As The World Tries To Turn

[pegesus]

I have been many places in my life time
I have seen more things than most
Yet I am amazed by how little we really know

I see a man who fails to see the sun rise
A woman who doesn't look at the wonder of a babe
A child who fails to see the flowers he tramples

I listen to the masses complain about the ails of the world
Yet I see no action on their part to correct what is wrong
I hear people tell me what I have to do but they cant live my life

Then I wonder where did they come from...who are they
the ones who think they know all the ailes of the world
yet they don't really know what we really need or want

Is this the world I rebelled against when I was young
were all my dreams for a perfect world just dreams after all
What a complete waste our dreams and lives were

[anirbas]

'ello, love. how's our Mary Etta?

I feel the frustration seeping/weeping through this piece...

[pegesus]

thank you Sabrina, for your words......is this all there is?.....now I understand that phrase

[moseley]

Mary. I was ten years old. I was in a room with a distant great uncle who was German who married my great aunt. He wasy dying. He was a physical giant man. He was about 90 and had been more or less immobile for the last twenty five years of his life. He was a bitter man toward children, he was always bitching when I came to visit. This day was different. I was wanted. He never gave me eye contact. He looked into me. For a moment, I had an understanding that was not words and was not spoken, but it was more or less telepathy. For a short period of time, he was out of his own way and I could not only see the surge of consciousness and awareness rise in him, I felt it. It drew from the feet to head like a migration and there was this shock on his face and a paralysis to speak and he was quite aware. He stared into me as if to tell me something or to remain here by inhabiting me but I saw that he was aware of something profound and the entire energy of this fifth element was about to remove itself from the body and dissipate and for all the effort a large immense man could do to hold onto the world, he could not keep it and he could not take it with him, it was going to be here and left...what I sensed and felt was all this frustration that in this last moment he had a grasp as to what life meant. It was the most amazing thing that I could feel what it was he was seeing and it was very hopeful and amazing but it was a clear view because, again, he was no longer looking into his inner mirror, he was past that, he was looking a billion miles into the universe, into a star that was giving out ancient light when we see it and he could feel it like it was a contemporary moment. It is the same thing when a crow plays with us and wants us to get close to fly away, because they do not understand why we cannot fly. It is the same reason James Barrie wrote of the spirit of something that never never dies in all of us, until it is dearly departed and then can be no more when he wrote of Peter Pan, it is a story for children who grew up and forgot some innocence that they never leave. At the end of his life, Wallace Schwartz was able to look into the void with is innocence and he knew something, I could not get that detail, I got the understanding that for that brief glimpse it was immediate sorrow that he did not live it that way and it was a way...not a thing, a means of expending energy and living that was like nothing else, and, it was gone and so was he. I could sense consciousness after that moment, I was aware of it, I could feel when people were balanced and when they were imbalanced or upset or disturbed or violent or murderous or happy or elated or horny or had just had an orgasm in the last 48 hours. I could not tell it in words or give a scientific relating to it. I began to feel impulses in other people and I could tell when they were going to do something and take action. I knew what they were going to do next. The thoughts of other people are partly their own metaphor and have their own antonyms based upon conditioning and experience both. Since most of us are given a set of rules by which the universe, the world, our lives and even our bowel movements are going to have to adhere to, when it does not fall within the lines, the confines and shadows of these preordained concepts forced upon us collectively, we get "off balance" when they go in some other direction and we persecute the experience and judge and jury it that it was bullshit because it does not match that illigitimate polaroid someone slipped into our inner mind's hand and told us to "comply or be insane!" with.

We all want to be free. But even the definition of what it is to be free is something that we have in our gilded cage lives have learned that word to mean. At times, we extend the borders of our confinement and we do reach into a little terra incognita and feel around in what we believe we have discovered as our own freedom. So, then, we give it names and words that we have been shown to make it fit the way it will. We then have expectations which would seemingly be impossible for things to not follow because we have given them the deepest of our understanding of the "laws" in which we know they must follow so the result is more or less "given" and we are then entitled. Is it not the worst thing of all to find that what we have arrived at in some seeming way of being entitled to receive was barren because, like Wallace, we were in our own way, a filter of what is and what we are imperceptibly stopped well withing the reaches of our fingertips? Most expectations have several fallacies and often it is the interpretation we have and the translation into some other language we were not prepared to speak or hear that actually works itself out.

Solomon went so far and felt he had seen and done it all and that all is vanity and so forth. As great as Solomon was, he was immensely in his own way. The people who came up with the mirror concept and those who use it as a inner reference have forgotten that a mirror is a wall between us and the universe to where we cannot see the universe, we can only see ourselves, as if we are the universe, but that mirror does not have to exist, most people have a name for it, as most people have a name or word for most everything that exists or occurs to make it a pocketable thing that they are larger than. Remove the mirror, stop seeing yourself and the universe is larger than you and it is quite ok, for a short period of time, children have this capacity until they usually learn language and words to then confine and cement the mirror that we have come used to having installed within us so that we may make that passage between child and adult and with the rules of proper conduct and the way things "really" are, we are ready to "really" "LIVE" our lives within these confines. Some of the happiest people are those who have no idea of this sort of thing and are quite content to go along with it.

That has not been you though, has it? Well, the answers are there within your own understanding but it is that part of your understanding that most of the time you dismiss because it does not have a comparable empathy with everything and everyone else. Like a pottery class, especially the first time, most people have about the same sort of blobs of clay beginning and ending and yet there is one person who has made something rather beautiful in form and everyone else looks at that person and sees their effort as failure through the wrong condition of comparison, when, in fact, the blob they are discontent with is actually well within their fingertip reach and able to still be made into something. What is before us and within us is often miscued because of what we think we see before and within others so then we have a delusion that we are lacking and more inept and unable. For myself and everyone I know, it is that mirror I would most like to destroy and smash even if it meant sorry, loss of sanity and reason for me and others because, it is a lie. The blob of clay is still before you, me and all of us. We only need but move.

[moseley]

Also, just because "it is written" never meant that it was right to begin with. Even the need to make something right and wrong it rather funny, but between what is right and what we can write is the volume of things and words we dearly hope to feed an insatiable want to know, ultimately...why?

[pegesus]

what an interesting response to my words.....words that were placed on paper to relieve to mind of the anxiety it felt from a world that seemed in chaos....but i do realize that poetry has the capability of being interpreted in many ways and i suppose i should accept that my words had such an interpretation by you. when you reach the old age of 67 you see the world with different eyes and im sure as i get older and close to death i also will have a different view.
thank you for sharing your grandfathers death with us, that must have had a profound affect upon you.

[moseley]

I love dogs as they never seem to have a sense or understanding that they are aging, with all their effort and energy they are abounding with some natural gift of joy that just one day, ceases. It is not the same with us, I am 47 and as I have gotten older, I have followed the pattern of counting days, weeks, months and years....I am working on erasing that, not easy, however, if you lived like a dog, I think you would live until you drop, get hit by a car, get shot or leave in your sleep...I do believe it is a choice, that has no popularity with anyone, but, still, a choice perhaps. At least, that is the angle I am working with at the moment.

[moseley]

No matter what is done to a dog, they are pretty resilient to be wonderful creatures. It is through inbreeding and some very dark intentions that a dog can indeed be turned. www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mental-mishaps/201005/dogs-dont-remember
I like this notion of episodic memory..after all, we are only alive AT THIS MOMENT(ATM)...yesterday and tomorrow are illusion.

[pegesus]

maybe tomorrow is an illusion, but yesterdayy was not....you hold memories of yesterday within the scope of your mind.....it can be rehashed at will or should you choose you can put it aside for the time, but the memoriy will never go away. You remembered your grandfathers death because you chose to bring it forth from yesterdays of years ago. we never know what will happen tomorrow, which is progably a blessing. if we were to know it may not be to our liking or worse....how would you spend today knowing tomorrow may be your last? No i dont think we really want to know tomorrow, and living for today is what you create now, but yesterday has already occured and you know that, you know what you have done and you can always call that memory up or bury it so that you think you forgot it.
As for dogs, they live for now, but they also hold memories of things that were important to them. how else would they remember someone they cared about in the past? and yes they do love as well, how else would you explain a dog who mourns the death of a beloved master. they have the capacity to remember and they have the capacity to love....I believe all animals have the capacity to remember and to love, just as humans do. animals have a different rule in life they live by, but that doesnt make them incapable of remembering or loving. they just have a different perspective of life then we do and are willing to accept what we sometimes do not want to accept.

[pegesus]

they can also be turned by cruel people, otherwise, they are indeed beautiful creatures....I love animals.

[anirbas]

" It is not the same with us, I am 47 and as I have gotten older, I have followed the pattern of counting days, weeks, months and years..."

I am fifty-two. I have died once on an operating table while attempting to give birth. And even though I returned, my doctor told my family, I would not live beyond a day or two...Well, I was twenty-two then. I attempted suicide, via pills three times, in the span of six weeks, after my baby girl did die, after three days. Woke up every dratted time with a hangover the likes of which alcohol never gave me.

I have come to close for comfort to death, far to many times, beyond that.

Once upon a time, I accidently od'ed myself in the eighties like a naive dimwit. Did not receive a doctor's care and I lived. I was beaten into a forty-eight hour coma and had three of my ribs broken by a lovely ex-husband and I lived. I almost died of hypothyroidism in my thirties, because I did not have insurance nor state aid. My doctor told me, when a doctor with brains finally diagnosed me, that I was almost the first person in a hundred years to die of hypothyroidism. My hair fell out. My gums turned black. I had vertigo and towards the end, passed out all the time, as though I had narcolepsy.

And the past five years, I have been in so much pain I didn't even know how much pain I was in, anymore. I have rusted up like a female version of The Tin Man. I haven't been able to dance for, at least three years. For at least twelve years, near as my specialist and I can surmise, I have been dealing with this auto-immune disease, undiagnosed. For the past year, since the sciatica, which is caused by spondilytis, (mssplld?) last summer, I have had to drag myself upstairs everyday, by using my arms to pull me up the stairs. Both arms. I wasn't able to carry a single grocery bag, therefore, as I needed my arms to haul me arse up the stairs. The right hip, hurt that bad.

Through proper diagnosis, and not my own self-diagnosis, (I was "just getting old, better ovary up") and the administration of prednisone, celexa and methotrexate (chemotherapy), I now have tools to fight this shit. I have a sword, double edged though that son of a beast, may be.

What I'm saying, Moseley and to anyone else still reading this, is birthdays should always be held in reverence, celebrated with great joy. Each one is a badge of honor. Another year, we survived. We won! We won!

I find it hilarious, we focus on January, as the "period" to turn over new leaves...Each person should do this in their birthday month, as I do. And I do not celebrate one day of that month. The entire month of July is my month, for inner reflection, resolutions and starting new ventures.

I would far rather be older and celebrating birthdays, than the alternative. Far more attractive to me to cut roses, and suffer the occasional slash of the thorn, than to be pushing up daisies.

Shake yourselves out of this apathy. Both of you are far to precious for this shit. Just saying....gigglegiggle...

However, inner turmoil does create the most lovely of angst poems. The stars only know how many of those I've done myself...lol

Write 'em...Bring 'em on...Reflect...Dissect...Create...That is what poets do...And at the same time, ovary up and get your big girl panties on and get ready for the next moment...For that, that is all we really have...And the certainty of birth and death...All that lies betwixt and between is ours to make the best we can with...Now, live long and prosper and all that shit.

Can anyone say, Sabrina is up in here on chemo tonight? Hey, let me tell you, if you need a shot, I can do it for you, now! I got this. And I've had the best practice, myself!!! lol

"...rolling like a freight train flying like an aeroplane..." ~Guns 'n Roses.

[pegesus]

its interesting how we get so wrapped up in our own problems, illness' amd pains that we forget to look around us and see that there are so many others who also suffer what life has dealt them and you seldom hear them complain. when i think of this i begin to realize how childish and selfish i am to complain about my life and my miseries and my angers. you have developed a very good outlook on life and as much older i am of you i feel ashamed to admit i lack that outlook myself. i do like to think that maybe i can learn somehing new each day and if you allow, that is my lesson for the day...start looking closer at the wonders of this world and spend less time looking at what i consider the lackings of myself.....thank you dear lady for showing me that much needed lesson of the day

[anirbas]

Hey, we all learn from one another, or some such rot and polyglot...lol...I have learned much from my poetical friends at this site and the bnet site poetfriends David and I made there, that migrated here with us. I believe you originally came from one of the handful of other sites David was familiar with. Can't remember...Was it Echoes? Or the site of the delightful Philippino woman? I can't remember the site name, but, I can remember watching the dance videos she did. Excellent group of poets to be found at both places. Some used to come from Dry Tear. But, I believe that group has worked out its civil war (lol) and re-coalesced. Good reading to be found at all the sites. Bnet is mostly religious inspired poetry. By religious, I mean all religions, including Pagans and Wiccans, etc. It's an interesting slice of life, too. I used to adore reading the works of those whom followed the old religion that gave thanks to Odin and Freya. Wiccans, too.

I digress. When all I meant to say, was "Gee, thanks, m'lady. I bow and tip my hat to thee, beauteous dame."

I must admit, I am kind of red faced reading what I wrote that night. I sound like I'm giving a lecture instead of trying to lift two of my bestest buddies up by their bootstraps. But, all of it's true. I'm a weird kind of cheerleader. Instead of a short skirt and pompoms, I run around in my ink stained glasses poking folks with my pen to goad them up from the slough of despond...

Shutting up, most esteemed dear.