For William Shatner

a poet flew into the sky.

up there he saw the edge...  peel away

and the darkness of the everything

faced him

and he understood 

something rare and true.

then,  he came back down

and the lock to his heart opened 

like a glacier falling into the ocean.  

A poet touched the sky today

and found 

the Earth.

the absolute

I am removed. 

you are removed also...

far from each of us ourselves

so far.

the woman in Ghangaria 

knows nothing of me

nor I of her'

yet some wonderment,

I can see the beautiful valley of flowers in which she lives. 

and this begins my thoughts 

on Utopia. 

If the world was perfect. 

I would live there

and we would pass a smile 

on the sunny road.  

Instead,

I merely peer out at the world 

through my lonely box of light..

and millions suffer while I 

do not.

I am so removed

and you also are

removed

so far from things unknown

and known.

what high magic 

will change this?

Not the lonely box of light.

It is just a toy.

 

There is a crystal mind 

 lingering invisible within our eyes 

that longs to connect

impossibly with everyone.

I feel it 

searching searching searching

 

Sensability

 We take it for granted

this higher reasoning thing,

Not everyone has it

millions are not so blessed

with A-level heads, in more ways 

than one.

but I am cursed with

various aspects of

"too clever for your own good"

Hyper vigilance among them.

It used to run my show.

down to the insomnia and sleep deprivation.

Thankfully I have learned to ignore it.

I actually sleep now

despite the horrors of the world

and the things I havent done 

and the thing I should have said.

It was all about the lack of 

Love, oh and the cruelty.

Once I finally understood

that most people are 

pathologically unable to love 

in any semblance of a 

functioning quality -

I was cured of my despair.

and I do really think

it is higher reasoning

that determines us.

not the usual way we think

like a crow uses tools,

or a cat looks questioningly 

into a mirror for days or weeks 

until finally he's settled on 

some answer,

No. It is a thing not easily accessed, 

imperceptibly deep.

most of life doesnt require it of us.

It all just Goes by

even the most difficult and frustrating things

are basic.

No, it's something else

that brings a person 

into the strange ethereal 

other worldly

higher reasoning

that I'm thinking of.

A Tolkein kind of a place

where the heart is so connected

to the mind that flowers grow

in Mordor.

2020, perspective

I dont know about you but this isolation period in all of our lives at once has really deeply affected me. I didnt think it would really. But lo, it has.

I think hourly on things like who am I, what matters, why are people so foolish, what will we be moving forward from this, are other people as deeply affected as I am, what are they thinking, is it hurting us, is it making us better, what about the loss, where is the mourning, why isnt it public, i am upset by this, i am in mourning, i am not even worried anymore, encouragement? hope? what about loss? has anyone addressed this loss, folks its friggin deep.

Those of us who are stuck at home are avoiding the underlying feeling that the world is ending by watching a steady stream of netflixhuluprime and making beercheesecrochetpaintings... but I find myself crying over a myriad of newly sentimental things like rock concert videos and driving past the pizza parlor and hearing an editorial on NPR about how parents should let themselves off the hook for failing at being their childs teacher assistant and managing remote learning.  and then theres the obvious thing were all trying to avoid, the government. what a bag of dicks. Its devastating. On so many levels, we are all going through an intense period of loss.

Put in perspective, our supermarkets diminished supply is nothing like post world war II Russia. Its nothing like the great depression. Our death toll, even the worlds death toll is not(yet) anything even remotely close to the death toll from starvation and malnutrition every year...
FYI, that is this number:    9,000,000.
And even after all this, our displaced persons number in the US will be an atrocity, but it will never come close to the number of displaced people currently living in camps worldwide...
That number is this:    70,000,000.

So, if you read this, you are probably not suffering. But on some level we are all suffering. Because if the above numbers exist, then the world is suffering and by extention so are we. But this steady stream of stuff stands in the way of us seeing or knowing that others are suffering, and we are content not knowing and not having to feel that ongoing loss.

Please let just one minute of this loss filter through to your consciousness. I swear to you, you will live through it. But you will also change. And that change needs to happen on a gigantic scale pretty damn soon, or we are absolutely doomed to see all the numbers increase.

Netflix can not save us from the catastrophic failure of our hearts to acknowledge our grief.