i really don't know how this is a connected,
but somehow it is,
you drink a few ms. ambers and
your mind just turns into an armchair,
you can unwind,
send the serpent of a tongue
into the garden and watch the show...

the original thought begins with an old
pet peeve...
   the argument...
   what was it?
  ah!
          why so much evil in the world,
and so little if any divine intervention...
can you imagine the sort of
hellish world that would be,
this, zoo?
                     why i believe in free will?
well... i don't believe in
divine intervention...
   however horrid, divine intervention
is "missing", i guess,
simply because we're supposed to
live out all our potential...
however that might be...
             the heavenly has to dance
with the macabre,
   the man with the woman,
      
an atypical argument by the sophists...
why doesn't god intervene
when bad things happen to good people?
do you want to look at
the zenith of being given freedom
to do either evil, or good...
and not be judged in the act of doing
so? you don't want this freedom,
because some magical entity doesn't
intervene?
   then you'd have a case for the non-existence
of free will...

****... did i really elevate myself
to such theological claims? guess so...
catholic education,
   i wasn't going to completely free from
the religious debate...
but that's beside the point...

the first Bukowski book i read,
i bought in Glasgow on one my psychotic
outings...
what matters most is how well
you walk through the fire...
i bought it because of but one poem...
it begins
   sometimes there's a crazy one in the street.
he lifts his feet carefully as he walks.
he ponder the mystery
of his own ****.
- and ends with
when you see a crazy one walking
in the street
honor him but
leave him alone.
    there's no luck like that luck
nothing so perfect in the world
let him walk untouched
remember that Christ was also insane..
while in between?
the line...
  the sane are too numerous...

but this ties in to another poem
(that one was called insanity)...
i sometimes think:
and my, my my,
what a fine way to exfoliate
the emphasis of punctuation,
but breaking lines so much...
point being, there's an upper tier
of punctuation,
primarily associated with the philosophy
genre...
and no... don't even try to read
philosophy book like you might
read a piece of journalism
from a newspaper...
  3 years to complete Kant's
critique of pure reason...
believe me, you can have your fictive
novel breezing through moment
when Kant writes out
  a schematic for transcendental
methodology... that bit is easy...
but you can't exactly read Kant
in 3 weeks, and subsequently spew
the content, or rather, plagiarize
it, hiding behind schematics,
and the obvious a priori / a posteriori
categorizations...
well... unless you're a college
philosophy professor,
and much akin to a news anchor ditto-head...
then yeah... plagiarism is the way
to go...

you know what elevated punctuation
looks like?
   you read a snippet of a philosophy
book, you'd be lucky to read a chapter
in a day...
   thinking... thinking is the over-arching
punctuation from your casual punctuation
already imbedded in the script...
thinking does the punctuation
when reading this genre of books...

but it dawned on me...
aphorism XXXII, pondering(s) VIII...
just one sentence...
  (i favor Heidegger?
because he favored poets)...
             poetißing and thinking enter
into an essentially transformed,
incalculable relation.
     when & how both become manifest
as da-sein with self-altering beings,
without publicly existing and "operating".

this immediately brought be back
to a Bukowski poem,
    the last poetry reading...
****... that's not it...
it's not even captain goodwine...
whatever the poem is...
it reads something akin to:

   you're an entertainer now...

that's what i steer away from,
  indicating that these words require
a stage presence,
an oratory valor...
   a performance,
     no public performance,
no freedom of speech *******...
    no speaker's corner manifesto...

            i already signed up to the ontological
motto of...
   cogitans qua esse per se...
thinking as being, being in itself...
the fact that i might leave my mind
and instead morph it into a waggling
tongue on a stage...
the fact that these words could
make public office,
and even be deemed as, "operational"...
not so much petrifies me...
but...
               disgruntles me...
   disincentivizes me...

  after all... i've noticed this...
once you start performing?
your repertoire suffers...
                   like all artists...
the moment you become confident with
your poetry via its public
reception,
   your creativity, your virility,
your fertility succumbing to new ideas,
drastically diminishes,
i've watch countless poetry
performers...
"poets"...
     with a repertoire of... 10 poems?
maybe even less...
   they start performing,
they stop exploring...
   when poetry is bound to the high
court of silence,
yet becomes visible phonetic encoding,
like... like I.T.,
signs, symbols emerge,
but there is no sound to be heard...
when no one is being entertained,
it expands...
        come to think of it...
Heidegger is quiet right...
     poetry has more to do with
philosophy than it has to do with
rhetoric, oration, sophistry,
   or Sophocles... to specify...
            poetry is about "speaking"
the truth...
   but who the hell, in public...
will speak themselves,
  speak the truth?
              let us leave that to the actors...
who... imagine themselves speaking
a truth, but certainly, not their truth,
the truth...

i want to be as close
to cogitans qua, esse as much as possible:
or rather...
cogitans qua loquitur,
   ergo loquitur qua cogitans,
qua, esse, qua est omni illud;
   (thinking as being talking,
therefore talking as being thinking,
as being, being, as being all that is).

p.s. well, yeah,
poet-thinker or poet-entertainer...
i don't need a freedom
to speak, i need a free to think,
and when i equate
thinking as speaking,
but i write,
rather than speak...
      see the comments sections
for more details...
if you "think" that this is
"talking".

I try to open my mouth,
letters bouncing around my tongue and teeth so they can form the perfect words.
I try to save my perfect words
for perfect moments
and perfect people,
but when my perfect time comes,
the universe is quick to remind me
that I am most certainly not perfect.
You see, I try to make myself believe that I can form a hurricane from my mouth,
that I can stand and stomp
and force waves to crash along the shore so you can hear the ocean...
As if I could be as intense as a hurricane
or as precious as a seashell that you hold against your ear.
I try to make myself believe that I could be the covers that keep you warm at night,
the blanket you hold tight against your skin
when ice is forming at your window
and the heater isn't on again because the bill is so **** high.
I try to make myself believe that I could be a photograph you keep in a shoe box,
the kind of photo you've hidden from the world,
not because it's bad,
but because it's this beautiful secret
and you want to keep it all to yourself.
It's always there to look at on dark nights,
this picture of a girl you used to know.
This picture is all you have left of her.
A photo that makes you so happy you cry,
but then you realize they are not just tears of joy,
because although it is too hard to admit sometimes,
you miss your past
you miss how everything was supposed to work out
and how you used to be king of the playground
but now you are just king of a one-bedroom apartment with a toilet that doesn't always flush.
I try to make myself believe that I could be hope.
I could be what makes you say,
"Hey,
this really isn't so bad."
...These words that I spit onto the floor will stick to your shoes when you get up to walk away,
and maybe they will stay there.
You will walk with them all across town-
step on gas pedals, stomp on ants.
I can believe my words belong on shoes,
side notes
blueprints
in unimportant categorizations that your mind will cast off as history and erase in your sleep.
I can believe that my words are like the paper airplanes I strung to my ceiling-  
Most of the time I don't even remember they exist...
but every once in a while,

I look up.

You know who you are.
The ones I loved
The ones I trust
The ones in whom I found safety, solace, retreat, non-judgment
The ones that were not the One but inspired something of the what-could-be

Or perhaps better to describe it as that magnetic compulsion of wanting to feel the strength of everything I adore in you surrounding me
Is it wrong to have felt this around many?

Perhaps simply the inevitable result of depth seeking and open hearted ;mess and vulnerability and empathy
And all that is so messy and beautiful
Of what human nature is
&can; be

I'm here
You're there
And somewhere
We will still meet

Perhaps soul sparks are as meaningful as soul mates
And categorizations are
Merely a device
Designed for the faint hearted.

(Obviously not about you--- you're in a category of your own)

It would be easier to not have an identity because then you are not subjected to be judged or labelled by flawed categorizations of society.