The debate between free will and fate has taken a hard right
turn to neuroscience, Brodmann area 4 the primary motor
cortex of the brain located in the posterior frontal lobe
(the one cut out of the one who once flew over the cuckoo's nest).
This area of the cortex has the pattern of an homunculus!
a little man, a troll, the all-wise, mandragon, the golem of Jewish
      folklore.

This little man has a ***** that, when fully engorged, is
equal in size to his entire body. However, diseases
such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, Huntington's, Lou Gehrig's and
      Creutzfeldt-Jakob
are gunning for him. His basal ganglia are garbled
and he ends up giving poor advice and making bad decisions.
Who can say what happens to his soul or cells or if all will be given
      or well?

I was listening to the famous astronomer on public radio
who expressed the certainty there is no death, your soul
is immortal, it exists outside of time (but not space?). That's because
time exists only in the human mind (as does the universe
including the professional baseball season which is canceled when
      you're dead).
By Spring, my problems will be solved or ignored, either way is
      good.

"Imagine if we taught baseball the way we teach science. Until they
      were twelve children would
read about baseball technique and occasionally hear inspirational
      stories of the great baseball
players. They would answer quizzes about baseball rules. They
      would practice fundamental
baseball skills, throwing the ball to second base twenty times in a
      row. Undergraduates might
be allowed under strict supervision to reproduce historic baseball
      plays. But only in graduate school
would they, at last, actually get to play a game." --Alison Gopnik

Groundhog holds the knowledge of death without dying
for man needs help from every creature born.
Will the holocaust wipe the smile off the face of our romantic comedy
or will laughter outlast the outburst?
About the dark times will there be singing?
Yes, there will be singing and some of the songs will be sidesplitting.

Solving the ****** reveals the city. Nature of kinships and economic
      sustenance,
who loves whom and why, when things happened and how they lost
      and found themselves
in what happened. Because a meter-making argument cannot appear
from nothingness, purposelessness, just cold.
He does not go where he was supposed to go. He is in the desert,
      Sonoran desert, counting cactus buds and ocotillo blooms.
This is the afterlife for which he has always longed.

Imperfect world, purposeless person.
I retired to pursue perfection
learn jazz tunes, woody and herbaceous plants,
read every inch of English literature,

Scientific American and Foreign Affairs,
have an affair with an American.
Oh, and by the way, before you ask, I'm from Mars.
Orbiting your planet, admiring the girls.

Paraphrasing prayers by George Herbert to share
with Jesus believers on talk radio shows
where we try to bring your lives into expressible states
before it’s too late and climate change inundates you.

Reversed thunder, savior-side-piercing spear,
one day you’re feeling fine, the next not.
We’re pretty matter of fact, clear about
the fact of death. Once you’re gone most of us forget

your face and previous accomplishments. The place
you lived is repopulated with the next generation (of aliens)
and that ought to be a comfort, a sort of restful
certainty all is well, nothing special need be done.

Bluebirds are back, crows are mating on the sky
and chasing hawks away from their nests. Juncos
and sparrows glean together. I hear pileated woodpeckers
jackhammering and barred owls hooting soothingly.

Herons smoothing feathers and spearing fish.
Everything is as one would wish.
Numberless are the world's wonders
but none more wonderful than aliens.

Science can't save you, neither can religion,
at least Popper and Niebuhr, philosophers and poets,
are entertainers, which is why actors and athletes
are paid so much. Thanks for the summaries.
I was teaching Shakespeare's 92nd ridiculous sonnet
to my student who lays blacktop in the off season
Shakespeare bellyaching about dying without her love
a feeling foreign to a modern adolescent sensibility
although many teens are pretty far gone searching
for their mothers or fathers in their dazed lovers' eyes.
Which is why we call it "the wound that never heals."
Or the lesion that's always lengthening. And bleeding.

Muslim fundamentalists and their Christian counterparts
are a mystery to me. Pews and prayer rugs, the airless
indoor environment of religious worship, reading
scriptures, hypnotized by hymns and fainting from staring
at candles through stained glass windows, almost certain
the preacher is faking his certainty about the afterlife.
It's not my problem. A more immediate concern:
receding gums and tooth extractions, swollen joints,
poor lubrication and circulation, wave after wave
of viral infection, the occasional antibiotic-resistant
bacterial attack, usually urinary, and who knows
what internal organs are dividing and conquering
without mercy or cease, i.e. the wound that never heals.

It is wise not to overvalue your continued existence,
good not to be innumerate, unable to compare
a mere 80 years with say 6.0 x 109 or all of time
(to date) times the multiverse. Conversely,
it is interesting all of space and most of history is contained
in your mind (realizing of course it's just a map
of the cosmos not the cosmos itself, or is it?). I'm
unable to wrestle free, tongue in that cavity
and locked in my memories, so separate and disparate
from the biomass in the crosswalks, even my spouse.
Alone, so alone, even your doctor can only devote
limited thought to your situational mortality through
the redress of poetry - also a wound that never heals.

Snow for eternity, that's what this February's been.
All to the good, for someone it's the final February
so enjoy it to the extent you can. By that I mean joy.
Joy at birth. Joy at death. All joy. All times. Anyway,
that was Shakespeare's message: even tragedies are comedies.
May, a Buddhist, chants each morning.
Her husband, Marc, who's Jewish, plays league tennis.
Their son, Aaron, will soon make Eagle scout.
How does that relate to your wound that never heals?
Luck runs out. For D.H. Lawrence in New Mexico
or Ulysses S. Grant in Ohio or Yasujiro Ozu in
Tokyo or Satyajit Ray in Bombay or Rabindranath
Tagore in Bangalore or at the Battle of the Atlantic in the Azores.

The night is a poultice, winter or summer solstice.
My anonymity will not affect the anomie ghettoside
seeing for myself how season by season
vacations and accomplishments accumulate, late in life
and early on, sunrise over mountains or moonrise over Bronx.
Masturbator, prisoner of war. Hospice of the Holy Roman Empire.
Numerous blue notes: the 3 flat, 7 flat, 5 flat,
the 6 flat and the 2 flat too. I don't get
what Wallace Stevens means by imagination.
When groundhog shows up as a totem, there is opportunity
to explore the mystery of death without dying.
This then is the purpose of purposelessness (and of eating less)!
Now what about that wound that never heals.

The Skeptical Observer column in Scientific American
was somewhat alarming when he accepted a paranormal
explanation for how his wife's grandfather's inoperable
transistor radio played music from its hiding spot
in his sock drawer on, and only on, their wedding day.
Now I'll have to believe my father (or mother!) is watching me
perform private ****** acts with (or without) partners
or that they could even know my thoughts. Or aliens
are attending our committee meetings and making
perfectly reasonable decisions given the available information
and the world is rotating just fine without humans.
These possibilities - angels, ghosts, aliens - are better
than holocaust and genocide. In this way,
and only in this way, does doom become endurable.
The wound that never heals in the end is all you'll feel.

As air and leaf litter are substrate for the bird.
And what makes a human. Separation from the substrate.
Believing the substrate and the subject are separately defined.

Whatever gives the poem form - three lines - is the substrate.
Things will be said. The signer and the seer must supply the words
Which are the substrate of the mind. A beautiful week ahead.

No hundred year storms, normal summer warming.
Your bones are white as lightning and strong as sticks and stones.
At Pat's 80th b'day party most of us are old and jolly.

250,000 port-o-potties. There's a way to wash one out
And a way not to. Arctic ice melt. Slushies. One can count
Past one or nine by inserting zero to keep the rows.

Implied is an order beyond the small order we impose.
Goes to greatness human and divine. The two white wines
Death brings to the garden are the love between good friends -

Abstract. Suppose there is no afterlife, to understand the end
Imagine the beginning - no brain, no mind, no name, no I. Zero
Had already been inflated and the rose was in the garden.

What do you think
of the man peeing, the ever-******* mouse?
Finding meaning in killing
and cleaning house.

Sal quit school,
your lover stops writing.
Eternity's waiting,
a lazy-eyed tiger.

Or everything's cool
even the fighting.
The weather is perfect
for swimming or dying.

Physical dizziness,
mental uneasiness.
Isn't exercise
the best blood pressure medicine?

Universally sad
about my mortality
but also glad
to be leaving the party.

The noise was incessant,
success inconsistent.
The demands of my neighbors,
employers, persistent.

Belonging is longing
for complete solitude.
Seas, odysseys
the loneliness of being spouse.

Rain of April, rain of August
writing of it dry as dust.
What's my reason, rhyme?
Pass the time, pass the season.

If you're alone as you get, why are you crying?
Hold steady until a tsunami.
Then swim if you can. Don't gulp.
Hit in the head by speeding debris. Couldn't be helped.

I'm thinking about rhyme and meter
but also my kidneys and my liver.

The nation-state and the failed state
and whether killers should be executed

or forgiven. Meditate on this: Thy
will be done. Do what has to be done

don't ask why. Clean the dishes and the house.
Will I be left to my own resources

or will all be given? Nevermind
what you can't imagine. Living's

life's priority. Friends are merely friendly,
they're in the majority. Loneliness

is the default position. Rain happens.
We supply the reasons.

How do people process their lives without art?
By caring not.

Ignore
yr autobiography.

In olden days, if you couldn't stand to ***
the family buried you under the pecan tree.

Appointment to have ***** removed by robot-assisted surgeon.
Air-conditioned, no mosquitoes in the OR. When you arrive
You'll remove all your clothes. Naked before the ladies, nurses
Who have seen it all before. Mainly remember you're not unique.
Think about the government while they're mixing up the medicine.
There's always governance even if there's little or no government.
Back to counting backwards. Inside out, if I die, will I know it?

At 70, Jack's running the gauntlet with some skill!
Benny Golson wonders aloud what might have been
Had Clifford Brown not been killed in that auto accident.
Jack's girlfriend once said he was the reincarnation of Clifford
But he doesn't believe in ghosts, karma or an afterlife.
Benny's old girlfriend Betty inspired the tune Along Came Betty
And that's the most afterlife Benny or Betty's gonna get.

The Trojan bench being not as deep as the Greek
Once Sarpedon and Hector go down even the lucky shot
To Achilles' feet is not enough to save the town.
Aeneas is no match for wily Odysseus
Although unbeknownst to all he has the last laugh when Rome
Conquers Athens, the Myrmidons, what's left of Ilion
And the whole known world from India to Britain.

It's not bad to acknowledge death's primacy
Although after a while you stop remembering
To fear. That's when everything becomes clear
Purpose v. purposelessness matters less,
Anomie v. rule of law, that's a preference
Love v. loneliness, worth about 25 cents
Or a million bucks in the light of the holocaust.

Nothing but light, love and the majesty of death in the room.
Machines stand ready like marines, their beauty is in the motion
That overcomes inertia. The food supply is deeply compromised
So eat whatever you want. Mourning the dead is part of the business
Of healing and staying alive. When you get to the afterlife, walk with
      eyes open,
Ocotillo and cactus may be in flower. The robot does the work,
      imposes
Its own small order, like a ******* a bicycle with disorder in her hair.