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Nat Lipstadt Jun 2013
Conditionality (All love is conditional)

All love is conditional.
Even unconditional, a state in and of itself, is conditional.

So many love in silence, or unrequited,
or fear expressing the finest emotion, less rejected,
And precurse it by commencing with,
If.
And that is the worst condition of all.

When she whispers I love you,
And I ask each time, Why,
She answers me the same,
Just because....

And as I ponder that, I realize,
That is the only answer in the universe of words
that is without even a hint of jasmine, of cinnamon,
or  conditionality.

Happily, I have proven myself wrong, yet once more...

8:48am
June 2
Nat Lipstadt Jan 2014
My Curator

I can't remember,
what I can't remember

new items arrive daily.
name of the restaurant,
where I ate dinner
last night

the name of the movie show
I saw last week,
the last place my glasses
went looking for me,
lucky me, only one key,
hanging around my neck,
easy peasy,
just trying to find which apartment
it's for

I can't remember,
what I can't remember

the first poem ever wrote,
the first poem ever loved,
written conceived while I ever wept,
cause
found some old ones and thought
hey, that kid is pretty good

I can't remember,
what I can't remember
when and how I knew,
what now you know
as well

what matters this, little

quote the kids,
last week is well,
so last week
or even better,
whatever...

yesterday, last week, last year
have all merged,
old men drivers, riding in the slow lane,
where the speed limit signs are reminders
go faster, keep up

the memory surplus, surfeit,
now purged, forfeit,
fear of droning,
my inspirations
grown decrepit,
forces desperate,
less than adequate creativity,  
trying to pour poems Beaujolais,
before they can age,
decant, evaporate,
poisoned by oxygenation
sour turning, stupid smiling,
cause I know you from someplace,
are you a clear and present danger?

I remember plenty
of glimpses and snatchery.,
but the incoming data flow
has strained my 50's circuitry.
these memories, onboarded
now a single product
of a mass hatchery,
all eggs are indistinguishable,
therefore they exist,
therefore I was once

electronic calendar
keeps my schedule,
thus my native personality
type A,
kept in line,
the pills work,
from time to time

so I am
where I was supposed to be,
a necessary
but insufficient conditionality,
pour justifier mon existence

the mission critical stuff,
the weave, the sensibility,
the collections of sensations
of another's hand
on my back as I write,
declining, felt their dying,
having arrived at the
skinny part of the tail
of the normal curve
of natural ability

alas,  alack,
too many poems dying stillborn

I have newly employed
a curator

sadly he (she?) will not
cure me,
nor save my soul,
tho he wears
a collar of white
around his neck,
and a stethoscope
over one wing,
a recorder on the other

his wage dear,
sold him my best jewels

Paying costly
for my Ponzi scheme
of reusing
words previously employed,
deeded ownership of the accidental newbies,
the old ones in the sewing box,
both now his property,
but at least, saved.

I cannot write
the name of what stands between  
you and I,
tween tip of tongue
and visions of past,
but future visions, pace taken,
they will survive
should they arrive again

you reader, you are
a familiar face

are you not my
savior,

My Curator?

10:45 AM
Sept. 3rd, 2012
Labor  Day
Noemi Amorphous Nov 2020
A borrowed history
A second-hand life
A true heritage denied.

This stranger sapling grafted to your family tree.
And the story told, to them and me;
" You were chosen, you are special, we were lucky..."

So you won.
Here's your prize;
A commodity baby, a charity child
Love conditionality and gratitude implied.
Woken from connection and amniotic peace
To a secret story of threefold grief.
I was taken from my First Mother when I was 10 days old by closed adoption. This was common in the UK until the early 1970s, a process whereby the baby was given to the adoptive family and the original birth records sealeduntil the child was 18.  This poem is about the strangeness of being a strangling, and in no way negates the love of my adoptive parents.  I am now, finally,  glad I am alive and able to share this part of my story, dedicated to all my parents, and all those who have shared this experience
Onoma Sep 2015
Having gone unnamed...
there's a type of intimacy that's
unbearable...what the heart meant
to say, overcome with saying.
In a peopled world of degreed
dearness...meaning is many.
That look, that gesture, that touch,
that word...all full, all empty.
The rawness of conditionality
scared to death of change, which
is death itself.
All feeling is painfully aware of the
inability to take hold...
the outline of the
heart is: I can't let go...the heart
of the heart: I let go.
Homunculus May 2015
“The Only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of
despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present
themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but
that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere
technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the
world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted
as it will appear one day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives
without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with objects – this
alone is the task of thought. It is the simplest of all things, because the
situation calls imperatively for such knowledge, indeed because
consummate negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror-image
of its opposite. But it is also the utterly impossible thing, because it
presupposes a standpoint removed, even though by a hair’s breadth, from
the scope of existence, whereas we well know that any possible knowledge
must not only be first wrested from what is, if it shall hold good, but is also
marked, for this very reason, by the same distortion and indigence which it
seeks to escape. The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for
the sake of the unconditional, the more unconsciously, and so
calamitously, it is delivered up to the world. Even its own impossibility it
must at last comprehend for the sake of the possible. But beside the
demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of
redemption itself hardly matters.”
~Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia
martin challis Jan 2015
When I am crippled by the fear
Of what others may think of me

The kind teacher speaks these words:

Your power lies within you.
Life endowed you eons ago.

Your work today is to know this deeply.

Your power does not lie in the minds of others - you do not need their approval for what you already posses.

As you practice today keep your attention on giving, on being generous without the conditionality of it being reciprocated.

In this moment now and in this breath you are free.


MChallis @ 2015
martin challis Oct 2014
Your power lies within you. Life endowed you eons ago.
Your work today begins with knowing this deeply.
Your power does not lie in the minds of others,
you do not need their approval for what you already posses.
As you practice today keep your attention on giving,
on being generous without the conditionality of it being reciprocated.
In this moment now and in this breath you are free.

MChallis © 2014
Justin S Wampler Nov 2021
Constantly accommodating conditionality
has steadily become entirely intolerable,
thus this premonition of exquisite repose
grants my psyche an opportunity to rejoice.

— The End —