In the Poet's Words

These words came to me after spending some much-loved time with the words of two particular poets: William Blake and Fernando Pessoa...

In the poet’s words

There comes...

No purity of amusement
No tidy rhythms
No market-crafted sentiments
No American Idol
No expert designs
No legal precision
Nothing that is ever spotless

Never any satisfaction...
For clarity-desires

***

The Nazi
Hated all
In the poet’s words
But (and why do people so often forget?)
He loved hygiene

Honorary Title: Master of Sanitation

Perhaps the original sin of the Nazi
Was a desire to produce...

(An insistence upon producing)

Cleanliness

And the second sin

A bureaucratizing of that desire

***

Beyond...
In another world
Far from those
Carefully formulated
(Anti-biotic)
Policies and procedures

Amidst a mess and a beauty
A messy beauty
Amidst overgrown vines
Uncut grass
A littered shoreline
Amidst all those un-see-able creatures
And (even worse)
Those see-able creatures
Crawling wiggling swarming
In the dirt beneath the feet
In the water we refuse to drink

Amidst such abundances
(Such undesired excesses)
We find again
And again and again
Something
Which is Alive

We accidentally uncover
Life
Overflowing
Twitching and squirming
Evading our pills and our bleach

And in this uncovering
We come to see
That the Alive
Is laughing
(And not with us)
Laughing at us
At our futile insistence

Yes...
We stumble upon
Life-Laughing
Life-Moving
Life-Loving

We fall into all of that

In the poet’s words