If you don’t like my peaches
Don’t shake my tree

How is it that the British Isles
Are all covered in grass
They were forest for the longest time
Guess that’s what 3000 years of sheep will do

Here in Georgia we have the worst soil
Sun-baked clay when the trees came down
Suburbanites and golf courses spend a million bucks
To raise chickweed dandelions and wild strawberries

At least you can eat the dandies and the strawbs
But that’s hardly worth poisoning the river
All because English lords had rolled-flat lawns
Tennis croquet and the manor house unobscured

The bible says all flesh is as grass
Or so to say it passes
But in Britain the grass never goes away
From the canal bank or the amphitheatre

In Georgia the grass never gets started
Except as exploitation of desire
I hope everybody thinks I’m rich
I wouldn’t want to be the oddball of the subdivision

Re porbla apernd do mot mrud
Poset curpos wo nir lek lud
Mantifacal sylcomflec dur
Seremant e obvientur
Obveis celemant parnmasa
Facal calur mintes dasa
Apogavata derdeling
Upergibtos nede feling
Manapislagan quazephant
Dap ding fars da nir ni befant
Lek nui privetset des effrent
Pardalikos langleng ident
Cers apygrav cert autrephors
Pugel syngeal deutramenors
Crumvent jambent rihm aldenend }
Skirly tuscata fordevend                    }
Ak rhitam olzo cle dassend               }
Plaiceto ob sotay dupli
Sylflec damur dilek duci
Insuf en sturum gallefre
Couvar phlegis ferm legalay
Portemanti cent chapotould
Prehand avas podiacold
Im dempst jo posit frie curpos
Ak mrudifa selbstend vervos
Fectoverv mana xerox
Spontunus eek rara klenex
Hardanor montera dissec
Retinor descus profisec
Pravit celcret mars odevand
Anlindic lengtops mrudiband
Nunculpos ver nuncompisant
Nunmentas verbon dompicant
Nui selbstich aldeësem                                }
Dobbi etsi publosedem                                }
Aldest ot’ curt verev du reslumbor adem }

Who has no regrets has no conscience
Said my father
Do something even if it’s wrong
Said my mother

A skin-encapsulated ego

Hail Dejection fair seed-time of the soul
Whence I reap in the time of exaltation
Hail the time of crushing burden
And I beneath the weight
Of a hundred thousand school buses
Stacked to the stratosphere
All dressed in yellow
Their little stop-signs extended
And though I’m flattened on the pavement
Like a squirrel recently electrocuted
Fallen into the midst of passing traffic
I see them all above me
From the outside like a saint in ecstasy
I see the dry-rotted tires
The seats with their tubular steel rims
The tiny fans above the drivers’ seats
The old-fashioned cranks for swinging the doors

I hear the sound of my own croaking laryngitis
Like a blown speaker in the back seat
Of an old clunker I can’t afford to replace
And I know that every word
Means that when and if my voice returns
It will return with ever less force
And I know that the corruption in my throat
Originated in my own impulsive disregard
For consequences
And yet I was driven to imitate
The pure voice of the child in the sky
Quixotic attempt
The upshot of which is decay and fall

Who has no regrets has no conscience
Said my father just before he died
And if his death was a peaceful one
As so it appeared to be
Then the physical pains overmastered
The regretful pangs
And death gave the blessèd release
That everybody hopes for

O Goddess who bows men low
Riddling singer who stultifies reason
Dejection sweet whose dwelling is dusk-time and rainy November
Who steals all salt leaving only the sour and the bitter
Dominatrix who gives man the aspect of the vine
When the harvest is done and the grape is crushed
And the blood of the grape is put away in darkness
Until such time as drinking it
Man is filled with divine madness and raves
And embers wink and grow cold

Hard by the highway a lone gas station stands
Out of business for many years
With signs that still display the prices
When gas was cheap and travel easy
Some of the plants growing in the pavement’s cracks
Change color with the change of seasons
Behind a jetty some miles away
A youth with a broken-off antenna
Draws naked pictures in the sand
Mood swings are a matter for endocrinology
Soon enough one tires of questioning
What force drives the particle
What force though dormant still drives

I’m as high as a kite
As a rocket driven heavenward
On the fuel of cliche
I’m as large as Godzilla
With the wisdom and kindness to turn my rage
Away from Tokyo
And toward the inconceivable ocean
That is my birthplace

I have at my fingertips
More power more energy
Than all the steam turbines
And nuclear reactors
Ever constructed
My sexuality extends to the edges of the galaxy
I possess the beneficent force
To abolish all boundaries

I exercise the vast discernment
To acknowledge my less-than-omnipotence
I am overwhelmingly but not absolutely
Powerful
In my footprints
The crushed stems of plants
Grow verdant and flower
My strength is matched only by my equanimity

I embody all configurations of the sublime
The mountaintops
The storms at sea
The inexpressible erotic ecstasies
The inexhaustible Faustian play of knowledge and skill
I know even that there are worlds beyond my own
And I know that soon enough I will plunge
And sing as I descend into the hell of dejection

How dare you say that some thing is boring
When it is you who are bored to tears

To delight in contrary motion
Joining the bitter and the sour

Too much attention is paid to the genitals
Understandably really
Since the exploding galaxy of the cerebral cortex
Remains out of sight
And people love visual stimulation
We say I see when we mean I know
But at some point seeing gives way to touching
And we say touched when we mean emotionally aroused

Emotionally but not necessarily sexually
And that which is touching is extra-sexual tenderness
Metaphors of course for cortical functions
But functionality cannot account
Neuroscience cannot account
For states that must be accounted for
Philosophically and poetically if at all
Though science has grown close to explaining sexual difference
And no doubt desire is a function
Of molecular biophysics
No doubt caring pleasure fear wrath and aching desire
Each represents an evolutionary adaptation
Fight flight pursuit and copulation
But how to account for the ache of the ache
How account for the fire the ice the rushing wind
How do our molecules differ really
From the myth of homicidal Ishtar
Or blind gropings in the forests of repression

Here’s a test case for you
Ennui
How does pissed-off boredom give advantage
How does this modern affective invention
Conduce to survival and reproduction
Sex is great for relieving sexual tension
Sex is really great for sharing tenderness
But sex is a lousy response to ennui
It fails in its aim frustrates and produces deeper ennui

Too much attention is paid to the body
The mind-body duality has done much mischief
What problem does this analytical division aim to solve
Analytical division of continuum is the problem
Division of the mind into faculties
Division of the body into the internal and the external
And thence into systems organs appendages joints digits
And yes genitals
And the equally mischievous treatment of the body
As coterminous with the ego
And the ego as coterminous with the person
And the subsequent analytical division of one person from another
When one really wants nothing more
Than to join with the beloved

If only your new mower could both bag and mulch
Then the female vocalist with the single sleeve
And her dance ensemble identically dressed
Could fulfill their promise

Of intelligent kitchen deluxe
Responsive to the device implanted in the skulls
Of citizens of the Republic
Of infinite choice within specified parameters

Most have the blue device
The blue device is trending hard
But early adopters are going black
And singing the praises of Device for Men

Most of the women were already edgy and blue
And wow black came on just in time
Just in time for Saturday night
The weekend is a good time hey to die

But you already knew that
Getting there is half the fun
Hip and young and free and multitasking
And leave the driving to us

Sometimes grouchy old men tell the truth
Sometimes even hypocrites tell the truth

Truth is all that which is
And poetry is whatever the hell you want it to be
But the written poem must be comprehensible
And all we know of truth is what we know
Which isn’t much
And I don’t want knowledge anyway
I want truth

Knowledge is seeing
And writing is technology
The disparity of hands and eyes
Frustrates
In the fatal or frustratingly near-fatal
Failure of hand-eye coordination
Knowledge frustrates not because we don’t know all
But because we know next to nothing
And precisely not nothing at all
And writing frustrates not because we can’t tell the truth
But because we must tell it slant
So since I can’t write perpendicularly
I want poetry

Wouldn’t it be great if it were easy
But there’s no obvious conduit
Between the poetic and the true
And so the task is one of seeking and not of finding
The improvised communion
Of two partial less-than-objects
And thus the poem as fragmentary
Incomplete defeated if you must
But just as total truth is boastful bluff
So too the finished poem
Is never more than first attempt
And since the writer never knows
What the reader does not know
The must in must be comprehensible
The ideal wild compulsion
Like the Great White Way
Or the Bridge of Sighs
The path of broken hearts
Hearts already filled to the brim
And even above the brim
And hands that reach and eyes that seek

There is no literal substrate
No truth-telling prior to figuration
I say I comprehend something
And I employ perforce the manual metaphor of grasping
Or more crudely a leg under me to stand on
Hominid tool use and the upright posture
And the mad cosmos of the neocortex
The new bark on the brain’s old tree
All of which allow the language-ape to see more deeply
And more colorfully than the quadrupeds
And confabulate about what’s out there
Kudus and sacred springs and moon-seas
Lutes and windows and burning lovers
Who can’t be satisfied

It doesn’t help to fabulate the clash
Of an army called mind
Against another called body
Wishful thought congealed into doctrine
Manichean utopia
Better a peaceable modesty before the truth
Here is a hand with which I grasp
That which I see before me
Here are lips tongue a larynx lungs
With which I fracture breath into articulate speech
And sad and lustful song

The claim is perfectly comprehensible that
I see and sing
For seeing is knowing and singing is speaking
Albeit here in that technological simulacrum writing
But then the poem goes on
By my own eyes inspired
Not what I see but that I see
Inspires me
And metaphor goes all the way to myth
For of course only a god or goddess
Could breathe into me
The light of truth or the life of light
Wherein I awaken
And open my eyes
But in this decadent age myth is falsehood
And the only permissible seeing
Is that of concrete objects
Potentially exploitable for profit
And thus for the materialists sleep is death
And the phantasmagoria of dreams nullity

The truth is that everybody dreams
And I can’t say within earshot a blue horse
Without your envisioning that imaginary thing
How crass therefore to synonymize unreality and insignificance
Or imagination and untruth

To seeing and speaking we must add breathing
And though speaking involves breathing
The breath seems to come from without
The invisible work of a goddess or god
Here there is no light
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Wherein the poet constructs an artificial darkness
The better to perceive the light
That moves upon the air
Of imaginative inspiration
Technique manipulates language
Working with the cortical hand
To transmute breath into speech
And speech into song

But an age that insists on the objective
Lionizes uninspired technique so that
True wit is nature to advantage drest
What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed
As if the second instance of the thought
Were the same as the first
And Mr Pope in his Essay lays down the law
As to what might qualify as good expression
In the objective age
Certainly felicity of expression charms
And poetry falls flat without the charm of style
But the truth of nature or the thought thereof
Is but a small portion of the whole truth
And truly the career of atoms
And indeed the whole sweeping vista of phenomena
Provide little sustenance
For a being driven and torn by passion
And a better disposition for the passions
Hurtful though they are
Must materialize than suppression
For suppressed passion returns vengefully
And the only song worth hearing
Is that which burns with life
And exalts the hearer with the sublime

And while some truth is better than none
Some truths are more truthful than others
And don’t suppose that I claim
One truth for Alexander and another for John
And others for Trixie Ned and Nancy
For on the contrary those swerving atoms
Are the same for everybody
And for everybody too the inner being
Is a muddy mess of desires
Though the composition of the mess
Varies from person to person
Hence subjective intelligibility differs from the objective
And thus there are more dimensions than the phenomenal
And more fitting for poetry
Especially in differing or clashing subjectivities
Namely the drama of human cruelty
And the idylls of struggling love
And so for most of the time
The psalm of life is the poem of suffering

Since the whole truth lies out of reach
Then poetry becomes the quest for significance
Or less romantically
The act of finding what will suffice
Or rather settling for seeking and not finding
And for a long time poets thought
Or wishfully thought it a matter
Of a man speaking to men
The neutral transmission of thought
As if through some substance called mind
One could see and sing
Grasp and manipulate
Without the intervention of the breath
And so I reject the poem of the mind
That spectral residue of worldly renunciation
And reject also the poem of the body
The inarticulate cry of pain and appetite
But I extol the hand and the eye that reach into the world
The terrible world
In a blessed rage for coordination
The beauty of the beloved and the work of noble note
And I embrace the poem of the breath
Both the warm moist exhalation
And the deep enlivening inward flow

The great evasion
It all depends

Do I want my verse to be savage
There’s a place yes for savagery I suppose
And I wouldn’t want ingratiating urbanity
To still the storm and stress and conflict of emotion

And I wish to free it from the Cartesian ghost
And I would never want the poem of the mind
And while I imagine it might affect a reader
I can’t abide the straining for effect

Least of all the catalog of sentimental violence
And images owing all to the latest CG
Or the blasts of gladiatorial virtuosity
The sword as pen the gun as counterpoint

Every man his own Ares
Open carry from the airport to the nursery school
Each justifies the right of naked coercion
And threat parades in suburbs all unclothed

Civilization has contracted a bad odor
From thought-control and the rage of empire
But a book of verse is underneath the bough
A loaf of bread a jug of wine and thou

I saw a man wearing red shoes
And I wished that he wished
That the angels wished to wear them

Poetry without meter
Is like music without melody

It takes so much energy
To conceal one’s depression

Illness provides a fine example
Of truth as an infinitely graded range
Rather than a black or white
Firmly bounded this or that

Now death erects a pretty firm boundary
Though friends deny and some say
The breath goes now and some say No
But truly when you’re dead you’re dead

And the great source of denial is hope
For so long as breath endures hope persists
And the great source of hope is technology
Poor addicted humanity

When the lights go out all shriek
And pour into the streets
We got no power we’re gonna die
And the town descends into looting and chaos

And the patients in intensive care
Are the last to flee
When an orderly wheels the gurney
Tubes cables and all toward the nullified elevator

And in a piping treble the patient implores
Is it an operation Am I going to be cured
And the brave orderly Just relax Everything’s fine
But at the moment of death the afflicted grows silent

Death is a silent monologue
The subject at peace after raving inexpressive terror
While illness in its majestic variety
Expresses itself in a million questions and complaints

It’s like a doctor’s prescription
That is
A combination of ingredients

The inner being is a muddy mess
Of desires one seems to have eaten
Like hash or like mud
It’s as if I’ve eaten mud

Hash is really the better analogy
Since mud is a simple mixture of dirt and water
While hash combines several ingredients
As they used to say in the Anacin commercial

But hash is after all a nutritive substance
While the stuff in my current gut
Continuously asserts
Its indigestibility

An American president
Once claimed to follow his gut
As if that vessel of contraries
Could serve as any sort of guide

And I can come up with no metaphor
Of a meal whose courses
Have taken up arms
Against each other

The desire to be normal
Which is really the desire to be accepted
To play second base once in awhile
Rather than right field where the ball rarely flies

Fights with the arrogant dismissal
Of others as conformist weasels
Living in fear of losing
Their precious positions

Which in turn fights with the rational desire
To acknowledge at the very least
The differences among people
If not the worth they themselves so often conceal

Which in turn fights with irrational rage
That people treat people themselves not least
Like shit
That emerges after so many twists and turns

I have in me a gut full of shit
Like any creature with an alimentary canal
But it does seem a peculiar load
For a gut to be conscious of itself

I prayed for madness
And the madness came

I have learned that it’s true
What I heard once when I was young
That old age abounds
In what we crave for lacking in youth
It’s true in the obvious way
That in surviving past midlife
One gains powers and skills
Unknown to the inexperienced
Though it’s a canard to claim
That method compensates Wordsworthlike
For declining inspiration
I see no reason for inspiration to decline
Though it’s intensely clear
That the accretion of method
If combined with the sustaining of insight
Brings about an abundance of creative power
As these pages show
And so one gets better at cooking
And enjoys many good meals
And one gets better at writing
And the rate of discard declines
Or better the rate of keeping increases

Much time in youth is wasted
Establishing our identity
Discovering our personality
Finding one’s voice
Only to discover upon achieving
Some measure of maturity
That one’s own identity or personality or voice
Is not terribly rich or interesting
And that everything of note
Comes from a collective or composite
Voice or personality
Indeed personality is nothing
But the static emplacement of a persona
And maturity brings about the welcoming
Of an ethos of the artificial mask
For the mask was always artificial to begin with
And real achievement follows
The repertoire the reservoir the repository
Of many masks and masks of varying size

And so I will speak of myself
And I trust that my reader will understand
That I make no attempt
That indeed I shun the attempt
To treat my self
As a unity a totality or even an accomplishment
And I will speak of the life of a poet
For in my youth I castigated myself
Nay I contempted myself
If I may indulge in neologism
If ever I exercised the temerity
Of referring to myself as poet
For in my youth I convinced myself
Erringly
That only a great poet
Only a Keats or a Milton or a Dickinson
Could take on the mantle of poet
For so foolish is youth
To suppose that only the finest exemplar of a thing
Qualifies as that thing
And now I know
I may be a good poet or a bad
And I don’t really suppose myself
A particularly good poet
But poet I am for good or ill
And I write this essay
For I have achieved a certain age
And am therefore qualified
To make the attempt
Of certain statements
As to the meaning of attaining
A greater age than many of my acquaintance

The young poet yearns to express herself
A yearning like most yearnings
Founded upon an idealization
That my self is bursting to escape
The confines of myself
To press outward into the world
Of delighted and horrified spectators
For I so strongly wish
That my self might be as delightful and horrifying
To the world as it is to me
Except that I don’t know my self one whit
Or even whether it exists at all
It does not
At least not as a coherent thing
And so this yearning is bound
To fall upon disappointment
And thus the passage into maturity
Is marked by ennui
And the person straddling youth and adulthood
Is the most cynical of dogs
And this ennui never lets up
So far as I can tell
But unless it is opposed
And supplemented by idealism
Then inspiration is sure to fail
The youth idealizes the self
As an unconscious figment
But the grownup idealizes
The conscious virtual self
And hence the necessity of the mask

My friend the philosopher has claimed
Each one must become a philosopher
For each one should want
To think rightly about the world
And agreeing with this I add
That each one must become a poet
For each one should want
To construct the conscious mask
And forswear the unconscious figment
For in dreams each person is a great poet
And imagination is nature’s artifice
And I was instructed in childhood
That one ought to develop talents
And all possess the natural gift of dreaming

When I had entered the cynical transitional phase
I thought to suppress subjectivity in art
For worthwhile art I thought to be
Hard and objective
But now I thoroughly doubt
That suppression is ever the wisest course
For I adopted the cynical suppressive stance
No doubt out of shame
For the inferior self
That I had after all never discovered
In its pure suppositiousness
But whose expression I feared
Would expose me as truly
Neither delightful nor horrifying
And to be fair the artificial mask
Of which I boast
Is constructed of such shards of subjectivity
As I might have become aware
And its expression
Not to say its exposure
Remains a matter of terrible anxiety
Since it is now no longer
A question of an admirable or despicable self
But only of accomplishment admirable or despicable
Although since one’s powers of composition
Have increased with experience
The joy of expectancy
Ironic perhaps in a greybeard
Outweighs the anxiety of success or failure
Or more simply
And old poet is less concerned
Than a neophyte
With being well received

And so the most comfortable mask
Is that of the guru
The aged preceptor
For I have been gainfully employed for many years
As a humble schoolmaster
And I have endeavoured to develop my talents
As I was instructed one should
And I add texture to the persona
By recognizing that I am a neophyte among gurus
As suggested by the poem of Ali Akbar Khan

If you practice for ten years
You may begin to please yourself

After 20 years you may become a performer
And please the audience

After 30 years
You may please even your guru

But you must practice for many more years
Before you finally become a true artist
Then you may please even God

So the guru has certainly practiced
For more than thirty or forty years
And since both Yoda and Pai Mei
Are more advanced than I
And each has reached an age over 800
I figure I must be about 612 in guru years
@ 10/10/2015
And by no means do I claim
The title of true artist
I do however claim the almost equally charming title
If oxymoronic
Of neophyte guru

But here the picture darkens
For I wish to serve as guru to aspiring youth
And two factors one internal and the other external
Thwart my desire
The first is that no guru
Has given me the boon
Of decades or years of instruction
And I must instantly confess in shame
That this puling complaint
Originates in youthful idealization of self
That some other wiser ideal self
Should devote herself to my tutelage
Attention baby
And yet I have learned
From both literature and experience
That the relationship of guru and pupil
Compares in intimacy
Only to that of lover and beloved
And my own beloved has made me wealthy
In the riches of love’s sweet mysteries
Lore invaluable
For understanding the world
For the beauty of the beloved
Is the most immediate figure of beauty as such
But the path of eros is also the path of the sublime
And who knows not the sublime
Knows not the world
But eros cannot be the whole truth
Or will be at best a synecdoche for the truth
And certainly parenthood has taught me much
Just as my own dear parents taught me
But the parent cannot be a guru
For the parent’s child can never be a pupil
So burdened is the child
By parental idealization

And well into my adulthood
And even unto this very day
I have yearned to serve as ephebe
To some eminent teaching artist
For great teachers instruct in all the arts
Except that of teaching
And so though in my age I enjoy an abundance of students
I have no pupil
And I am no guru’s pupil

Which brings me to the external factor
For my geriatric dissatisfaction
For in this decadent age of history
We have given up so much of our selves
Ideal or multifariously practical
Old and young late and soon
To abstract and impersonal System
As the devout submit to the will of God Almighty
That commits the unspeakable tyranny
Of relegating persons to the status of things
As Dr King accused racial segregation of doing
Transcripts curricula rosters schedules and worst of all
Grades grades grades grades grades
Howl howl howl howl howl
And we surrender our autonomy
God damn it
If you want to get better at reading and writing
I’m your boy

And yet I have a friend
A younger man than I
And thus prima facie not a fit candidate
To act as guru to aged me
But in a few short years
And in old age days grow long and years short
I have learned more from this young teacher
Than I have learned from any other
In my long life
And he asserts
Motivated perhaps more
By a desire to evince respectful reciprocity
Than by the truth of the claim
Though I know of no other
His equal in hungering and thirsting for truth
He claims to have learned something from me
And so I envision the cheering prospect
Of the symmetrical gurus
No longer the master and the apprentice
But shipmates on the voyage of understanding

As a youth I cultivated
An exorbitant love of chat
Preceding even the dormitory bull sessions
Ending only with birdsongs and rosy dawn
And in old age I have transmuted that enthusiasm
Into the recording of these poor pages
And their transmission
Outward toward fit audience though few
Although my audience need not
Demonstrate in any wise its fitness
And most assuredly the readers are few
Even if technology gives the promise
Of infinite reproduction
And let me attack another canard against the aged
That they are technologically incapable
When anybody with any sense knows
That a person makes technology serve
Instead of the other way around

But age is the time of abundance
In less obvious ways also
For abundance is more abundant
When you desire less
Take sex for example
In youth three or four times in a day
Could leave me dissatisfied
And while fewer instances
Can bring me now closer to satisfaction
But Platonists are right to observe
That sex can never satisfy ultimately
For two can never become simply one
Except perhaps in some Tantric paradise
But there no doubt two hope to become zero
And attain nirvana

But age is most abundant
In that one gets better
At recognizing the good
And evading the mediocre or worse
For example as Tolstoy observed
It’s so much easier for an oldster
To be truthful
Than for a youth
Certainly I did a lot of deceptive
Sneaking around my parents
Especially in the days of early love
And as a young parent
I spent half my time
Sneaking around my kids
But I intend here the good
More in aesthetic than in ethical terms
Unquestionably tastes are formed in youth
And I was lucky enough to come of age
During the glorious cultural flowering
Of the late 1960s
And perhaps for the last time
The culture industry gave one access
To the classics that made popular culture possible
And the Stones and Jimi led me to the blues
And Cream led me toward jazz
And the Beatles led me to the classical music
Of India and the west
Though I must disclaim that that taste
Already resided in me
But most of all Dylan
In collaboration with Mr Smyth
At Bishop Kenny High School
Showed me that poetry
Backed by electric guitars
Differed not a particle
From the art of Dickinson or Melville
And Ezra Pound and TS Eliot
Fighting in the captain’s tower
And so I became a musician and a poet
Though as I always disclaim
An eminent practitioner of neither art
And in old age I have come to recognize
Ever more distinctly the excellence
Of the Beatles and the Stones
Of Hendrix Dylan and Cream
And indeed of Beethoven Schubert and Miles Davis
But I have learned to renounce my toleration
For Steppenwolf Steve Miller and the Amboy Dukes
And for every Björk or Aphex Twin or Radiohead
There are a thousand Skrillexes and Miley Cyruses
And other pasteurized processed commercial cheeses
But the essential truth
Is that there is more than enough noble art
To sustain one for a lifetime

And it’s manifestly true
That one does not reach old age
Without many reminders of debility and death
Though these are never far from the view
Even of inattentive youth
And our epoch isolates the young
From the solemn spectacle of death
Except in sentimentally violent representations
And our epoch wallows in a slough of denial
Of the frightening and the inconvenient
While any reasonable person adopts a way of life
That aims to forestall debility and death
Moreover addiction the plague of the age
Proves more powerful than reason
Certainly in my own case
For I am addicted to animal fat for example
But I lack the will even to seek rehabilitation
And so much of the suffering we link to old age
Is preventable
The rest is mere contingency
And not a matter for fear or resentment

The relentless question arises
At any stage of life
Whether to suffer the slings and arrows
Of outrageous fortune
Or take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them
But first it must be observed
That this formulation
Comes from a cynical transitional figure
Who should be king
That is
An adult
But is thwarted in that natural progression
By the corruption and complacency of others
Especially the selfish old
But Hamlet is right to assert that troubles are a sea
Deep because so many troubles
Result from mere contingency
But wide because so many troubles
Result from the wickedness of others
And you won’t end troubles by opposing them
Any more than you will defeat the sea by arms
But I know of no middle path
Between patience and opposition
And so I try
And fail
To mount patient opposition
Or perhaps the fulness of time
Will prove me a success
And this modicum of wisdom I will share
That there are things in life more important
Than success

The decadent scientism of our epoch
Loves to remember Aristotle as the guy
Who was wrong about physics
And it is probably true
That Aristotle committed the sin
Discovered by Socrates
Of claiming to know
That which he did not know
Though he certainly knew more
About more topics than any other
And dependent as he was
Upon the state of arts in pathetically embryonic stages
He erred
Nevertheless Aristotle was right about this
That all persons want eudaemonia
Though many of the human race
Languish in ignorance of this fact about themselves
And try to enrich themselves one way or another
Shortsightedly neglecting the purpose
For which they seek material things
And in my old age the good life
Seems singularly lacking in mystery
But is as clear as sparkling water
Nobody desires to be in agony
Though history especially in the West
Is nauseatingly replete
With apologists for suffering
And avoiding the agony of privation
Requires skills such as are handed down
From generation to generation
But no degree of competence
Can guarantee the prevention of suffering
Since so much suffering originates
In mere contingency
But the worst of all suffering
Originates in the human animal’s instinct
For promoting exalting and enriching
At the expense of others
The individual or the tribe

Now hedonism is a fairly respectable
If incomplete philosophy
For obviously the opposite of pain is pleasure
And one might reasonably surmise
That humans seek pleasure and avoid pain
And I myself have often claimed
Though I should probably retire the claim
That having a good time is nature’s way
Of telling you that you are doing something right
And what I meant was
Given that our time in life is limited
A fact that age regards distinctly
One should endeavor to make that time good
But good is a highly ambiguous term alas
And goodness in the sense
Of doing something right
Has little to do with nature
And much to do with the cultivation of reason
Which cultivation is most conveniently accomplished
In the dialectical exchange
Of guru and ephebe
And the ignorant equate a good time
With fun which means little more than diversion
A turning away from trouble or care or duty
And hence in many cases culpable neglect
And more subtly many equate a good time
With pleasure
And the more respectable hedonists
Know that drunkenness results in a hangover
And thus reason defers present pleasure
If it results in later pain
But in this they credit humanity far too much
For the drunkard might well calculate
The hangover as a small price to pay
And indeed decadent scientism
Promises a pharmacological remedy
For this and all ills
Including perhaps the moral ones
For all ills are now bodily ills
And any dysphoria a neurochemical deficiency
Never a metaphysical ennui
For subjectivity is hallucination
And metaphysics a quintessence of vapor
And all the universe a compound
Of matter massive or lightweight as the case may be
Convertible to the energy of forces strong or weak
And physicists will no doubt flame
My Aristotelian errors in nomenclature
And in the pharmacologically materialist epoch
Pleasure seekers know
That for a few drachmas
They can purchase preparations that go
Right from the stomach or the vein or the nose
Into the brain’s pleasure precincts
And that pleasure is no longer
A state for which one will take action
But merely the effect of a chemical substance
But worst of all is the pleasure
Of which I will speak as little as I can
For some derive pleasure from causing pain
Or imagine relief of pain of their own
Or imagine the triumph of their belief
From the slaughter of innocents

Hence
Since competence cannot exert sufficient control
To obviate contingency
Or the wickedness of others
And there is no absolute security
Or probably not even minimal security
In these wicked days
What must I do to achieve a good life
And let me reiterate most emphatically
That the world is a shithole
Because humans are assholes
And if that makes me sound like a bitter old man
You’re hearing me right
And yet and yet
I ask most seriously the most serious question
What must I do to achieve a good life
And I ask not for myself alone
But for any youth or indeed any fellow greybeard
Who wishes to hear any answer I might discover

I cannot control the world of things
I cannot control abstract impersonal system
I cannot control the world of other people
I can only control myself
But I know my multifarious self but poorly
And by fleeting glimpses
I know that I don’t know
The extent to which any of my selves
Result from intention
And which from contingency
And yet even so
I know that I am a being of incalculable value
I know that like any organism
I will struggle to sustain my existence
And I know since I can communicate
And that any two persons can reach understanding
That all other persons
Similarly know themselves to be incalculably valuable
Unless they are so woefully ignorant
Or criminally devoted to unreason
That they stand in direst need
Of my tutelage

And now I know what it means
To do the right thing
And it’s so simple
To treat each person as a person
And not as an instrument of use
Or an obstacle to be kicked out of the way
So to begin with
To live in a world full of assholes
Don’t be an asshole
And perhaps now I’m feeding the canard
That old people are squares
But I nevertheless assert
That the best chance for having a good life
Is to cultivate the habit
Which cultivation no doubt requires dialectical exchange
To cultivate the habit of doing the right thing
The path to a good life
Is the path of virtue

When I consider how my hearing is spent
I wish to blame the world for its absolutism
For deafness is too strong a word
When many have never heard a whistle or a voice

But though my impairment is milder than some
It brings decided discommodation
Less for me than for others
When I say Wha Wadja say

Townshend blamed the fireworks
A momentary bang on the Smothers Brothers show
Ignoring the hours he stood before
The Marshall stacks invented just for him

But I blame myself alone
Knowing the etiology of the disorder
Negligent excess
Impulsive disregard

I at least admit my addiction
To the gratification of the senses
And I wish to do some service
And I can’t stand to wait

When I read a book
It bears the scars
Of my confrontation with it

I scribble between the lines
Scribble in every margin
Summarizing querying rebutting and cussing

I break its spine
Dogear the pages
And in pique even tear off a corner

And if it’s a good book
I carry scars away with me
In sympathetic symmetry