Monday, November 23, 2015

To My Audience (if there is one) An Explanation (if I need one)

The object of my writing has changed in
the last month. A causal factor might be
that I stopped drinking after fifty years, and
stopped smoking pot...both at the same
moment, overnight. How and why this 
happened aren't important here. What is
important is why my focus has changed.

For me now, it's no longer enough to write
abstract or romantic poetry about my 
experience in and of the world. To me, it 
feels like the Sixties all over again, only this
time the world is in an even greater state of
chaos and revolution. I feel the need to 
write about the world as clearly as I can see
it. If there is no one to listen, it goes into the
Akashic record, the universal consciousness,
so, at least, it's on record.

My generation was taught  to think for them-
selves. That's why we protested en masse,
why we were so hard to control. With 
succeeding generations, that has become 
no longer the case. And now, children are 
abused into stupefaction by such things as 
"Common Core", meaning there's not just 
one rotten apple in the barrel anymore.

Now, no one protests that their lives are 
being drained in oh so many ways. 
They watch people fall around them; the
latest mass shooting, (a form of protest?),
the latest suicide, the latest back flip into
the loony bin, and say to themselves:
"Thank God it's not me!"

But, it is "me", it is "you", it is "them"...it is
"us". We are afflicted with the engineered
insanity engulfing us at every turn. Eliot 
was right: this is the way the worked ends;
not with a bang, but with a whimper.

What can we do?

"Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights."
Intention is everything. Win or lose, 
intention carries forward, beyond the myth 
of linear time. If we don't lose our love, our
courage, our hearts, in spite of the odds, 
that energy, that intention, will never be lost,
but will find its time of fruition.

Art is fading, from beauty that informs as 
much as it uplifts and delights, to 
entertainment: just another drug meant to
stupefy and repress, dazzle and bewilder.
Even if I'm not such a great poet, I'm better
than whatever comes out of Hollywood.

me: "What do you think of Tom Cruise as an
actor?"

Marian Seldes: "Oh, I don't think of him as an
actor."

I can't just sit back in Tepoztlan, my 
Casablanca, my protected (for how long?)
paradise, and write nothing about the 
processes taking place in the world today.

I can't not rage against the dying of the light,
even though I  am no Hamlet, nor was meant
to be.

The fewer that listen, the greater the need to
sing and shout, the greater the need to work
it on out. Seeing the problem is the first step
in doing something about it, or at least,
finding a way to escape it. Shake it up, Baby.



































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