Tag: Poetic Essays

You Can’t Spell November without NV…

On By Beleaguered ServantIn Poetic Essays1 Comment 
I wonder alone about all that I want -- 
How it seems to recede from me daily and far --  
As I walk through the loneliest places I know 
And I mildly curse the more fortunate ones

  Sometimes, within heaven, we make us a hell: 
  A dark habitat where we choose then to dwell, 
  Where we take what we have, and would give it all back, 
  Just to focus instead on whatever

  We lack

Envy is a weird emotion.

If you are around small children, or children of any age, you will rapidly realize both how natural and how pervasive envy is. Children tend to want whatever other children have, and to resent said children for the having.

This is often exacerbated by another common behavior among children, which is: they realize when they themselves are the ones being envied, and — they revel in it. This is a result of the interplay of natural emotions and our human tendency to want to see what (and who) we can impact, or even control.

In stories, we see this played out by the virtuous poor person who is made fun and lorded over by more affluent bullies. This is a trope so popular as to be almost universal, but one which has the unfortunate side-effect of skipping past the envy and going straight to “well, they deserve to be hated anyway”. And, to be fair, it the dividing line between wanting a better life and envying others for having what we may not can be almost impossible for us to spot from within the forest of our own feelings.

One of the other bewildering things about envy is that it can work to undo virtually everything in our lives by turning our self-image inside out. Let me explain what I mean by way of an example.

Let’s say, hypothetically, that a young person decides they want to learn how to play a musical instrument. They begin to work, outside of school hours and beyond the sight of anyone they know, on the long and arduous process of how to physically and mentally operate their instrument. It is typically months or years before anyone would want to hear the music they are able to produce, but with time and application, they are gradually met with greater facility; that, in turn, starts to turn into public notice.

Being “good at something” is a thing we are all encouraged to do; so is “work hard” and “stick to it”. So they have successfully modeled the virtues that we are all taught. And what are they met with?

“Ugh. It’s not fair. You are so talented!”

The term “talent” is supposed to be a compliment, but it is far more frequently used as a subtle way of dismissing the amount of work people have put in to get good at their craft. We aren’t allowed to envy people who work hard, so we instead claim that people have some sort of genetic “talent” advantage that we can fairly resent.

Here is the paradox: by successfully modeling the virtues we are taught, we gain a skill, which is supposed to be a good thing: but people hate us for it, which is generally considered a bad thing. This is what I meant by calling envy “bewildering” and how it can “turn our self-image inside out”. Envious people don’t want others around them to stand out in ways that trigger their envy.

I spent much of my teen and young adult life just trying to blend in. Being hated for your faults can be very difficult, but being hated for your virtues is in many ways worse. When I got to the point where I was reasonably good at playing the piano, I lost a lot of non-musical friends; when I then left music to pursue other interests in college, I found out there was another group of musical friends I thought I had who envied me for having choices.

In the mean time, I participated in all the common envies of my age: of better-looking guys, of guys with more money, and the ones who were more popular with girls for whatever reasons. So please don’t get the idea that envy was something I only saw as a target, I experienced it almost every type of way possible.

It is of very little benefit to tell people that envy is illogical. In that way, envy is like every other emotion. Of course envy is illogical, because we feel it before we have all the facts; we are even likely to continue to feel it when the facts tell us we should not.

Gratitude, of course, is the counterbalance to envy. When we focus on what we have, the emotional power of whatever we feel we don’t have lessens.

If only there was a holiday set aside for gratitude…

Each End

On By Beleaguered ServantIn Original Poems, Poetic Essays1 Comment 
each day, 
a little older; 
each end, 
a crossing over

The picture above is of a rock bridge in a park nearby where I used to take my kids, and I now occasionally take my grandkids. Bridges fascinate me, in all their varieties.

If you’ve ever tried to build a bridge out of Legos, you realize pretty quickly that bridges constructed in that manner do not want to stand up, they want to collapse. The amount of engineering that goes into bridges that last hundreds of years has always been remarkable.

Stone bridges and covered wooden bridges are particularly wonderful. I’ve used probably 100 different bridge photos in these posts over the years.

For much of human history, when you hit a reasonably long, deep, or wide body of water, you’d reached the end of your journey. There was no practical way to go further. Bridges turn “ends” into “new beginnings”. They are natural markers on journeys.

As this is the last of 30 NanoPoblano days for 2023, it is traditional to mark the occasion with expressions of relief, gratitude, regret, and any one of countless other emotions writing and posting more often for a month might bring up. I’m grateful to everyone who reads this blog, and I am equally grateful for the chance to share some of your lives through your blogs this last month.

November 30th can be a river to stop at, or a bridge to keep going. Not sure which I’ll do, but it’s good to know that bridges are an option.

Unreliable Friends

On By Beleaguered ServantIn Original Poems, Poetic Essays1 Comment

I had several people direct message me about yesterday’s post, saying (a) it was late; and (b) that I’m wrong in asserting that there is no secret to eternal youth, because there is. After reading and considering all of their carefully reasoned arguments, I can only respond with

… sorry it was late.

in dreams the roads are longer 
and night and day are one 
we rustle then like leaves across 
some distant overrun 

where sound turns into silence 
and silence into haze 
in dreams the roads seem endless 
just like these 

latter days

I love sleeping, but I’m not that fond of dreaming. Dreams are unreliable friends; they bring up subjects we’d rather they didn’t, stay too long, and come back at the worst possible times.

Sleep is like getting a massage; dreams are like someone operating a jackhammer just outside your door.

come ride the hillside of barely knowing, 
come slide along on the nescience; 
all is so free where the winds are blowing 
random accessible ignorance. 

come see vapors that turn to shadows 
that we can claim to mean "it's our turn" -- 
come ride the hillside of barely knowing, 
where we can find, but can never 

learn

One of the best things about writing poetry is that it doesn’t really have to make sense, at least not in the same way sentences are supposed to. Last time I checked, emotions don’t really make any sense, either; ideally, poetry conveys those nonsensical (or irrational) emotions. It can, of course, do a million other things; and people will have their preferences as to what they like in poetry.

Sometimes, it helps to read online prose discourse as though it were poetry. When you stop trying to make sense of the welter of human emotions, it can make life a lot easier.

And then one can produce their own posts on time. So sorry about yesterday.

Chimeras

On By Beleaguered ServantIn Original Poems, Poetic Essays1 Comment 
Years go by, 
And words entwine: 
So we must accept 
Our own 

Decline

Acceptance of the limitations that come with aging is not a particularly easy skill to master; however, life tends to leave us with few other choices. One of those few is “raging and storming”, which, while entertaining, has limited value in actually changing anything.

I myself prefer “bitching and moaning”, which is equally useless.

Now we humans love secrets, and we seek them everywhere. Many of us think there is a secret to never getting old, never being in decline, never having to deal with new limitations. And we look for the secret. And we spend hours of time and as much money as we can muster chasing the secret. Which turns out to be a chimera.

chi·me·ra

/kīˈmirə,kəˈmirə/

noun

… a thing that is hoped or wished for but in fact is illusory or impossible to achieve.

From the Oxford Dictionary

Chasing after impossible to achieve things is a bit of a hobby with me. And I hear it is good to have hobbies as you age. So learning to accept aging by refusing to accept aging seems to be my current path.

Sigh.

Well, it isn’t the last self-contradictory cycle I’ll find myself in, I’m sure.

joy breeds habits

On By Beleaguered ServantIn Original Poems, Poetic Essays1 Comment 
joy breeds habits; 
habits, addictions -- 
there I am

I do not drink alcohol. I more than make it up on soft drinks.

I loved them from the first time I tasted one. I basically like them all. Even though I pretty much stick to the diet versions, these days, I like basically every brand. I do heavily favor ones with caffeine, however.

I don’t drink coffee, either. Or milk. I drink fruit juice maybe twice a year.

I will, however, drink tea. I like tea equally well, but, unlike soft drinks, there is a lot of tea sold out there I do not like. The kind I like is more trouble to buy (and more expensive) — or more trouble to make, which I just don’t ever do. So I end up drinking either soft drinks, energy drinks (which to me are just extra-caffeinated soft drinks) or water.

Water comes in a distant third. I of course know it ought to be a distant first.

In wondering why it is I knowingly do something that I am aware is suboptimal, healthwise, I find myself going through a series of excuses. But at the bottom of all of those is “because I want to”.

That I am addicted to caffeine is evident. I have gotten off it (for as long as 18 months, as an older adult) and the transition period was not particularly fun. At that time, I used heavy exercise to get my heart going fast enough to duplicate the effects of caffeine in my body; which would be much more difficult to do at the age I am now.

Difficult, but not impossible.

I’ve seldom been able to use the positive aspects of my personality (like willpower) to make positive changes in my life; as it turns out, the negative aspects of my personality (like being a creature of habit) have been much more useful in achieving healthier results. So I would have to make a habit out of water consumption and avoiding caffeine, just as I did 12 years ago.

But I don’t know that I will. I mean, I also ought to eat healthier, exercise more, find more constructive ways to deal with stress, be more understanding of my fellow human beings, do more for others, care less what other people think, and finish a book once in a while.

I don’t know that I will effectively do any of those things, either.

The term “wrong” is used ambiguously in everyday conversation; for that reason, people equivocate between the wrong of ingesting too much caffeine and the wrong of (say) stealing. In between those might be any number of other “wrongs” that turn out to either be a big deal, or not, depending on one’s perspective.

Just as a trivial example, I know a guy who screams online daily about the immorality of certain NCAA football rule violations, but who has no problem parking in handicapped parking spots he isn’t entitled to. He definitely thinks the former of those two things is a bigger deal than the latter; I might think the opposite. From such sources do many of the ongoing disputes of humanity arise, although, not in this case, as I have never brought the subject up with him — nor do I plan to.

I do not feel like I am in any position to deal in moral judgments; I am too flawed. I tend to fall back on what I will call “effective judgments”, which don’t deal as much with good/bad dichotomies as better/worse ones.

Like, it would be better to have a purpose to these essays than not. But having one doesn’t make the essay “good”, just better.

Better than what, I’ll leave up to you.

in memory

On By Beleaguered ServantIn Original Poems, Poetic Essays1 Comment 
in memory, you're still alive, 
 and I'm still young, and we're still free; 
 in recollections deep and high, 
 there's still a you to be with me 

along the shore, beside the sea, 
 it's not a veil, it's verity -- 
 there's summer actuality, 
 in memory, in memory

The photo affixed to the top of this post is upside down. It gives it an odd, unsettling quality, I think.

It took me a minute to figure out what was wrong with it. I flipped the photo, and it suddenly just looks like an ordinary photo. But I show it here the way the photographer intended.

Much of what we present to the world or are presented with, daily, is upside down. We may realize that something seems off with it, but can’t put our finger on what it is.

I think this sort of “upside-downness” characterizes most of my own memories. That’s because a bare recording of the facts or events changes almost completely when perspective is skewed, and mine pretty much always was, and is.

I realize, looking back, that my ability to understand why other people behaved as they did was severely limited at the time, and is scarcely better now. I might think today, that my parents did things with us like take us to the beach because they loved us. At the time, I just thought, “well, this is a things that’s happening” — if I thought anything at all.

The fact that memories are upside down doesn’t make them inaccurate. It just means others need to take care in using them, because they may not be what they appear at first.

a piece of furniture

On By Beleaguered ServantIn Original Poems, Poetic Essays1 Comment 
when you become a piece of furniture, 
the known, predictable is your full mark; 
your loved ones all can say what you'll say next, 
as personhood, itself, flees out the door 

to then be chased by you, along with dreams 
of other feelings -- other thirsts and dares -- 
to where you are not patronized or viewed 
as something boring and ridiculous 

but rather as a lover, or a friend, 
or as a mystery, something alive; 
not static, in a warehouse in the dark,  
someone no longer seen, but simply 

there

She didn’t know why he had left her, but I did. She criticized him constantly, carped at him, belittled him.

On the odd occasions he would fight back, she would say he was insecure. “Insecure” is a word used by people to dismiss other people’s feelings.

Having said that I understood why he left, it was harder watching the choices he made afterwards. He was with a series of women who used him for his money, and he said he was okay with that. “At least these relationships are honest. No one would ever want me for me, no one ever has, so… they get what they want, I get what I want, it’s all good.”

But it is not all good. Do you think the woman you’re with now would stay by you if you were sick?

Not likely.

Why do you think you are unlovable?

Ask my ex-wife. I gave her the best I had, and you see where that got me.

Yeah, she treated you like a piece of furniture. But that was her, not you.

Yeah, well, you’re married to one of the three good women in the world, so I wouldn’t expect you to understand.

Oh, I understand. I was married before, remember?

Look, I know you don’t believe what I’m about to say, but: almost nobody really loves anybody. Romantically, that is. People love their kids; people love their dogs. But partners? That’s all just biology, and once it wears off, there is nothing but residual dislike left over.

Yeah, you’re right, I don’t believe what you just said.

word crayons

On By Beleaguered ServantIn Original Poems, Poetic EssaysLeave a comment 
the facts are black-and-white, we have to 
color with our words, 
or else the outlines lose 
their verve and meaning -- 

for those who know the most of fact 
may know the least of feeling, 
or how those shape our posture and 
our leaning. 

to separate what is (out there) 
and how we feel about it, 
is fanciful; our thoughts are where 
we are --

we color daily with our words 
the bare facts of existence, 
and bring to fingers what 
is really far

Crayons are kind of ideal analogies for our ability to put our feelings into words, because they are very imprecise. Precise tools are sharp, and can as easily destroy as create. Crayons force the artist to be a little less aggressive, though no less energetic.

All I wanted to be able to do as a child was draw. I have no talent for drawing whatsoever; nonetheless, I loved doing it. All that’s left of that these days are idle moments I spend on a coloring app, turning out things like

When you think about your own life, it seems good to recognize what remains of the childhood you. The childhood me was erratic, angry, arrogant, and clueless. Through a miracle of consistency, I have retained most of these traits.

I hide them a little more successfully these days.

When people look to you for answers, it can be disconcerting to realize you don’t have them. This is a common experience people have as a friend, lover, parent, or co-worker: being approached for answers, but not having any.

Answers are very comforting, of course, and there are any number of people around more than willing to provide them. To me, answers are like statistics: less convincing once you learn how they’re arrived at.

It’s easy to let other people color our pictures for us, is what I’m getting at. But it’s our piece of paper, our drawing, our chance to express what we see and feel. It may be different than other people’s; experts may sneer at it. But it is no less valuable, no less glorious for being the work of an aspirant or an outcast.

always/sometimes

On By Beleaguered ServantIn Original Poems, Poetic Essays1 Comment 
ever the always/sometimes wonder, 
heart in the throat, and cash in hand; 
promises made, then torn asunder, 
faces and bodies barely scanned, 

heritage, legacy in forfeit -- 
choices unmade like a hotel bed -- 
ever the always/sometimes hollow, 
life for the living; death, the dead.

Lives are easier to break than they are to build. Every gift in life can be a curse: every boon, a myriad of opportunities for failure. He had made money, then the money unmade him.

Nothing seems more real in life than the desires of the moment; nothing brings consequences quite so real, either.

Now, many people I know struggle with a form of the belief that modern life itself is not real: the imagery is fake; our relationships are fake; the promises of politicians and businesses are fake. Most of us having spent two years recently locked inside with nothing but the internet didn’t help those types of feelings.

But for him, living out of a hotel and having lost his job, his marriage, and with kids he never sees, life seems only too real. It is hard for him to believe he gave all of that up for things so empty and fleeting.

From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.