Life can be painless
Provided there is sufficient
Peacefulness

For a dozen or so rituals
To be repeated simply
Endlessly

Your genius does not fail you
It allows you to understand the
Truth of the situation;
Which makes you--at times--
more tragic than ever

And your genius,
like all geniuses
Suffers periodic fits
of monumental
naïveté
Hi-**

Listen:
Where is Grace
When milk and blood
Are about to be added
To the composition of the
Stinking ping-pong
***** being manufactured
In Grand Rapids?

Schizophrenia
The sound and appearance
Of the word fascinates

It sounds and looks to me
Like a human being
Sneezing in a blizzard of
Soapflakes

This much we know:
You made yourself hideously
Uncomfortable by not narrowing
Your attention to details
Of life that were immediately
Important

And by refusing to believe what
Your neighbors believed
Hi-**

Let your imagination continue
To be the flywheel on the
Ramshackle machinery of the truth.

But not the ‘awful’ truth

The ‘beauty’ in truth

Because we are a part
Of a system that is very
Restless,
With people tearing around
All the time

Every so often,
somebody stops to put up
A monument

Ours is a country where
Everybody is expected to
Pay his own bills for
Everything,
And one of the most
Expensive things a person
Can do is get sick

Grace:
Because if we stay here
We’ll do one of two things
(or both!)

Build a Commune

Or do like Collin Heise did:
Make the main thing that we
do be this:
Move seventy-eight
Thousand pounds of olives
To Tulsa, Oklahoma

Even if we can’t
Improve the quality of our surroundings
We’ll do our best to make our
Insides beautiful instead

Piebald Roadtrip-writing, baby
Hi-**

You are the turtle
able to live anywhere
even under water for short periods

With your home on your back

A particular comfort in
Realizing that it so often feels
There is no order in the
World around us

That we must adapt ourselves to
The requirements of
Chaos instead

Remember:
We are healthy
Only to the extent that
Our ideas are
Humane

To you
To me
To ourselves
To We