The Lament is the Mode of Our Age (take 2)

The lament is the mode of our age
(though a philippic or two still lands on the page)
8 billion prisoners
Of the self-same dilemma
Admit it or not
We all share in the blame
And soon your safe house
Will be a sauna too
Though Mr. Schmertz assures me
Hell is all powered by fossil fuel

To My Own Devices (by Li Bai)

Facing the jug

Oblivious to the night

How the petals have fallen

To fill up my gown

Drunken I rise

And stumble towards

The light of the moon upstream

With the birds so far away

And people so few

And far between

自遣

李白

对酒不觉暝

落花盈我衣

醉起步溪月

鸟还人亦稀

*******

Addendum: Counting the Blossoms

Last night

Sitting up late

Drinking red wine

With Li Bai

This morning looking

At the lawn hungover
I wondered just how

Many petals it took
To fill up his gown

The Moon Amidst a Brocade

Half an hour before sunset Against a backdrop Teal trending to gray The moon appeared As a cloud among equals Part of the cumulus brocade Draped across the sky

Living in Metaphor (part 1)

Last night walking my dog into town I had this strange sense of passing through a Hollywood movie lot.  The façade of the storefronts seemed to be just that, as if the small town where I live had contracted further still by losing a dimension.  Just beyond the storefronts, I could sense, lay another world, another plane of reality quite different from what presents itself along Main Street here in Mayberry RFD. In truth, only a few hundred feet behind the storefronts, the gravel lots give way to pasture overrun with weeds.

So much of what we know of the world we learn from the various media we consume.  Our sense of what’s real and what’s not is itself entirely constructed by the thousands of books, movies and TV shows that flit before our eyes.  Common sense tells us there’s a difference between stage and reality when in truth there’s not all that much because our sense of both has been similarly contrived by the very same means.  All the world being a stage is no mere figure of speech but a metaphor that conveys an extremely radical and much deeper meaning about the experience of being human.  How like players on the stage we are never quite ourselves yet always hungering for more love and applause.