On the Avenues of Revenue
Advantage believes peoples’ memories
Be too short to take into account
I can’t recall who it was who said that
People understand anything can be said
Poets who are people know this too
Does this explain everything?
Some believe saying anything repeatedly
Will incline people to believe it
Poets love repetition as much as anyone
Maybe more than many
I wonder if to be the humblest thing
Might be a solution
If I could name it I could say
Be that way
Sugary Surgeries
I followed the heart attack
down the grazing horse’s neck
through topsoil and nematodes
through worm holes and roots
through underground rivers
through schools of blind fish
and up like silent lightning
into the man’s useful groin
it continued on its path
along a hawk’s thermal sleep
until it found its way down
a weak breeze near a tin thorn
it could bore a hole into and wait
there as long as it saw fit
A Poem Written by TomaĹľ Ĺ alamun
A poem written by John Keats
Death by firing squad
Life taken by force
Born and begot, begotten
Reborn and Stolen
A poem written by C.P. Cavafy
A poem written by Raphael Alberti
A fight with an other
A twice broken family
Work for some other
Talk with a friend
Love of a sister
A poem written by Emily Dickinson
Refusing love to feel more pain
Empathy does not require assuming another’s pain, empathy recognizes
the pain someone has while doing what you can to respect it. Emotional
contagion is not empathy.
A story about a blind child is not for pretending you’re blind. Someone
failing into dementia is not for pretending everyone around you is losing
their minds, if you hear of someone who despises their family it doesn’t
ask you to take steps to begin to despise yours.
Lines crossed and stories inhabited that do not belong together, it is not
for you to misunderstand, for your own sake to steal another’s pain to
have that pain be your own. That is not empathy.
That’s a kind of pathology —it is also true you already have pain enough,
plenty of pain to go around, And you have the shame of your pain, your
shame and its self-doubt claim a steep price, In hard cold cash, so it
seems, this is not empathy it is your sorrow masquerading as understanding,
it’s melancholia masquerading as caring, it’s the suffering of saints and
martyrs, and as so many of their stories go, dangerous games of self-annihilation,
or so I tell myself.
A Birthday Wish
Even when there is less me to miss you more/ As luck would have it
someone else takes care/ Having luck makes it clear/ Another way of saying
Chance/Indifferently & fate jealously take turns/ Bossing who gets to see
who/ In the end and along the way will be/ Staring into fire, hypnotized
by water pinpoints/ Stamina, love & desire/ Can and mostly will hold
up the borderlines / Far be it for me to pretend it is me who determines
the petrichor I favor/And faithful turns to words & song and dogs/
Skymist, mystery, eyemist and mystic river/ I miss most everything there is
prior to its loss./ Even when there is less me to miss you more.
