"tergiversation" poems
"Future"
The word alone is dangerous
So full of blown-out-candles,
Long-drowned purse-change,
And hundreds of thousands of shooting stars gone still.
I have so many hopes pricking into my skin
that I start to think I'm stitched of impossibilities
As if my soul was drenched in daydreams.
I laugh at the paradox that is "Future":
Today is yesterday's tomorrow,
And this poem, the past.
Every time you ask me who I want to be
In ten-times-three-six-five I sink
Deeper in my body
My skin tinged blue
Dye creeping from my chest to my toes
Dye for blood, blue for heartbeats.
Pardon me, Future? Who am I?
No answer.
Sorry, this poem is too
DIFFICULT
too STRENUOUS
to think about right now.
I know what's next: tergiversation.
Ask me who I was before
My poetry will be a compendium of a girl
I never knew.
Apr 25, 2017
Apr 25, 2017 at 11:21 PM UTC
A call to action is not action
Other things that are not action include:
Expostulation rhetoric poetry
Fulmination logic contumely
Proposition dialectic philosophy
Tergiversation polemic and ideology
Actual action, he expostulated, is behavior -
Behavior that acts, he fulminated,
Actually impels or constrains the acts
Of other behavers
This is only done, he propounded,
By applying pressure to weak points
In these others’ safety or security
But acts of violence, he tergiversated,
Only spread or institutionalize violence.
Apart from physical violence, he droned on,
All people have two things they can use
To act with –
Time, and Money.
What you can do with time is specific
To your skills and situation
But what you can do with money
Has exactly two categories:
You can give it,
Or you can withhold it.
You may think withholding is automatic,
And it is, it is; but you are not the one doing it,
It is being withheld from you, in every pay period.
By far your largest charitable contribution
Is to institutionalized violence.
To attempt to withhold your money from these withholdings
Would be enormously risky, painful and destabilizing
In ways that calls to action and other forms of talk never are.
But for one body to impart momentum to another body,
It has to transfer energy, i.e. there must be a cost.
* * * * * * *
On the other hand:
It is currently fashionable to say
That we are not the same person over time
Everything is replaced every few years, personality is a myth
And according to the most advanced thinking
Consciousness is an accident that affects nothing.
In the real world, of course,
I’m the same person I was at age seven
When I first thought of myself as a person;
This knowledge is immediate and irrefutable.
We aren’t the sum total of replaceable parts,
And consciousness for most people is a long-lived thing
Not the space between tick-tocks of a metronome.
This conscious thing concerns itself almost entirely
With exteriors, which are almost the only thing to
Latch onto. But the ultimate ho-hum of the exteriors
Compared to the permanent (mortal) consciousness,
Which has no good bad up down or plus-minus incentives
Gets so obvious as to become ridiculous. This is Anti-Action.
Other terms include depression, cynicism, selfishness,
Detachment, solipsism, reality.
But you must care about the others,
Or you are contemptible. Even the Buddha
Said this…right? (It was a long time ago
And there may have been many edits.)
The real and only basis for action is Love,
That is to say you must care about the exteriors
Which is to say the undeniable mechanics of the world
And what happens to those who are acted upon. You Must.
Is this knowledge immediate and irrefutable?
Apr 2, 2020
Apr 2, 2020 at 3:58 PM UTC