I saw you from afar
and held my hand out
before I knew about you.
From a distance you looked
helpless and forlorn,
but when I brought you closer,
I saw your pathetic distortions,
I saw your behavioral freakishness
and hurriedly scraped you off me,
like some gruesome thing.
Then, when I saw you lying there,
I shuddered to think you
ever touched my delicate skin.
After that I cried for you,
that you were too awful
for me to hold.
Thank you for this insightful poem from 1989. As I age, I find that the unsightly that I once knew, are less so today. Time and life and shown me that even the worst have properties of worth.
That drawing of, if I read it correctly, an embroidered hanky, is sweet. But I remember the white handkerchiefs that my mother gave me in winter would become slimy and yellow colored by the end of the day as continual colds from dry winter air filled with coal ash required me to use it way too many times as my nose ran continuously all day. She should have burned them, but she always bleached them white again, folded and ironed them for another round of mucus assault.
A delightful sharing of, for want of a better word, a compassionate description of what could be so many objects, and or persons. I couldn't help but think of my early years in NY when going to a bar was an automatic solicitation of a visit from one of the ladies of the night. Being who I was, and still am, a one-focus monogamous guy, I did some "shuddering" too and moved on to a different bar. Unfortunately, back in the 60s, they all had their roster of ladies. I often watch reruns of "NYPD Blue" as it shows the look of New York when I was there in the 60s and 70s. When I moved back in 2005 for a couple of years, it was a radical change. Had to move to Oregon.
A detailed study of the origins of the New Alienation. The author labels it normative or postmodern ennui and traces its rise to cultural power over the last two centuries.
For the reasons I describe in this book, the world-wide suffering, death and extinction of humanity is very likely to occur, unless nonviolent and democratically determined radical and revolutionary personal and societal actions and changes are taken
