Philadelphia iS NOT WHAT IT CLAIMS

The Goddess Who Extends Her Hands

A spark hits the ground

It's a smile from heaven: one that tells us it's time to awaken to a new life

I once believed in pneumatic effluence

No such thing exists: what does exist is the life-principle in each and every one of us

What I mean is this: When the day dawns and the sorrow hits something gets us out of bed.

It's not God; it's something that reverberates in our souls

I call it hupostasis

One day, I'll learn to believe in theos again

But when I cry somebody responds: it's a sort of recollection of all the women I've ever lloved

It'a more than that, though

Love writes our life for us, and if anyone tells me otherwise, I'll show them HATE

I've found myself feeling misery for Wordsworth

His love of nature, his declaration of the glory of what faces us each day

He was wrong: each day we are met with a smirk, a face that tells us that we mean NOTHING

But we know better: we are sparks of the divine essence. Better than that which brought us here!

For s Pascal said: we are reeds, but thinking reeds

We know that we are capable of being torn to shreds by the crimson had of God

Yet we love him, for we know that there is no other manner of existence capable of sustaining our emotional needs

Physical needs are easy: they come with shit, foot, and sex

But EMOTIONAL needs: that something else entirely

I need to know that my loves of Beethoven, Botticelli, Bruce Springsteen, and cats are

Loves shared by others. Because a life without communion is a life without interpersonal communion

.

And such a life is no life, and it's worth leaving

One day recently I forgot about philosophy

I called out to God like a fool

Hoping some dumb foxhole prayer might save me

It didn't

But here I sit, beer in hand, thinking that it would be best to die.

No! Instead I'm going to explain to you -- if you'll give me a minute -- why this is so beautiful:

"The other error that scares us is our consistency: a reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loth to disappoint them." (Emerson, "Self-Reliance").

The love of the other is what makes us human.

I am loth disappoint others with my words because I don't want to lose the necessary, life-affirming love of others

I am waiting for a goddess ... I've said this before

Once upon a time I sat beside a stream and held a woman.

She quoted Thoreau to me:

"There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

I'm an excitable boy. I have delusion of grandeur

However, like Byron, I know that salvation comes from a woman

Though the day of my Destiny's over,

And the star of my Fate hath declined,

Thy soft heart refused to discover

The faults which so many could find;

Though thy Soul with my grief was acquainted,

It shrunk not to share it with me,

And the Love which my Spirit hath painted

It never hath found but in Thee.

Lord Byron, "Stanzas to Augusta"

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A Time for Hate ... LOVE

a time for peace, too late perhaps

It's a tad too late, but that's OK

Somewhere, somehow, I fell into an avernian ditch

I'm not quite out, but I'm scratching

Virgil is no guide. but this woman is:

One thing to say is this

Boredom kills, adventure inspires

But adventure destroys the mind and all it loves ....

Remember that!

Sylvia My Love

I met you one day, before I was born.

You smiled and quoted some bad poetry.

I made fun of you, but we laughed, and for a moment I fell I in love.

Then you died.

I wish I were older, perhaps I could've rescued you from Ted ....

Or probably, more likely, I would have destroyed your soul instead of your life.

I am evil.

She Mocves Me

The pain and the pleasure linked together in a sick dance.

I found myself writhing, striving, for a new chance at life, One that would involve no sacrifice. Just love.

But that concept – love – is rather new. The Greeks said

agape sou

Who knows? What I do know is that there is a time for hate and a time for when he, submissive, yielded to her :

He yielded to her, and his heart was glad.

~ Homer, The Odyssey bk. 24.

Gladness of heart … Let’s recall what ancient language formulated that phrase …

Forget it. In our vernacular, we’ll say that joy has its hands ever at its lips, bidding us adieu. (Keats, “Ode on Melancholy,”)

loosely quoted)

As I sit here, watching a fountain merge with the sky, and children run with “joy” about the wooded lanes of this park, I realize that “there hath past away a glory from the earth” (Wordsworth, “Immortality Ode”)

One of these days I’ll watch for a little while a Lou reed-style satellite.

One of these days I’ll feed geese gain at the park.

One of these days I’ll wake up without the shakes, and eat a sandwich, alone …

Always alone. I should quote Poe, and I guess I will, but not what you’d expect:

Some human memories and tearful lore, Render him terrorless: his names’s ‘No More.’

` Poe, “Sonnet – Silence”

But I’ll smell the grounds again around the little brook along our street.

Someone wielded a sword at me once ,,, it was a fantasy.