Respite/Upside, Downside

So I am back again. The Gig For All Seasons is in recess for ten days. I didn't write yesterday because we were busy doing family stuff, most of which involved waiting for various family members to return from various family outings so that a small assemblage of family members could then go out for barbecue. I had St. Louis style ribs and beer. It was good.

I have also been working more on the poem I want to write about the near defunct mall where I work. But before I get to that, there's this, from today's front page at Wikipedia:

...that over 100 million people in Indonesia lack access to safe water and more than 70 percent of the country’s 220 million population relies on water obtained from potentially contaminated sources?

No matter what people might like to say about Wikipedia being unreliable, the above is most assuredly true. Say whatever lousy thing about the town you live it, it doesn't suck nearly so much as it would suck to live in Indonesia. In that spirit, the next installment.

The last one left the two commentators a bit cold. To say the least. Also, I think they only commented becauise I had previously challenged that no one ever reads the posts that contain poetry, because people have been brainwashed by bad English teachers to think that poetry has to be psychically painful and brain-numbingly bad. This next bit is about the place whjere intersubjectivity and community come together tyo create that wonderful, sometiems squirmily uncomfortable recognition of self, other, and place. I am not so sure it happens the same way in Indonesia, although logically I guess it must. Imagine you are passing someone, imagine it's someone of another race and another culture, a total stranger, and your eyes meet, and you pray:

. . . awake, awake to me

Ye somnabulist, raise your eyes to meet mine, to say

Hello, to say fare the well,

For I declare that there is, indeed

World enough and time

To speak, to say

Hello; How is your world today?

My world is bold and blue and bright and sun-lit

Over tumbled stones and flea-bitten storefronts

The mangy curs of rotten commerce.

World enough and time for us, my friend

To exchange well wishes in this fractured world

O beautiful for damaged cars

And flowing waves of gray

Busted asphalt in this beaten landscape

Surrounding this face-fallen whore of Kapital and commerce

This freak-faced clown

Lain down drunk in the gutter

Amongst the remants and ruins

Of all the best intentions.

I swear there is world enough and time,

Hope and aspiration

For, at least, a smile and a nod.

Frreedom, O, Freedom,

The games, the games

Go on.

It's a phase. It's in progress. I have almost-- almost-- decided to open it with a quote from a Don Henley song:

"O beautiful for spacious skies

But now those skies are threatening . . ."

I also intend to include an invokation against politicians and civic administrators, whose grand plans for the mall (the city bought it God knows how many years ago) keep netting nothing:

You do not represent us.

Hate us, revile us as you will, reduce us, deny us,

We are here.

But I don't know where it goes yet.

It occurs to me that the process here is mightily akin to the way Big Sur Poem and Molested in Modesto came together, although whether that means anything or not is anyone's guess.