open your eyes, O idiot, innocent boy, look at what has happened: once there were sunlit days when you followed after where ever a girl would go, she loved with greater love than any woman knew

(Catullus, "here's no time for nonsense") Roman poets give us some wisdom, but they seem to have had a charmed life, with women like these: the Graces of Botticelli, or better yet, Maclise's lovely Madeline, brushing her hair. Of course these were Renaissance (or early 19th century)versions of Romanesque ideals. It doesn't matter. Where are these women today? In my mind. Dwells angels of the highest aeonic order. I dream of rosy lips like Botticelli's Venus, or like that haughty woman reclining on David's couch. The one I love the most recedes from me. Like Cat Stevens sang: a lot of nice things turn bad out there. If I had proleptic power(not like Macbeth's!)I'd recede into the vast quietude of my past, when I rode my bike, wearing a Who t-shirt, trying to make the woman of my dreams love me. Now I KNOW I'm crying like a bitch, but let's be real. What man ever wants to see the woman he loves recede into the misty distance?

Tapestries of life. We weave ourselves into clumsy corners where no spiders dwell. By which I mean: dangerous entities intent on devouring not our bodies but our fluid essence. I don't bleed red like most ... I bleed noetic effluvia, and I try to share it with women who simply don't care ... or at least make fun (which is worse) As I guzzle my beer and smoke my cigars, I think of the Bayeux tapestry, and how my life is little more than a collection of black threads.

O ravenous hell! My evil hatred rises against your power

Catullus, "Dress now in sorrow, O all" Shantih

A Vietnamese Woman Who Made My Heart Kick Its Heels Across the Dance Hall of Life Her smile and face made me want to kiss her immediately. So what did I do? Like a schmuck I talked about Li-Po and other relatively Asian poets, while missing out on the glorious luster of her lips, the cute manner in which her eyeglasses slid down her adorable button nose…I had a lot to tell her: about how Queen Elizabeth sent Sir Francis Drake on a pirate mission …. Or better yet, how Milton, blind as a bat, declaimed the verses of the greatest poem the world has ever known. She only smiled, with eyes that made me melt, and desired to embrace her beauty. Nothing else mattered. Botticelli’s Primavera mattered not a whit to her, only the promise of my kiss. I tried to explain atonalism in music to her, but she just smiled, and took my hand , and begged with glorious eyes for a kiss … And what did I do? Like an ass I started reciting Shakespeare. “O that this too too solid flesh would melt,” etc. …. She held me, and listened, and for a moment I felt like a man again. But when my tongue tasted her body, I danced across the hall of life like a horny jester, and I ceased to be me.

Metaphysics lives in a parking lot

There is a thing called hule and it invades our souls

Someone had better be prepared for rage. There would be more than ocean-water broken Before God’s last Put out the light was spoken. ~ Robert Frost

A root beneath a NO PARKING sign declares nature to be a unique, unrepeatable entity – Not prosoponbut hupostasis How many know the theologic-philosophic distinction? One, perhaps two … and one I’ve lost. A Monad without the all-formative, productive Dyad. So now what? I smoke my cigar, awaiting governmental largesse. My watch is white gold and platinum, my shoes are KC, but yet I’m poor. I’ve squandered my money on liquor, women, and Onyx Toros. But somehow the Monad remains. Augustly aloof, rotting in the juices of his own noetic effluence. This root beneath the sign that I keep tapping, enjoying its permanence, makes me feel ephemerality as almost a virtue. I sing a song and dance a dance with myself …. Quietly alone, awaiting the worst but somehow always finding an angel. They DO exist, but not in dreams or shadows as Stevens once put it. Divinity is an attribute of our evolved selves. I lack it. But I love it in others. The sweetest woman who ever lived (in my own biased estimation) was the pretty Vietnamese lady who hugged me when I cried, and sent out a page for me to make sure I didn’t leave before (chastely) hugging her goodbye. And yet still I return to this root. It establishes a strong sense of  - a sense that the wooden nature of reality will never abandon us. A sense that no matter how much vodka I imbibe, I am still Edward Moore, 39 years old, at the midpoint of my life … And like Dante in his dark wood, but with no Virgil to guide me. A guide? I reach out when necessary, and as Ginsberg once wrote, Mohammedan angels dance on the rooftops. What more can I ask for? My angel ….

If I can get metaphysical for a moment .. Bach's 4th Brandenburg Concerto combines the windy plurality of the Platonic Dyad with the stable Saturnian force of the One. This may seem too precious, but I'm really just trying to recapture my old love of music by way of my recently usurped love of philosophy. My ex-wife has excelled where I failed, and I can't bring myself to write philosophy any more. So here is a poem instead: Neither death nor immortality was there then, No sign of night or day. That One breathed, windless, by its own energy (svadha'): Nought else existed then (The Rig Veda) How glorious to have no death, life, nor breath -- just consciousness. Probably the finest definition of a god that I've ever encountered. But where does the HUMAN come in? My pain and stress and desire for yet more alcohol leads me to an embrace of life that is perhaps cold and abusive, but ... I'm Edward, and shall remain so. But over atop all of it, on my face with her moist femininity is my Venus. Breathing is pointless, when there is something more precious than oxygen in the air. Smile of a woman, her sweet caress and (clichéd) tenderness, all this makes the pain endurable. Without it, I fear I'm done for.

There is a painting by Daniel Maclise (1868) entitled Madeline After Prayer. It's based on the poem by Keats, "The Eve of St. Agnes." Madeline is painted therein like a sad angel. I won't comment on the clarity of the presentation, for I don't particularly care for that too lengthy poem by our greatest poet since Shakespeare. However, the melding of melancholy and effortless beauty in that woman's face moves me to thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. I write this because I recall a certain young teacher, when I was in high school ... She had that ethereal beauty that makes sensitive souls turn like flowers to the sun. When she saw me carrying around a volume of Lord Tennyson, she began to show an interest in me that I interpreted as, well ... erotic. It wasn't. But the recollection of the fantasy has sustained me through many dark periods of a turbulent life. I am listening to Chopin right now, pretending to be stable and connected. When in fact, I'm drunk and ready to go start a fight. I promise to write more about Maclise. It's important, to me if to no one else. Peace to all. And if you ever stop loving life, read Shakespeare.

The Aristocrat: The Aristocrat: A Drunken Poet Rambles

The Aristocrat: The Aristocrat: A Drunken Poet Rambles: The Aristocrat: A Drunken Poet Rambles : On Listening to Georgs Pelecis on a Particularly Terrible Day By Edward Moore Jacques-Louis Dav...

The Aristocrat: A Drunken Poet Rambles

The Aristocrat: A Drunken Poet Rambles: On Listening to Georgs Pelecis on a Particularly Terrible Day By Edward Moore Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), The Children of Niobe A...

A Drunken Poet Rambles

On Listening to Georgs Pelecis on a Particularly Terrible Day By Edward Moore Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), The Children of Niobe A piece by the composer Pelecis, entitled “Nevertheless” takes me back to an old love-making scene (and I use the word “scene” carefully, for no real loving occurred, just a fantasy reaction) … Anyway (I almost wrote “nevertheless”) something cold and calculating in me was born that night … or perhaps not born but encouraged to tickle the hyper-nervous tendrils of my imagination. It is often tempting to use adjectives like “tragic” or “revelatory” to describe moments that are really just selfish jaunts into the domain of the sensual. I love sensuality, and the physical form … What did Wallace Stevens say? Beauty is momentary in the mind – The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body’s beauty lives. (“Peter Quince at the Clavier” IV.51-54) The body lives in the taste left on my lips, the sweat that covers me after … After what? Pretending that she was Aphrodite on her crimson shell, or Thetis with the glistening feet coming to console her war-weary … lover? No, the body dies every day, in myriad ways, and only the noussurvives. Nevertheless, a fetish cannot be sustained by intellect alone: it requires taste, texture, a certain scent, and (hopefully) words to go with it. To hear a word of sensual kindness from a desirable woman is probably the most beautiful thing the world has to offer a man. But we – or at least I – seek alternatives. This descending motif of Pelecis, in which the violin vies with the piano for supremacy is like one of those rare and wonderful episodes of love-making in which the woman can laugh and the man can get annoyed and both find, in one orgasmic moment, that they love each other more than words or even music can tell! Some things are terribly funny, like a woman farting in the tub and the man making a crude joke, and then wrapping her in a towel, telling her what a goddess she is, and tasting every ounce of her womanhood with an ardor born of aeons of evolution. It should be obvious from this that I have, as D. H. Lawrence famously put it, “sex on the brain.” But it’s more than that. It’s a return to origins: to a time when all was new and I could be silly without being branded a drunken fool with a foot fetish by women with whom I used to discourse upon the finer points of Hegelian philosophy. So now I have turned from Pelecis to Beethoven: quite different effluences of the divine pneuma. Since I’m on to Ludwig’s violin concerto now, here comes a poem. A gentle tread upon the grass How different from the blistering bluesy antics of concrete! One wants to be surly but can’t (for) The tired indifferent glance of the world makes us long for friendship. Tears can fall with power, like an aggressively scraped G-string on a Stradivarius. But they can rain gently, too, like the tears of Echo as she tried desperately (and ingeniously) to court Narcissus. It’s the same, really. Remember what Whitman said: “There is that in me – I do not know what it is – but I know it is in me.” I would love a woman who would rape me with words: Who would tear back the dull husk of my noetic diaphragm to reveal the glossy suppuration that festers within. I would love such an one – not with a love of roses and chocolates, but with a love of Niobe-like contentment with a glorious pissing-off of the gods. To make something, as ktisiscreate (which is a Christian term) … Perhaps to be demiourgos… That’s better. I want to invite love into the world, not demand it! When I sit on the shore fishing, I want to catch crabs … Crabs that will walk backward and return me to the history of my race. When I make love to a woman, I want to be carried forward, into a world that even my drunken mind can’t conceive. That is Love. agape 