Necrophilia

Why are humans afraid of death? Perhaps it is an evolutionary mechanism so that we can live long enough to reproduce and further our species, but even that seems like a very human and positivist response (although here too, death and love are interdependent). Perhaps it is the vertigo of realizing that eventually, any sense of identity we cling to will be erased forever. (Whoever said we have the right to an identity?) Why do we fear death! Perhaps no one knows, but the point is that we do fear it. We can do many things to prolong life; eating well, exercise, medicine, wearing seatbelts, etc. but the truth of the matter is that all living things must die. That is how we know we are living; awareness of death. Fear of death is fear of life. We understand very little about either or these two interconnected phenomena. When we try to have life without death, we effectively eliminate both and are not quite living, not quite dead. We love this state because it allows us to forget about death, if at the cost of resignation from life. Modern life is consumed with this obsession with death - this necrophilia. Our lives fall in to orderly, planned out, almost mechanical routines while real, rich and violent life always seems to exist someplace else and we are spared its threats, mainly death, as if such a thing we possible. We prefer to superficially transcend into an abyss of forgetfulness. Little do we know, this comfortable and quiet life is death. Or perhaps we do know, if subconsciously. Either way, we love it. We love death.

Sping is beautiful too

Perhaps to learn how to make ourselves happy
And then break down again.
Perhaps to have children who will have children
Who will die.
Perhaps because sunshine is so pure.
Perhaps because as children
We had no concept of nothingness.
Perhaps to buzz around in these studios
That would otherwise be so boring.
Perhaps to learn to tell the truth
Then to learn that is impossible.
Perhaps to make love on sunny afternoons
With Nick Drake on the stereo.
Perhaps to be given shelter
And then to be given rain.
Perhaps to dream.
Perhaps to learn the best way to peal garlic,
Grow beards, get sunburns.
To be preserved in glass; a few photos,
A song, a poem and then forgotten.
To inherit the question and then misplace in the rosemary...

To Salome with love

I’ve given myself away
I have nothing and can do no more.
I’ve spent days waiting
For my milk to be delivered.
To let her in and make a pot of coffee
Without obligation
And start talking
Watch her move slowly
From the kitchen, to the piano, to the bed
Brown hair curling and swinging
Like a caveman’s arms
Breaking the still air
With jingling bells and eagle feathers
Then on the horizon, the captain spies
The enemy sail.
A pink bed sheet, a t-shirt, socks.
I want to swim in the ocean and,
Like a whale, not come up for hours
Perhaps that would be enough time.
Guitars play in the cave
Lit up with fire and wine - hashish smoke
And she is there, waving hair deliberately, playing some castanets
Or some god-awful thing
She is awful, awe-inspiring, like God;
Cruelly beautiful.
Likewise?
No, I am ugly and kind.
But there is this Apollo 13 passion
(Lift off, explode, you know, go to the moon anyway.)
That still manages to leave me all baroque and sad,
7:30, Sunday morning, ready to puke.
I am week; oh, too human,
And painfully so, my one hope is round orbit that moon and bring it back home
My music? My love?
These are my too competing theologies
Without them I am lost in space; the superhuman realm of emotions;
Imagination without an outlet.
There she is in the cave, head swinging,
Hair all syncopated with her arms that hold the terrible castanets
I hear over the guitars, over the old gypsies
(all gypsies are old, either they are old or they seem old,
that’s how you know a gypsy)
I am drawn into the cave, out of the valley of expression
Into the depths of copulation, domesticity.
The gypsies growl and force me out
She shrugs, apologetically, continues her dance
I am no John the Baptist.