Ok, I'll try Harder

I know I took the day off yesterday, and I'm catching some flak from my loyal readers. I thought my audience was 6, but this number has ballooned to 8. 8 confirmed readers is pretty good. I mean, surely the Washington Post cant have THAT many more readers than that, can they? Heck, I've been alive for 25 years and I havent read that rag once. Not once. I've got EIGHT readers, baby! Take that Bernstein! What's more, I can personally confirm that at least 3 of them are actually literate.

I did try to write last night. I figured that if I could write every day for 10 days, it would be habit and I'd be compelled to write every day for the rest of my life. Of course, this doesnt mean much, because I probably wont make it much past 30 what with my hard living and all. Ha!

Anyway, so I tried to log on last night with no luck. I could connect to blogger, but not my particular site. My only guess is that the moral police pulled my site for review because I included the term 'sex scene' in my previous post. Fascists. (I'm only kidding Blogger folks. Please dont can my site. Think of my three literate fans! And how will the other five ever learn to read without me?)

I was going to write about how I thought poetry was an under appreciated art form, but who cares about that? I'm not sure I care enough to write about it, let alone subject you to having to read it. I did, however, come across some poem I wrote last year. I'm not posting it because I think it's good, but rather because I can post whatever the heck I want. This thing is awesome. You, of course, dont have to read it. If you dont like my poem (or think that poetry sucks in general) feel free to stop in the middle and do something else. Might I recommend that you visit www.washingstonpost.com They could use your support.

The poem is about death. Well not really. It's about my sense that death is overrated.

Why do you lament death?

Is it because you are a theist,

Who believes that life is a sacred gift,

Given to the Earth as a cure

For its otherwise monotonous existence:

The predictability of the ocean’s ebb and flow,

The perpetuity of solstice after autumnal equinox:

the Great Hunter, a stoic Prometheus,

a dutiful Lazarus, returning to work

from an afternoon’s siesta, his endlessly faithful dog in tow.

If so, do you, then, grow angry at your Father,

For reaching His long, thin fingers

Across the great expanse of the Cistine’s ceiling,

The black of His fingernails scratching

And tearing the pale blues and puffy whites,

That lay between Him and your life’s only friend,

Adam, who grew up just three houses down,

Who saved your life in 4^th grade when you fell

Into the deep end of Mrs. Johnson’s pool,

Who never failed to send you a birthday card,

Not once,

and who now unwittingly reaches for this caress,

Gentle, cold and Malignant?

Do you fault Him for reclaiming His gift?

And if so, will you burn His house and slaughter His animals,

Rape His children and drive Him into the barren West,

The only appropriate punishment, as History teaches us,

For those guilty of treason or Indian-giving?

And if so, will you then erect

A gilded figure, one hundred feet tall,

Crafted in your own likeness,

Having grown lonesome after the loss,

First of a friend, then of a Father?

Or, is it because you are a young artist,

A portrait painter, who believes every subject,

But man, an unpersuasive reason to pervert

The pristine white of a virgin canvas?

And if so, do you visit auction houses under the cover of night,

Cloaked in black and armed at the hip

With stolen credit cards and forged checks,

Drunken and lustful, bidding on every Picasso and Caravaggio,

Until you have monopolized the world’s supply?

Do you fault them for what has happened?

And if so, will you rip canvas from frame,

With each of the broken and splintered pieces

Piled in a heap, doused with gasoline, and peppered with gun powder,

And will an inaudible cackle part your lips,

As you paint, in your mind’s eye, the looks on their faces,

As they bear witness to a funeral pyre appropriately large enough

To honor the loss of such a great man,

A man,

And will you be contented, having rid the world

Of all evidence that beauty is to be found in lines and light?

And if so, will you then collapse into bed that night,

Arms heavy, eyes stinging from smoke, carbon caked

Around your nose and mouth, which has broken into smile,

As you dream of the eight days to follow,

With tomorrow’s pyrotechnics being sponsored

By a Frenchman you’d never met, who you understand

Went by the name of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin.

As you hope that, after tomorrow, beauty will no longer

Be assigned to wretched bowls of fruit?

Or, are you a computer scientists, an astute observer

of the binary nature of systems all around you,

who, from your air-conditioned cubicle, prefers the noon-day Sun

to the cold, desolate light of the mid-night’s crescent,

the latter a respite for sinners and poets,

who never do anything useful?

And if so, do you, ever economical with your emotions

Quiet the shudder that almost occurred when your cerebrum

Imparted meaning to the soft blue luminosity that radiated

From the curt, one line email you are reading, one letter at a time,

And which resulted in the sudden reuptake of serotonin-

That delicious chemical which formerly resided in your synaptic gaps-

Which is thought to cause, in most, the emotional state of bereavement?

Do you blame mathematics?

And if so, did your ever-stoic, almost robot, heartbeat hasten,

Upon the realization that, given the probability algorithm and the variables at hand,

That, in a short time, your one would also devalue into

A zero,

Which would also result in the rampant production of strings

of alpha-numeric symbols, each barely one-line in length?

And if so, did you conclude that your sadness was a virtue

Or merely a sin, as to a cosine, a yin, as to a yang, a one, as to a zero,

And just as the dying dutifully meet their expiration, so too, do

Those left behind, bound by some cosmic obligation, dutifully shed a tear,

And that funerals and headstones are as much for the living as for the departed?

If you do, then what will you think, if you could so think, when we all have forgotten your name?