Multiconstruct

An interesting night, all dressed up no place to go, if I was capable of being frustrated, I might have been. I was pledged to go to the Dinner Train to Centralia something I had been wanting to do and the Odd Fellows reserved a car. Tre and I were gonna go but he got sick and I couldn’t find the take off spot. The guy at Caseys didn’t know nor did the guy at the bookstore. So I bought a book. If I were up to the technological norm I could’ve looked it up easily, instead I just accepted it wasn’t going to be. Next time.

Thank goodness I have had ample opportunity to walk through a lot of frustrating situations with people and encourage them to roll with stuff outside of their control. I also read and preach a lot of stoic philosophy. All that helps me just roll with stuff enjoy the ride be flexible. I might do a lecture on stoic thought when I finish my series on self esteem. Got some good students, one with 8 pages of notes, cross referenced by topic because I like to skip around.

Most interesting conversation I’ve had has been on facebook. We were talking about judgement, he critiquing my encouragement of Fire your Bank day. (4.5 billion dollars pulled out of banks I heard on Marketplace and more people have joined a credit union in the last 6 weeks then in a normal year. That’s a nice protest with the multibillion dollar hit.) Anyway he cited Bruce Cockburn as saying we all want judgement on somebody else and said the Occupiers were as greedy as the banks.

I conceded his first point but challenged the second that banks with more resources are more liable to judgement for not helping the poor and that activists with some notable exceptions often take a financial hit and have a sincere desire to help and a simple lifestyle. He commented back saying salvation comes from belief not good works. But I wasn’t saying you get to go to heaven for doing good, I just said you face damnation for not. But we’re talking about different stuff, I don’t buy the concrete version of heaven.

The heaven I believe in is more conceptual, an idea, the memic universe. Do you want to know if you are living forever? Are you living forever right now? Investment in the trappings of wealth or power block out the eternal now that is accessible in a child like way to anyone who reaches out for it. That’s what I’m saying. Greed and accumulation make people scared, shuts off from real experience and transcendent awareness. I know because if they had it they wouldn’t act like that. You couldn’t if you value others like yourself.

Mostly I want to put up more poetry. This one I wrote a slight variation on the first line in my first chap book 16 Best. I took the title of the book from the CD that John Glenn took into space Neil Diamond’s 16 Best. I wrote on the top of a blank page something like “I can write a free verse poem about anything” as a statement that I could finish it on a first draft and have it be a pretty good poem. I couldn’t, and ended up hacking out a short little shitty thing. Some time later though in a late night manic rush I blasted through the thing in its completed form in only a little more time then it takes to read it ( a bit over 3 minutes unless I’m doing it in a slam with 3 minute time limit which I pick up the pace. I consider it my definitive slam poem.

I can write a free verse poem about anything

If I want to extend my ego

Or I can just let the world be

All fucked up and beautiful

Six billion lives alone

Living in self imposed exile

From real experience

Cast adrift in a specific social milieu

Which is then projected onto the rest of humanity

Except for those, few or many

We think of as “others”

People so alien to our experience that we deny our  common existence as people

Greeks and Barbarians

A five thousand years old idea

Which still dominates our consciousness

And of course it does

How we clothe ourselves, how we feed ourselves

How we have shelter and transportation and the frivilous entertainments that make a C+ life feel like a solid A-

Can I hear an amen please?

Because of course I’m preachin’

In a free verse poem about anything.

The last frontier of the wordy hypocrite

On vacation from responsibility

When the knowledge that we are all one

And the world is in pain

Often and harsh and often preventable

If we can care more, know more, do more

more, more, more, or

nothing…

Block it out

Return to the acceptable

Accept the inevitable

Of the way things are

Just sit back an enjoy the fringe benefits that go to those citizens and their neighbors who get to vote every four years or so for one of the two  guys who learned how best to suck up to power and gets to be the CEO of the big stick of Capital

Bread and circuses baby

Only now its on a hundred and fifteen channels

And the bread may take a little longer to get then it used to

But its so good

That’s why most of us have to make it

Or serve it

Instead of painting and writing poetry

Singing and dancing and growing gardens

We wouldn’t want them to do that would we?

I can’t make my own fucking Big Mac can I?

It isn’t someone has to dig the ditches anymore

Now its the guy who gets to drive the ditch digging machine is a lucky bastard

With a fat paycheck and a good  tan

A paid lunch and health insurance

May I take your order please?

Would you like fries with that?

I’ll suck your dick for fifty dollars.

Because of course a man has to talk about sex in a free verse poem about anything

Because money buys sex and not just servitude

Would you like fries with that?

If you turn your back I’ll kill you

Just for what you’ve got in your pockets

I can’t write ads to sell cigarettes to teenagers in Asia can I?

But I watch the same TV commercials that you do

Where the guy in the phat car gets the skinny girl with the big tits and perfect teeth

And guess what motherfucker

Guns are cheap

Would you like fries with that?