The trouble with courses that center on a single thinker, or around a single, narrowly-defined topic, is that after several weeks, there’s only so much that can be said. All the major theses have been trotted out; all the dead horses have been flogged. There’s only so many times that I can get excited about the prospects and/or pitfalls of communal deliberations or about the cesspool of “modernity”.
And so, I write: haikus, gestures, grocery lists. And the occasional full-length poem. Today’s installment:
The Barfly
Like flatulence
I sink into the carpet
And slink along the walls.
I linger like a racial epithet
Pausing time, breaking friends,
Red eyes and my mother’s mouth.
Like a broken glass on the floor,
I cause raised eyebrows and curled lips
All around me,
Until like the glass,
With a single napkin,
I am picked up.
So…do you date much?
Yeah…me too. It’s so awkward.
Hey, are you going to eat that?
Dressed Like 25
Heart of 12, Mind of 17
Nabokov yawns again.
Suitcase brims and bursts
Tired eyes meet waiting arms
Where did those keys go?
**
Leaves scrape concrete walks.
Winds blow grey, and hearts burn bright.
Wool socks on cold toes.
**
Writing: sex sans joy.
Words copulate and birth pages.
I drown in their kids.
God smirks at SoCo.
“God is/not what we have thought”,
Say scholars in heat.
A Haiku:
Dear Emo Barrista,
One day your hair will wither
So furnish your soul.
Grace in our bleeding veins.
Christ, the history of all,
Guides us into Life.
***
I’ve alluded to this paper that I’m crawling through for a few posts now. I’ve made a resolute commitment to not get into anything too heavy on the blog anymore, as there are plenty of avenues in my life for those writings; the blog is for haikus, baseball, rants, and fart jokes. Inevitably, theology comes slipping out, but I’ll try to keep it to a minimum here. I’m working on this paper on Marie-Dominique Chenu, French Catholic priest during the Second World War who wrote on, among other things, the meaning of labor, and how a Christian vision of labor means that the very work we do mimics the Incarnation. God became flesh in a particular time and place, leading us to see that history itself is enveloped in the folds of God, that history is not without meaning–not just for the future consummation, but now. So, for Chenu, in an age where workers were dropping like flies in the factories, that meant that work–being the place where people gathered together in unity–became the new place where the Spirit finds a home. We participate in God’s activity in history by work.
And so, tonight, I’ll do my participation. Work, that is. I’ve done mostly nothing productive today, so here we go.
A final haiku:
“A Cricket Closes Its Eyes as I Swat it With My Paper”
Green twitches in time
White flash! Veins pulse! Barbrous Yawp!
Green mush into the floor.
***
thankyouandgoodnight.
Ochuk has caught the fever. Wedding haikus. He’s pretty funny already, but these are stellar.
THE HAMSTER IS BACK. I’M SO EXCITED I KEEP TYPING IN ALL CAPS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111
GO HERE IMMEDIATELY.
Oh dust balls of Hell!!!
Spawn of Satan, dry and evil.
You trouble Jen’s soul.
***
The celebration of my 30th year on Earth begins tonight. True, the actual birthday’s not til next weekend, but lots of people are out of town next weekend, and all I really want to do for my 30th is have people that I care about over, eat good food, drink good wine, and enjoy one another’s company. A foretaste of Heaven, as it were, to have the various facets of my life gather together under one roof with the purpose of simply being together.
So, I’ll work on Chenu, fast and furious, with the anticipation that tonight, there will be merriment and laughter and joy abounding. Or so the story goes.
Peace.
