Sunday, March 31, 2019

IHTWTGADTLWLIPTD

  • Next (soon) tattoo
  • sixteen letters: IHTWTGADTLWLIPTD
  • right forearm, rightside-up for me 
  • one line of sixteen, two lines of eight, or box of four
  • maroon (too white to schoolbus yellow) or maybe jade
  • Barcoding me, occurred to me post-tattoo
  • odds I'm an All-Star Silver Alert in twenty
  • QR:


 


VAUCANSON

John Ashbery

It was snowing as he wrote.
In the gray room he felt relaxed and singular,
But no one, of course, ever trusts these moods.

There had to be understanding to it.
Why, though? That always happens anyway,
And who gets the credit for it? Not what is understood,
Presumably, and it diminishes us
In our getting to know it.

As trees come to know a storm
Until it passes and light falls anew
Unevenly, on all the muttering kinship:
Things with things, persons with objects,
Ideas with people or ideas.

It hurts, this wanting to give a dimension
To life when life is precisely that dimension.
We are creatures, therefore we walk and talk
And people come up to us, or listen
And then move away.

Music fills the spaces
Where figures are pulled to the edges,
And it can only say something.

Sinews are loosened then,
The mind begins to think good thoughts.
Ah, this sun must be good:
Doing a number, completing its trilogy.
Life must be back there. You hid it
So no one could find it
And now you can't remember where.

But if one were to invent being a child again
It might just come close enough to being a living relic
To save this thing, save it from embarrassment
By ringing down the curtain,

And for a few seconds no one would notice.
The ending would seem perfect.
No feelings to dismay,
No tragic sleep to wake from in a fit
Of passionate guilt, only the warm sunlight
That slides easily down shoulders
To the soft, melting heart.







5 comments:

  1. 20? Bullshit. I'll live to see it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. re - stop eating animals

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-impossible-foods-ceo-burger/vegetarian-patty-gets-the-burger-king-whopper-test-idUSKCN1RD1WO

    re silver alert


    1)

    Crimes and Dementia: What's the Connection?
    Frontotemporal dementia patients more prone to criminal behavior, postmortem analysis shows

    by Judy George, Senior Staff Writer, MedPage Today
    March 31, 2019

    Criminal and socially inappropriate behavior occurred more frequently in people who had frontotemporal dementia than Alzheimer's disease, a retrospective review in Sweden found. Instances of criminal behavior -- including theft, traffic violations, threats, pyromania, vandalism, and stalking -- were found in 42% of patients with pathologically verified frontotemporal lobar degeneration, but only 14.9% of patients with Alzheimer's disease, reported Madeleine Liljegren, MD, PhD, of Lund University, and colleagues.

    2)

    my male senior cat, whom we allowed outdoors, tried to wander away on his last day

    i chased him down, brought him back to the house, took him to the veterinarian, paid for his diagnostic procedures which revealed he was terminally ill, petted him while he received his lethal injection, brought him home in a box and buried him in the back yard

    now i wonder if i should have respected his urge to wander off and breathe his last alone in the woods

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's a tough one — involving an emotions-racking process of second guessing that's something many who've ever had pets can relate to, myself included, though I had someone else in mind of similarly caring character to yours, mistah c. Having just given it a bit of thought I could only come up with following him into woods to make sure he didn't suffer additional misery, which ultimately involves doing the deed there, which of course assumes one is aware of the terminality when one decides to let him stray farther than usual. That would mean, I guess, letting him stray wherever whenever always, which as I type seems to make moot everything I am saying. Now, trying to generalise the situation I conclude that it's really about weighing the risk of relenting's leading to the suffering of the potentially poor creature. Considering all that I'd say you did precisely the right thing and that you male senior cat was blessed.

      Delete
  3. re concerning humanity's future

    philosophy professor crispin sartwell predicts "in 30 years the world will still be beautiful"

    https://www.splicetoday.com/writing/go-ahead-and-have-babies-if-you-want

    ReplyDelete
  4. Probably s/b "IHMFDs" instead.

    ReplyDelete