The Myth of Arcady

A shepherd tried to ruin for me
The eloquent myth of Arcady;
That breathing couplet of antiqued joy.

A feeling I had since I was a boy—
An idea that Greece was a song
That I, cataclysmically wrong,
Sensed the tune that I was fed
Of pastoral beauty somewhere read
Was but a dream of wrathful Rood
Whose salvation, misleading and good,
Stood alone in its mournful place
For my imagination to trace
The warring words of a blitheful ditty,
Of a red-head perched, so true and pretty.

And I gave that shepherd a frightful stare
As a boy grown old with Aesop’s mare.

The solstice revolved around a setting sun
And my stammering desire rolled undone
In the tearfully drenched aftermath,
And desire swayed from my immanent path.

© 24II09 Le Même War Press

When Money is God

When money is god
people will dismiss notions of god
and repeat the verifiable
mantra of money

and fashion will replace beauty
since beauty does not discriminate
based on class
and fashion is a cycle
which spirals away from
beauty’s lazy truth

and opinion will be
the knowledge used to hurry
wisdom.

© 2009 Le Même War Press

The Magic Within

Jean-Paul followed Magic
to the end of his world
but stopped short
a fool’s length from
the horizon.

On his left was the Demon
he first met in bruises
of his father’s fear.

And it was this Demon
for whom he swore lust
as she smiled
the interrupting orgasm
of death.

He turned to the right
hoping to see an Angel
but all he saw was distance
to his mother’s tears.

And he looked long last
into the mirrored eyes
of his beloved Magic
and the Sun rose
in tendril pink
and voluptuous orange
blinding Jean-Paul
to the Magic within.

© 2009 Le Même War Press

Thinking Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman is a barrel-bellied man with thick, unstarched flannel shirt maybe tucked in to thick, unwashed denim jeans, and calloused white toes crammed into the sturdy white boots of a democracy brawl.

No one imagines his thick, unkempt pelvis rollicking side to side and back and forth in the legato-lazy act of lovemaking, because while he may dream of laying freely over bent grass with the isolation of a warm doll-like body straddling him, he does not hold in reserve his libidinous body in its entirety against the chaste world.

He does not fill her womb with seed, he lies with the soul of the world and impregnates passions untapped and sets fire to the icy stasis of the democracy mind.

When the gestation has followed traditional cycles of want, he belly laughs and names his first and only born child, Poesy.

© 2009 Le Même War Press

Grown Tendencies

There was a little girl, maybe three or four years grown from birth, who was dressed as a princess. A Disney princess would be a more fulfilling description, but for little girls her age, and others who are not presented daily with the pomp of an established monarchial society, her pink and purple dress, and plastic tiara placed haphazardly on her head would be easily communicated as that of a princess; and the terms real or fantasy would be irrelevant. This princess played on the playground with my son and several other children for a while this afternoon.

I watched her and vainly tried to determine if she would grow up to be the type of woman who looked back at pictures of herself at this age and raged at her parents for allowing her to dress that way in public, or would she praise her parents for allowing her the freedom to pursue her own idea of creativity and live without social persecution within the structure of her imagination.

Another scene came to mind; one with a little girl aged about the same as the princess on the playground, perhaps even a year older and having already outgrown the luxury of the princess attire. This other scene is situated nearly a full year prior and is in no other way related other than the path of my thought as leading to a memory. The little girl of the past year announced to me that she “used to be a princess, but that was when [she] was little.” She spoke these words as a former President might speak of his previously elected title which has since been passed along. Without need, and more to feed my humor, I asked her age. “I’m four, but when I was a princess, I was just a baby,” she said.

That this story is about two little girls and both little girls are, or have at one time been princesses, is mostly irrelevant. The situation could have just as easily involved two little boys: one of whom dressed as Superman, the other a four year old who has outgrown the days when he was Superman. The question which arises as I connect the current scene with the scene of the little girl in my memory is: Do we ever really outgrow this stage of our lives?

It seems humorous from the perspective of an adult, or grown-up, as childhood vernacular allocates, that a little girl who has aged only four years would have already outgrown the fantasy of being a princess, or that she has outgrown the status of being a baby. Again, do we ever really outgrow this stage of our lives, or do we become more competent at hiding this level of creativity and imagination from the world around us and eventually ourselves? Are our “grown-up” selves merely disguises employed to distance ourselves from our childhood? Do we disguise ourselves so well that we begin to believe our own facade? When does the masquerade become the reality we have tried for years to suppress for the sake of becoming adults from the distanced perspective of children, and not adults as a continuation of the lives we began as children? Why must becoming a responsible adult mean sacrificing our childhood imagination and playfulness?

There is an ancient practice of disguising the firstborn male child of a family as a female to protect the child from what were perceived as demons, and oftentimes real dangers of persecution. It is a simple matter to relegate such a seemingly absurd practice to the ancients, or to suppose that it belongs solely to other cultures and not our own, but the reality is that this practice continues in varied form and is so integrated into normalcy that the practice is effectively disguised as something else, something different than what it is. This practice goes beyond the conversion of male to female, princess to former princess, or Superman to common man. The process in which we engage to disguise ourselves from ourselves, as witnessed from the perspective of childhood to that of adulthood, is really the death of our original selves.

We begin our lives with hope and promise, and somewhere along the way we sacrifice these ideals for acceptance and security. Hope and promise are viewed as idealistic because each are abstracts which never mandate final verification. Acceptance and security somehow become tangible because when enough people talk about them, anyone who disagrees is cast as an outsider and is thus estranged not only from the comfort of childhood through self-willed sacrifice, but is also estranged from the security of community which one needs to survive and potentially prosper.

The only moral to this episode is that which we determine for ourselves. No ready-made answers exist for any question of authenticity. The only fruit established from our labor is that which we cultivate based on our needs and the demands we allow external control. Internally, the question must be visited and ultimately harvested based on our individual abilities and subsequent desires. Answers are not the only companions to Questions. Often, it is more beneficial to continue questioning than to arrive hastily at an answer which may not even be recognized by the question. Perhaps the face behind the mask has withered from neglect; in which case a new disguise must be sought, or the exposed must be determined to stand firm with or without an answer, and to do so is to stand mired in authenticity. For most of us, our only experience with authenticity is in the imagination of childhood. With luck, the sacrifice wasn’t too severe.

© 21II09 Le Meme War Press