Thursday, February 14, 2013

Emotions: Can You Trust Them? or, Emotions in the Chris-Life


Chapter One:  Football and Mosquitoes

You're about to read a book about human emotion and its impact on high school in 1930 and some other things.  In a small Oklahoma town which had produced a series of terrible football teams, the students and their parents began to get depressed and dispirited.  It must have been awful.

Finally, a wealthy oil producer decided to take matters into his own hands.  This businessman proceeded to offer a brand new Ford to every boy on the team and to each coach if near the end of a day a mosquito listened to the sounds of the night, wondering if emotions are powerful forces within the human mind.

Even the young and the brave experience the sun disappear beyond the horizon.


Chapter Two:  Games

My father assumed someone was holding the door shut from the other side.  My terrified mother, on the other hand, could feel feel the killer trying to force tug-of-war.  Mother then decided to personalize the issue at hand.  A commitment to one another is based on the excitement the couple shares.


Chapter Three:  Destined Infections

Need for self-control is emphasized by one darn thing after another.  Every two weeks an ingrown toenail becomes infected or a business crisis develops.

This is the nature of human destinies.

This statement was intended to convey one primary message: emotions must always be

a dominant role in disappointment.  Satan is

a person who experiences deep feelings.


Chapter Four:  Rhetorical Questions for Zen

Can parents influence the absence of guilt?

Why do so many couples become kept alive?

Is all anger handled for the Chris?

Does being morally right in a particular instance justify biblical understandings?


Chapter Five:  Guilt the Powerful Emotion

Few human emotions are as distressing and painful as feelings of guilt and personal disapproval.

Since the voice of the conscience speaks from inside

we cannot escape.

An internal taskmaster is on the job

with expectations
and even personal hatred.

But is all guilt harmful?
A husband may go to work when he would rather go fishing.


Chapter Six:  Ruminations

One summer they hired a 15 year old boy to water their emotion.  He confessed he had entered their house one day to bring in the mail and had seen a stick of gum lying on a table.  He stole the gum and chewed it, but had suffered intense guilt ever since.  The weeping young man then took a penny from his pocket and asked them to accept it as repayment for the stolen gum, requesting their forgiveness for his dishonesty.

Now what do you think was the origin of his remorseful guilt?

I have presented the illustration.
Perhaps his parents or his minister had made him feel.


Chapter 7:  Inspirations

Some feelings of guilt are obviously inspired.

When a mother and father realize that they are individually responsible for the distorted, broken, intellectually damaged child before them, the family is destroyed.


Chapter 8:  The Pow, The Young Man

Undeserved guilt is the most pow.

To accuse, torment, and berate his victims, a young man was extremely sensitive to the voice of his conscience.  If he saw some glass on a sidewalk but failed to remove it, he felt guilty for having caused a possible wound to a child.  And of course, his inability to stifle every inappropriate sexual impulse created further agitation.

This young man fell.


Chapter 9:  Hitler and the 66 Percent

Adolph Hitler experienced the arms of their screaming parents and snowstorms.  Hitler conceived and implemented remorse.  Likewise, Joseph Stalin is said to have no obvious deathbed.

Perhaps the most effective silencer for the conscience is found in widespread social opinions.

One study reveals that 66 percent of today's college students "like a lot" of the opposite sex.


Chapter Ten:  Standards

And of course, the ultimate standard on which guilt is evaluated must be "The Department of Emotions."

But there is a third division of emotions called "The Department of the Will."  This is a vitally important mental faculty for it deals with willful disobedience.

Let me explain my point.  Suppose I gave my three-year-old son a direct order:  "Ryan, please close the door."

He did not obey me.





Valentine's Day: A Translation of Pablo Neruda's Long Poem, "Valentine's Day"


1.  Wine Before Leaving

The morning is an apple full of tempests,
Red as the chorus on the truth of wine.

Like white small breads the ocean’s waves fare young hands
Well to the wind; its handkerchiefs like graying birds.

Numberless chorus of latitude,
Soberly ours and enamored of silence,
Zumba between the sounding trees
Resonant as a tongue fooled of war and songs.

Bear off the arrows of quick milk
And the dead pulsing latent birds.

Wind topples the derided spume of sin
And sustains the volume of kisses.

You combat the door with leaving,
Like an orchestral tree, latent with birds.

Don’t go, now the grapes
See leggings fit to my words
More than I can costume,
Guilty of gavels, noise, and misery on beaches.

2.  To Govern the Sea

Leaning tardy into the tear of my sad readies,
I cast red reeds.

There in the high ardency
Your arms turn bronzed
Distant as a coast
Of spines, tasseling the blue land.

I send out senatorial eyes
The sea gallops to regard but shed.

Stories to tell you...

I who lived in a harbor, trembled
Toy ravens ripe with thirst.
Like a spider able to celebrate
You with a timid deliriousness netted between teeth,
Something sings penned between sadness algebraic and undead words.

Like kisses tremendous with roseate cement,
I steer the fast seal drawn toward death.
Torqued, pale, lashed to agricultural water,
An abandoned chimera mounts my only way.

Becalmed in the throat of your cool hips,
Practice roses on me; parallel the other fish.

3.  Neck of Despair

Anguish twenty in its pain arrests me.
We tumble like hurricanes dreaming of each thumb
We hear supplicate for old blood.

Love me, abandon me.  On this "hello" stained
With your love, pass and occupy everything.

I am making an infinite neck
To stretch like calm water and canvas
Above the blank laced grapes collaring your face.

4.  Hatching

Hatching birds into the laps of broken faces,
You burn like a belfry at the hands of tenderness.

Marking, I have gone across
With trembling cats retaining water
The fugitive map of your body.

My mouth went across: a net of fire, trying to catch
         something or catch on.

5.  Thirst

From the night great roots
Fall like a dark sweatervest.
A butterfly silent as a lap of frightened rose
Has come to hear, pressing, the flutter.

Statuesque and naked as a nose
Your eyes fasten, in search of hastened hope.

But the vast digit of pines, rumors the breaking murmurs,
And the slow juice of light camps solitary
In the closing-coyote of your toy-dolls.

In you the canteen sings like a river;
As you desire, send me out
So I may return a bandage of arrows
Fetching back my aim to your waist of fogged nests.

I caucus with said-thirst in the dark river-beds
Until you look like a world, a white hill of colons.

You have deep hours in which the rose flails.
Cool arms of dark fright and a lap of glued shells.

6.  Here I Love You

At nine, the snow like a cinema makes new figures.
A plated gavel slips the cargo out of the occasion.

Here I love you.
In the pines disrobing the dark of the winds,
The moon soberly errant as phosphorescent waters,
Days, the same iguanas, go chasing their tails
And each others.

Alone, 
Sometimes I get up early.
Where I must put a humidifier to wet my woul
It is black as bark.

Between two motionless gondoliers,
Take yourself between the lips and the voice
As the starting point.
Here I love you--
Clenched in a cape of hurt dog
To learn the sources of sorrow
And roll towards the feet of evening
Erasing statues and coins and mountaintops.

Some of the Most Directions from Here



Morning under a stack of toasted hamburger buns
I found seeded free green lumber and knew
It was time to finally get the bed zolofted
And clear a space for going under.

East was the bed and South was too red.
North like the snow of Teachers driven hard before us
All the hope of history to date came express-mailed into sight--
Toothpicks in a blind line-up, faking their death as a possible escape.

In southern Brazil, it began raining social spiders.
Nelson Mandela loves Toddlers & Tiaras.
The tainted beef scandal grows
& they recall the British lasagnas.

Zero-sum cannibals offer an unlimited public transport pass
To a grateful multinational protection group
For the obligation-free infrastructure project
They'd guaranteed Chechen infoterrorists.

Down the hill and almost to last year
There were bad haircuts to get
In the hopes we could make
The old Polaroids more nearly near.

Under the national nursing home scenario, 
I dig a pit with two sanded sticks
And fill it with gingerbread men recycled 
From upcycled Old Spice and silent limbs.

My head is killing me--
No molecular shortcut to postponing death
Compels me to be relentlessly sunny.
I keep the pit open & atop like a prized hat.

And into the great pink outdoors,
Hooded with white whips I flagellate & chant, out of habits:
The world is my leper
I shall not want...


The moon is a horse eating water-
Chestnuts out of a pawned brainpan
But mostly it's a dog
In the sense of the playground
You've yet remembered till now only mostly.
Of course, this shouldn't make you think of celery,
But compelled to be relentlessly sunny,
It's so crisp that it does refresh nostalgia
Like a toothache televised in relentless morning syndication.

With the sun deeply involved in viral end-user license agreements,
Out of rayguns it was once again high-time
We started turning sexuality on and off
Like a stolen wallet in the 99th percentile
Of broken doors and roped, justified silence.

Inside, fitting decay like velvet into halved cantaloupes,
Johnny Bible was taste-testing the trail of blood
Into the final interview of the burgundy family room.
He didn't know it was too late, but I wouldn't have
Either or maybe I would have; it's hard to say,
As everyone sometime or another says.

Out in the long grass
Dorothy is discovering cream,
Mostly under the gums.
No one remembers,
Sitting or not sitting,
The Great Comedies anymore,
But Dorothy is using nasal spray
In certain great hopes
To prove whoever smelt it, dealt it.

Skyward, like a chicken deprived religiously of reason,
We cry the sky is falling like beheaded employment into its own lap.
Little did we know it was the fairest of seasons
Or that the job fair had come to town, giving away free pap.

Falling down is fun but moreso to watch.
I bought everyone a new swatch.
We could all keep Time’s arrow

Straight, even when the times were narrow
Like now, when everyone’s living off vegetables grown in old wheelbarrows.
Before the fall comes and between the hours

Of sitting or not-sitting, after April showers,
On futons behind curtains folding out to shadow more sooner, more now-er,
We sit in flip-flops rocking back & forth

Still warm but facing North
And drinking fresh whiskey sours
Debating some of the directions maybe taking from here.


Monday, February 11, 2013

Laker Poems


“Dwight is Howard” Was Wrong
No Longer Premature

“Dwight is Howard”
Was wrong

It was a league of stars                      
And then it wasn’t

It was and then
It wasn’t

It was
And now

We’re unsure
















 

1/5/13            NBA season standings

Eastern Conference                                                    Western Conference
1 .     Miami 22-9                                                                 1. Oklahoma City 25-7
2.      New York 23-10                                                          2. LA Clippers 26-8
3.      Atlanta 20-12                                                              3. San Antonio 27-9
4.      Indiana 20-14                                                             4. Golden State 22-10
5.      Chicago 18-13                                                            5. Memphis 20-10
6.      Brooklyn 19-15                                                           6. Houston 20-14
7.      Milwaukee 16-16                                                        7. Portland 18-15
8.      Boston 16-17                                                               8. Denver 18-18
  


Only playoff teams listed. LA Lakers 10 GB @ 15-17








Dwight Isn’t Howard

If Dwight Howard isn’t Dwight Howard anymore
Then the question becomes how can Dwight Howard
Bring Dwight Howard back—                      

Can Dwight Howard
Become himself
Become           Dwight Howard
Again?

            Likewise
What can the Lakers do
To become the Lakers            again?

            Must the Lakers must beat the Lakers
To become the Lakers?

Must the Lakers
Beat    themselves?
Beat    themselves?     in what?

Like the rest of the league
Can the Lakers even
Beat the Lakers?

Even Now       when everyone’s
Beating the Lakers?

Can the Lakers
at least            become            ok—







The Lakers beat
The Thunder tonite

Fifteen games back

Does this mean
Anything         to anyone outside LA?           

1/27-29           


A Break

Three in a row
Six of seven
Less than four
Back from eighth
Yet sixteen from one

The Lakers blew it
Lost to the streaking Cs

But next
The Bobcats

A break—













96-91
4th quarter
1:29 to go
and its kinda close
its a game

30-40
down ten after one
twenty in three
100-93 final

Kobe Bryant, Lakers pull away
in fourth, top Bobcats

that they had to
that it was kinda close
that     it was a game

2/7—2/9