Proprioception

"Le vent se lève! . . . il faut tenter de vivre!"—Paul Valéry, "Le cimetière marin"

Proprioception is the sense of yourself

Relayed by neurons in your muscles, tendons and joints,

Which merging with the evidence of your eyes

And the vestibular noise and signal transmitted by your ears

Creates the world into which you awake

It’s 5 a.m. and I’m a little stiff from weedwacking the “back forty” yesterday,

but a bit of yoga should fix that

In the pantry cupboard I see curry powder, kibbles, and gin,

among many other good things,

And on the radio, out of Salzburg via WTJU, hear played a passacaglia from the Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Ignaz Biber.

So far, then, all’s OK!

I jot these things down, frivolously judge them a poem

and want immediately to send them to you, unknown hearer

It seems important that you should know them

though they don’t rhyme and any meter’s entirely accidental.

Anyhow, good morning! Καλημέρα!

Clinical Ontology: Rafah and After

Samuel anointing David, Dura Europos, Syria, 3rd century CE.

I’d thought to craft a plan to perfect the UN's

double-blind—and peer-reviewed—experiment,

but with that Saviors without Borders marquee unfurled,

it quickly grew clear, the problem is . . . immense.

Stumbling haplessly from blunder to blunder,

my schemes to right it tore the world asunder.

What's a poor messiah at wits' end to do?

How far in the pursuit of justice can a meshugana go?

Locum tenens of the global order,

standing in for the old quack Pinocchio,

wracked by relief, I thought I knew.

Ontology’s the science of being,

and the key to all being's seeing

—also, you must not simply see but look, look, look, look, look, loo . . .

There’s no truth except in the looking,

the rest's all lies,

fiction—like scotoma of the eyes.

When one gets going, how the BS flies!

And maybe that's just what's needed:

the unique ointment in the Great Apothecary's black bag of safety salves, diffusing wrath.

I'll tell it to those giants in Gath and proclaim it in the streets of Ashkelon.

The wages of sin is death—that medicine is strong!

Memorial Day 2024

Nonfiction

The French for “nonfiction” is non-fiction.

Oh, you may argue, Ça n'existe pas ! There’s no such thing.

And I’d agree—witness these very verses' phoney ring!

We’re all so hopelessly hooked on lies

we'll die romancing. Surprise, surprise!

Or so many a wisesacre realist might suppose.

But true nonfiction does exist. A rose is a rose is a rose.

Poetry is a way to find what you really think.

You thought you knew? That's just where you go wrong!

The only way us idiots can discover this is through song.

Shakespeare and Ovid sang until they fell silent,

having no more mere words to think

or say.

I'm sure they wouldn't have wanted it any other way.

Neither would I—assuming, that is, I ever get there

(which, judging by these clunky lines, there's little need to fear).

Such silence must be the sweetest shroud to wear.