A bit of a downer, frankly

I wanted to share this poem by W. H. Auden.  You might recognize him as the author of the poem John Hannah recited in Four Weddings and a Funeral.  This one caught my eye on one of the poetry sites I frequent- sometimes they post an excerpt of a classic to lure people in on the home page.  But as I was reading through it, it really struck me today.  You know the phrase "arresting image"?  It's something that makes you stop what you're doing and pay attention.  That's how I feel about the following passage:

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

'O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.

Here is the poem in its entirety.  Maybe it will strike you, too.

As I Walked Out One Evening

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending.

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,

'I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

'The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.'

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

'Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.

'O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.

'O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.'

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.

The human condition

I have to dedicate a post to my roommate, who, upon hearing I was feeling under the weather, took it upon herself to learn how to make fresh ginger tea.  It is seriously the best thing in the world.  It tastes a little like ginger ale but with more bite.  Plus it's hot.  And there's lemon in it.  So, thanks, Omaira Galarza.  Now I'm not so scared to go see The Roommate with you.

I asked Omi what kind of poem she would like dedicated to her today.  She said something about the beach.  Then I found this poem and we both had a good chuckle over it:

The Beach in August

The day the fat woman

In the bright blue bathing suit

Walked into the water and died,

I thought about the human

Condition. Pieces of old fruit

Came in and were left by the tide.

What I thought about the human

Condition was this: old fruit

Comes in and is left, and dries

In the sun. Another fat woman

In a dull green bathing suit

Dives into the water and dies.

The pulmotors glisten. It is noon.

We dry and die in the sun

While the seascape arranges old fruit,

Coming in and the tide, glistening

At noon. A woman, moderately stout,

In a nondescript bathing suit,

Swims to a pier. A tall woman

Steps toward the sea. One thinks about the human

Condition. The tide goes in and goes out.

-Weldon Kees*

*Note the last line in his bio: " It is not known whether he killed himself or went to Mexico."  Omi thinks he went to Mexico to lay out on the beach.

Now I see why Ginsberg was imagining you in the watermelons.

I am enraptured by this poem by Federico Garcia Lorca:

Arbolé, Arbolé . . .

Tree, tree
dry and green.

The girl with the pretty face
is out picking olives.
The wind, playboy of towers,
grabs her around the waist.
Four riders passed by
on Andalusian ponies,
with blue and green jackets
and big, dark capes.
"Come to Cordoba, muchacha."
The girl won't listen to them.
Three young bullfighters passed,
slender in the waist,
with jackets the color of oranges
and swords of ancient silver.
"Come to Sevilla, muchacha."
The girl won't listen to them.
When the afternoon had turned
dark brown, with scattered light,
a young man passed by, wearing
roses and myrtle of the moon.
"Come to Granada, muchacha."
And the girl won't listen to him.
The girl with the pretty face
keeps on picking olives
with the grey arm of the wind
wrapped around her waist.
Tree, tree
dry and green.

Don't you just love that "grey arm of the wind"?  And why does picking olives sound so romantic? Where can I find some myrtle of the moon?

Lorca is a very big deal as a poet, but I had not read him until fairly recently.  He was a contemporary of Salvidor Dali in Spain, and his life ended during the Spanish Civil War.  Listen to this craziness:

"In 1936, García Lorca was staying at Callejones de García, his country home, at the outbreak of the Civil War. He was arrested by Franquist soldiers, and on the 17th or 18th of August, after a few days in jail, soldiers took García Lorca to "visit" his brother-in-law, Manuel Fernandez Montesinos, the Socialist ex-mayor of Granada whom the soldiers had murdered and dragged through the streets. When they arrived at the cemetery, the soldiers forced García Lorca from the car. They struck him with the butts of their rifles and riddled his body with bullets. His books were burned in Granada's Plaza del Carmen and were soon banned from Franco's Spain. To this day, no one knows where the body of Federico García Lorca rests."

In honor of Edgar Allen Poe's birthday (and my friend Amanda's)

I killed a spider in my bathroom five days ago, and I have not yet found the nerve to dispose of it.  The first day it was to make sure it was dead.  The second was to be extra sure.  The third was to be absolutely Washingtonian about it.  The fourth was to let him be a lesson to all his friends.  And the fifth (today) is because I just plain don't want to get near it. 

Instead, I am going to focus on celebrating Mr. Poe's birthday, which my friend Amanda-from-New-York also shares.  Bet you've never heard this one:

"Alone"

From childhood’s hour I have not been

As others were—I have not seen

As others saw—I could not bring

My passions from a common spring—

From the same source I have not taken

My sorrow—I could not awaken

My heart to joy at the same tone—

And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone—

Then—in my childhood—in the dawn

Of a most stormy life—was drawn

From ev’ry depth of good and ill

The mystery which binds me still—

From the torrent, or the fountain—

From the red cliff of the mountain—

From the sun that ’round me roll’d

In its autumn tint of gold—

From the lightning in the sky

As it pass’d me flying by—

From the thunder, and the storm—

And the cloud that took the form

(When the rest of Heaven was blue)

Of a demon in my view—

The sound of silence = the sound of my own paranoia

Have you ever heard of those sensory deprivation tanks where you sit in water in the pitch black with absolute silence around you?  At first I thought that would be kind of a cool experience, but now I'm not so sure.  I think my imagination is not cut out for something like that.  It would be kicked into overdrive.  After two minutes I would convince myself that I'm going to be stuck in there forever, that I am being punished for something, that the people in control of the tank are at any moment going to release a shark or a piranha or killer squid into the water to see how I react. 

What brought about these thoughts was the electricity going out on our block tonight.  Being in a new apartment, my roommate and I are not entirely sure of where everything is. We just kind of sat there in the blackness for a minute before launching into action.  Usually in the past when this happened it was because we overloaded the circuit or blew a fuse.  In this place, I don't even know whether it uses circuit breakers or fuses.  All I knew was that I was going to have to step over a lot of crap between where I was in the living room and where my flashlight was next to my bed.  And I cannot even begin to tell you where I packed the candles.  Anyway, my imagination kicked into gear as I was sitting there- it was really dark!  When my roommate ventured into the kitchen to find her flashlight, I sat there in the dead silence and imagined this was all the effort of a serial killer targeting me specifically.  Once I brushed off the serial killer scenario, I focused on the noiselessness and that freaked me out even more.  That's because it amplifies smaller sounds like rodents skittering. 

Look, I know I sound like a crazy person with a bunch of neuroses.  Maybe I am, but that rodent thing is legit.  One time we had a rat loose in our apartment, and when we thought we had it quarantined, we all went to bed.  Guess whose room it ended it up in.  I woke up to the scratching sound of rat claws on the wood floor.  When I turned on the light, it ran across my wall.  I didn't know rats could do that!  And that is why I sleep with earplugs.

Beach Walk

I found a baby shark on the beach.
Seagulls had eaten his eyes. His throat was bleeding.
Lying on shell and sand, he looked smaller than he was.
The ocean had scraped his insides clean.
When I poked his stomach, darkness rose up in him,
like black water. Later, I saw a boy,
aroused and elated, beckoning from a dune.
Like me, he was alone. Something tumbled between us—
not quite emotion. I could see the pink
interior flesh of his eyes. "I got lost. Where am I?"
he asked, like a debt owed to death.
I was pressing my face to its spear-hafts.
We fall, we fell, we are falling. Nothing mitigates it.
The dark embryo bares its teeth and we move on.

-Henri Cole

That was easy.

There was a fly stumbling around in the kitchen this morning.  It was moving awfully slow.  It even landed on the floor a few times.  I figured it was not meant for this world much longer, but I didn't have the heart to kill it.  There's a door leading outside to the backyard on the other side of the room.  That was when I started trying to herd the fly toward the door.  Have you ever tried herding a fly?  Well, try herding cats and then multiply the difficulty by 10.

Dish towel in hand, I waved it around yelling, "I'm trying to save you, fly!  Can't you feel the cold air blowing in?  Go, go!"  Well, a few minutes later he finally went.  I watched him zip out and then I shut the door on Old Man Winter and went about my business.

Cut to lunch time.  I'm in the kitchen again and what do I hear?  That old familiar buzzing.  What the heck?  Now, I know for a fact the first one went out, and the door was locked up tight after it.  This had to be . . . the first fly's sister/cousin/stepmother?  For a minute I entertained the idea that I was at the beginning of a horror movie where flies start to show up one by one until there's a big reveal of a scary guy opening his mouth and thousands of flies swarming out.  Still, I was trying to avoid killing it.  I figured since I got the first one outside, I could do the same for its relative (or minion of Satan).  Well, this one had a little more pep in his step (zing in his wing?), and he just would not go.

By the time my family arrived home later in the evening he was still buzzing around.  I ventured out the back door to cut some rosemary for dinner, and when I came back my dad was folding up a dish towel, looking pretty pleased with himself.  I looked at him, questioningly.  He assured me the fly was taken care of.  He had "whacked" him.  Oh. 

The Fly

Little fly,
Thy summer’s play
My thoughtless hand
Has brushed away.

Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?

For I dance
And drink and sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life
And strength and breath,
And the want
Of thought is death,

Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live,
Or if I die.

-William Blake

Transplant gangs are sooo 2004.

I was going to introduce this next installment a la Masterpiece Theater, but then I got sidetracked reading an article about former M.T. host Alistair Cooke.  The poor guy died back in 2004, and before he was cremated his body parts were chopped up and sold for profit by "rogue morticians."  Geez.  Sounds like the plot to a CSI episode.  So I guess this is more in the vein of Halloween than Christmas, but The Brute continues nonetheless:

The Brute bolted up, blinking. The sun had gone black. No one knew the reason. There was no great crack, no explosions, no fizzle, no fireworks shot. Simply what once was there happened now to be not. The world grew quite cold. People huddled together. The Brute stood alone while they debated the weather. As the children’s teeth chattered, their breaths froze in the air. But what The Brute saw was strange. All the words remained there.

Good words and bad words and gossip and jokes. The words tumbled out of their mouths as they spoke. They floated up to the trees, took a perch, looked around. Their movements were graceful. They made not a sound. Rude words cracked open, flashed their innards and leered. Some jokes came out moldy. One or two had on beards. A “thank you” dropped lightly. It curtsied and bowed.  Gossip tended to slither and leap bough to bough.

The Brute wondered if this was something he should mention, for none of his classmates was paying attention. They were all playing tag with the flashlights they’d found. A boy in his haste knocked The Brute to the ground.

“Idiot,” The Brute snarled, “I’m standing right here.”

The sentence took off like a shot at his peer. The words chugged along like a train on a track from The Brute’s mouth to boy’s head in two seconds flat.

There was howling. It seemed like the boy had been stung. The Brute watched it all happen. He knew what he’d done. He had not raised a hand, but the fact remained true: his words were what bruised the poor boy black and blue.

Questions popped up, hopping this way and that. Through the crowd they scurried. They darted like rats. One circled The Brute, sniffed his ear hole and hair. He swatted it off with a series of swears. The swears formed in a cyclone of prickles tiny as peas. They swirled and they roiled. They exploded like bees.

Only one target was set in their sights. The Brute’s eyes grew wide. He prepared to take flight. But from every direction the prickles advanced. They flew up his nostrils. They prickled his pants.

The Brute sneezed and swatted at what no one could see. The children all stared, some were grinning with glee. Their bully was making a fool of himself. The children all whispered, “Look at the elf!”

Their giggles erupted while The Brute tore at his clothes. They mocked as he picked prickles out of his nose. The words soared above them. They pointed and dived. They crystalled like ice and sharpened like knives.

The Brute raised his head up, eyes tearing in pain.   But then his eyes narrowed:

“So you want to play games.”

Keep calm and carry on.

Many of you may have heard of the following poem before. It has one of those often quoted refrains.  The author wrote it for his dying father, but he (the author) died quite shortly after publishing it.  It is a good reminder for anyone going through a tough time- illness, economic loss, heartbreak- to "rage, rage against the dying of the light."  I myself received some bad news over the weekend, and I don't know why but somehow these words are powerful enough to make me feel better.

Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

-Dylan Thomas

 

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,   

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

The perfect murder

I have always been fascinated by murder mysteries, detective stories, law and order.  There's a sense of excitement and anticipation in knowing that I'm about to be in for a roller coaster ride of twists and turns but that hopefully the storytelling hands are capable and will lead to a satisfying ending.

Sometimes I like my mysteries to have a supernatural twist because it opens up limitless possibilities in the world of my imagination.  In fact, the first story I ever wrote was a supernatural murder mystery called "Queen Elizabeth's Revenge."  I must have been in 4th or 5th grade when I wrote it, and all I can remember now is that it involved Queen Elizabeth I and an emerald ring that had special powers and made the finger that was wearing it fall off her dead corpse.  I also remember scaring my sister quite heartily with it. 

Anyway, I haven't ever been able to get past my fascination with the macabre, and this still plays into my creative process.  As I've mentioned here in the last few weeks, I've been trying to piece together a perfect murder that would stump everyone involved.  This is for a script I'm working on.  At first I thought it would be a piece of cake because of my vast research into the subject (i.e. years of watching Colombo and Hitchcock films and reading Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen mysteries).  However, I quickly got myself into trouble by trying to be far too clever for my own good.  The catch-22 of good writing is that you want to write yourself into a corner because that way your audience will be on the edge of their seats wondering how you're going to get your characters out of this mess.  The problem with that is you also have to figure out a plausible way to escape the corner yourself.  While I think I've finally got a handle on the situation as far as my script goes, I thought it might be fun to put some things I've learned into poetical form.

The perfect murder

In cop shows, it's always
the person you least expect,
someone you meet
in the first 10 minutes,
quickly so
that you can forget.

The grieving widow,
the childhood best friend,
the special guest star,
all guilty,
all fueled
by love, greed or revenge.
It's clear they were
too full of passion 
they could never get
away with it.
You can't hide
a thing like that.

The prerequisite
of a perfect murder
is
a void of emotion,
a cold calculation.
The perfect murderer craves
no credit for his crime.
He does it to feed a monster.
He doesn't care
for the world outside.

He needs only
the barest of tools:
a bit of rope,
a locked room,
the perfect alibi.
And when he's finished,
it hardly seems like
murder at all.
This model criminal
casts just enough doubt
as to make it seem possible
that something
supernatural,
some higher power,
came to collect
this "victim,"
this person
whose time was up.

And the dectectives
will scratch their beards
or mustaches
and bumble and
wonder if maybe
they shouldn't
be meddling
with such things.

Mr. Daniel

When I was in high school, I took a speech class at the insistence of a friend and also because it was a prerequisite to TV and video classes.  Speech was taught by a strange little man named Mr. Daniel.  He always made a big deal about how there was no "s" at the end of his name.  It was very important that we remember that.  He was the type of person you could see wearing a bow tie.  He was short, with a mustache and glasses.  I always wondered what Mr. Daniel wished he could be doing instead of teaching.  We got the sense that he hated kids and that he felt his talents were being wasted on us.  He had a great respect for theater arts and expected nothing less from his students. 

One of our assignments in that class was to read a fairytale in front of everyone.  I wanted to pick the perfect story, but I also didn't want it to be the same old thing we'd all heard a hundred times.  That's when I discovered Anne Sexton's Transformations.  As Kurt Vonnegut writes in the foreword, ". . . she was, in fact, retelling many of the Grimms' fairy tales in poetry. . . How do I explain these poems?  Not at all.  I quit teaching in colleges because it seemed so criminal to explain works of art.  The crisis in my teaching career came, in fact, when I faced an audience which expected me to explain Dubliners by James Joyce.  I was game.  I'd read the book.  But when I opened my big mouth, no sounds came out."

I read out Anne Sexton's "Cinderella" in class.  Terrified, I kept my legs crossed one over the other the entire time I was standing at the front of the room as if I had to pee.  When I finished, Mr. Daniel looked at me.  My heart was thumping in my ears.  He looked down his nose and then he said, "Tell me . . . why aren't you entering speech contests?"  I was so taken aback I didn't have an answer.  And then he busted me for the way I was standing.

The next year I enrolled in Mr. Daniel's TV and video classes.  We were responsible for producing the morning news.  We arrived at 6:30 am every morning to get it going.  One morning, early in the school year, Mr. Daniel had a heart attack as we were getting ready to put on the news.  He died at school. 

I remember watching him get wheeled out on a stretcher, sheet over his head, through the school's front doors.  And now when I think about him, I think about what he had wished for himself.  Did he still think he had plenty of time to achieve his dreams?  How sudden life is.

Cinderella

You always read about it:
the plumber with the twelve children
who wins the Irish Sweepstakes.
From toilets to riches.
That story.

Or the nursemaid,
some luscious sweet from Denmark
who captures the oldest son's heart.
from diapers to Dior.
That story.

Or a milkman who serves the wealthy,
eggs, cream, butter, yogurt, milk,
the white truck like an ambulance
who goes into real estate
and makes a pile.
From homogenized to martinis at lunch.

Or the charwoman
who is on the bus when it cracks up
and collects enough from the insurance.
From mops to Bonwit Teller.
That story.

Once
the wife of a rich man was on her deathbed
and she said to her daughter Cinderella:
Be devout. Be good. Then I will smile
down from heaven in the seam of a cloud.
The man took another wife who had
two daughters, pretty enough
but with hearts like blackjacks.
Cinderella was their maid.
She slept on the sooty hearth each night
and walked around looking like Al Jolson.
Her father brought presents home from town,
jewels and gowns for the other women
but the twig of a tree for Cinderella.
She planted that twig on her mother's grave
and it grew to a tree where a white dove sat.
Whenever she wished for anything the dove
would drop it like an egg upon the ground.
The bird is important, my dears, so heed him.

Next came the ball, as you all know.
It was a marriage market.
The prince was looking for a wife.
All but Cinderella were preparing
and gussying up for the event.
Cinderella begged to go too.
Her stepmother threw a dish of lentils
into the cinders and said: Pick them
up in an hour and you shall go.
The white dove brought all his friends;
all the warm wings of the fatherland came,
and picked up the lentils in a jiffy.
No, Cinderella, said the stepmother,
you have no clothes and cannot dance.
That's the way with stepmothers.

Cinderella went to the tree at the grave
and cried forth like a gospel singer:
Mama! Mama! My turtledove,
send me to the prince's ball!
The bird dropped down a golden dress
and delicate little slippers.
Rather a large package for a simple bird.
So she went. Which is no surprise.
Her stepmother and sisters didn't
recognize her without her cinder face
and the prince took her hand on the spot
and danced with no other the whole day.

As nightfall came she thought she'd better
get home. The prince walked her home
and she disappeared into the pigeon house
and although the prince took an axe and broke
it open she was gone. Back to her cinders.
These events repeated themselves for three days.
However on the third day the prince
covered the palace steps with cobbler's wax
and Cinderella's gold shoe stuck upon it.
Now he would find whom the shoe fit
and find his strange dancing girl for keeps.
He went to their house and the two sisters
were delighted because they had lovely feet.
The eldest went into a room to try the slipper on
but her big toe got in the way so she simply
sliced it off and put on the slipper.
The prince rode away with her until the white dove
told him to look at the blood pouring forth.
That is the way with amputations.
They just don't heal up like a wish.
The other sister cut off her heel
but the blood told as blood will.
The prince was getting tired.
He began to feel like a shoe salesman.
But he gave it one last try.
This time Cinderella fit into the shoe
like a love letter into its envelope.

At the wedding ceremony
the two sisters came to curry favor
and the white dove pecked their eyes out.
Two hollow spots were left
like soup spoons.

Cinderella and the prince
lived, they say, happily ever after,
like two dolls in a museum case
never bothered by diapers or dust,
never arguing over the timing of an egg,
never telling the same story twice,
never getting a middle-aged spread,
their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.
Regular Bobbsey Twins.
That story.

That's not for you.

I was reading through a recently published collection of Charles Bukowski's poems, though he died in 1994 of leukemia.  Many of the poems in this collection had been previously unpublished, but his widow and editor took them and put them together.  The same thing happened when Michael Crichton died and his editor found a manuscript he had been working on called Pirate Latitudes.  The editor made the decision to publish it, and of course Steven Spielberg is now making it into a movie.

Now, I understand that if someone made a living as a writer, you might assume that he was planning to publish this newly discovered work eventually, but you can't know that for sure unless he told you himself.  You might think it's very tragic that the author died before he could see his work appreciated.  I, however, find it kind of disconcerting that when I die some unlucky person who has to sift through all my crap might happen upon some horrible first draft of a poem or story I've written and would try to put it out into the world.  What if I had hated that draft and decided to scrap the idea all together?  After you die, are your ideas just fair game?

If the person is famous, I think we feel it's owed to us, the audience, to read his or her last words.  I think we view the song or poem or manuscript as a gift that person was working on for us, and if he died before he could present it to his fans, then we will take it anyway because we're sure that's what he would have wanted.  "Oh, Grandma always meant to give you this brooch.  She never got around to putting it in her will, but take it.  I'm sure she would have wanted you to have it."

On the other hand, consider that some things are too personal and not intended to ever be shared.  If someone found a poem I wrote at an emotional low point (and subsequently stuffed into the back of a drawer) and then submitted it to a literary magazine, I would have to haunt them so that they could know how pissed off I am.  It's like one time when I was on a picnic with some friends.  They had a fancy picnic basket given to them as a wedding gift and it came with silverware and wine glasses and specially decorated paper napkins.  As we were passing around the food and utensils, I went to take a napkin and one of my friends took it back.  "That's not for you," he said.  We looked at him, surprised, and then we all burst out laughing because his wife said he really wanted to save those special napkins for some unknown future occasion.

That personal emotional poem I wrote 15 years ago?  That's not for you.  But that script I've been hawking the last 6 months?  That you can have.

waste

"boring," he said from his deathbed,
"I bored everybody, even
myself.
I wasted it, I was a fake, a word-
blower . . . all too fancy . . . all too
full of tricks."

"oh master," said the young poet,
"that's not true at all, not at
all."

"all too true," said the old man.
"my work was overblown
rubbish."

the young poet did not believe
those words.
he could not, he would not,
for he too was writing
rubbish.

but still he asked the old man,
"but Master, what is to be
done?"

"begin at the beginning."
said the old man.

a few days after that
he died.

he had not wanted to see the
young poet anyhow.

now that didn't matter
either.

-Charles Bukowski