5/6/2020

sorry, skipped a day yesterday, because, well, i was tired.

i have included in my routines (don't really know why) the "reading" of manga. i read about 5 chapters of a couple of manga a day. i read "one piece" (don't really know why, except that it is one of the longest running manga in history, and it was consistently rated high in shonen jump, even higher than one of my favorites, naruto). i also read "berserk," which i find is a great story, filled with violence and darkness... i appreciate the pacing with which the author delivers his epic. i'm not sure if i could have that sort of patience, or if i have a vast space within me to imagine such a world from nothing...

***

i went to the food pantry today, which was at my school. i helped to pass out our little food offering, which was composed of a cabbage and onions, as well as some canned goods. it felt good to hand these things out to people. i wish it could've been something better. i worried that people would be disappointed at the offerings. but hey, food is food.

***

i know i was angry in my last postings. my brother is always a touchy subject with me. and as i've said countless times before, distance and absence only makes things worse for me. i start losing the capacity to appreciate things, to see things in perspective. i only see the negative contours. the shadows start swallowing up the form, until all i see is a blackness, and all i hear is mocking laughter.

i always think, in the end, that he is laughing at me. and by extension, god.

that's why i don't believe in it, that whole paternalistic, republican, white christian god. because it's fake. it's partial. it isn't the true god. the god i know is the one that hung out with the broken people. it's the god that was always broken himself, because only in knowing brokenness himself can he reach the broken. i hate perfection, because it is so false. nothing in the experience of man is ever, ever perfect. and to put that before us, that stinking perfection, is merely to push us away, to make us wallow in our self-disgust... i hate people who pretend that perfection. no, let me amend that, because i think it is natural to seek perfection, and perhaps it is noble and human to do so. but to pretend the arrival of it, or even the arrival of greater degrees of it, and to use that to judge the world. that is what i hate. watch fox news, and you'll see it in spades.

***

i hear the choppers, chopping the air. i feel a mild wind on my back, and wonder if it is from the ginsu knives of those helicopters.

the clouds won't give up their rain. i keep waiting for it, to fill my one constructed rain catchment system barrel. i keep waiting for it, to drown out and wash the world. but nowadays, the rain doesn't come. we just get this blaring sunshine that wilts some of my infant plants... it's just too brash and bright...

***

i like billy collins, although i feel his poems are a bit too- what's the word, clear? and too- folksy? i guess i prefer my poems to be either lyrical or obscure. to play with language to the point of breaking it. of course, i don't like my poems to be entirely obscure or mysterious. i found t.s. eliot to be completely unreadable. too many external references, too many foreign verses. i didn't get it. i mean, there were fragments of it that seemed sympathetic, what i mean by that is that i could resonate with them, like the hollow men part. but most of it? blech.

i think the danger of talking about poetry is that it can turn poetry into some sort of intellectual gimmick. and it isn't, it shouldn't be. it shouldn't just be a process. or rather, it shouldn't be a process that is coopted by the mechanistic rational mind. it should be a fracturing, or an exploration of the edge of a break... an incautious exploration that cuts the soles of your feet, and leaves you bleeding footprints- incautiously- over the landscape. it should be a- not knowing where you are going- that somehow ends up where you are supposed to be- but never giving the reader the expectant view of an arrival... i don't know.

poetry should shock. it should be the knife that impales your back. or the ice cold water that you fall into, when your weight becomes too much for the paper thin sheet...

***

sorry, that's all i have to say for today.