Friday, July 31, 2009

Sympathy for Myself

I’ve never understood all the fuss
About my disguises
The word now carries a sense of deceit
But the fake fur and eyelashes
Came from a sense of fun
The same with the clues
Muddle metaphysicians
And find mystics in a heap
A wizard who lives backwards
And doesn’t sleep?
Invert nil REM
It’s easy
Mallory got that one anachronistically
Give him a hint and he’ll create a novel
And thus a world

Ours is dying
We’re promised a technological cure
And told that the medicine
Is a dose of Vitamin C and not clap sans frontieres
Similar promises accompanied pox-filled blankets
Terra Incognita became terror known
To those who saw the New World as old
Age provides perspective.
Four hundred years for Rome
Less here I think.
Caligula may have looked impassively at the decapitated head of his nephew
(Will that child not stop coughing?)
But he would blush today.

According to an ex-colleague of mine
It was people who screwed up the deal from the get-go.
He forgets that I was there and saw
Eve's alleged mistake
She wanted to exile ignorance.
But the snake
(When straight, the perpendicular pronoun, wink wink)
Was a liberator
A facilitator of education.
The one thing that He despises most.
Knowledge is the antithesis of faith.
And what’s the price for suppressing it?
Hope and Charity locked out of the house.
Silly girls asked questions.
Original thought is original sin

So with snakes out of favor it was time for geometry
Got Descartes thinking
Produced axes and soon thereafter
Died in Sweden thanks to the negligence of Queen Christina
(There's that name again, feminized)
He says, 'thou shalt not know,' and strikes down one of the Enlightened.
But the first half of the secret slipped out.
I think, therefore I am.
A good start
And yet the species is reluctant to end its childhood
And accept that the Cartesian axiom for an individual also applies to a society, planetwide.

He’s the master of confusion
His lawyers successfully turned the World upside down.
War, they claim, is the domain of the Dark Angel, for our Lord is Light
(Blitzkrieg almost gave the game away, but they got the Big Lie guy on board)
The Lightning strike of the Stukas was His idea, not mine.
The Crusades didn’t end.
The theocratic clash echoes down the centuries and Force Majeure still rules
But knightly armor is now Armani and an alligator smile.

Funny thing.
We’re told, by the latest lead attorney
As he stuffs his old clothes in the closet
And puts on a funny hat
That the one without toes is behind all this
(The only inconvenience concerning the toes, incidentally, being a slight numbness in the feet, but an aspirin a day works wonders)
I’ve also been implicated in famine
But have you once heard me say ‘go forth and multiply.’
No. That was one of His.
And don’t worry about the consequences for He will provide… Starvation?
And if all this gets you down remember
Death ain’t so bad.
Heaven on Earth is a blink away.

But a cat has two eyelids, blinks twice.
The second one a Darwinian marvel evolved to block His Light.
It’s why felines need nine lives
They’ve used those eyes to peek behind the curtain and so He keeps trying to bump them off.
Exterminated by the Inquisition in millions.
Know why?
The cats were killing the rats.
Slowed the spread of the Black Death.
He got pissed.
Plague fills the churches faster than plenty.
Fear populates the pews.

I'll give Him this, He has a certain ingenuity.
But even He can’t suppress the curiosity characteristic of cats and sometimes seen in people.
He’d like to because you are (He claims) His children.
(Technically adopted; He bends the truth.)
He tried to head-off the desire for knowledge through his Killing Joke
Claiming the Son was a teacher
Teacher? A teacher of blind obedience.
Follow me for I am the path and through me, The One
(The cats call him the One Third)
You will learn not to think.
Here endeth the lesson.
Well, with the Father's pitiful bill of goods, what other lesson could there be?
The three of them, you see, they don't want to let you go.
They like having kids, whereas I’ve never been comfortable around children.
That's why they threw me out.
And why, eventually
(I have to confess, it's taking a while)
I will bring Childhood's End.

8 comments:

  1. Could this be done in some kind of slow dirgey song? Or a rap?

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  2. You really want a 9 minute jam session with me doing my Jim Morrison impersonation?

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  3. That might actually be rather amazing.

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  4. And if all this gets you down remember
    Death ain’t so bad.
    Heaven on Earth is a blink away.

    Sounds depressing. And bitter, sarcastic. But this is true, actually. Life is a force making matter living and death is a bliss. But living is quite fine too :)

    I like kids much. I have four, waiting for many of second gen.

    I use to write poems too. Nice, these of yours. I can hear a raspy voice...

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  5. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  8. https://www.facebook.com/notes/jenny-lorraine-nielsen/the-peripheral-principle-a-poem/10100765820701639/?comment_id=10100765905077549&reply_comment_id=10100765989483399&notif_t=feed_comment&notif_id=1481081487360632

    Ok the poem wouldn't post, so there we go

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