Myth of Arrival

There is no forgiveness for the greedy
since there is no greed. Sin bores me.
Talking of it. Stating that there must be,
smugly, one fixed value to this, to
anything, continually prove wrong.
Woman conceives with her sister's
ovary. That is not the function of this
poem. West Virginia College girls
give it all away and confessing to
crimes? That is not poetry's function.
Has your advice ever solved
suffering? These wars, like sex,
continue. Take me out tonight I’ll
do you good — she said — abortion
is just as essential as food, passion,
water, god. There isn't an original
sin that has not been done. All your
zillion crimes and the world has yet
to stop. Take me out and I’ll go
down on you I’ll do anything to hear
you say have a ball artful dodger,
who was cast out? Our cowardice
springs from a world of thrilling unknowns,
all of this both swine and vicious.

There is no forgiveness for the greedy
since there is no greed. Sin bores me. Talking
of it. Stating that there must be, smugly,
one fixed value to this, to anything,
continually proves wrong. And confessing
to crimes? That is not poetry's function.
Has your advice ever solved suffering?
These wars, like sex, continue. Abortion
is just as essential as food, passion,
water, god. There isn't an original
sin that has not been done. All your zillion
crimes and the world has yet to stop. Artful
dodger, who was cast out? Our cowardice
springs from a world thrilling, unknown, vicious.

The topic of "sin" came up recently in a conversation and I began wondering if there was a universal sin? They say there is a universal mother but I was curious if there was something everyone could look at and say, "that is a sin" and no one ever would disagree. The more I thought about it the more I concluded sin is simply a social construction and that most of us confuse the idea of sin with our own inner demons, thus making life miserable for everyone else.

I think you can tell a person who believes in universal sin a mile away because the things they are upset about and outraged over and standing in front of Planned Parenthood with picket signs all day long for and claim are "sins" are always things that change with public moods and times. I am obsessively listening to Sonny Rollins right now but not that long ago many people thought jazz a sin. It is hard for me to believe that but its hard for me to believe in racial superiority and loads of people of all colors go around spouting out the worst nonsense you ever heard so just because a room full of fools say it is true doesn't mean it is, I suppose. I mean, look at the Promise Keepers. If you want to see an example of repressed homosexuality self-hatred just go to one of those meetings and talk to their members. Their own fear of being seen as an "other" makes them both hate themselves and hate everyone around them. Thus, they say, "being gay is a sin." That is what you call faulty logic, or as Ghandi would put, bullshit.

But perhaps obsessive behavior is a sin to some? It can certainly cause misery. But is it a sin? I wrote this note to a friend this morning:

Have you ever become obsessed with a song and played it over and over, irritating all those around you but you can't get it out of your veins? In fact, you know it so well that all the little shifts in tone and the building of noise and sound gives you tingles as you ride out the wave the song makes? I've been listening to this one cut by Sonny Rollins, Sonnymoon For Two, and I can't get enough of it! I mean each note the saxophone makes I get geeked over, the rising and rolling of the notes building up and the drums in the background. I wave my hands , wig-wagging about, grinning at the pauses and low bits of sound. I've hit repeat on the CD player … what? 8 times so far and I think there will be a 9th right after I am done with this …

There was and a 10th and 11th as well. Is saying "geeked" a sin? The inconstancy of the human soul makes it hard for me to take almost anything seriously but who I really feel sorry for (if they existed) are robots. I mean, Star Trek Conventions aside, I always found the Cyber Punk genre's obsession over artificial intelligence and cyborgs and whatnot and whether robots have their own morality or not a tad bit … obsessive? neurotic? boring? But to give the authors and legions of fans the benefit of the doubt, no, they don't. End of argument. That's why I feel sorry for the robots. They don't even have enough creativity to be banal about what they consider sinful like we do. Perhaps being banal is a sin? Making misery for the rest of us because you haven't worked out your own bad karma? It is as the Star-bellied Sneetches all know:

… [They] had bellies with stars.
The Plain-bellied Sneetches had none upon thars.
The stars weren't so big; they were really quite small.
You would think such a thing wouldn't matter at all.
But because they had stars, all the Star-bellied Sneetches
would brag, "We're the best kind of Sneetch on the beaches."

Ah, humanity, I love you!

If you're going to read one book about sharks you need to read Richard Ellis and John E. McCosker's The Great White Shark (HarperCollins, 1991). It helps set the record straight. Unless you live in the ocean a fear of sharks is like a fear of all other things: superstitious, illogical, irrational. Fears based on ideas and not experiences.

Still, living only on a crap diet of bad movies like Jaws and Deep Blue, you have no reason to challenge your assumptions. Luckily there are people out there like and his webiste, Sharkman's World. On the left side you will find a list of links. Click on "Sharkman's Downloads." Scroll down and click on this link and go to commercial for Arena swimwear. It's a download video. I love this video. I simply love it.

Today I happen to smile when
I squint I squint all the time these
days I squint because the sun is
always shining into my eyes off
building rising it is always rising
and in my eyes and I am lucky
I smile today I fell and dislocated
my ghost you laughed which
was rude I was going back to
haunt the homes of all those I
do not know. Which is a lot.
Everyone, in fact. All the grays
and monochromes. All the duck-
people and fox-people, hot
with blood, cool like foil.
It's tommyrot to say I am
not a ghost. "This is how the dead
dress," I tell the kids in black.
"What? is hell really that drab?"
a girl asks. I was flitting about
when I fell. It's low-brow to think
the dead don't flit. They pass
you by all the time and you never
noticed. I fell and dislocated my
ghost and now the sun is in my
eyes. It's logical if you think
about it. I use to frown. You
called it "sad eyes." No, I answered,
I've seen sad eyes. I use
to look into the eyes of sharks.
I love that sharks mate for life.
I love that they migrate like
whales through the Pacific.
I love that they play like cats,
they tease their pups, when
left undisturbed. It's logical
if you think about it. It's all
a matter of size. It's all
a matter of watching their
eyes, black and flat and god
you could see the whole empty
ocean in there, all that we have
done, a whole planet of emptiness
stretching back to the sun, rising
up, blinding us with
the dawn of creation.

The Monolators from L.A. released a new video for their single, We Fell Dead. Ever wondered what Eli and Mary look like as a dictators in snazzy uniforms? Check it out and find out!

Sad news! Richard Peel's free bizarre clipart has been taken off the web! I loved his drawings and all I could find was Mr. Smallsmall Squeezy, which is cute but also sort of … small. Oh well, Richard Peel, R.I.P.

Today in Grand Rapids it was warm and brilliant outside for November and I went out into the sun and took off my big overcoat with the buttons and my woolly-down scarf and rolled up my red sweater sleeves and watched humanity on their lunch break. When people aren't talking I love them dearly. I can understand why there are so many nudists in Norway and South Dakota because we in northern climes see the sun so rarely after October we need every pore in our body to soak in the rays, let our DNA remember what sunlight feels during those long, dark months. I have no problem with nudists … I just wish most of them weren't so hideous to look at.

So I went to the public library and found a book with a title like Know Your Body: 1954 with drawings of hairless men and women with no genitalia all smiling (I think they were Dutch) and I started thinking about all the parts of the body that make us up and how identical we all are with slight difference which we hold up as important while ignoring the vast similarities. We might have different skin hues but we all got spleens that look the same.

Then I found a book by Robert Crumb (who has stooped so low his comics appear in The New Yorker, has he no shame?) about the dead German neurotic Franz Kafka. It was well worth the read, unless you don't like looking at cartoons of Kafka in various stages of bizarre behavior and nudity. A passage that caught my eye read:

Letter writing … is an intercourse with ghosts, not only with the ghost of the receiver, but with one's own, which emerges between the lines of the letter being written … Written kisses never reach their destination, but are drunk en route by these ghosts (Crumb, 65)

And I thought, "that is how I feel with all these people I have been walking around with in this city today. I don't know them, never will but because we are all enjoying the same warm air I feel drawn to them …" but not them of course, but to the idea I have of them, their ghosts as Kafka would put it.

Which raises the question, to all my friends I write to, who I never have met but feel ecstatic and connected to, is it the person behind the letter I feel ecstatic about or their ghost?

Everybody I pass by has the burden
of potential I love potential, the potential
of potential, the hunger for all things
I can't have. For all the things I will
never know. Not in the Biblical sense.
Not like William Carlos Williams knew,
sad and pathetic confessing on his
deathbed to his legions of affairs. No.
I do not want to end in a pool of ridicule
but I love that Goethe never had sex
until he was 40 or that Kafka lay in bed,
night after night, writing "so alone, so
very alone" in his notebook with doodles.

It gives me hope for the rest of us
since it all ends the same anyway:
dirty coloring, our flesh tones
mangled, our shrill accents fading.
Among all these office workers and
skateboarders and break dancers
and poets out on this warm day and
kids handing out fliers for fund
raisers for battered women's shelters
will any one of us pay attention to
another's bones? another's skull? our
skeletons under siege pumping out
blood? We ignore so much you ignore
my femoral, I know you do. My
femoral! and the thing which owns
all this sickening pap. Behind these
tones and hues and morass of
color is — what? fire? a spark? some
dull spirit that moans in its cage? I

love it all. The fleshy-rot smell I find
everywhere. Our passions caught in
flesh, pathetic, diseased, but still
passions. And this, everything — every
misbegotten body, every flesh-born
fire, all passing by — bodies I will
never have, bodies I will never
know and again I say I do not
want what I cannot have is still a lie.

Work Cited

R. Crumb's Kafka; art by Robert Crumb; script by David Zane Mairowitz. New York: Ibooks: Distributed by Simon & Schuster (2004)