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Connor Jul 2016
And it's difficult to remember something as the very name of Eisenhower
Or flowerbaskets
And tired movies made of silicone and
Aftersex
Or sixteen candles echoing out of an imaginary suite with cigarettes at every table
And green lawns
Barbershop conversation
The reflection of the sun in special trees
Or my best friend Jesus Christ
Or the smell of the theater that one day with the cynics who just got back from a tennis match and barbwire still laced delicately around their thoughts and
Nihilism
And automotives
And priestess Jane or Henry's gloomy doppelganger who reads alternative magazines and loves the aesthetics behind broken glass
And fine tuned musical instruments

It's difficult to remember
Lonesome Fridays smoking on a park bench trying to finish the puzzle
Or synagogues you've never been in
Or insurance
Or newspaper articles detailing the misadventures of Mr. City
(Of course of course! Take your shoes off at the door and make yourself at home)
We're tossing all our sewage into the ocean
that's far from clean as it
LOOKS anymore these days
That's anything
And everything except for the glowing mountains seen faded and wintry behind Apartments and the
"Glorious Mexican House of Spices"
Never been in there either

It's difficult to remember
Times of Mr Twin Sister
Or Joan Jett in the hallway
In a highschool who's psychology classrooms have become a time capsule in the ground/
Or the gentle skinny ******
Wearing Broadway makeup and
Kafka tattooed on his shoulder
I like his hat
He looks at me suspiciously
Or the guy who is yelling his order at the counter when it's quiet here anyways
Or the mariner who has a hobby of the saxophone
Or 1970s *******
Or the sheepskin bikeseat fad that's yet to come but I'm predicting it now!
Or two dollars and twentyseven cents at the beginning of Allen Ginsberg's America
"I've given you all and now I'm nothing"

It's difficult to remember
The Oriental
Sacramento flies
Midnight Moon
Quarter to four
"The Immortalization Commission"
Remodelled hotels downtown
Where mandalas on the floor became a
Tiger lily luminous
And the kimono is yesterday's painting/
Dearest Darling
When I was feeling down!
A staircase in reverse (??)
The sound a kiss makes
It's difficult to remember
Colleen's earrings
Or Washington State
Or air conditioners in Bali
The Indian ocean's daybreak hymn
To Seminyak
Or whatever happened to Steve from the Airplane out of Taiwan
On 3 days awake
Hello Kitty nursing stations
****** (Kubrick's version)
Cardboard taking up half my bedroom
It's difficult to remember until I jot it down and then its a sudden forever
Sunshine Superman in a cafe spontaneous
drawings with someone I just met who has some ******* attitude/
Who hops fences and has feral ideas
People! En Masse! Te Amo!
You're all in wolven liberty
And vague postulators
And holy prostitutes for the dollar
Sad eyed intellectuals
With undergarments made of breakfast cereal/
Seaferry poetry is different from
Trestle in August poetry
Or henna handshakes
Or the Napoleonic era
Sweet Cherry Pie
The tulip's tongue
Garabajal
Cloudy first day of July
Was hotter yesterday
But not too hot

It's difficult to remember
Antiquity
The pale horse Studebaker outside the clinic
With a glossy red trim and **** I wish that was my ride
Andy Warhol's exploding plastic inevitable
Nearsightedness
Angels and their ability to shower with a a snap of their fingers
Distant harp music
Better him than me
Bananas almost ripe
Green aquatic
Reclusive junkies
Palomo's appliances
Questions for the next time
How much I like what you like and how I like that you like what I like
Ahh that's not my bus
I'm trying to get to the city!
That one quote Socrates is known for about knowing nothing as true wisdom
Supermarkets being built on top of liquor stores burned down a while back
Monopolies
Tragedies
"No Love Lost"
THE HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL
Your guess is as good as mine
Never tried to eat Asian food in Asia
It was all pasta and good cider that tasted like pineapple
Rain hitting the window and I'm
Drowsy again
God Save The Trees!
Curly hair looks good on boys
Torn up blinds
Queer as a three dollar bill
If Bill costs 3 dollars I'm sure he's caught something better safe than sorry
Sage advice
I'm the very model of a modern major general
Golden yen and international currency
Incense in the bedroom and how good it smells
There's my bus! Applying for a better job than the one I got now
But that's how it always is right?
Chasing satisfaction
1007 apt
Porch ornaments
Unique names
Unique style le style
The extra charge on foreign ATMs
Cordoroy polo shirts
Flooding in New York!
When someone's face screams *******
"Slippery when wet"
Dine N Dash
Grass gone yellow
Confidence in dyed hair and capes as long as wedding gowns
But less expensive
Doors that always seem to be locked and I'm wondering 20 year later what's behind them?
Albino animals
White thoughts as clouds or
Abstractions
Weathers nicer in Florida but who cares
Festivities this early in the day
Automatopeia
Do sad orphanages still exist?
Just like the movies
Midnight in mirrors
That sick puppet at the shoe shop used
To know how to really hammer it down
And now he's weak and forgotten
Never heard the words of a true prophet only Oceania
Or the private temple near Apollo Bay
Like Japanese gardens behind that gate
Will I ever see it
Make a proud example outta ya misbehavior
Form without function
Exhausted spiritualism
*** Kettle Black
negative photographs of dark rooms
And there's laughing coming from SOMEWHERE
Essays on kleptomania
Had a bad dream I became a cliche
Surrounded by other freaks and there was a lovely ***** I fell in love with her
We married in Oregon by the sea her name was rosy
***** rosy
Check your mailbox for nails
And what you don't wanna hear/
If you were a vegetable you'd be organic!
Empire
Satirical bubble gum
Satori
Linda Lovelace and her special party trick
That's someone's fantasy
Diamond in the rough
Mister guy with two black eyes frequents the adult playhouse
Hes fully stocked on fishnet leggings
He's too proud to put them on himself but
Has nobody else around
Boo hoo
Swigs back the whiskey and trips down the stairs getting a third black eye in the process
Marion came by with her dog the other day
Wanted her box of clothes back but he loved to sniff them to remember her
But she wouldn't have it

"Honey I'm going to call the police!"

"Ah they don't give a **** they have bigger things to worry about"

"Yeah you got that right shrimp **** enjoy my unwashed *******"

And she never came back again
He started losing the vertebrae in his spine 1 by 1 and you know where this is going
I won't say he was a poor man because he had it all coming to him the *******
But he coulda had a better start if you ask me.

It's difficult to remember
And even more difficult to forget
After the fact

Seagull opera
Giganticism
Portrait of the artist as a young man
Losing one's pencil when the best idea of your life drops down from heaven and into your sorry head
Signs graffitied to have funnier meanings
Cruelty
Impassive
The Loyal Lioness
And Bangladesh has too many kitchens
And not enough dishes
When I was young I used to say Island as "is-land"  
Which is true it is land
But the Europeans probably stole it from somebody else anyways/
I left my future behind
And objects in the mirror are closer than they appear
Im no illusionist
I'm terrified of the cracken
Father feels the same way about
Hotels
Why bother/
This has been going on and on for a while are you tired yet
Is your patience being tested
Mine isn't because this wasn't an all-at-once kind of rambling
It's extremely important to laugh at least
Once a day
Otherwise you'll find yourself a politician
In no time at all
Rockefeller
(         ) Quaint home to die in
I think
Trains create great music
Float on
Sink into yourself
Roses in a crooked alley
That's people
Busy busy busy busy
Let's describe a situationist
I'm not a fan of bright colors on clothes
Your best shade is blue
Bricklayers transcription of Don Quixote to a skyscraper
Rocket thyme
& Garden
Erratic children's
Insomnia
The doorbell repeatedly
Vancouver riots/ I saw that live on the news!
Pictionary with the surrealists
N Dada TV set MC Escher
Antenna
You're in the Twilight Zone now
Dear Ramona
I'm trying to make it up to you
With a brightness only seen when you're ready to see it so please for the love of God don't blame me when it's not appearing
The tapestry hidden
Keep your blankets clean
And avoid hospitals unless you're fine with fishbowls & the halogen
The water gestapo
Storage lockers full of unacted plays and
Antique microwaves
Emitting the nostalgia of the cold war era
And what a waste of time that was /
Walter Wanderleys presence in Autumn universities
The opening of Vivre sa Vie
Salvador Dali's pluvial taxi
Lightbulb epiphanies
Aquariums and their protestors
Zebras in the shade
Two wrongs dont make a right
Elizabethan theater
Saloon shootouts in a fever dream
I lost and bled out all over the rustic wooden floor
A maiden reached out for me and El Paso did play I woke up and pretended nothing happened/
Funerals for bad People who did bad things
My first memory of a cat beneath the mattress
Hello Dolly!
Auditory learning
Psychotherapy
Lillian the landlady lost her ladle and labeled little Lyle as a lair
The Black panther movement
Reading symposium some years ago and
Making note that Phaedo was still my favorite dialogue/
Zen Buddhism
Xoxo xoxo
The day Gypsies were replaced with
Surface ****** appetite
And not the real thing
Newspaper clippings
Hypnotism when all other options are out
Mystical visions of sidewalks
And the love of your life stepping through a door you've never seen
Maybe Yes No I Don't Know
Creature comforts
Che Guevara's problem is that his beard made him too easy to recognize
(Also that little hat!)
Chinese cough medicine didn't work
For long I still wheeze sometimes
Domestic violence thru the wall
Ceiling fan probably doesn't even work!
Dimpled laughter
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
In skytrains to Commercial
Bermuda in her mind
And courtesy in her voice
I'm no Arthur Rimbaud
But you already knew that
Alcazar of Seville
Filling up the shipbottle
Here's your paradise
Now relinquish it as it is
False!
Hare Krishna
Nowhere Fast
El Diablo and the
Portofino loaf left rotting on the countertop
Latin children speak of the sacred viper
You'll hear of it after this but we'll never see what the ******* meant
Heads alternating round the social current
Of my lively city
There's a dog soaking up the rain
And songs are made in honor of
Recent catastrophes
Trials are dealt
Cards cast to the gutter
New York quiets down for the news of another war
You scratch my back I'll scratch yours
Skeleton key
Ballad of the last wailing zoo
THE ATRIUM
Complexity in simplicity
That's how Brainard got me!
Elderly overcoats
Hiding purest LSD
Is a fan of Hawaiian T shirts
And a communist
What if I was a Freemason
Or owned a tanning salon
Faint crimson
What did Marv look like again?
"You're surrounded by people who love you"
Coffee when one needs it
GOODBYE BLUE MONDAY
Tattoos on the wandering man
Oriental chimes and the people who own them
Bus stop regulars
Vines overtaking power lines
The hypnogogic state
Strawberry light softening
The mind
Sister Ray LOUDLY PROCLAIMING
doitdoitdoitdoit
Passing the graffiti n Pluto neon
Halal wide awake another Saturday
Where's the Karaoke
Flashing by here
Those who find comfort in a bridal scavenger hunt
Or expensive beer
And here comes the hooded clown
Clamoring about his favorite
Loudspeaker
Telling me my time is soon and the noise
Drowns out the drowsy bliss
After hour spirits the perfect time for
Writing and trying to read distant Chinese
Indecision on the tip of the tongue
"NOW WHO IS THAT KNOCKING
ON THE CHAMBER DOOR?
COULD IT BE THE POLICE?"

I'm completely off the topic
And into Apartment lobby photosets
Low battery phone calls
Confessions
Nauseated reverb
Trying to see the attachment people got with bingo halls
And moving companies
Ah no luck again
Eve is at it with her showtunes
Halfway methodology
Triage
Paisley headbands left
Distraught on the quivering
Heater
Dwindling sunsets
We're truly disciples of the moon spirit which grants us more energy
(This is according to a drunk I met one night)
Or ***** old men
When the horizon is engulfed with
A winking cinder
Suitcase at the door
Last time
First time
Magician never reveals his fetishes
(They all have to do with bags under your eyes)
Employment office dramas of my friend the one who blinded a social worker
And the one who blamed Islam
And the one whos philosophy entirely consisted of Spooky Action at a
                                            DISTANCE
Parisian riots
Queer youth
Didn't make the team! Jester
'cross the hall who's beard suggests
Ishmeal n car battery n expired vegetables n rain which crosses the line n
***** cranberry n
Poorly fitted suits n
Harsh pigment n incense shops n
Bocca     secret towns
With churches more beautiful than any you'd find in your own city
n the cultural market
Xylophone ear to ear
Soul cleansing starting at only
$89 (with a 6 month guarantee)
Sophie's birthday and her picnic at Victory Park
The nearby bums trying to sell tea mugs and
Loose wires beside gated convenience stores
I'm an Island away attempting a poem
And never bought a scratch n win
Or heard the same song more than seven times in a row or been in a column
Or escaped the washhouse
Invested in a birdcage for next year
Been to a palm reading
Visited Oasis
Smoked salmon
Told anyone else about Montana
Screamed the things I'd like to scream
** Word of the day
Or kissed a lunatic or swallowed the corpse of yesterday
I keep her on my neck until
I'm too anxious to let go
Counting streetlights
Jeans worn in and faded to be sent off to
A lonely caffeine addict
Christmas Eve I'll be reading a postcard from San Francisco
Asking the same questions
My imagination is made of a different material than last week
Now it's the same color as your hair
HEY that's a good pickup line to use in the heart of the Canadian Embassy
Drinking discarded music resembling a sweater you may have said YES to if it wasn't so unsure of itself
And now Mr. Acker Bilk ascends thru the window of an August home
Like a lazy hornet
I'm still lost without identification
Or a nice belt
As happens when one uses a quality item too casually
How did uphill suddenly seem so downhill?
I'll claim a waterfall
For SALE that inevitable Indonesia
Greyhound O another greyhound O another greyhound
I'm fretting too much about not enough
Delayed the Airport and the yellow question

????

II

What if I knew how to read the curb?
Or translate drunken droll
What if I was never tired again and could
REALLY do anything I set my mind to?
What if I was the first cigarette that cured cancer instead of caused it?
What if I could end superstition
And walk underneath any ladder I wanted?
What if I could make it with a young Audrey Hepburn!?
What if I stopped pretending to be a microphone and got on with "it"
What if the grocery store closed later
And I opened earlier?
What if parking lots werent so sad
All the time?
What if gravity simply had enough of exotic birds and specifics?
What if we stopped trying to recreate what is truly lost?
What if foreign children embraced
Wasting time instead of
Midnight starry bicycles
And the antics of a monk
Disguised as a romantic?

There are those that worship God
And those who worship the Sun
And those who worship nothing at all
But I suppose on the last bus
We're all the same exhausted
Voice who can't wait for next pay day
What is an empty bank?
Or authenticity
What is there to prove anymore?
I hope I don't die tonight and regret
Being impulsive for once
You're a smart shadow
And a dull character
Pushing the last of the daisies
Get the lamp to turn on again
Give the pavement something to look forward to with your walk
Be consistent in being inconsistent
If there's a word there's a ***** and a poem for it!
We all oughta worship
Nothing at all except
Clarity
Compassion with ones neighbor who either forgot the pay the electricity bill or couldn't afford to
We're a swimmin
Written between late June to July 13th.
Corpus Mortalis in the Greek, Hellenic, and Egyptian pantheons, in the vaults they were filled with marble by all the gangs that tried to find them, because it would soon be the longest night in the Aegean world, where it was propitious to indicate places where to spend the night because the Corpus mingled with the Souls of Trouvere in the Apennines, Ghosts of Shiraz from Jaffa, Almas Christi from Leros with the Gerakis, and finally the souls of the Necropolis of Helenikká to support all believing proselytes of the Hexagonal Birthright. They were attracted to the theorization of fragmented intelligence in every being that fears their own, without the opinion of those who leave them alone and hostages in their isolation, and of a corpus characterized by persuasion in the first objects of twilight, which only left distinguish the moons of the nails and not that of the firmament, the intelligence became lethargic and closed itself in its own object of ideology, of the individual and of the gods who administered everything without a Corpus Mortalis, rather they challenged three-quarters of the day, and three-quarters of their spiritual acuity, to resist the siege of space that disrupts the pause in the hour that excludes all gadgets, to counteract the detonated and not rescued exception of the challenge. The voices of the Moiras were tuned in with Circe, under Zefian's ordering principle, who was already delivering the ergonomic ****** of the fourth arrow, to leave it in the carelessness of Vernarth and Saint John already revived, encompassing and assuming three-quarters of the day they glossed to attract them the threshold that behaved in immovable demiurgic, where men stopped being men with intelligence, rather they dialogued about initiations of the cosmos, but without human centrism that acquires it for a dialogue of Timaeus, wherever they may be. the non-existent things, where he splatters her with nuances of science would bring serious stenches of his erudition. The saga was made of the Ekev of causality that explores from an understood cause already issued, but of the Samaritan philanthropist who shone more at this time, than anyone who closes his eyes so as not to open it after the eternal Aegean night. The philanthropic sense was sensitized with reason in the hands of Zefian, after delivering the Saetas knowing that his personality trilled from the Timaeus, not to disagree with it from a human conscience, but from bilocation of the Beit Hamikdash, attributing his conception with low resources of whoever restrains him by rationalizing, but is under the clinical resource of the one who is recovered from his stuttering and dyslalia.

The Argive constructor Tecton already came with his builders, while the Corpus Mortalis hit who or who would hammer from the plexus, or who or what would be the first network of his linear for the Vóreios de Zefian, adjusting to the beginning of a Corpus Mortalis when it began the constructive principle of the Argivo tecton. The arches were deconfigured in irrational measures, which with their sixth sense they could foresee from the trace of the Platonic Philebus, as he nodded with a refined tiresome bustle, but he appropriated it in presupposition, going to settle where everyone goes together to pick the berries of the field frank, next to the Mataki who was already putting an end and closing the Phaedo that was encircling, with the feverish organization of the trembling desire of the philosophical den, not determining to die like Corpus Mortalis in the breviaries of the ellipsis, where everything remains in nothingness or in the outcast of the one who treasures it with more contingents of memory, and of the same one who is reborn from the slags, having had an insight that remains empty in the cliffs, under the figure of a marked man who revives in the lightning bolts that enabled royal wisdom, while his Corpus Mortalis was leaving with his soul that was embracing vast fields of his thesis. Where what he removes when he pulses from the heart, he adds what the dying person adds, although it is not known where he is going, it will summarize his ontology more than a prison inhabitant who poses free on his profane neighbor from the rhetoric that manifests position in his trajectory who will remember him and will not locate him in the next scene of the challenge of a new life. The Phaedo is on the ex-Voto of him with two institutionalized powers, he will have to know who will dare to cure him of his sieges and his demons that resurrect him but not make him his captive. The spell already inaugurated that knowing or deciding in the nomenclatures of a Platonic Demiurge, who from all past life made it ulterior, but not processed from the Seventh Heaven, between both coincidences from an astral magistracy that will take him through the lawsuit of self-exorcism, wild for the greatest mountains that protect him when he wants to warn, that beyond them he will come umpteenth more monumental than themselves, but with his, Phaedo contained in his soul written and rewritten by him and by his Corpus Mortalis.
Corpus Mortalis
Lauren Tyler Jun 2012
Plato, Socrates, Aristotle.
Forms, idealism, transcendence.
I don't know what to make of it.
I just keep getting lost in my mind,
thinking of other things,
ignoring Anaxagoras.

Fellow students search for insight,
attempting to find inner depths,
pretending to be profound.

I wander out of my head-maze momentarily,
long enough to write a few things down,
a couple scribbles in my notebook,
until my brain draws me back in,
and I'm ignoring Anaximander.

Thinking of anything but Plato's Phaedo
while miming rapture, staring blankly
into the depths of the instructor's ginger beard,
ignoring the words that come out of his mouth.
Ignoring Anaximenes.
My best thoughts arrive when
I wait for my towels to be cleaned.

Leaning over the sturdy white machine,
contemplating life's intricacies
and delving into quixotic thoughts only suitable
for my delicates in their spin cycle,
that's when it happens.

Suddenly, as the bumps and whirrs of a laundry room
fill my headspace, I am
Socrates, I am Plato,
one finger heaven-oriented as my clothes spin,
spin, spin.

I can only imagine if Phaedo was
conceived in the throes of laundering.
As slaving women with their washboards
worked tirelessly on his thinking linens,
that's when Plato must have done his
best philosophizing,
when Napoleon felt his tallest.
My best thoughts arrive when
I wait for my towels to be cleaned.

Leaning over the sturdy white machine,
contemplating life's intricacies
and delving into quixotic thoughts only suitable
for my delicates in their spin cycle,
that's when it happens.

Suddenly, as the bumps and whirrs of a laundry room
fill my headspace, I am
Socrates, I am Plato,
one finger heaven-oriented as my clothes spin,
spin, spin.

I can only imagine that Phaedo was
conceived in the throes of ancient laundering.

As slaving women with their washboards
worked tirelessly on his thinking linens,
that's when Plato must have done his
best philosophizing,
when Napoleon felt his tallest.
Qualyxian Quest Feb 2019
Tonight I take the Downbound Train
Plato’s Phaedo as it rains
Is my Quixotic Quest in vain?
Is it I, or has my country gone insane?
Regardless I relentlessly remain ...
Qualyxian Quest May 2019
last night the gentle rain
reading Markson on the train
Plato’s Phaedo once again
Is my Quixotic quest in vain?
But yes relentless I still remain...
Qualyxian Quest Apr 2021
Tonight i take the train
Plato's Phaedo as it rains
Man of La Mancha, Spain
Is my Quixotic Quest in vain?
Regardless I remain ...
Qualyxian Quest Sep 2020
Immortality is not likely
But still I do love Plato

Dialogue with the other
Dialogue in the Phaedo

Shakespeare lives forever
I met him once in Staunton

He went by Rene Thornton
I'd like to let my aunt in

              literature!
Qualyxian Quest Dec 2018
Tonight I take the twilight train
Plato’s Phaedo as it rains
Is my Quixotic quest in vain?
Regardless I relentless remain ...
Qualyxian Quest Sep 2019
last night the midnight rain
D.C. metro train
Plato's Phaedo on the plane
Is my Quixotic Quest in vain?
Regardless I remain...
Qualyxian Quest Jul 2021
Tonight I take the downbound train
Plato's Phaedo as it rain
La Florida, La Mancha, Spain
Is my Quixotic Quest in vain?
Regardless I indeed remain ...
Qualyxian Quest Apr 2021
Tonight I take the Taipei train
Book of Kells burns in my brain
Plato's Phaedo as it rains
Quixotic Quest, Southern Spain
Is my search va! Vegas vain?
Regardless I indeed remain ...
Unamuno wrings his hands, frets over
the Tragic Sense of Life in which we
all die inevitably, inexorably, unwillingly.
And death is simply non-being to him,
and non-being looks a lot like pure
nothingness, which means we can't
even think "non-being" or "death"
when we're dead. It's all one, big,
fat zero. Add it to or subtract it from
itself, and it's still nada, the sum
of all fears. O the woe of being human.

I read him as a teenager in love with
philosophy, and thought him the most
profound thinker Europe had conjured up
in the 20th century. Continental philosophy
was the only philosophy for me, heavily
Germanic. Even Sartre was a closet
Heideggerian, teething on Sein und Zeit.
But Unamuno leapt over the Teutonic depths,
plunged into Dante's circle of death, scratched
out a mirror image of the human face. I took
it and ran, Kierkegaard stuffed in my back pocket.

Philosophy is eros is love is an incomplete connection.
Reality rises like a daffodil in the green grass
of spring. Wordsworth pens an ode; the rest of us
stare and blindly think we know what we see. But
the eye doesn't conceive, it doesn't relieve anything
save a surface tension. The eye can't speak, can't say
that the daffodil is real. Nobody sees reality in the
flesh. Nothing meshes with sensation but sensation.
That's the Latin way, the Mediterranean way, says
Jose Ortega y Gasset, another Spanish wizard of
wisdom, wishing for intellectual love, dancing at Delphi.

Philosophia. You can't see it, you can say it, but it's
all yearning, no release, no peace until the mind
settles on the bottom of the stream, feeds on
jetsam, maybe flotsam, then thinks "Being" and
gushes *******. This is Plato's territory, a long way
from Spain. But there's geometry in the bullring. There's
life and death and nada and sol y sombra in the stands.
Ideas don quixotic cloaks. Cervantes turns them into
literature, the Ur-story of Spain and its millions of minions.
The common man squirms for comedy. Tragic senses
squire hard work, and if life is so short, why not eat, dream

and be merry? Unamuno deserves his fate. Thinking
about death still adds up to nothing. Thought dies, too;
it's not accustomed to rue the end of infinity. It has no
affinity with hard limits. It rises, stays aloof, looks down
on the world, which has only one side visible, and pronounces
it good for nothing. But can't the thinker take a joke?
Incompletion competes with vast yearning like the tortoise
with the hare. No one gains on the other: Zeno's Paradox.
We might still ride Mediterranean Vespas, but the Greeks
kick-started this thing into motion. There's no reason

without Socrates, and he pronounced death a no-fear zone.
Unamuno forgot his Crito, Phaedo and Apology. Irony adds
up to something, not nothing. There's no surface irony here,
folks. This is Mycenean, not Mediterranean, Athenian not
Salamancian. Spain thinks it thinks new thoughts, taking
the bull by the ****** ear that's left behind the horn. No mas.
Only philosophy thinks itself, eternally. It never dies, man, even
if the cosmos explodes to a pinhead, then vanishes like
a magic trick. What's tragic about necessity, certainty? They
rave on in that dark night of the soul. Nada means nada,
but "means" isn't nada. It's todo on the human topos.

So climb it like a mountain in Dante's Purgatorio. Fret
no more, amigo
. You are on the top of the world; it's a tricky
move to the summit. Ascend on the wings of meaning,
then see what you think, not think what you see. That's something.
And Socrates proclaimed it enough. Hey, Plato made him say so.
Qualyxian Quest Jul 2019
the body ending, like Wendy did
the soul to be reborn

the Tibetan Book of the Dead, he said
not paranoid, not forlorn

Christ, I hope it's true
ordinary people outlast the storm

Plato's Phaedo philosophy
Phillip finding form
Qualyxian Quest Jun 2020
Tonight I take the twilight train
Plato's Phaedo as it rains
Stephen King in misty Maine
Is my Quixotic quest in vain?
Regardless I indeed remain...
Qualyxian Quest May 2020
I know they think I'm mad
My letters show my folly

But I'm not insane
I'm more like Salvador Dali

No, I cannot paint
I'm a poet like his friend Lorca

I resist the American fascists
I'm for albino whales and orcas

Spain is a mystical land
With my main man from ol' La Mancha

He dreams Impossible dreams
For women who do not yet want ya

A love that's distant, pure, and chaste
Spiritual like Plato

Just might live forever
As with his divine Phaedo

I too have these feelings
For two women not my wives

I sent them intimate poems
Does love like these survive?

                      From 1985?
Qualyxian Quest Jul 2020
Tonight I take the downbound train
Plato's Phaedo as it rains
Stephen King in misty Maine
Broken marriage, father pain
Lots of love, La Mancha, Spain
Is my Quixotic Quest in vain?
Regardless I indeed remain ....
Qualyxian Quest May 2020
Tonight I take the twilight train
Plato's Phaedo as it rains
Stephen King in misty Maine
Is my Quixotic quest in vain?
Regardless I indeed remain...
Qualyxian Quest Aug 2020
Tonight I take the midnight train
Plato's Phaedo as it rains
Stephen King in snowy Maine
Seattle full of misty rain
I quest, I quest La Mancha, Spain
Is my Quixotic Quest in vain?
Regardless I indeed remain ...

— The End —