Thursday, June 11, 2020

to sip at the lacrimal glands of chaos

  • If I'd offered million to one odds on a dollar on May 25, 2020
  • goddamn Columbus statues beheaded and NASCAR betrays the Confederacy by June 10, 2020 
  • I'd settle the million you'd owe me buying me one imaginary digital pint
  • I hadn't the vision to make that bet
  • Gaslighting
  • Two nights ago 
  • I never messed with this blog's fonts or
  • monkeyed margins much less tested
  • new visual identities, it's been eons
  • since I even did you see it...
  • I don't remember May in June 
  • I won't remember June in July, July in August, August in September, September in October, I bet I remember October 2020
  • I never cursed on this blog, my apologies for the above gXXXXXm





COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS

Dean Young

I love you for shattering.
Someone has to. Just as someone
has to announce inadvertently
the end of grief or spring’s
splurge even as the bureaucracy’s
spittoon overflows. Someone has to come out
the other end of the labyrinth
saying, What’s the big deal?
Someone has to spend all day staring
at the data from outer space
or separating the receipts
or changing sheets in sour room after room.
I like it when the end of the toilet paper
is folded into a point.
I like napkins folded into swans
because I like wiping my mouth on swans.
Matriculates, come back from the dance floor
to sip at the lacrimal glands of chaos,
a god could be forgiven
for eating you, you’ve been such angels
just not very good ones.
You’ve put your tongue
into the peanut canister
of your best friend’s girlfriend’s mom.
You’ve taken a brown bag lunch
on which was writ another’s name.
All night it snows a blue snow
like the crystallized confessions
you’ve wrung from phantoms
even though it is you wearing the filched necklace,
your rages splitting the concrete like dandelions.
All that destruction from a ball of fluff!
There’s nothing left but hope.

2 comments:

  1. speaking of commencement addresses

    1)a few years ago i was shocked - shocked! - when a guy i knew repeated the false vonnegut massachusetts institute of technology commencement address story with 'wear sunscreen' advice - it was shocking to hear this from him because he actually had graduated from mit

    snopes tells us

    Claim: In 1997, Kurt Vonnegut gave an unusual commencement address at MIT.


    Status: False.

    Legend: According to a text circulating all over the Internet, Kurt Vonnegut was the 1997 commencement speaker at MIT. His speech supposedly began as follows:




    Ladies and gentlemen of the class of ’97:

    Wear sunscreen.

    If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.


    2)there is a commencement address genuinely given by kurt vonnegut


    Kurt Vonnegut, in his 1999 commencement address to Agnest Scott College in Georgia (the whole thing is worth reading, and mentions the sunscreen meme - see http://apps.npr.org/commencement/speech/kurt-vonnegut-agnes-scott-college-1999/) quoted Jesus while blaming many of the world's problems on revenge:

    What antidote can there be for an idea that popular and poisonous? Revenge provides revenge, which is sure to provide revenge, forming an endless chain of human misery.

    Here's the antidote: Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

    Amen.

    Some of you may know that I am a Humanist, not a Christian. But I say of Jesus, as all Humanists do, ''If what he said was good and so much of it is absolutely beautiful, what can it matter if he was God or not?''



    3)vonnegut described forgiveness as 'the one good idea humankind has had' - maybe some day we will have another good idea - he had the sense it might have something to do with music

    ReplyDelete