(no subject)

Better die infants, decided the gods, keeping us infants for lifetimes.

(no subject)

The trick to a poem, I think
is that we forget absolutely everything.

While obnoxious, this time-again reopens
the forever disintegrating path
to living again the best of all possible moments
which though of course neither taken nor recognized,
for the most part and maybe not ever, still
there is for a spell intertranscontinuity
of ether and path smells and creatures
the which, metaphorical, act as real signs
and later, as dream things, can stay live in memory
enough on some rare days for some
to sketch out a recipe map (in what words touch
these merge) to a place
where, not living again the best of all possible moments,
we're at least close enough to not forget
to not care
to not be.

(no subject)

In the presence of the violent reality of war, consciousness takes the place of the imagination. And consciousness of an immense war is a consciousness of fact. If that is true, it follows that the poetry of war as a consciousness of the victories and defeats of nations, is a consciousness of fact, but of heroic fact, of fact on such a scale that the mere consciousness of it affects the scale of one's thinking and consitutes a participation in the heroic. [...] In war, the desire to move in the direction of fact as we want it to be and to move quickly is overwhelming.

This, if you'll forgive my saying so, always seemed to me to more accurately describe my sex drive. Getting a woman's clothes off for the first time is the realest and most restorative experience I can think of. And anything reminiscent of, or seeming to lead to that place is like a waking toward it, a resumption of lost intensities of consciousness. Even of one's own body; that word heroic even seems to apply, and without irony, as irony is not for this.

I struggle against poets, philosophers, theorists when they speak of this fit as being illusory or lost or never-quite-attainable. I hate that this can be lost, though it clearly can; hate even more that once lost its memory must be derided, effaced, sublimated. It's hard to blame someone for not refusing any comfort, any power available. Still.

18 lasts for one year. That does not make it an illusion.