For M.W.

There is no transcience of twilight in
The beauty of your soft dusk-dimpled face,
No flicker of a slender flame in space,
In crucibles, fragility crystalline.
There is no fragrance of the jessamine
About you, no pathos of some old place
At dusk, that crumbles like moth-eaten lace
Beneath the touch. Nor has there ever been.

Your love is like the folk-song's flaming rise
In cane-lipped southern people, like their soul
Which burst its bondage in a bold travail;
Your voice is like them singing, soft and wise,
Your face, sweetly effulgent of the whole,
Inviolate of ways that would fail.
                 -Jean Toomer

Devastation

I am awake for months now
It is too painful for me to sleep
For love in all its subtleties
Has gutted me and left me breathless
upon your altar

A poem and a strategy

So, I've recently been a bit torn about posting my poetry here, as I am getting more serious about getting published. What I have decided to do is to post only those pieces that I feel wouldn't fit anywhere else. To be clear, this does not mean that I'm only going to post my 'bad' poetry here, but rather that I will simply be posting poems that don't feel to me like they belong in any journal for one reason or another. So without further ado, here's a poem on the Drake Equation:

The math is simple
The number of possible civilizations in the galaxy
is the number of new stars per year (big)
divided by the number that have planets(small)
then the number that could have life(just the possibility)
then the number that will actually have life(the reality of it)
then of those, the few that gain sentience (we are aware)
of these, the ones that can transmit
and last, multiply by their lifespan.
The universe is at least 14 billion years old.
There are billions of new stars every year.
We have been sentient for a million years.
We have been listening for 60.
But in all this numerical babble,
I learned something greater than science;
something as important as the knowledge that the soul
is infinite and immeasurable, and applied over all universes.
the point of the equation is not that the universe is very big
the point is that we are not
that life as we know it-
self-defining, self-organizing life-
is rare and significant.
The point is not to waste it.

To keep going

Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.

-Kurt Vonnegut

Of the Simpsons, and why I'm conflicted about it

I am, like most Americans and many people around the world, a Simpsons fan. Have been for a long time. I am however , fully aware of the shift that the show seems to have taken from being edgy, cutting comedy to being rather wholesome fare. I was relatively sure of this feeling until last night when I saw this:



In case you couldn't tell, that was the opening couch gag for last night's episode. Dark, huh? Also, it was storyboarded and directed by Banksy, marking the first time that an outside artist has designed the couch gag.

This causes conflict for me largely because, I had just been having a conversation about how the Simpsons was no longer as daring as Family Guy, but also because the episode which followed it was still pretty non-outrageous fare.

Now, it's not that I don't like shows like the one last night, (Professor Frink's line about baseball only being understood by the Poin-dexterous was great), and I do like having my heart warmed occasionally by ep's like last season's "The Squirt and The Whale", but I find it hard to hold them in the same esteem as Family Guy, largely because the shock value that standalone jokes provide is missing. The Simpsons still puts out 26 new well-crafted episodes a year, which is an accomplishment, but maybe the show has failed to shift with society. Maybe The Simpsons becoming a global icon, meant that they couldn't shock us anymore, because now we have the sensibilities of their writing staff. The Simpsons is preaching to the choir, which sadly means that Family Guy is on it's way there too. Oh well, things could be worse, and I'll always remember lines like this one from Family Guy's season premiere:

Carl: So in the bear world, are pandas like your version of interracial children?
Bear: Yeah Pandas are something I don't agree with.
Carl: They're cute though right?
Bear: Just when they're babies.

On the difficulties of blogging

The longer I persist, against all reason, to blog, the more apparent certain things about me become. Things such as my fundamental laziness. You see, this post was going to be in list form, because everybody loves a good list, but me being genuinely distressed by the idea of having to reach the five inches from my laptop to my mouse, decided I should just go paragraph. Sadly, I also know the html tags for lists, but again, in an effort to avoid superfluous typing, (made all the more ridiculous by my use of words like "superfluous") I figured I'd stick with the basic structure. So here is a minor gripe session about why I blog, and what I've learned so far.

Complementarity Pt. 13 (the end)

I just realized that I didn't post the end to my magniloquent beast of a poem, so here it is, the final piece of Complementarity. Comment, let me know what you think:

As I sit under the burning kerosene star

                Of my inspiring voice

Your face begins to be transfixed

Your slender hand, limply like a grain of wheat

Is moved by some unseen spirit

A touch then!

An inciting of the asphodel to blooming!

A word escapes you...!

I have gone ahead to light the torches West

I have lit out for the frontier which we have set no thought on.

For you the day has begun anew;

For you the river has opened itself.

The greed of the first mile from town lights upon you

Here is a diner by the side of the road

I will stop for a moment, have a burger, cross the street

Reserve a room, lay my hat on the chair,

Lengthen my skeleton and sinews upon the bed

And be patient until I hear you ambling into town.