New Path

With enough time to make,
and time does 
make its own,
her kiss is the 
thousand mile walk
I would take.


(c) 2012 - Mark A. Douglas

Evolution of Theory

Sun has to set somewhere.

There?  Big deal.

You just won’t understand my

suffering, as I brought to you another

installment in the what

were you thinking chronicles.

Sunsets on the harbor.

Tense.

Or ignore each other.

Mongoose and goats, for what it’s worth,

oh by the way, lay down together.

As long as the snakes survived the goat-

surviving mongoose as long as the mongoose

cultivated a taste for green garden

variety serpent, it’s easy to understand that goats

were brought to drive out the mongoose that

were brought to drive out the snakes that

were brought to drive out the rats that

had never actually inhabited the island

and weren’t going to, dagnabbit.

It’s different.  Promise.  You just think

you do.  It’s not something

at which you spend that much time

wondering.

The notion that everything passes eventually

eventually passes

it would not fit here to mention.

Where is that wascally wabbit

when you need him?

You spend so much time

wondering about spending so much time

wondering about time that nothing

becomes healthier than staring

down the barrel of a tumbleweed indelicately

situated on a grossly misplaced

lava field.  

To make up is just

to invent, no more, no less, no

reconciliation, no prettification,

but an invention of a peace betwixt

a storm, or if not storm, at the least,

dischord.  Discord.  Dischord would signify

a different key is being played,

the one at play in the key of me,

and the other banging away in the key of I,

with no do, no fa, no re, no so,

no golden drop of sun

but always the long long way to

think you can and think you can

and then you blow a fuse and then you short a circuit

and then you’re not thinking and then

you’re not canning and you won’t get

all Buddhist on me because vengeance is mine,

sayeth the little tao’ster.

Errr, toaster.

Where’s the fun in that? In what?

You might never get an answer, you

and your much improved toaster,

brought back from the dead from life

support.  Well, dead:  clinically dead.

Some lines you miss a hare, some

days you miss the rabbit.

A fire’s cherries ringing have no dearth

of source, of heat, of anger, expired,

and soon, I thought, there won’t be any more

this.  All of that will be gone.  What

will be missed, what won’t?  This

chair, no; this clip, no; this longing, no;

this impulse, not in the least.

There are worse things to see on the drive

from the airport than lava fields, but what

I want to see is you, your face,

your made-up

or not face.

© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas

Theory of Evolution

There are, if you think about it,

worse things than being listed as being

‘on life support, clinically

dead, and much improved.’

The and just kills you there, doesn’t it,

its placement so hopeful, so denying

the previous clause, as though no

amount of pause will erase

either the dead or the life

you support. 

The drive from the airport

will catch your attention if you

can embrace tumbleweed on lava,

wild goats and rampant donkeys

lining the highway:  everything seems

out of place here, nothing works,

and your much improved

diagnosis falls into deeper and grander

doubt.  Some days you miss a hare,

some lines you miss a rabbit.

Why make up,

why the impulse?

If you mean a toaster, say

a toaster.  Anger, too, rings the cherries

on a fire but remember when 

- according to Hass, who would say

according to an ancient Chinese poet,

I’ll bet

– poetry answers the questions

philosophy was not built to tackle? 

Tense.

If you mean a much

improved toaster, say

a much improved toaster;

I’m unclear what

question that answers but

don’t let chortling songbirds

or spiffling whirlybirds turn you aside

when you ask your clinically dead

questions. 

To make up

is not just to invent but also to reconcile

(also to prettify, but another time,

another subject)

and where’s the fun in that? 

You may never get an answer but

if you won’t get all Buddhist on me,

vengeance is mine sayeth

the little toaster that could. 

I think I can I

think I can, said he, right before

the short circuit

and thinking ceased

and canning ceased. 

Nothing’s healthier

than staring down the barrel

of a tumbleweed on a grossly misplaced

lava field and wondering

at the time you’ve spent wondering

why you spend

so much time wondering about

time.  It would fit here

to mention that everything

passes eventually,

especially the notion that everything

passes because eventually? 

It’s not something at which you spend

that much time wondering.

You just think you do: 

it’s different, promise.

It’s easy to understand that goats

were brought to drive

out the mongoose that

were brought to drive out the snakes that

were brought to drive out the rats that

had never actually inhabited the island

and weren’t going to, dagnabbit,

as long as the snakes survived

the goat-surviving mongoose

as long as the mongoose

cultivated a taste for green garden

variety serpent. 

Goats and mongoose, for what

it’s worth, oh by the way, lay down together. 

Or ignore each

other.  You just don’t understand

my suffering, as I bring to you another

installment in the

what were you thinking

chronicles.  Sunsets on the harbor,

there?  Big deal.

Sun has to set somewhere.

© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas

What Is It

It is not the scenery that surrounds you

that momentarily eviscerates your idea of home,

it is the missives from that home

that delineates the scenery that surrounds you.

What notion of paradise you might hold

stripped by the longing – “Come baaaaaack!!!!” –

in the notes you long for, in the notes

that make you shudder upon receipt.

You might walk on the pounded murky lava sand

   wondering at the amount of dye involved

   in the shading of the water, land-locked

   you, so normally surrounded by flat,

by brown, by the dander of the cottonwood.

Land-locked, unparadised you might

stand, fruitlessly, under a shallow palm tree

looking up for fruit it does not bear.

The resort’s façade might give pause –

   you, too, resort to something, sometimes –

and you wonder that they don’t call it a repose,

although that also brings its troubles.

Somehow the heightened heat back home,

remember:  left behind, is to be blamed

on your leaving, on your absence,

as is the desertion of a trust,

as is the baseness of all the expected places,

   of all the expected faces

you see on an all too often basis.

The pictures you send – of sunsets, of sunrises,

of turtles (ho’nu) at bask, of dolphin at play,

of flamingos in repose – aren’t really making

your case that it’s a shame

that the sand is scarce and gray,

that the riptide makes the ocean unventureable,

that the mix of moonscape and tropic is unsettling,

that your trip was off-season for watching whale.

“Come baaaaack!!!!”

Everything is upside down, where you are

   to where you want to be,

you might look at the cresting waves,

and with everything turned asunder,

you might resort, in a state of repose,

allowing the crystal-sharp sand to cover your toes,

to wonder, Will it?

Will it really pull me under?

© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas

Dear Numbnuts, letter 3

I don’t know why I love you like I do, don’t know why,

and the song goes on to explain the why if not the like I do

but I won’t trifle with your emotions today, will not lead

you on as a forest - facing fire - will mislead the brush beneath the trees,

the grass amidst the brush, telling the brush, the grass, you are safe

here, the dew will protect you, when any fool with eyes can see

that it’s the trees that the forest is really looking out for.

Brush comes, grass goes, and everything is not permanent

but everything that is not permanent is not necessarily in abeyance

to its transience, to the love of its own transcendence.

Like my love for you, I don’t love you like I do,

your presence becoming an absence in my path, when I count the footfalls

it takes a lifetime to climb, the road littered with oncoming trucks

that approach their corners with the recklessness of the coyote

approaching the road runner, the cliffs the walls the falls no

matter the rocks, and be damned the obstacles in the path on the road

or any such smack about killing the Buddha if you see him.  Trucks

don’t kill the Buddha, they are always already bodhisattvas,

as enlightened as they are ever going to be in their grinding, dieseled roar

down the path – your path!! – towards an unaccounted-for floor

that isn’t a dune prambling slowly into the wind, against the picturesque of that,

that isn’t the seep of dew in the morning moving from the grass blade to the earth

in an inexorable descent but is instead a suddenness that takes the breath,

simultaneously inhaling and exhaling it so that seemingly no action is allowed,

no utterance is allowed, language becomes dormant in the ascent of simile.

No in.  No out.  Just void.  To quote:

            Of all the laws

            that bind us to the past

            the names of things are

            stubbornest

Why you try to know everything when it is so few

things we really need to know.  Names is all you are trying

to escape.  Void.  Seep.  Path.  Wonder.  Lifetime.  Presence.

Brush.  Blade.  Breath.  Wander.  Loveline.  Absence.

You will only ever go as far as your language will take you.

So it goes.

M---

© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas

Dear Numbnuts, letter 2

Completely forgot how angry I wanted this to be,

the mauled mural-strewn vaulted ceilings 
detailing angry fingers pointing at equivocating 
supplicants who find themselves,

again,

on the wrong side of the nail, with no pith, no sense of humor,

no relief from the bitter bitterness, the spleen of the pen

spewing vitriol in every direction like a…

like a…

like a one of those broken thingamajiggies you use spray-painting a wall,

and a floor,

and a ceiling,

when you are aiming to paint a wall.

Aim to maim, they used to say in the pizza delivery business.

In another day, another dollar world, you find yourself a quarter shy,

again.

Like how words must feel about letters, like the trees

feel about the ax.  Don’t let your happy exterior

fool you, you’re no happier today than you were yester-

day, than you’ll be tomorrow, than you’ve ever been before,

than you’ll ever be 

again.

You can spend a lot of time wondering why you spend so much time

spending time wondering:  go ahead, but you are only

feeding other insecurities under the guise of nursing your own

doubts, your own concerns, thoughts spreading, diverting,

digressing, converging,

merging, this guise masking why I would forget that this is angry,

not a paean to your sovereignty, not a psalm to your prambling,

but a left turn at Albuquerque you forgot to take, so pretty

you are, taking the bull by the horns,

where your wonderings become a wander,

a search for the new path your letters

believe themselves to be inventing

again.

 

To be invented.  To become to believe.
It sucks when your metaphors fail you.  Fail better than you.

You don’t have to take my word for anything, you are free

to look at the scattered ruins of relationships you’ve left

in your wake, each one centered around a common

denominator of you.  I don’t believe that I’m making

this up, but I’ve nothing to prove

that I’m not.

So it goes.

M---

© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas

Dear Numbnuts, letter 1

This isn’t that clever, you know.

A self-help essay in the form

of poetry to and for the self,

a stab at a self-deprecate

that wants to negate the stab

while winking about the stab

with a grin aimed to generate

the stab.

Remember when irony was dead,

then reinvented, then

stronger than ever?

It’s dead, again, thanks to this

exact type of tripe.

The reader may delight

in the poet’s lack of regard

for the insight of an essayist,

flat on his back, the beach,

the freezing sand,

just as the reader will attest

to the essayist’s lack

of poetic skills regarding the balance

of language and time,

not to mention rain from a low sky,

the tide way out.

Poetry does not examine the head;

poetry, not meaning anything

after all, does not dig beneath a shimmering

spleen of surface, will not eat

mold; answers aren’t

to be found on the nail

the hammer tries to drive

against the grain, the nail of symmetry

when not altruism when not

aphorism when not metaphor soiling

the coat of unsolicited sympathy.  Not

this new path you perambulate about so,

to differentiate from some old

archive of a self you keep trying

to escape.  Your old self

walks beside you, still,

that ringing between your ears

the hearing aids won’t correct,

not some looped drive

created by loud DNA;

it’s the knife you never mention,

it’s you howling at age, inventing

language because you have

no language for how you are, this

language sounding like so much

unbearably high-pitched tire

on a taut ecstatic asphalt, going down

your new path.

So it goes,

M---

© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas

Metaphors to Live With, Chap 8 v1

METAPHORS TO LIVE WITH

CHAPTER 8:  CONVENTIONAL METAPHORS RAISE NO SPECIAL PROBLEMS FOR TRUTH

            Were my friend here, by the way, with me now, or Here Now, as the case may be, he would mention that my picture argument was rather specious and facile.  Or, rather, is.  Not was.  It is like asking if my blue is the same as your blue.  Which he did, by the way.  Ask, I mean.  If my (but he said his) blue were the same as my (where you most likely said your) blue.

            And but for were, I am certain you may read is.

            Earlier, I might have been confusing when I said what has gone before in conjunction with what you might want to re-read.  I just want to be clear that I did not mean everything, as in every word ever written.  Because that is most likely not necessary.  To read every word ever written, I mean.  For most likely, please read almost certainly.  Not necessary, I mean.  It is unclear to me what might or might not be necessary to read.

            To catch the missed elements of plot, I mean.

            And but so I also want to mention that I do not necessarily consider bare to be practical.  Because I mentioned that the small room where I am is practically bare.  And I do not know for a fact that the bare is practical.  Another possibly wrong impression I did not want to linger.  Not, by the way, that I am at all certain what I might want in the small room besides what is already here.  Or but even that I might want something other in the small room besides what is already here.

            It is already bad enough, turning away momentarily from the duck bedroll in the Bora corner only to find myself instantaneously overcome with the urgent suspicion that the duck bedroll is no longer in the Bora corner if only because I do not see it, even if peripherally.  I have the same fear of the table disappearing.  And the chair.  And the drain in the Mistral corner.  If I am at the drain, I am frequently looking over my shoulder to ensure that the table and the chair stay right where they were when I left them.  Same thing with the drain if I’m at the table, seated in the chair:  looking over my shoulder to make sure that nothing happens to my drain.

            Left them, I say, when what I mean is where they were when I stood up from the table and went maybe to the duck bedroll in the Bora corner.  Because I do not actually leave them.  Ever, hardly.  Or right them.  Again, ever, hardly.  Ha.

            My drain, I say, my drain in the Mistral corner, as though I can count the drain amidst my possessions.  This is one of the things that practically bare does for you:  you begin to count even the most nascent of objects as possessions.  My floor.  My wall.  My drain in the Mistral corner.

            I was trying to be funny.  When I said, Or right them.  I have no idea if it is clear that I am not funny.

            I do wonder if the Pi carver was the same carver as the one who carved on the incessant moebius strip.  Because if yes, then, was she also aware that if she switched from a right-handed strip to a left-handed strip that she might very well end up with a lemniscate?  If I had something to bet, I would bet that yes, she was aware that if she switched from a right-handed strip to a left-handed strip she might very well end up with a lemniscate.

            This, by the way, is not meant to exclude the possibility that she was left-handed.  She might, for instance, have started with a left-handed strip and then switched to a right-handed strip, her rightful inclination as a southpaw being to start with a left-handed strip.  Instead of a right-handed strip, I mean.  And I am presuming that by right-handed and left-handed strips it is understood that I am speaking of right-handed and left-handed moebius strips.  Still.  By which I mean the strips have not changed into something else. 

            Although it does again puzzle that they acquired the moniker of only one of their discoverers.  Because, again, why not the listing strip?  Or, the moebius-listing strip?

            It is surprising to me that in the history that was written for my existence it took until 1858 to figure out the non-orientable qualities of the strip.  It apparently took almost no time at all to figure out that potatoes, for instance, were edible, or that animal was better to eat if you made it very hot first, but then, seemingly forever to begin to grasp the qualities of a looping band that seemingly eats itself.

            It does occur to me that the Pi carver probably sat in this very chair at this very table thinking the same thing about my drain, repeating Here.  I.  Am.  Thinking the same think about her drain, of course I meant.  By which I mean, thinking that it was her drain.  Not some other’s.

            Here.  I.  Am.  She thought.  Probably over and over again, carving her Pi and her moebius strip.  I.  Am.  Here. 

            Carve, carve, carve.

            Do Lord o do Lord o do remember me I’ve got a home in Glory Land that outshines the sea o do Lord o do remember me.

            Which is something I sing to myself, on the occasions when it gets really bad.  Well, sing:  something I hear in my head like a song.  On the occasions when it gets really bad, that is.  Sometimes, too, when it’s just normal.  Normal, that is, being the term I use to designate how I feel it must be for everyone other.  Than myself, I mean.

            Everyone other’s level of normal being what I, supposedly, according to the Great Man and some of all of the people here, should be thinking about aspiring towards.  Why can’t you just be normal, the Great Man might say, repeatedly. 

            Say repeatedly, I mean.  Not just be normal repeatedly, the Great Man might say.

            Which should not make me sad, but then, somehow, does.  Not being normal.  And not the Great Man exercising every possible opportunity to point out my inability to obtain the level of everyone other’s normal.

            It should but this is not what makes me sad.

            It is the It that makes me sad.

            When I was just a little kid, I enjoyed building forts in the tall grasses of the vacant lots around the house in which I was raised.  The grasses were not so tall, by the way.  Maybe three feet at most.  But I was not so big that I could not hollow out an area and completely disappear from sight. 

            I can imagine the Pi carver and I sitting in my hollowed-out fort, discussing the principles of the moebius strip.  For instance.  Or why Möbius and not Listing, or both.  For instance.  I can imagine her name being something like Penny.  Short for the old-fashioned Penelope.  Well, old-fashioned:  as old as a muse might turn out to be.

            We could trade marbles in the fort.  She’d give me a steely for three of my tiger-eyes.  It would be okay because I have a lot of tiger-eyes.

            Sometimes when you think about something that is sad for a long enough time, it no longer makes you sad.  It quits having the saddening effect upon you.  Instead, it simply buries you.  It buries you and you no longer even really remember what made you sad, you do not any longer exactly know what happened that you were saddened over.  And maybe you do not even exactly feel sad anymore because you no longer know the difference between what sad feels like and what not sad feels like.  And but by then, you are buried.  Then being when you no longer know the difference between what sad feels like and what not sad feels like.

            For over, you might also possibly read about.  Saddened about, it would then read.  Or Saddened regarding.  And for you, in this case, you the third person can read you the second person as I.

            You are buried then because but when you reach the stage where you cannot say exactly what the something was that saddened you in the first instance you are at the point where it is everything that is saddening you.  Well, everything and everyone.

            Even if you are in your hidden fort with Penny, playing marbles and winning because you have properly traded for a steely and steelies can beat other marbles almost every time if you are a good enough aim, and even if you are winning and no one can find you because you are hidden in your fort with Penny, even then you might accidentally be buried.

            Penny is okay with losing at marbles because it is not really the game that matters so much to her as it is the opportunity to expound on her theory of how infinity was discovered.  Penny is okay with losing because she takes the Hellenistic view of infinity, a view that in your opinion is infinitely less sad than the Indian view that you have adopted.  Even though, on the surface of it, it would seem that a view that seemingly embraces multiple lives would be the less sad of the two. 

            Penny, by the way, discredits both Euclid and Archimedes and accredits the discovery of the infinite to someone she calls Artemeaus.  I have never heard of an Artemeaus, by the way.  Which is not to say that Artemeaus does not, or rather, did not, exist, but is just to say that Artemeaus certainly does not receive very much credit in the classical texts on the notion of the infinite.  Penny explains that Artemeaus was stoned for his views and made to drink hemlock and was run out of town on a rail and that she is the 24^th reincarnation of Artemeaus’ restless and wandering spirit.

            I win another round of marbles.

            Penny claims that Lewis Carroll was also one of Artemeaus’ descendents, as it were.

            This is how you can become buried.

            Even your imaginary friends can contribute by creating imaginary Greek philosophers who somehow endow their spirit through the ages to such luminaries as Lewis Carroll.  Because how can you argue with this?  Or, worse, why would you want to?  Sometimes the dirt hits you and you know it and you know where it’s coming from and you know that at some juncture in the future it will stop, and sometimes the dirt hits you and you have no idea where it is coming from or how long it is going to last or when it is going to stop or for that matter for when read if.

            Penny is, by the way, full of theories.  Not just about infinity, either.  Theories about things other than infinity, I mean.

            Penny has theories on grammar, on the French, on phallocentric politics, on hyper-realism as practiced in the 20^th/21^st century as opposed to how it was practiced in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, on why the 20^th and 21^st century could and should be considered one century, which doesn’t make sense until you hear her explain it, on my notion that history begins and ends with the individual, on photography as an art form, and on how she is not simply a character in my own personal history.

            But and on other things, too.  Theories, I mean, on other things, too.

            Such as Russell being wrong about Pythagoras.  Because, in Penny’s reasoning, if Pythagoras, then definitely instead Anaximander.

            Heraclitus, I might argue, being a more natural choice than someone named Artemeaus.  Someone, I might and do occasionally add when I am speaking with Penny on the subject, that oddly enough no one other seems to have ever heard of, by the way.  Artemeaus, I mean.

            Never having been heard of.

            Artemeaus taught Heraclitus how to tie his shoes, Penny’s rejoinder will be to my argument.  Or some such.  Because if I do not posit Heraclitus, and say instead I posit a more natural choice, such as the afore acknowledged Euclid, she will rejoin with the factoid that Artemeaus taught Euclid the proper purpose of toilet paper and where to use said toilet paper.  On his body, I mean.  I mean, Artemeaus taught Euclid where on his body to properly use toilet paper.  According to Penny, that is.

            Because imagine the first person who dug up a potato and stuck it in his mouth.  Or, her.  And then you sort of have to imagine that same person, the one who takes a potato and sticks it in their mouth, as quickly probably figuring out the principle of washing off the dirt, perhaps.  The dirt off of the potato, that is.  Because otherwise, a mouth full of mud, basically.  And then but you learn to wash off the dirt only to figure out fairly quickly that there is a skin on the potato.  Because so, then the conundrum:  which is what you are supposed to eat?  The skin or the stuff beneath the skin.  Because until you do something with the potato, the skin and the stuff beneath it taste pretty much the same.  Bitter, being how they taste.

            At some point, you have to learn how to boil.  Because you sort of have to figure that frying, as a option for cooking potatoes, came much later than boiling.  Or baking, even.

            Penny does not, that I know, have a theory on the first potato-eaters.  She says that only the forlorn would waste time on thinking about such obvious things.

            Forlorn.  I can only normally reply, Oh yeah?

            It is when she says things like essentially calling me forlorn that I quit for a while imagining what the Pi carver might think about the carvers who have come before her.  Or him.

            Here I am, do Lord.  Alone, oh do Lord or do remember.  Me, I mean.

            Maybe what the Pi carver and I are discussing is why I always put an e in Moebius when we both know, the Pi carver and I, that Möbius’ name was not spelled with an e.  Well, was.  For the second was, please read is.  Möbius’ name is not spelled with an e.

            Because it is when Penny says things like essentially calling me forlorn or a waste or stupid that I quit for a while imagining that Penny even is the Pi carver and start remembering that I used to think that the Pi carver might be Tony.  Only a stupid waste might think something like that, being what Penny might sometimes say when she is in complete disagreement with me.  Or when she is so sure of herself that she can allow for no possibility such as maybe I am correct about something.

            Or but when maybe I have a point to what I am saying.  Which very certainly depends upon what we are speaking about.  My having a point, I mean.

            Which is one of those times that I start thinking that the Pi carver isn’t Penny at all, or Penelope, but is instead Tony.  Who is also allowed to play marbles in my fort.

            For a lot of the times that I use the word can, as in can imagine and can contribute, read do.  Do imagine, do contribute. 

            Do become buried.

© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas