental
pendulous pulsation. It was the moral embodiment of man’s
abstract idea of Time. By the absolute equalization
of this movement—or of such as this—had the
cycles of the firmamental orbs themselves been adjusted. By
its aid I measured the irregularities of the clock upon the
mantel, and of the watches of the attendants. Their tickings
came sonorously to my ears. The slightest deviations from
the true proportion—and these deviations were
omniprevalent—affected me just as violations of
abstract truth were wont on earth to affect the moral sense.
Although no two of the timepieces in the chamber struck the
individual seconds accurately together, yet I had no
difficulty in holding steadily in mind the tones, and the
respective momentary errors of each. And this—this
keen, perfect self-existing sentiment of
duration—this sentiment existing (as man could
not possibly have conceived it to exist) independently of
any succession of events—this idea—this sixth
sense, upspringing from the ashes of the rest, was the first
obvious and certain step of the intemporal soul upon the
threshold of the temporal eternity.

It was midnight; and you still sat by my side. All others
had departed from the chamber of Death. They had deposited
me in the coffin. The lamps burned flickeringly; for this I
knew by the tremulousness of the monotonous strains. But
suddenly these strains diminished in distinctness and in
volume. Finally they ceased. The perfume in my nostrils died
aw

Providence is inherently ambiguous
Says the military man in the Nation

Abraham Lincoln would doubtless agree
The Divine Purpose beyond revelation

So would sorrowful Soren Kierkegaard
Who knew terror of teleological suspension

If God is, then I think She is Hidden
(You won't find her at the Republican Convention)

I once heard of a man named Pascal who wagered that my soul was better off in the hands of a myth than left to my own devices, and as I lay here chained to my bed with my demons pulling at my ribcage I'm starting to think he was right.

You could tell
by Mamie’s face
she was sick

of shish kebabs
in fact it seemed
that the whole Moroccan holiday

was kind of getting
to her sensibilities
from the standing

on the two brick toilets
to the shish kebab
food misadventure

let’s go walk
on the beach
she said

before I throw up
with this crap
and so you walked

with her down through
the path to the beach
the moon and stars

above in a black
patchwork sky
the sound of the sea

rushing in and out
and the voices
of the others

getting less
and less
and she said

looking up at the sky
isn’t scary that sky
why is it scary?

you asked
it’s so vast
like it goes on forever

she said
I think Pascal found
the immensity

of the night sky
disturbing
you said

Pascal?
Is he on the coach?
Is he on the tour?

she asked
no he was a mathematician
and physicist and inventor

and Christian philosopher
in the 17th century
oh right

she said
boring ****
come on let’s get

on the beach
and lay down
and stare

at the sky
and stars
and that bright moon

and then we can snuggle
up close
and we’ll see

what comes
and she pulled you
onto the beach

and the damp sand
eased itself
between your toes

and the smell of the sea
hit you
and the sounds

and the wind
from off the sea’s shoulder
and she pulled you

down on the beach
beside her
and you lay back

and looked up
and the vast sky
seemed to press down

on you both
and she laughed
and said

it kind of makes
you seem small
and insignificant

doesn’t it
she said
you felt her hand

in yours
a soft pulse
of her being

right there
like a small beeping drum
and she turned

and looked at you
and smiled
and her smile was captured

by the moon’s glow
and you said
we need to remember

this moment
this being here
this newness of being

and she laughed
and said
don’t get too deep on me

and she leaned in
close to you
and kissed you

and her tongue
entered you
and the whole sky

seemed to witness
the moment
seemed to want

to embrace the kiss
the bright humanness
in her moonlit face.

Hommage élégiaque au poète indicible du Genêt, Giacomo Leopardi


Oh toi, Leopardi né à Recanati,
Tu portas sur la vie, le regard des «antiques»
Et même, les «lumières» semblaient pâles pour toi,
Du haut du belvédère de la pensée antique ;
Tu vivais en ton siècle comme un exilé,
Qui a connu l’âge d’or et se languit d’ennui.
Recanati, pour toi, était comme un caveau
Dont tu ne t’échappais qu’au travers de tes livres.
Ivre de grec et féru de latin,
Seule la bibliothèque était ta vraie amie.
Latiniste à huit ans, Helléniste à quatorze,
Si ton corps t’enfermait, ton esprit t’élevait ;
Bien haut, dans les hauteurs où dominent les aigles.
Très tôt dans la palette de tes talents immenses,
Tu sus choisir la muse comme cime des arts ;
Et devint son Mozart, ciselant de ses mots,
Que tu allais cueillir dans les champs de diamant,
Dans la Grecque éternelle qui irrigue l'Esprit,
Tu souffrais en silence ton époque mesquine.

Par ton hommage à Dante tu commenças d'écrire
Et souffrait tellement pour ta patrie meurtrie.
Ainsi tu ravivas la mémoire, des légions enfouies
Sous les neiges et les glaces de la Russie glaciale,
Là où, Napoléon, conduisit tes enfants
Où dans de vains combats ils moururent, si ****.
Admirant la nature tu en perçus la grandeur,
Mais en compris aussi les minéralités froides
Dont l'éternel retour se rit de nos soucis,
Alors que nous goûtons des lieux apprivoisées
Son chaos naît et renaît en "Bige Bang" convulsifs,
Et moins que des fourmis, elle se soucie de nous.
Gravissant les volcans tu pouvais contempler
Le peu de cas fait, de cités, jadis si glorieuses.
Tu pouvais mesurer l'immense solitude
Qui pétrifia Pascal et rend tout orgueil dérisoire,
Comme pure chimère dans les champs du Cosmos
Ou le temps ne suit pas, nos piètres horloges.
Et, pourtant gravissant les pentes du Vésuve
Du Genêt si chétif, tu saisis la grandeur ;
Celle même, des humains face à l'inexorable.
Mieux encore tu en appelas à la fraternité humaine,
Et face aux cataclysmes toujours renouvelés
Tu conseillas de ne pas y rajouter nos propres maux.
Toi que l'on désigna : "prince du pessimisme" ;
"Sombre amant de la Mort, pauvre Leopardi",
Tu fus plus bien plus que d'autres, un sceptique attentif,
Aux peines de tes frères, et à leurs vains combats,
Toi le savant chétif qui mourut à trente-neuf ans,
Tu goûtas la passion de cruelles qui repoussaient ta bosse.

Paul Arrighi ( Toulouse/France)
E-Mail : paul20.arrighi@numericable.fr

Almost happy now, he looked at his estate.
An exile making watches glanced up as he passed,
And went on working; where a hospital was rising fast
A joiner touched his cap; an agent came to tell
Some of the trees he'd planted were progressing well.
The white alps glittered. It was summer. He was very great.

Far off in Paris, where his enemies
Whispered that he was wicked, in an upright chair
A blind old woman longed for death and letters. He would write
"Nothing is better than life." But was it? Yes, the fight
Against the false and the unfair
Was always worth it. So was gardening. Civilise.

Cajoling, scolding, screaming, cleverest of them all,
He'd had the other children in a holy war
Against the infamous grown-ups, and, like a child, been sly
And humble, when there was occasion for
The two-faced answer or the plain protective lie,
But, patient like a peasant, waited for their fall.

And never doubted, like D'Alembert, he would win:
Only Pascal was a great enemy, the rest
Were rats already poisoned; there was much, though, to be done,
And only himself to count upon.
Dear Diderot was dull but did his best;
Rousseau, he'd always known, would blubber and give in.

So, like a sentinel, he could not sleep. The night was full of wrong,
Earthquakes and executions. Soon he would be dead,
And still all over Europe stood the horrible nurses
Itching to boil their children. Only his verses
Perhaps could stop them: He must go on working: Overhead
The uncomplaining stars composed their lucid song.

Tant que mon pauvre cœur, encor plein de jeunesse,
A ses illusions n'aura pas dit adieu,
Je voudrais m'en tenir à l'antique sagesse,
Qui du sobre Épicure a fait un demi-dieu
Je voudrais vivre, aimer, m'accoutumer aux hommes
Chercher un peu de joie et n'y pas trop compter,
Faire ce qu'on a fait, être ce que nous sommes,
Et regarder le ciel sans m'en inquiéter.

Je ne puis ; - malgré moi l'infini me tourmente.
Je n'y saurais songer sans crainte et sans espoir ;
Et, quoi qu'on en ait dit, ma raison s'épouvante
De ne pas le comprendre et pourtant de le voir.
Qu'est-ce donc que ce monde, et qu'y venons-nous faire,
Si pour qu'on vive en paix, il faut voiler les cieux ?
Passer comme un troupeau les yeux fixés à terre,
Et renier le reste, est-ce donc être heureux ?
Non, c'est cesser d'être homme et dégrader son âme.
Dans la création le hasard m'a jeté ;
Heureux ou malheureux, je suis né d'une femme,
Et je ne puis m'enfuir hors de l'humanité.

Que faire donc ? « Jouis, dit la raison païenne ;
Jouis et meurs ; les dieux ne songent qu'à dormir.
- Espère seulement, répond la foi chrétienne ;
Le ciel veille sans cesse, et tu ne peux mourir. »
Entre ces deux chemins j'hésite et je m'arrête.
Je voudrais, à l'écart, suivre un plus doux sentier.
Il n'en existe pas, dit une voix secrète ;
En présence du ciel, il faut croire ou nier.
Je le pense en effet ; les âmes tourmentées
Dans l'un et l'autre excès se jettent tour à tour,
Mais les indifférents ne sont que des athées ;
Ils ne dormiraient plus s'ils doutaient un seul jour.
Je me résigne donc, et, puisque la matière
Me laisse dans le cœur un désir plein d'effroi,
Mes genoux fléchiront ; je veux croire et j'espère.
Que vais-je devenir, et que veut-on de moi ?
Me voilà dans les mains d'un Dieu plus redoutable
Que ne sont à la fois tous les maux d'ici-bas ;
Me voilà seul, errant, fragile et misérable,
Sous les yeux d'un témoin qui ne me quitte pas.
Il m'observer il me suit. Si mon cœur bat trop vite,
J'offense sa grandeur et sa divinité.
Un gouffre est sous mes pas si je m'y précipite,
Pour expier une heure il faut l'éternité.
Mon juge est un bourreau qui trompe sa victime.
Pour moi, tout devient piège et tout change de nom
L'amour est un péché, le bonheur est un crime,
Et l'œuvre des sept jours n'est que tentation
Je ne garde plus rien de la nature humaine ;
Il n'existe pour moi ni vertu ni remord .
J'attends la récompense et j'évite la peine ;
Mon seul guide est la peur, et mon seul but, la mort
On me dit cependant qu'une joie infinie
Attend quelques élus. - Où sont-ils, ces heureux ?
Si vous m'avez trompé, me rendrez-vous la vie ?
Si vous m'avez dit vrai, m'ouvrirez-vous les cieux ?
Hélas ! ce beau pays dont parlaient vos prophètes,
S'il existe là-haut, ce doit être un désert
Vous les voulez trop purs, les heureux que vous faites,
Et quand leur joie arrive, ils en ont trop souffert.
Je suis seulement homme, et ne veux pas moins être,
Ni tenter davantage. - À quoi donc m'arrêter ?
Puisque je ne puis croire aux promesses du prêtre,
Est-ce l'indifférent que je vais consulter ?

Si mon cœur, fatigué du rêve qui l'obsède,
À la réalité revient pour s'assouvir,
Au fond des vains plaisirs que j'appelle à mon aide
Je trouve un tel dégoût, que je me sens mourir
Aux jours même où parfois la pensée est impie,
Où l'on voudrait nier pour cesser de douter,
Quand je posséderais tout ce qu'en cette vie
Dans ses vastes désirs l'homme peut convoiter ;
Donnez-moi le pouvoir, la santé, la richesse,
L'amour même, l'amour, le seul bien d'ici-bas !
Que la blonde Astarté, qu'idolâtrait la Grèce,
De ses îles d'azur sorte en m'ouvrant les bras ;
Quand je pourrais saisir dans le sein de la terre
Les secrets éléments de sa fécondité,
Transformer à mon gré la vivace matière
Et créer pour moi seul une unique beauté ;
Quand Horace, Lucrèce et le vieil Épicure,
Assis à mes côtés m'appelleraient heureux
Et quand ces grands amants de l'antique nature
Me chanteraient la joie et le mépris des dieux,
Je leur dirais à tous : « Quoi que nous puissions faire,
Je souffre, il est trop **** ; le monde s'est fait vieux
Une immense espérance a traversé la terre ;
Malgré nous vers le ciel il faut lever les yeux ! »
Que me reste-t-il donc ? Ma raison révoltée
Essaye en vain de croire et mon cœur de douter
De chrétien m'épouvante, et ce que dit l'athée,
En dépit de mes sens, je ne puis l'écouter.
Les vrais religieux me trouveront impie,
Et les indifférents me croiront insensé.
À qui m'adresserai-je, et quelle voix amie
Consolera ce cœur que le doute a blessé ?

Il existe, dit-on, une philosophie
Qui nous explique tout sans révélation,
Et qui peut nous guider à travers cette vie
Entre l'indifférence et la religion.
J'y consens. - Où sont-ils, ces faiseurs de systèmes,
Qui savent, sans la foi, trouver la vérité,
Sophistes impuissants qui ne croient qu'en eux-mêmes ?
Quels sont leurs arguments et leur autorité ?
L'un me montre ici-bas deux principes en guerre,
Qui, vaincus tour à tour, sont tous deux immortels ;
L'autre découvre au ****, dans le ciel solitaire,
Un inutile Dieu qui ne veut pas d'autels.
Je vois rêver Platon et penser Aristote ;
J'écoute, j'applaudis, et poursuis mon chemin
Sous les rois absolus je trouve un Dieu despote ;
On nous parle aujourd'hui d'un Dieu républicains.
Pythagore et Leibniz transfigurent mon être.
Descartes m'abandonne au sein des tourbillons.
Montaigne s'examine, et ne peut se connaître.
Pascal fuit en tremblant ses propres visions.
Pyrrhon me rend aveugle, et Zénon insensible.
Voltaire jette à bas tout ce qu'il voit debout
Spinoza, fatigué de tenter l'impossible,
Cherchant en vain son Dieu, croit le trouver partout.
Pour le sophiste anglais l'homme est une machine.
Enfin sort des brouillards un rhéteur allemand
Qui, du philosophisme achevant la ruine,
Déclare le ciel vide, et conclut au néant.

Voilà donc les débris de l'humaine science !
Et, depuis cinq mille ans qu'on a toujours douté,
Après tant de fatigue et de persévérance,
C'est là le dernier mot qui nous en est rester
Ah ! pauvres insensés, misérables cervelles,
Qui de tant de façons avez tout expliqué,
Pour aller jusqu'aux cieux il vous fallait des ailes ;
Vous aviez le désir, la foi vous a manqué.
Je vous plains ; votre orgueil part d'une âme blesses,
Vous sentiez les tourments dont mon cœur est rempli
Et vous la connaissiez, cette amère pensée
Qui fait frissonner l'homme en voyant l'infini.
Eh bien, prions ensemble,-abjurons la misère
De vos calculs d'enfants, de tant de vains travaux !
Maintenant que vos corps sont réduits en poussière
J'irai m'agenouiller pour vous sur vos tombeaux.
Venez, rhéteurs païens, maîtres de la science,
Chrétiens des temps passés et rêveurs d'aujourd'hui ;
Croyez-moi' la prière est un cri d'espérance !
Pour que Dieu nous réponde, adressons-nous à lui,
Il est juste, il est bon ; sans doute il vous pardonne.
Tous vous avez souffert, le reste est oublié.
Si le ciel est désert, nous n'offensons personne ;
Si quelqu'un nous entend, qu'il nous prenne en pitié !

Ô toi que nul n'a pu connaître,
Et n'a renié sans mentir,
Réponds-moi, toi qui m'as fait naître,
Et demain me feras mourir !

Puisque tu te laisses comprendre,
Pourquoi fais-tu douter de toi ?
Quel triste plaisir peux-tu prendre
À tenter notre bonne foi ?

Dès que l'homme lève la tête,
Il croit t'entrevoir dans les cieux ;
La création, sa conquête,
N'est qu'un vaste temple à ses yeux.

Dès qu'il redescend en lui-même,
Il l'y trouve ; tu vis en lui.
S'il souffre, s'il pleure, s'il aime,
C'est son Dieu qui le veut ainsi.

De la plus noble intelligence
La plus sublime ambition
Est de prouver ton existence,
Et de faire épeler ton nom.

De quelque façon qu'on t'appelle,
Brahma, Jupiter ou Jésus,
Vérité, Justice éternelle,
Vers toi tous les bras sont tendus.

Le dernier des fils de la terre
Te rend grâces du fond du coeur,
Dès qu'il se mêle à sa misère
Une apparence de bonheur.

Le monde entier te glorifie :
L'oiseau te chante sur son nid ;
Et pour une goutte de pluie
Des milliers d'êtres t'ont béni.

Tu n'as rien fait qu'on ne l'admire ;
Rien de toi n'est perdu pour nous ;
Tout prie, et tu ne peux sourire
Que nous ne tombions à genoux.

Pourquoi donc, ô Maître suprême,
As-tu créé le mal si grand,
Que la raison, la vertu même
S'épouvantent en le voyant ?

Lorsque tant de choses sur terre
Proclament la Divinité,
Et semblent attester d'un père
L'amour, la force et la bonté,

Comment, sous la sainte lumière,
Voit-on des actes si hideux,
Qu'ils font expirer la prière
Sur les lèvres du malheureux ?

Pourquoi, dans ton oeuvre céleste,
Tant d'éléments si peu d'accord ?
À quoi bon le crime et la peste ?
Ô Dieu juste ! pourquoi la mort ?

Ta pitié dut être profonde
Lorsqu'avec ses biens et ses maux,
Cet admirable et pauvre monde
Sortit en pleurant du chaos !

Puisque tu voulais le soumettre
Aux douleurs dont il est rempli,
Tu n'aurais pas dû lui permettre
De t'entrevoir dans l'infini.

Pourquoi laisser notre misère
Rêver et deviner un Dieu ?
Le doute a désolé la terre ;
Nous en voyons trop ou trop peu.

Si ta chétive créature
Est indigne de t'approcher,
Il fallait laisser la nature
T'envelopper et te cacher.

Il te resterait ta puissance,
Et nous en sentirions les coups ;
Mais le repos et l'ignorance
Auraient rendu nos maux plus doux.

Si la souffrance et la prière
N'atteignent pas ta majesté,
Garde ta grandeur solitaire,
Ferme à jamais l'immensité.

Mais si nos angoisses mortelles
Jusqu'à toi peuvent parvenir ;
Si, dans les plaines éternelles,
Parfois tu nous entends gémir,

Brise cette voûte profonde
Qui couvre la création ;
Soulève les voiles du monde,
Et montre-toi, Dieu juste et bon !

Tu n'apercevras sur la terre
Qu'un ardent amour de la foi,
Et l'humanité tout entière
Se prosternera devant toi.

Les larmes qui l'ont épuisée
Et qui ruissellent de ses yeux,
Comme une légère rosée
S'évanouiront dans les cieux.

Tu n'entendras que tes louanges,
Qu'un concert de joie et d'amour
Pareil à celui dont tes anges
Remplissent l'éternel séjour ;

Et dans cet hosanna suprême,
Tu verras, au bruit de nos chants,
S'enfuir le doute et le blasphème,
Tandis que la Mort elle-même
Y joindra ses derniers accents.

I wanted to know what was real knowledge,
so I went to the wisest master, God,
Not to learn things of school or college,
But to go where no foot has ever trod.
.
God said," I know what you seek, child,
But if real knowledge is what you wish to gain,
You venture into mountains dark and prairies wild,
And go through joyful hurt and honoring pain."
.
I was ready to put up resistance,
Said God," To men you shall speak,
Who are the wisest of this existence,
And at the end you shall get what you seek."
.
And so I went to the Physicists,
On whose principles this world exists,
They asked, “Pascal’s law, Bulk modulus, Doppler effect, can you tell?"
I said," No sir, but like Newton, even I wondered why the apple fell."
"Sacrilege!" they said," You inelastic plastic, may your soul rest in hell."
But I remembered God's words and moved on.
.
Then I went to the scholars of Chemistry,
Who are the wisest in mankind's History,
They asked me," What about Dalton's law, KTG, inorganic Benzene, can you say?"
"Nothing, sir, but I wonder about molecules and atoms, night and day!"
"Sacrilege!" they said, " You miserable molecule, May in hell your grave lay."
But I remembered God's words and moved on.
.
Then I went to the supreme Mathematicians,
Whom I consider as God's own magicians,
They asked me," What on methods of solving DEs, LMVT, can you speak?"
"Nothing, sir, but I work on theorems of Euler, the mathematician Greek."
"Sacrilege!" they said," You rootless equation, may you end up in the Devil's steak."
But I remembered God's words and moved on.
.
Indeed, I felt sorry for their and the future generations' plight,
But at the end of the road, I realized God was right,
It’s not about knowing Pascal's, Dalton's or Euler's shouts,
Its knowing how to live life to your fullest, every time you breathe in and breathe out.

For Thomas V. Morris and William J. Bennett
In gratitude for a wonderful summer at Notre Dame



O, thou dry Jansenist! A night of fire
Left in your pocket like a shopping list
Sitting quietly in a room, will never burn
To set your sere and withered soul alight

And one might wager that your calculator
In brass, for counting brass, touches not the heart
Which has its reasons which the mind knows too
Pensees which never make a night a day

Forgive thou, then, this lettre provinciale
And count it as a friend’s memorial

the west rid itself from the plague of doubt that cradled the concept of theology subscript submergence in philosophy or philology, it now expects to be cool with outright denial, but as Sartre pointed out: denial is representative of bad faith... hence in doubt i sit firm as if in a roller coaster and experience good faith... doubt so never appealing even with Pascal's wager, Pascal would have no wager as he had with doubt should such strict obedience of the 20th century teaching of denial had been his contemporary - both sides would hardly embark on the metaphor of a gamble.

after finishing the book reviews
from the saturday magazine
(typical, no review of poetry books,
all you get is a review of a poem - not a book -
in the sunday's news review section...
was Shakespeare born in England?
are you sure?! i'm starting to believe
he was born in Prague.)
i ended up reading the first few lines of
the weekend magazine,
about 50 year old women getting their libido
back prior to menopause
and 60 year old stallions...
i read the male perspective and threw the ****
newspaper into the gutter of my imagination,
then i started gesticulating at my bookshelf,
oi! Ezra! come 'ere! i've three cantos to finish
you off! come 'ere! i rather read you than this
filth... and the goats go, and the sheep
b'ah b'ah (there's no point writing an
onomatopoeia for a reference of goats)
in this Orwellian farm that once belonged to
McDonald Trump; where western society is
i don't know, 60 year old capitalist journalists
and diarists blame lack of ****** enthusiasm
of the young reciprocating pleasures on an
over exposure to ****... I BLAME THESE
DINOSAURS AND OUR PLIGHT ON CENSORING
A ******* LETTER! PAPA DON'T MIND
GIMP MASKS AND WHIPS... PAPA MINDS IT
IN FCK OFF! i guess i better start learning
sign-language... actually i have one sequence
in sign language: why don't you *******,
bear with me, it goes like this:
a. index + ******* of the right hand slapped
   on the palm of the left hand (why)...
b. index + ******* of the right hand slapped
    on the palm of the left hand reversely / inside out (don't)
c. index + ******* in a V shape longed into
    the side of the left hand (you)
d. right arm made into a fist smashed against the palm
     of the left hand (****)
e. right hand with thumb ***** attempting to cure
    the ailment of spilled salt in an off direction
    from d., i.e. the fist slapping the palm (off).

Epigenetics
Avoiding Dementia
Will's Wellness Wager

Trois Poèmes sur l’été en Corse et Letia
L’été Corse

L'été est la saison bleue
tant attendue, tant espérée
quand le froid de l'hiver vous glace,
quand le printemps pleure à grands eaux.
L'été s'installe quand le soleil
brule, hardi, de tous ses feux,
que la lumière devient reine de jour
et que les soirs s'étirent et se prélassent
Les fleurs et plantes du Maquis
ne sont pas encoure roussies
et forment comme un tapis bariolé de couleurs.
Les senteurs nous embaument
de leurs sucs capiteux
et nous nous croirons presque
dans une vaste parfumerie à ciel ouvert.
La mer parfois ridée de mousse blanche
devient parfois turquoise, émeraude ou bleu outre-mer.
Mais le soir venu le soleil se plonge
dans des rougeoiements varies
qui irritent et bariolent l'horizon.
Alors que s'assombrit ces curieuses tours génoises trapues ou rondes qui faisaient mine de protéger les anciens.
Et sont autant de rappels des périls barbaresques durant les temps médiévaux et modernes



                                                      *
Le café de Letia Saint Roch

Il est dans ce gracieux village de Letia, à flanc de Rocher, un endroit ayant résisté à la disparition des commerces. C'est le café de Toussaint Rossi, placé au cœur du village et tenant lieu de salle commune. Ce centre de vies, de rires et de joie comporte un antique et majestueux poêle en fonte, et des décors muraux faits de multiples coupes d'anciennes victoires aux tournois de boules et de foot et chargé des espoirs à venir. Surtout, les murs sont décorés de gravures austères de Sanpiero Corsu et de Pascal Paoli, attestant de l'attachement des villageois aux temps forts de l'histoire Corse. L'hospitalité est depuis bien longtemps assurée par l'excellent Toussaint Rossi, lequel fait aussi le partenaire des parties de belotes contrées. Maintenant sa nièce Emmanuelle apporte aujourd'hui, à ce café,  son dynamisme souriant et son sourire enjôleur. A l'occasion de la Saint-Roch et du tournoi de boules, «Vincent Battesti»,  la salle prend des airs de café-concert et cousins, amis et villageois entonnent le répertoire des chants «nustrale», lequel dure parfois **** dans la nuit quand scintille un peu l'Esprit du village. Aux anciennes chansons de nos parents : «la boudeuse» et «Il pescatore dell'onda» s’ajoutent les succès nouveaux comme «Amerindianu» et l'admirable chant du Catalan, Lluis Llach,  «l'Estaca», traduit en langue Corse. Les voix s'accordent et les chœurs vibrent à l'unisson, sur ce répertoire commun qui arrive à élever le sentiment d'unité et à souder les valeurs des êtres.

                                                               *

Le pont de l’embouchure du Liamone,

Sous la fausse apparence d'une large rivière tranquille se perdant dans les sables,
Le «Liamone», prenant sa source sur les montagnes de Letia peut se révéler torrent furieux.
Cependant il se jette mollement dans le grand bleu en s’infiltrant par un mole de sable.
Cet endroit est magique car il mêle, mer et rivière, poissons d'eau douce et de mer,
La plaine alluviale qui l'entoure est large et propice aux cultures,
ce qui est rare dans cette partie de la Corse aux côtes déchiquetés.
Il annonce les vastes plages de Sagone dont la plus belle,
mais non la moins dangereuse fait face à l'hôtel «Santana».
Le nouveau pont du Liamone a des formes de grand oiseau bleu,
Et déploie des deux ailes blanches sur les eaux vertes de la rivière.
Cet endroit peu hospitalier aux nageurs car l’on à pied que peu de temps sur de fins galets tranchants
Il l'est en revanche très agréable aux poissons et aux pêcheurs,
car il mêle les eaux et le plancton
C’est aussi un endroit magique pour celles et ceux qui goûtent par-dessus tout,
La Liberté sans contrainte, le soleil, une vaste étendue de sable et les points de vue,
car plusieurs promontoires ou collines inspirées sont encore coiffées de vestiges de tour,
et le regard porte **** comme pour surveiller et protéger les populations des antiques razzias barbaresques.

Paul Arrighi.

I am scared!
Scared of this world

Robert Godwin Sr
Alyssa Elsman

How many more have to die?
By my kind,
By their kind,
Because they blame some other kind
What ever happened to just being
kind?

Daniel Parmertor, Russell King, Jr., Demetrius Hewlin

Where were you when the World Trade Center went down?
It’s something everyone alive then will always remember
Never Forget! was our brand motto for American Pride

Krystle Marie Campbell, Lü Lingzi, Martin William Richard, Sean A. Collier, Dennis Simmonds

And now, the death of another is so commonplace
That we forget what and where.
It’s no longer personal enough to register where in our lives that it struck us
Only note that another life has been struck down
Add another tally to the equation
And still it does not add up

Trayvon Martin
Tamir Rice
Samuel DuBose
Delrawn Small
Philando Castile
Terence Crutcher
Heather Heyer

We are completely desensitized
And decentralized
We keep ourselves disconnected
(because we just can’t absorb,
Take,
Process it all)
It’s not us
It’s not me
It’s somebody else
Somewhere else.
Until it is
Then we care
How much can we take, before we break

Cynthia Marie Graham Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, Depayne Middleton Doctor, Clementa C. Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons, Sharonda Coleman Singleton, Myra Thompson

The tragedy is the comedy
We laugh so we don’t cry
Sakia Gunn
Richie Phillips
Nireah Johnson, Brandie Coleman
Glenn Kopitske
Scotty Joe Weaver
Jason Gage
Michael Sandy
Sean William Kennedy
Duanna Johnson
Lawrence "Larry" King
Angie Zapata
Lateisha Green
****** August Provost, III
Mark Carson

I can’t say I’ve never thought of committing violence.
Hell, when my ex-wife cheated, it occurred to me
And I can’t say that I have never hit another
I’ve been a kid
My whole life is designed just to grow up
But, I’ve thought of killing myself far more often than the thought to harm anyone else have ever occurred to me
Because my problems are mine;
My fault,
And I am not seeking some scapegoat

Keenya Cook, Jerry Taylor, Million A. Woldemariam, Claudine Parker, Hong Im Ballenge, James Martin, James L. Buchanan, Premkumar Walekar, Sarah Ramos, Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera, Pascal Charlot, Dean Harold Meyers, Kenneth Bridges, Linda Franklin née Moore, Jeffrey Hopper, Conrad Johnson, 1 unnamed victim

I am not going to deny that being a white male hasn’t allowed me to sidestep a whole level of *******
One day, angry white males will be the minority
And we’ll have no one left to blame, but ourselves.
If we don’t **** everyone first
If we don’t **** ourselves first

Michael Arnold, Martin Bodrog, Arthur Daniels, Sylvia Frasier, Kathy Gaarde, John Roger Johnson, Mary Francis Knight, Frank Kohler, Vishnu Pandit, Kenneth Bernard Proctor, Gerald Read, Richard Michael Ridgell

Jonathan Blunk, Alexander J. Boik , Jesse Childress, Gordon Cowden,
Jessica Ghawi, John Larimer, Matt McQuinn, Micayla Medek, Veronica Moser Sullivan, Alex Sullivan, Alexander C. Teves, Rebecca Wingo

The earth has already decided that we are a plague upon it
Maybe climate change is the natural response to the abuse of our gifts

Nancy Lanza, Rachel D'Avino, Dawn Hochsprung, Anne Marie Murphy,
Lauren Rousseau, Mary Sherlach, Victoria Leigh Soto, Charlotte Bacon, Daniel Barden, Olivia Engel, Josephine Gay, Dylan Hockley, Madeleine Hsu, Catherine Hubbard, Chase Kowalski, Jesse Lewis, Ana Márquez Greene, James Mattioli, Grace McDonnell, Emilie Parker, Jack Pinto, Noah Pozner, Caroline Previdi, Jessica Rekos, Avielle Richman, Benjamin Wheeler, Allison Wyatt

What is this world going to teach my son?
That he’s better because of how he looks?
Or what I’ve taught him:
You make yourself better.

Jamie Bishop, Jocelyne Couture Nowak, Kevin Granata, Liviu Librescu,  P
G. V. Loganathan, Ross Alameddine, Brian Bluhm, Ryan Clark, Austin Cloyd, Daniel Perez Cueva, Matthew Gwaltney, Caitlin Hammaren, Jeremy Herbstritt, Rachael Hill, Emily Hilscher, Matthew La Porte, Jarrett Lane, Henry Lee, Partahi Lumbantoruan, Lauren McCain, Daniel O'Neil, Juan Ortiz, Minal Panchal, Erin Peterson, Michael Pohle Jr., Julia Pryde, Mary Karen Read, Reema Samaha, Waleed Shaalan, Leslie Sherman, Maxine Turner, Nicole White

I work as a data analyst
So, I ran the numbers
But, these are more than numbers
These are people: sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, friends, lovers.

Stanley Almodovar III, Amanda Alvear, Oscar A. Aracena Montero, Rodolfo Ayala Ayala, Alejandro Barrios Martinez, Martin Benitez Torres, Antonio D. Brown, Darryl R. Burt II, Jonathan A. Camuy Vega, Angel L. Candelario Padro, Simon A. Carrillo Fernandez, Juan Chevez Martinez, Luis D. Conde, Cory J. Connell, Tevin E. Crosby, Franky J. DeJesus Velazquez, Deonka D. Drayton, Mercedez M. Flores, Juan R. Guerrero, Peter O. Gonzalez Cruz, Paul T. Henry, Frank Hernandez, Miguel A. Honorato, Javier Jorge Reyes, Jason B. Josaphat, Eddie J. Justice, Anthony L. Laureano Disla, Christopher A. Leinonen, Brenda L. Marquez McCool, Jean C. Mendez Perez, Akyra Monet Murray, Kimberly Morris, Jean C. Nives Rodriguez, Luis O. Ocasio Capo, Geraldo A. Ortiz Jimenez, Eric I. Ortiz Rivera, Joel Rayon Paniagua, Enrique L. Rios Jr., Juan P. Rivera Velazquez, Yilmary Rodriguez Solivan, Christopher J. Sanfeliz, Xavier E. Serrano Rosado, Gilberto R. Silva Menendez, Edward Sotomayor Jr., Shane E. Tomlinson, Leroy Valentin Fernandez, Luis S. Vielma, Luis D. Wilson Leon, Jerald A. Wright

I did research to try to find all the victims since I became abruptly aware 16 years ago
There are too many
I could not discover a single database that contained a comprehensive record
No one can keep track of it anymore
I know I’ve missed people
I know there are 1000’s of people now missing people
Even 1 was too much

Hannah Ahlers, Heather Alvarado, Dorene Anderson, Carrie Barnette, Jack Beaton, Steve Berger, Candice Bowers, Denise Salmon Burditus, Sandra Casey, Andrea Castilla, Denise Cohen, Austin Davis, Virginia Day Jr, Christiana Duarte, Stacee Etcheber, Brian Fraser, Keri Galvan,  Dana Gardner, Angela Gomez, Rocio Guillen Rocha, Charleston Hartfield,  Chris Hazencomb, Jennifer Irvine, Nicol Kimura, Jessica Klymchuk, Carly Kreibaum, Rhonda LeRocque, Victor Link, Jordan McIldoon, Kelsey Meadows, Calla Medig, James ‘Sonny’ Melton, Pati Mestas, Austin Meyer, Adrian Murfitt, Rachael Parker, Jennifer Parks, Carrie Parsons, Lisa Patterson,  John Phippen, Melissa Ramirez, Jordyn Rivera, Quinton Robbins, Cameron Robinson, Lisa Romero Muniz, Christopher Roybal, Brett Schwanbeck, Bailey Schweitzer, Laura Shipp, Erick Silva, Susan Smith, Tara Roe Smith, Brennan Stewart, Derrick ‘Bo’ Taylor, Neysa Tonks, Michelle Vo, Kurt Von Tillow, Bill Wolfe Jr.

and NOW I’ve run out of lines and time to read off all 2,977 people who died in 9-11
Isn’t that a tragedy?

turn the lights on
to this body in this night
flushed with anger
and eyes staring
into nonsense like
fog lights brightly blind
into which we dropped
a spirit deep
as into a bottomless well
and it fell into the darkness
yet can't be entirely lost
and stares back
out of the absurdity
the disordered emotions
and disproportionate flesh
around you one cat is awakened and
quietly crying, light on the white tiles
so you stand before your reflection
and trace *******
down the line of your center,
which in your fancy
seems a means of escape
but the inside will
never open up and be seen
or touched and you
can never quite give up

and yes, very much a niche concern, my laptop broke down
   and i'm forced into the box room, albeit not ramped
out with Nabokov's Switzerland lodging:
at a hotel in the Alps catching butterflies and Lolitas -
i've finally matured in my likings -
but let me tell you, it has been painful
adjusting to the upright sitting:
lost the slouch and the quickie
crow-on-a-windowsill with a whiskey
sharpshooter and then a tornado cascade
into the lesser concept of a blank page and that famous
nothing of philosophers... i love the lesser critique
of Heidegger, my grandfather bought me
a 25 volume worths of interest,
and Heidegger stood out foremost,
primarily because of a peculiar surname,
i later learned that he was the German
that would eventually make Wordsworth
pointless in picking up the lyre,
with so many books i had to realise that
i needed a partner akin to walking through
Dante's epic,
              i could have chosen Ovid, but esp.
Horace, but i didn't choose Virgil or Homer,
a blood German peasant... but also
a pheasant, which means auburn peacock...
oh sure, you get familial ties with people
of the world, people who made either their
forenames or surnames akin to the nouns
as familiar as stars chairs and smoked ham rumps...
perfectly akin to everyday familiarity of use...
i wasn't worn in Warsaw or Krakow -
if i were, i probably wouldn't have left the natives,
but living on the outskirts of that great capital
doesn't necessarily impress:
in all honest edict contraction: i feel debased
travelling into London (central), ***** and ******
out my mind...
       i guess this means two more years rereading
Heidegger's being and time
                               after purchasing his ponderings ii - vi
from the years 1931 - 1938;
yes, my family was directly affected by **** Germany,
not in concentration camps, on the frontline,
so why would i be sopping over a **** familiar
in the realm of philosophy?
       a. public intellectuals don't exist in England,
    English doesn't like philosophy,
         proof
                  ?    b. Shakespeare - peer in on shaking
a pear and
                      the dancing of a retired circus bear dancing.
     c. that's Pythagoras, we leave him in the Pascal gambit.
i just think it's a shame that i have this massive
democracy in my room, and i'll end up with something
akin to a Quran -
                              again, why Heidegger?
i don't know, it could have been that Czech Kundera -
     or Kafka, it could have been Seneca,
              but all these writers are city dwellers,
Heidegger was a quasi-villager pseudo-city-dweller,
i find foxes and deer and dead badgers in my little
promenade escapades, also Satanist black masses
with the framework of in excelsior satanis! -
and lightning that strikes but no thunder is heard...
less for the sons of thunder: the 12 hot-air balloons,
it's very much Germanic in Japan with
feng shui or otherwise known in the peninsula as qi
     kee.
                      then there's the **** of the haiku
by the west and me answering: let's make ensō -
smoothed out narratives, ecstatic variation from
     thinking and away from moral decisiveness
in that activity of perpetuated choice-making -
                how clearly thinking extends into narration
rather than the Cartesian
                 precipitation of thought into being -
nope: from thinking into narration
          juiced-up enclosure of "zoological" tightening
with ensō: beefy haikus.
          but what i really find problematic?
the interpretation of Heidegger's concept of dasein
as coupled with ecstasis.... our ex-stasis...
                  with da meaning there
               you can pretend to be "happy" about protests
across the world, and wars and other turbulent
activity...
                   what i am proposing is what Nietzsche
prompted with sum ergo cogito,
         in that the real ecstasis is concerned with being
allocated to a here, and therefore a hesein -
the interpretation posits the ecstasis there
when Heidegger originally posits concern there,
     or as he encodes: "concern"
                       meaning the dittoing puts him in a safety
of the here, it's the ecstasis of not being there,
but here in the present as the ecstasis, and there
     of some abstract venture as being beyond his command
of attributed dynamism of being involved,
for he's not involved. give me an hour and i'll be
in the countryside: we have that weighty countryside mentality,
farmers talking ******* when stacking hay
and laughing with the grammar Nazis when
    people go to the gym but teach their brains
the flab that the brains actually are: primarily spongy fat -
     apart from typos, it's the case
                                           (it is the case that)
   i don't (do not)
                               much concern myself from English
slang of piano (Joanna)
           and the outright **** (Pakistani),
               cos there was no sine                  when people
overacted toward the tan of me swallowing vowels and
replacing them with shortcuts to prop'ah Cockney,
oi oi, ******, bruv! brush up! this bus to school is
mingy with the throng!
                          who ordered the sardines?
        Stendhal is still the love of my life... i can write
enough complexities with Heidegger, but my love
resides with Stendhal... who would have thought
that a film adaptation would make me eager to read the book
(the scarlet & the noir)? Peter Jackson knew, as did J. R. R.
but it comes from the musings,
          once i do the Kantian critique a one over
the missing yawn and what's actually the most underestimated
arithmetics of wording rather than number circus
         or replicas of taxman rubrics:
after enough chemistry, favouring the organic and
later becoming endowed with a palette for Indian cuisine
well: philosophy books are the worded versions
of mathematics in terms of jumping the burning wheels
of 1 + 11 = 12        and          i contemplate
                                            but what's the = and the 12?
it's so ****** open, i could have invited a hundred thieves
to porose a car-boot sale at my house.
but all this, which might seem like self-love,
    it's not about that...the French intellectualise
and have them public because they talk beautifully -
                  the English?
they sing...
                               the Germans are morose and silent...
        the Spanish are simply the onomatopoeias of *******
and the Italians are seen and heard licking their fingers
after enough basil is added to tomatoes...
   i'm still banging on about the apathetic interpretation
of dasein, rather than the ecstatic version popularised
by the scholars...
                                 the version that reads:
if a tree falls in a forest and there's no one to hear it fall,
does it make a sound? that's my interpretation of
dasein / being there / being "there"....
                          a.                          b.
                       concretely            in abstract,
we already know that the abstract of being is nonbeing
or that things are abstracts of nothings with identifiers
of being used, without actually being touched:
i can say that i see a chair without actually having
to sit on it.
                    i was thinking simpler though -
olly murs' heart skips a beat and someone of the major
tracks by one direction...
             when i reference myself to these tracks
i'm being ecstatic, in the dimension of hesein,
                  like da, shortened purposively from the
authentic hier / here in german....
              why am i ecstatic in the here?
   because i don't have to be concerned in the realm of da /
there, where my opinion "might" matter...
                   but really doesn't...
                             which is why i don't understand
this interpretation of dasein meaning ecstasis -
                           or ex status quo....
                                               as already suggested -
our moral obligation toward language is to provoke
a Minotaur to become an architect of our venture in
using language, away from the market place...
into forests, into depths that have no justification
for being imagined, or as such diagnosed as ever being
there and established to planning permission and norms
of established caricatures and cleanly undertaken
shallowing and hollowing out from them being furthered.
i should be sad having trodden such a path
for myself, but i feel a kinship with this German,
come on, what consolidated the Kantian
dichotomy of a priori and a posteriori as in
   or must not philosophy a fortiori poeticize beings?
should not be conversed with from a wholly
anti-intellectual dynamism suggesting a personal
historic aversion of what's otherwise ethnically ******
without suspicion in terms of cultural tact?
again: nothing - which is higher and deeper than nonbeing(s)
(i ensure the ambiguity of the plural, if only
due to the fact that nothing is
    kindred of a definite article - the -
                          and ensures a translation as nonbeing,
while nothing in a quality as in nothingness
            kindred of an indefinite article - a -
         and ensures a translation as nonbeings, the plural,
ambiguity and throng -
   perfect offshoot that's already known as a-
           and -the         with a missing -ism).
yes, language ought to resemble something less
instructional, certainly less capital / monetary,
and more of a preservation of ambiguity and subsequently
myth... or what otherwise concern themselves with
in the hustle and bustle of a public life: integrity,
                                ulterior of the personal sphere of interests:
the person per se;
       and the apéritif (a'per-teeth)?
                 for lack of diacritical insurance, the English
are constantly in need of a tongue-map for waggling it
prop'ah:
                    the Chelsea y'ah
or the Cockney wa'er                - t t t.
                mind you, that's related to the trilling of the R
(originally intended as a trill) and subsequently lost
in the Germanic ethnic cauldron: hark the French and
cipher the English curling the tongue making the R curled
rather than trill - my idiosyncratic fascination aged 8.
  i thought i ought to end this with a thought about
what's a universal maxim in psychiatry
  in England in terms of a standard prognosis:
patient A has lost touch with reality...
      that's the prognosis, the diagnosis: dialectics of Gnostic
teachings? anyway, that's the standard,
that a person has lost touch with reality... what a great swindle!
     y

Tu transmigración será ir de cama en cama,
durmiendo raros sueños parejos al segundo ocaso,
de las fábricas del tiempo verás el eterno paso
y serás como una vana sombra urdida por el karma.

El misterio de la identidad es sostenido
por las divinas piezas que forman la memoria.
el cerebro, único amanuense de la historia
rapsodia el ser que miente lo que has sido.

En el vino que es nepente y en el delirio del mezcal
buscaste el rostro que tenías antes de crearse el mundo,
y aunque la fiera enferma te convoque a lo profundo
no evitarás esa sustancia doble como lago de sal:

La voluntad.  Su potencia sugiere el arte o la copulación
y su tremendo motor vuelca decadencia en apogeo,
no escapan de su orbe las horas diseñadas por Morfeo
y su caravana te escolta de la abulia a la revelación.

Todos los días sos otro. Sin embargo,
hay algo que te pertenece:
la idea de la luna, el amor y la amistad,
la música, los dones y la fantasía.


                                                     ­                a Pascal Quignard

“I want to live for myself.”*
And you guessed it right.
This was me, before I met you.

Always wanting to be busy
To avoid all kinds of thoughts
That could devour me at night
Swallowing every bit of what I deemed right
And not knowing how to keep everything in sight.

I start my day with the usual waking up routine
Eyes opened at 5:15 to take a cold bath
Wanting to wake myself up. Or was I really awake?
For goodness’ sake, I had no idea
What was going on in my head
Keeping myself always on the edge
This was me, before I met you.

“Never will I meet someone
Who won’t get me hurt.”
And on and on and on it goes
With my mind, slowly killing
My deepest sense of who I really am.
What am I to myself
When all I could see
Is not being the person
In the mirror of my soul?

But, on that day,
It was different for me.
You were with an old friend
Reality was bent, for I had the chance
The opportunity of a lifetime
To meet that girl
Who only gave me one word answers
An awkward and shy person
Who happened to be a dancer.
This is the start of a new friendship.

Fast forward to next week
The month of November
So full of surprises
My friend gave me a pass
To a debut and alas, you were there too.
Didn’t have any intentions to pursue
But why was my attention always directed to you?
I attempted to relay my emotion through the phone call of the
Devotion that my old friend had for you, but
Looks like my world developed a deeper sense of purpose.
This was me after meeting you.

Another week has passed and a blockmate wrote me on the guest list.
The night was going well
When suddenly
A person enters the room
The room remained dark, but my world was shone a show of light.
Two stars aligned and in between, was your nose.
I couldn’t believe it. Why was I feeling this way?
At the end of the day, I couldn’t listen to the ways of my
Heart. It’s because you had a heart
For someone else.
But, “the heart has its own reasons that reason cannot understand.”
Why did Blaise Pascal have to word it so beautifully?
And to top it all off, why’d you have to be so beautiful?

I was about to go home alone, when you offered me a ride.
Initially, I waved a goodbye, but you wouldn’t let me slide
This opportunity to get to know you more.
So, you brought me home and before you dropped me off,
With those sleepy eyes accompanied by the soft soothing sound of your voice, you said,
“Good night.”
And in that moment,
I knew I was in love with you.

This is now me and will always be me
Because there is no day in my life now
That I am not changed
And it is only everyday in my world that
My love grows for you.

Like two foci of an elliptical, your eyes entice me cause my cardiac muscles, to palpitate
As I estimate the distance between us
I have arrived at the conclusion that you are sitting approximately 5 feet and 11 inches away from me, 7 and half millimeters closer than yesterday.
As you sit there and I calculate your potential energy.
I find myself wishing I could change Y= mx+b into Y=you next to me, you are my complementary angle.
I long to whisper that newton law was just created for you.
Of course that not true, but logic doesn't matter anymore because my feelings for you are growing exponentially.
Like radiation you penetrate through my skin, you  watched my veins branch like fractals
Like absolute zero, all molecules within me halted in that movement,your centripetal  force sent me spinning when they say opposite attracts each other.
It figures seeing as the probability for you noticing me is exactly 1 in 10,032 but I long to coined my name on a love letter, you are my pascal behind my triangle.

Samesame, ripple, ripple, splash

against
the wall.
Still,

some way of thinking, some
idea
still doesn't like a wall, a

boundary, a barrier, a pallisade of
implausibility
beyond which

we are.
For a while,
what can we do? Live, right?
Live. Live right.
Right.
That idea, samesame, yours or your's
right's right, like

equal's equal

or,
better may be...
beauty is beauty, right, in the eye

of the be
holder, the holding being

holding steady, nuetrial calm

equatorial doldrums

art is bound to save the world,
it is something to do when there is nothing to do.

Angels embodied by men as men might imagine
a message bearer or
a christopher

jar of an ointment. Dr. Ruth's **** for Rubes.

Doktor doktor tell me tales, riddles only magi know

emmett fox--- chong says the audience will luv,
joel s. goldsmith--- the Bible is the truth, en code.
Okeh.

Ever learning
Coming never to the fullness of the godhead ******,

y'know? No lie is any part of truth, but parts of many lies are true.

You see that right, common sensed by the we we agree to be
ad hoc 'n'all.

Vectoring from our being modeled on Vetruvius's
form for man in harmony with

ever lasting things, measurable means transmute  metaphoric gold.
Bestness.
Per fectual in effect, per se, y'know, y'know, magic,

and not knowing any ever things is not samesame as
not knowing now things that are ever things.

Pay attention.
Mean is never meant to be mean like "worthless" or "hateful"
"naughty" is "as nothing", literally, virtually, actually, really.

naughty children made mean, on the bell,

C students can elect a presider over a we, the people, without me in it.
I float in the shallow calculus edge area of a plain
surficial bubble, after the wave
flushes the sand casting

a grain of meaning in a nue light...

Quant, quant, quant
and half a quant

convert that to horsepower or
candle power or

BTUs British Thermal Units.
The empire is not weaker now, the ice is melting,
the crushed polar surface is feeling free
flowing current,
a sixth gyre, as seen from a far.

------- Go, set a watchman-----

Find the old sergeants, where have they all gone?
Gone to seed,
rotted under clods.

Old broken guardians, unwilling to live under the lie of the law.
Opposistion to tyranny is obediance to

the highest reason you answer to.
By any other name, samesame, good has al
ways won. Ought causes naught to flee.
---
Me, flee? NO. I'm the great, great grandson of the
white trash, overseer seen empiratical,
Tonton boyz drum drum drum

Old rastifarianish lookin's guy, old
man, wombless hermit holy
man, set aside for
later

by faith.
Made set aside,
Pre-served in right use of spice and salt and fire and greasy savory
meat smoke,

mouth waterin', finger lickin' good
greasy green goblin guts.

Dandelion soup. The diary entry was,
"We had wild greens for supper." That being,

apparently all a tired, hungry fifteen year old girl considered
recording for the family chronicle of the journey,
Texas to Arizona, 1917,

while staring at more stars than any naked human eye
can see in twenty nineteen,

light is thicker now, around the inner edges of life's bubble
we abide in.

---- what if learning is the work?
Then, now we learn

ever, then we learn yon
yonder we find

godliness as defined by men who found no better word.

are there words better able to
hold being
really?
Acting asif whats were ours

chaching I ching's a thing
AI see
co rect me, in a lefthand way.
Make me right, in an underhanded way.

Listening prayer,
cast all your care, upon...

what if, per se, there
we planned to keep a secret sacred,
set a part,
a
rite a role. play an otherwise magician's apprentice enspeliered

up against the wall.
No light, no flight, no fight.

Birds eat my fruit and shit my seeds,

I am the vine growing up the wall
intentionally espelliered, planted to scale the wall
bhering fruit
full time

Kali fornia ifity

de-if now. Give it y'best ef
fect com
fort ify the lie "why is an unreasonable quest."

Try,

effectual, fervent prayer of a right using man, eh?

Pascal, m'man, layomoneydown!

L’être Méditerranéen et la mer

« Écrit à partir d’un extrait d’une lettre à un ami prenant le bateau à Barcelone pour se rendre à Tanger »

Ce soir ou demain, vous serez sur notre chère «Mare nostrum» dont seuls les Romains arrivèrent à tisser, certes par la violence, l'unité provisoire.
Vous vous promènerez sur le pont en humant l'air marin, mêlé aux senteurs d’embruns salés, de peinture et de goudron et vous vous sentirez «en partance »; délicieuse sensation si rare de l'être libre enfin « désamarré » des vêtures de plomb de ses habitudes et contraintes, l’amoindrissent et le ligotent. Vous êtes enfin partis et pas si pressés que cela d'arriver « à bon port », tant le voyage, lui-même, est attrayant, enchanteur et bariolé de curiosités enfin assouvies. Vous serez alors en mer entre le goût de la méditation à laquelle nous incitent la vaste étendue marine et l'excitation bouillonnante de vos enfants ravis.
Cependant le temps ne sera ni à la nostalgie ni à la tristesse, mais a une forme de communion sans hostie, entre la terre et la mer, entre toutes ces hautes civilisations qui se sont succédées et se sont si souvent inutilement combattues sur ces flots irisés et ces rives empreintes d'une si grande beauté et d'une paix apparente, hélas, tant de fois brisée par la folie des hommes.
C'est alors, peut-être, que tous deux, ressentirez et peut-être voudrez bien transmettre à vos enfants  d'être, avant tout, des Méditerranéens.


En effet, « être méditerranéen», ce n'est pas seulement dû à un coup de dés du hasard, ni au seul hasard relevant de son lieu de naissance. Non; c'est d'abord la participation à un «art de vivre » qui mêle étroitement uni les idéaux Apollinien et Dionysien. C’est aussi une chance donnée d'atteindre ce si subtil équilibre de l'Esprit Humain qui nous a donné : Ulysse, Averroès, Le Maimonide, Cervantès, El Greco, Ibn Khaldoun, Leonardo da Vinci, Dante Alighieri, Pascal Paoli, Antoni Gaudi, Albert Camus, Yacine Kateb et Youssef Chahine.

« Etre Méditerranéen » c’est refuser le malheur des êtres, ce qui provoque et crée  ces actuels «naufragés de la honte», tous les  «attentats nihilistes et meurtriers» aux  prétextes divers qui  se déguisent sous des motifs pseudo ment religieux; ou sont le fruit d'indignes rivalités de puissances,  de la confiscation de cette ressource de l’Humanité, le pétrole. Car cette violence  risque de ruiner nos civilisations millénaires. A l’inverse;  « Etre Méditerranéen» c’est vibrer à ce vaste « chant du Monde», porté par les meilleurs poètes et philosophes, lesquels ont toujours œuvrés pour une humanité et une convivence meilleures, plus riantes, plus soucieuses des êtres et vraiment fraternelles.

Paul Arrighi (Texte écrit, cet été  sur le cargo «Le Girolata» relu et modifié à Toulouse le mardi 19 janvier  2016)

We made out on the beach;
in sand dunes,
not far from
the Mediterranean's reach.

After we lay
looking up
at the moon
and stars,
listening to
the sea's rush
on the sand
and a guitar
and singing
from the camp base party.

Wasn't it Pascal
who said infinite spaces
frightened him?
Miriam said.

Not fear
as we mean fear,
more an awe
at the infinity
of it all;
the stars and such,
I said.

Is kind of awesome;
makes you feel
kind of insignificant
in comparison.

That's what Pascal felt,
I think.

She put her hands
behind her head;
looked around her.

I wonder
if there is
a God?

Wonder is all
we can do;
either we think
He's there
or we don't;
no proof
either way.

She turned
and stared at me;
her hands still
cupping her head.

You won't tell anyone
what we did?
she said.

Of course not,
just us and ours.

She smiled;
unleashed her hands
and put a hand
on my shoulder.

It wasn't planned;
kind of spontaneous.

Yes, like buds
opening in Spring;
like day follows night.

She smiled again.

First time
I’ve had ***
on the sand.

I ran a hand
over her ****,
skimpy shorts,
warmth there.

A sound of music
from base camp
hung in the air.

call it culture... call it: kul-toor... something "cool"...
i've just drank a bottle of wine and
i'm far from... feeling an armchair moment
of enjoying: whatever it is i'm supposed to enjoy...

millenial woes...
        h3h3... the whole list... it's really your standard
packet of pork chops...
i would be much prouder if i were...
adamantly watching an english soap-opera...
at least that sort of "consumering" makes
it to a pub quiz status... the trivia the knowledge:
the machine gun and blank stares:
who's who?

      but i have comes across the concept
of ASMR...
                       insomnia dalmation barking
in swiss...
i was... once upon a time:
  told to listen to some Max Richter...
      i still much prefer christopher young's
hellraiser II: hellbound soundtrack...
i've been buthering that soundtrack for almost
forever... and the "problem of counting sheep":
i imagine myself making a chicken...
into a soup from the torso - intricate bones
of the spines...
   perhaps the wings... then leaving
the ******* for a roullade: or schnitzels...
and the quarters (thighs and legs)... well...
that's just another dinner... probably roasted...

counting sheep: can it be called:
shooting ducks?
              ASMR... cringe videos of whispering...
who pays...
when there's that full package available
with the bulgarian women... the dimmed lights...
once a year... perhaps once every two or three...
but of course... i check on myself daily:
whether all this drinking and all that smoking
is true: that it might lead one to a limb-****
bashing... day in day out like someone checking
their blood sugar or their blood pressure...
i check mine...
                        
        culture: ketchup...
           a clean and easy throne of thrones affair...
the no. 1, 2 and 3... and then a baptism in
the shower...
                most of the time i pretend:
having wiped my ***...
            if "culture" / ketchup is this bad...
the next best thing? ******:
                  becoming a **** flinging monkey!

busy as busy comes...
when was the last time it rained in england?
april was when i witnessed the spike of oddities...
it was sunny: so much so that you could
turn sunlight into a liquid and drink it:
like a schnapps...
     the bewildering concept of the english garden...
when... the garden is rarely used...
to b.b.q. like an australian:
   etc.
                 but the neighbour put up a fence
after 15 years of "politics" and now
i am working on putting apart the old shed
and putting up the new one...
          
ASMR... that kite is flying and i just want
to cut its umbilical chord...
and send a message in a bottle... thrown...
into something as static as a big chemical-puddle...
in a mini "bottle"... the message being written
in braille and itching on nail's head...
like a Gustav Dore etching...

                              something: spectacular...
        this that or the other... something spectacular...
like a phoneline... all calls from india
and from a call-centre...
                     thank god this canvas is "meine sprechen"...
spectacular" unwinding in how pedagogy
is a memory acid... someone comes along:
we, write - alt. "grammar"...
           no need - or need...
                      rules like gravity: never mind!
rules like: how to tie a tie: never mind!
      we make up as we go along...
***** spirit: yo'go!
               astounding my disbelief...
                 such rules when asked:
  could, extend... toward... the schizoid cipher?
        nooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
bad grammar is one thing: speaking in metaphors
and crosswords: only the zodiac could:
with that splinter of ego and a hacking:
of brain as woo woo wood woody chen.

                to have went to school for the sole reason
that: one weren't born in the victorian
era and being a chimney-sweep!
   better have dumbed down and taught
to stack supermarket shelves:
while also being taught that...
   and... wanting to read in your spare time...

to see... a cohort of peacocks strutting like
geeese... tails folded.
                
    for lack of a better choice of words:
hit & miss... hit & run...
             if this was as easy as getting:
what walt whitman got...
             or didn't get...
                   bad grammar is good grammar:
a bit like arithmetic: 3 + 15 = 19!
or... the science of: guess...

                scratch of the head:
perhaps i'm an apostate catholic...
a proselyte veering toward... digging under
judaism is a pitiable reading of the qabbalah...
the good catholic boy'oh with his credo,
his litany of ave marias and unser vater...
     in conversation with hey'zeus: ihre vater...

                  noster pater: pater noster...
                    vester pater: pater vester...

to be so: "shielded"... a belief matching up
to prayer beads...
to actual prayer... and all that... cognitive free-space
to boot!
i'm a bad atheist: at inception...
or is that the "un" conversion?
to gravitate filling nothing with a self,
a mirror and smoking a cigarette infront of it...
it's not enough...
that i do not pray: doesn't excuse the fact
that... i'm squeezed by an octopus in a straitjacket...
to think of god: existent or non-,
            it's hardly concerning myself with:
objective reality objective truth or objective
morality...
               pass as a ghost in this life...
a tomb of body in the waiting: to admire sparrows
is to also pay very little due for
opera... the timing is crucial... or not...

   concern oneself with comparisons...
to truly appreciate a sparrow singing...
is to stand stark naked in a garden...
to truly appreciate an opera...
is to don the tux... and play the vanity game
and the game of voyeurism...
same old same old:
same book: different cover...

                     new atheism: no god...
yes... but still that funnel argument of: no god...
if a funnel is the hearing-aid of Pascal...
i bet it is...
                  bad grammar was one thing...
but the proof of solipsism?
farting in a crowded place...
and being the only person who wouldn't
mind the mild: overstated "nuance"
of exploring perfumes that...
better suit... the decomposition of
strawberries and apples...

cezanne... had he painted still life...
yes... at that moment of "death"...
recycling vector (0, 0, 0) when the fruits
in still life have reached the nadir...
but the form is still intact... etc.

                      to be a catholic or...
but to be an atheist: and have one's prayers
"stolen" and replaced with...
at best: the prefix omni- and a geometry...
to have one's prayers "liberated"
by the thought-glutton of existence or non-,

chowhound: chew-fiend...
best of all... no teeth, not tongue...
no tapeworm of oesophagus inverted:
umbilical chord "gizmo" replica...
no stomach no **** bishop "pomp & circumstance"
and the **** the crown...

so much for praying: praying could be recovered
from...
but to have one's thinking occupied so?
it's beside the psalm of the Pascal wager...
to think:
             ut cogito... the act, itself...
so much for: ego cogito...
                    
                         to think: no therefore...
is... to...             what?               be?
how many times i have found thinking to be
a **** manual... thinking at times frees...
but most of the time: reality-checks...
contrains... and obliterates prospects...
then again: that wouldn't be concise enough
to be given either noun or verb status concerning:
the...                zone rouge...

to think: is and isn't:
     otherwise... a statement... of exasperation...
that has no compensation
in a translation of: thought = being...
i think is hardly a cornerstone...
it's a stone... a stone among rubble...
a good... revisionist: again!
   this... "i" and this "think"...
                      
and overstated fact guarded by:
a pronoun invocation...
          but: to think...    what's that?
to think is... what?
           to conjure up a soul...
and all the hallucinations to boot?
to think is to... what?
in the future: the lost participle of present...
and the past tense being:
nothing more than a mongrel
of journalism... history and... perhaps...
poo'etry?

             no... there's absolute no need to make
of h'americans for their secular shortcomings...
but there's just the Salem...
and those stickers... parental... guidance...
necessary...
                        oath words like: i... **** i swear...
the church the tele-evangelical:
spit *** sooner pit of...
                    if i had my way with
the mid-west... sooner i: deer-hunter...

so much for the catholic boy: prayer, duty...
and so much for the atheisst "i":
who eats all my thought: the θ(ought)
conundrum... perhaps it's a moral question
too... perhaps...

   to think: thought: ought i?
lucky for me...
my body is a shadow and my shadow is thought...
and i forget what's a crowd-pleaser and
what will allow me to sentence to grief: less and less...
and less...
ah! to think: ought i? ergo:
qua: non-qua
                             vel: non-qua: qua...

i waited for rain... i waited for rain...
i finally found joy in rain...
i also found a lisp of scotland...
many a mile before edinburgh was reached...

up and along the swing...
to swing so high... but to also sulk so low...
at least the catholics and those other
pseudo-italians are just: god-****! predictable!
backwards... introspective:
that the orc started to trend on twitter...
where is Mordor? east...
i usually conjure up the russians and
the slavs: well... given that russia is mostly
conjured up into breath by
mongol mongrels - anything of russian
envy east of moscow?

kazakhstan?!

         i'm no freer from "god" as either
atheist or catholic...
sure... i don't have to pay duty for and excuses
mumling credo under my
"knowledge" of soul: the breath...
but something is still eating my thought:
it doesn't exactly care whether it exists
or whether it doesn't...
the best argument i'll have to borrow...

si dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer...
if god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him;
i too wish it would be done: the easiest -
to simply not think of him...

a cul de sac of arguments for my liking:
it's a plughole...
a bathtub full of water...
and the waterline is diminishing...
that will still not make me more
"believable" should i succumb to pray...
the worst aspect of h'america is
not the gluttony...
it's the evengelical zeal... then again:
i'm also wondering how this
is to escape me...
dilute itself into the readily available air...
fizzle out...
like a bottle of caronated water...
left open... till the carbon mingling within
a ******* of oxygen twins...
goes-bye-bye:

  when the first h'americans took to tourism
via pulp fiction: about le bib mac...
and fries served up with a dollop of mayo -
alt. - to home run: score...
zoid ist tod! zoid ist tod!

                 the prayer manual worth of god...
gone... dusted... the moths are settling...
and the spiders too...
              but the thinking loose skin...
"   " and what was missed bound to
a "malapropism" -
             hyper-inflated dyslexia...
       because learning grammar sentences you:
to that ode for the dickensian
chimney-sweeper!
  
                the misnomer... and the malapropism...
a debate: no... it's not a pun...
the peacock is loitering...
bad gwammar doth not:
fizzle out to faze him...
            
                yep... one of those internet ketchup
        moments...
to be "commited": pride and dignity...
performing a karaoke of harakiri...
                high-brow ambitions...
that: pride... and dignity... revenge... say what?!

salt is salty: no... salt is salt...
sugar is sweet: true... because:
you can't exactly....
              sugar is: sweet...
but sugary? unlike salt: there's no salty...
    sugar... sugary...
           salt: salty...
                    sugar is sweet...
but: sweety? an endearment?
sugary: taste the difference?
granuled... powder... syrop prone?
salt is salty: no... salt is salt...
sugar is sugary: no... sugar is sugar...

                                             blah blah...
and thank god no one has the time
and... concern for a capacity of minding...
such details... of obscurity...
better equipped:
a plumber with a blockage of a pipe...
than me... teasing at etymology...

life is: the bore of the precursor of time:
eternal time...
           forever is hardly a wait...
no amount of solipsism could ever solve...
the stage the sycophancy:
i ask: the solipsist and the sycophant
the same question:
what's the answer... when no question
is being aksed?

For Thomas V. Morris and William J. Bennett
In gratitude for a wonderful summer at Notre Dame

O, thou dry Jansenist! A night of fire
Left in your pocket like a shopping list
Sitting quietly in a room, will never burn
To set your sere and withered soul alight

And one might wager that your calculator
In brass, for counting brass, touches not the heart
Which has its reasons which the mind knows too
Pensees which never make a night a day

Forgive thou, then, this *lettre provincial
And count it as a friend’s *memorial

A name so colors one, is anyone satisfied with
a nomenclature such as Myrtle or Prudence or
a name that shouts out a particular feature:
like Hogg, or ****.
Who the hell is as lucky as Rene Descartes
or 'scuse me , my favorite, Blaise
Pascal. Wow. I wanna name me next newborn
Papa, see what becomes
do his pals
make fun.
Or, will he or she
suffer
under letters small
and
significant.