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31

Sweet Talk

The lyrics:

Lift me up on my honour
Take me over this spell
Get this weight off my shoulders
I've carried it well
Loose these shackles of pressure
Shake me out of these chains
Lead me not to temptation

Hold my hand harder
Ease my mind
Roll down the smoke screen
And open the sky

Let me fly
Man I need a release from
This troublesome mind
Fix my feet when they’re stumbling
And well you know it hurts sometimes
You know it's gonna bleed sometimes

Dig me out from this thorn tree
Help me bury my shame
Keep my eyes from the fire
They can’t handle the flame
Grace cut out from my brothers
When most of them fell
I carry it well

Let me fly
Man I need a release from
This troublesome mind
Fix my feet when they’re stumbling
I guess you know it hurts sometimes
You know it's gonna bleed sometimes

Now hold on
I’m not looking for sweet talk
I’m looking for time
Top a tower and sleep walk
Brother, cause it hurts sometimes
You know it's gonna bleed sometimes
Hold on

You know its gonna hurt sometimes
When you call me
Hold on
Hold on
Hold on

I’m gonna climb that symphony home and make it mine
Let his resonance light my way
See, all these pessimistic sufferers tend to drag me down
So I could use it to shelter what good I’ve found

Dirait-on

Pensive, at the moment, though that's not such a rare occurrence for me. Contemplation seems to be a double-edged sword. My analysis and consideration of most every minute detail of every situation I face provides me a solid foundation for any decision I might make. Conversely, my over-contemplation can become paralysis, total inaction in a situation where the outcome is entirely without importance. How that relates to anything I'm talking about here, I'm unsure. I started writing this intending to post quotes, poems, and words that often cross my mind. I suppose I ought do that now.

*****************************

HARPER: Night flight to San Francisco. Chase the moon across America. God! It's been years since I was on a plane!

When we hit thirty-five thousand feet, we'll have reached the tropopause. The great belt of calm air. As close as I'll ever get to the ozone.

I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it thread-bare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening...

But I saw something only I could see, because of my astonishing ability to see such things:

Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired.

Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there is a sort of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead.

At least I think that's so.

*************************

February
Frank O'Hara


The scene is the same,
and though I try to imagine
plinking starry guitars,

and while I spend my
time listening to a foreign
contralto sing the truth,

the earth is everywhere,
brown and aching. At first
it seemed that this life

would be different: born
again in someone else's
arms, after seasons of childhood

and error and defense,
I though freshly and tried
to change the color of my

habit. New metrics would be
mine in this excess of
love! but I was a braggart

to hope so. My old hurts
kept attacking me at odd
moments, after too many

songs, on public conveyances,
in the blue light of bars. Ah!
I cried, do not blame me,

save your temper for the
others! and at the same instant
in the same breath cried,

break me! I dare you, for
which of us am I? you will
break yourself! And this

became only too true, the
worst of all possible vistas,
my lone dark land.


*************************

E.M. You take this too lightly, Miss Bearing. This is Metaphysical Poetry, not The Modern Novel. The standards of scholarship and critical reading which one would apply to any other text are simply insufficient. The effort must be total for the results to be meaningful. Do you think the punctuation of the last line of this sonnet is merely an insignificant detail?

The sonnet beings with a valiant struggle with death, calling on all the forces of intellect and drama to vanquish the enemy. But it is ultimately about overcoming the seemingly imsuperable barriers separating life, death, and eternal life. In the edition you chose, this profoundly simple meaning is sacrificed to hysterical punctuation:

And Death - capital D - shall be no more - semi-colon!
Death - capital D - thou shalt die - exclamation point!

If you go in for this sort of thing, I suggest you take up Shakespeare.
Gardner's edition of the Holy Sonnets returns to the Westmoreland manuscript source of 1610 - not for sentimental reasons, I assure you, but because Helen Gardner is a scholar. It reads:

And death shall be no more, comma, Death thou shalt die.

Nothing but a breath - a comma - separates life from life everlasting. It is very simple really. With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something to act out on a stage, with exclamation points. It's a comma, a pause.

This way, the uncompromising way, one learns something from this poem, wouldn't you say. Life, death. Soul, God. Not insuperable barriers, not semicolons, just a comma

*************************

I think that's all for now.

Goodnight, Travel Well

I'm learning this as I go along. I've been trying, for the past several days, to figure out why I should have such extraordinary back pain, unlike anything I've previously experienced. Tonight I may have identified a culprit of the cause. I found out a few days ago that someone I love, more deeply and for reasons more significant than those for which I love anyone else, may have only six months to live. It was a passing comment, barely a mention, and yet its effect has been... well, devastating. Few may read this, and fewer know of whom I'm speaking, but I feel a need to take this knowledge off my own shoulders. I can bear a great deal, but this is too much, even for me.

This person has harmed me, disrespected me, downright hurt me; but I've forgiven him. I've let go of his misdeeds for one reason: I love him. It's taken me a very long time to realize and understand this, but I love him, in spite of it all. I love him because I've had mere glimpses of who he truly is, an amazing man, marvelous beyond telling. I have risked my life to save his. I have gone to hell and back to bring him through. Though I barely have him, I may lose him. And this, more than any of the trials and difficulties I'm now facing, breaks me.

I can say nothing more than this. I have no answers or questions. All I know is what is.

I'm trying to have empathy, but at this moment I feel so blighted by the inevitable, by a future which may well be my own, that it is the greatest strain to reach beyond myself. At this moment I hurt for myself, I hurt for the man, the one man, I have ever truly loved, and I can do nothing.

Love Lockdown

Finally tonight as promised, a Special Comment on the passage, last week, of Proposition Eight in California, which rescinded the right of same-sex couples to marry, and tilted the balance on this issue, from coast to coast.

Some parameters, as preface. This isn't about yelling, and this isn't about politics, and this isn't really just about Prop-8. And I don't have a personal investment in this: I'm not gay, I had to strain to think of one member of even my very extended family who is, I have no personal stories of close friends or colleagues fighting the prejudice that still pervades their lives.

And yet to me this vote is horrible. Horrible. Because this isn't about yelling, and this isn't about politics. This is about the human heart, and if that sounds corny, so be it.

If you voted for this Proposition or support those who did or the sentiment they expressed, I have some questions, because, truly, I do not understand. Why does this matter to you? What is it to you? In a time of impermanence and fly-by-night relationships, these people over here want the same chance at permanence and happiness that is your option. They don't want to deny you yours. They don't want to take anything away from you. They want what you want—a chance to be a little less alone in the world.

Only now you are saying to them—no. You can't have it on these terms. Maybe something similar. If they behave. If they don't cause too much trouble. You'll even give them all the same legal rights—even as you're taking away the legal right, which they already had. A world around them, still anchored in love and marriage, and you are saying, no, you can't marry. What if somebody passed a law that said you couldn't marry?

I keep hearing this term "re-defining" marriage. If this country hadn't re-defined marriage, black people still couldn't marry white people. Sixteen states had laws on the books which made that illegal in 1967. 1967.

The parents of the President-Elect of the United States couldn't have married in nearly one third of the states of the country their son grew up to lead. But it's worse than that. If this country had not "re-defined" marriage, some black people still couldn't marry black people. It is one of the most overlooked and cruelest parts of our sad story of slavery. Marriages were not legally recognized, if the people were slaves. Since slaves were property, they could not legally be husband and wife, or mother and child. Their marriage vows were different: not "Until Death, Do You Part," but "Until Death or Distance, Do You Part." Marriages among slaves were not legally recognized.

You know, just like marriages today in California are not legally recognized, if the people are gay.

And uncountable in our history are the number of men and women, forced by society into marrying the opposite sex, in sham marriages, or marriages of convenience, or just marriages of not knowing, centuries of men and women who have lived their lives in shame and unhappiness, and who have, through a lie to themselves or others, broken countless other lives, of spouses and children, all because we said a man couldn't marry another man, or a woman couldn't marry another woman. The sanctity of marriage.

How many marriages like that have there been and how on earth do they increase the "sanctity" of marriage rather than render the term, meaningless?

What is this, to you? Nobody is asking you to embrace their expression of love. But don't you, as human beings, have to embrace... that love? The world is barren enough.

It is stacked against love, and against hope, and against those very few and precious emotions that enable us to go forward. Your marriage only stands a 50-50 chance of lasting, no matter how much you feel and how hard you work.

And here are people overjoyed at the prospect of just that chance, and that work, just for the hope of having that feeling. With so much hate in the world, with so much meaningless division, and people pitted against people for no good reason, this is what your religion tells you to do? With your experience of life and this world and all its sadnesses, this is what your conscience tells you to do?

With your knowledge that life, with endless vigor, seems to tilt the playing field on which we all live, in favor of unhappiness and hate... this is what your heart tells you to do? You want to sanctify marriage? You want to honor your God and the universal love you believe he represents? Then Spread happiness—this tiny, symbolic, semantical grain of happiness—share it with all those who seek it. Quote me anything from your religious leader or book of choice telling you to stand against this. And then tell me how you can believe both that statement and another statement, another one which reads only "do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

You are asked now, by your country, and perhaps by your creator, to stand on one side or another. You are asked now to stand, not on a question of politics, not on a question of religion, not on a question of gay or straight. You are asked now to stand, on a question of love. All you need do is stand, and let the tiny ember of love meet its own fate.

You don't have to help it, you don't have it applaud it, you don't have to fight for it. Just don't put it out. Just don't extinguish it. Because while it may at first look like that love is between two people you don't know and you don't understand and maybe you don't even want to know. It is, in fact, the ember of your love, for your fellow person just because this is the only world we have. And the other guy counts, too.

This is the second time in ten days I find myself concluding by turning to, of all things, the closing plea for mercy by Clarence Darrow in a murder trial.

But what he said, fits what is really at the heart of this:

"I was reading last night of the aspiration of the old Persian poet, Omar-Khayyam," he told the judge. It appealed to me as the highest that I can vision. I wish it was in my heart, and I wish it was in the hearts of all: So I be written in the Book of Love; I do not care about that Book above. Erase my name, or write it as you will, So I be written in the Book of Love."

Are we human, or are we denser?

I've never felt a particular need to get married. Having constant company sounds nice, but I don't necessarily need marriage, civil or otherwise, to ratify the relationship. Now, though, that I see so many people I grew up with, people that always seemed friendly, inquisitive, and intelligent, are opposed to same-sex civil marriage, I think I'll get married out of spite.

That's right. I'm going to find the biggest, most brash and abrasive, loud and obnoxious, camped-up stereotype of a tranny drag queen and marry him/her. Just to spite you. Don't believe I wouldn't do it? You don't know me very well. A though I've lately been fond of quoting: If you don't like me, I'm going to make you HATE me.

Realize this, please, as it is fundamental: There is a distinct difference between civil marriage and religious marriage. I have no desire whatsoever to have my marriage blessed by ANY authority, much less one that claims its founder was perfectly justified in molesting little girls. I don't need some stupid temple or cathedral over my head. I don't even need a courthouse; but so long as I am a citizen of this country, and so long as any man and woman can be granted rights simply by signing a form and paying ten lousy dollars, then so should I and any other man, whether he be a hot tranny mess or the love of my life.

In other words, provided one's choices do not DIRECTLY harm another person or violate his rights, one is free to make that choice. This is called equal protection; it is a central concept in the constitution, has been so since its ratification, and was reiterated in 1868 (That's the 14th Amendment, y'all). The framers of the Constitution sought, as Justice Brandeis said in 1928, "to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions, and their sensations." It is for this reason that they established, as against the government, the right to be let alone as "the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men." Essentially, leave me alone to see my life as I see fit. Realize, though, that if there is any right or responsibility granted a citizen, it is for ALL citizens. If you want to call it marriage, call it marriage, but it must be for everyone. If you want to call it civil union, or domestic partnership, or friends with benefits, I don't care. Just make it the same damn institution for me as for you as for anyone and everyone.

The Reason

Earlier tonight I felt bored. Not by anything in particular, just a general sense of boredom. I decided, then, to go to Double Daughters, hang out, write, be bored a place other than my apartment. I ran into friends, had several drinks, some great conversation. A good time overall. I love living downtown. :-)

Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed

Crazy Creepy Cult Leader Warren Jeffs
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz



I'm just sayin' is all.

Continued, to a degree...

On the bus, yet again, headed to work. Some woman is shouting at the driver, something about the frequency of this buses on Saturday. Her hair is carrying on a polyamorous affair with peroxide and Aquanet. I shudder to think of the day they turn on one another. I intended to write about 'Atlas Shrugged' but am too distracted by the people surrounding me. The woman dressed like a polygamist prostitute daintily eating Doritos, sucking the salt from her fingers decorated with luminous fuschia polish; the man in the black leather pants and mesh-fabric shirt, wallet again dangling from his left pocket, picking his nose; the dazed man wearing worn jeans and a new t-shirt clasping a paperback romance novel to his chest; the younger man with fading tear-drop tattoo wearing his tank top inside out, perhaps to show off the Fruit of the Loom label, cigarette tucked behind his ear; the drunk couple, staggering, carrying take-away Mexican food in cracked plastic boxes. Just another day.

Just You Wait, Henry Higgins

I finished 'Atlas Shrugged' a few minutes past seven this morning. I'd promised myself before beginning I'd read the entirety of John Galt's sixty-page speech (sixty LARGE pages of miniscule type) in a single sitting. I'd neglected to notice the conclusion of the speech was a mere hundred pages from the end of the book. I couldn't resist. I'm not an Objectivist, not by Ayn Rand's stringent standards anyway, but... perhaps I approached that poorly. I've never withheld my assent from well-constructed logic. The logic in 'Atlas Shrugged' is near-flawless. I'll have to continue this later. I'm on the bus at the moment and am near my stop. Briefly, yay this book. Me gusta.

Oh, Lately It's So Quiet

I find myself quite vexed at the moment. Not by anything of particular note or substance, but something minor, something that bothered me nonetheless. I've made plenty of mistakes in my life, though to a lesser extent of late. Those mistakes have often had an unfortunate effect on others. I ran into one such person today and some of this person's friends. And while he was perfectly genial, his friends barely acknowledged my existence. Barely. Even that is being generous. I know I should react with perfect indifference to this; I think to myself, "It's their problem, not mine." I was once on good terms with them, in fact grew somewhat close to them. Now I'm persona non grata even though my actions did not affect them in any meaningful way. And this bothers me. It doesn't anger me, or offend me. I feel... well, sad. Disappointed in myself all over again for the mistake I made long ago. Consequently, I'm annoyed with myself for feeling this way. I've rectified the mistake, atoned for it, and am a better person because of it. Why should I feel the slightest bit of disappointment?

You see? Vexing.

As it is.

My Boo

Do vaginas smell like celery? I have a theory.

Blood on the Dancefloor, or: I fucking hate FOX News and the retards who watch and believe what it says

The Line Begins to Blur

I'm gifted in a way that seems like a monstrous joke. This gift, this ability, entails my going on one date, perhaps two, getting along rather well with whomever the fella may be, then not hearing from him again. My rabid curiosity consumes me in this, as in all matters, and I eventually talk myself into calling Mr. Man, usually a month or two later, and finding out just why the hell he didn't call me. The joke is this: always, always, always, Mr. Man has rekindled romance with a nameless ex and was too embarrassed/ashamed/inarticulate to tell me. I'm some sort of cracked-out matchmaker, someone of a caliber (good or bad) that rouse within others an overwhelming desire for the comfort of familiarity.

Huh?

Methinks I smell a monstrous pile of bullshit. Or a very fishy vagina. Either way it stinks.

When I ask a question I expect and crave only one thing: the truth. A little bit of honesty, with me, goes a long way. I don't give two shits if the real reason is deeply personal and might hurt my feelings; I'm a big boy, I've dealt with plenty of shit, and have more or less come to accept shit as a part of my life. Seriously, pile it on, I can handle it.

My only fault in situations as I've just described is that I have a hard time exerting energy where it clearly will make no difference, so instead of speaking my mind and saying, "Hey! Fuck you!!" I say something along the lines of "No worries," and let sleeping dogs lie.

If anyone reads this, knows he has at some point qualified as "Mr. Man", and is curious as to how I truly felt, take to heart what I've written. And to drive the point home... Hey! Fuck you! Come back to me when you've sprouted balls big enough to enable you to be honest. Hearing this excuse once, maybe twice, I can buy it. But the seeming scores of times it's been fed to me... well, I may be a hopeless romantic at times, but I'm never a complete idiot.

Just Missed the Train

I saw tonight a marquee board at a nearby Lutheran church bearing the following message:

The United States of America is the only country in the world with a known birthday.

Huh.

I'll bet the people of East Timor might take issue with that.

Come to think of it, the "birthday" of the United States isn't as clear cut as all that. Is it July 4, 1776? Or is it November 15, 1777, the date of the ratification of the Articles of Confederation? Perhaps September 17, 1787, at the adoption of the Constitution? Or June 21, 1788, the day New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify it, thereby ratifying it altogether? Or perhaps even March 4, 1789, when the Government formally began operations under the Constitution?

Granted, the Declaration of Independence was the first instance the colonies were referred to as a contiguous body; however, it wasn't until the drafting of the Constitution that it was considered a single sovereign nation, rather than an allied body of several independent states. Perhaps some clarification is in order for those who posted the aforementioned message on the marquee.

Or perhaps I shouldn't put so much thought into something I read while driving down South Broadway at 9:30 p.m.