From:
The Collected Poems (1988)
New York, NY: The Echo Press.


How it Was

Stalking a deer I wandered into the mountains and from there I saw.

Or perhaps it was for some other reason that I rose about the setting sun.

Above the hills of blackwood and a slab of ocean and the steps of a glacier, carmine-colored in the dusk.

I saw absence; the mighty power of counter-fulfillment; the penalty of a promise lost forever.

If, in tepees of plywood, tire shreds, and grimy sheet iron, ancient inhabitants of this land shook their rattles, it was all in vain.

No eagle-creator circled in the air from which the thunderbolt of its glory had been cast out.

Protective spirits hid themselves in subterranean beds of bubbling ore, jolting the surface from time to time so that the fabric of freeways was bursting asunder.

God the Father didn't walk about any longer tending the new shoots of cedar, no longer did man hear his rushing spirit.

His son did not know his sonship and turned his eyes away when passing a neon cross flat as a movie screen showing a striptease.

This time it was really the end of the Old and New Testament.

No one implored, everyone picked up a nodule of agate or diorite to whisper in loneliness; I cannot live any longer.

Bearded messengers in bead necklaces founded clandestine communes in imperial cities and ports overseas.

But none of them announced the birth of a child-savior.

Soldiers from expeditions sent to punish nations would go disguised and masked to take part in forbidden rites, not looking for any hope.

They inhaled smoke soothing all memory and, rocking from side to side, shared with each other a word of nameless union.

Carved in black wood the Wheel of Eternal Return stood before the tents of wandering monastic orders.

And those who longed for the Kingdom took refuge like me in the mountains to become the last heirs of a dishonored myth.


Czeslaw Milosz (1968)

Karen Walker
 

George!
 

Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?
George Carlin

I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more as they get older; then it dawned on me - they're cramming for their final exam. :glasses:
George Carlin

Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.
George Carlin


There's no present. There's only the immediate future and the recent past.
George Carlin

:byebye::byebye:

Cool is effortless. Cool is soulful, an inner peace and calm within that’s radiated outward. Cool isn’t afraid to say or do anything. The uncool is. Cool is magnetic.

Cool is… (who wants to step up to the mic?)

from Mark VV

Quote
 

The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it... I can resist everything but temptation.



-Oscar Wilde

“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.”


Ambrose Redmoon

I love this poem and wanted to share it.


The Forgiveness Parade

There's nothing like a full moon reflected in the eyes of a blind man
using a telescope to stir a bowl of Russian alphabet soup
for the cosmonauts who orbited the shadow of Jupiter
and are landing in an ocean of tears
shed by cold blooded murderers who miss their mothers convulsively
in their prison cells being wheeled caravan-style down Oswald Boulevard
as part of the Forgiveness Parade where relatives of the victims
stand quietly holding banners like 'Apology Accepted' as the vandals
stumble past in shackles followed by the hijackers and the pickpockets who
march single file up the fire escape of a skyscraper built by arsonists.

Jeffrey McDaniel