Love at a Reasonable Price

[Ch. 47 of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, The Mat Maker]
[Entry 1 in Bartleby’s Scrapbook]

It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging about the decks, or vacantly gazing over into the lead-coloured waters. Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving what is called a sword-mat, for an additional lashing to our boat. So still and subdued and yet somehow preluding was all the scene, and such an incantation of reverie lurked in the air, that each silent sailor seemed resolved into his own invisible self.

I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat. As I kept passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline between the long yarns of the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle, and as Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy oaken sword between the threads, and idly looking off upon the water, carelessly and unthinkingly drove home every yarn: I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads. Meantime, Queequeg’s impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric; this savage’s sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance—aye, chance, free will, and necessity — nowise incompatible — all interweavingly working together. The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course — its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events.

Thus we were weaving and weaving away when I started at a sound so strange, long drawn, and musically wild and unearthly, that the ball of free will dropped from my hand, and I stood gazing up at the clouds whence that voice dropped like a wing. High aloft in the cross-trees was that mad Gay-Header, Tashtego. His body was reaching eagerly forward, his hand stretched out like a wand, and at brief sudden intervals he continued his cries. To be sure the same sound was that very moment perhaps being heard all over the seas, from hundreds of whalemen’s look-outs perched as high in the air; but from few of those lungs could that accustomed old cry have derived such a marvellous cadence as from Tashtego the Indian’s.

As he stood hovering over you half suspended in air, so wildly and eagerly peering towards the horizon, you would have thought him some prophet or seer beholding the shadows of Fate, and by those wild cries announcing their coming.

“There she blows! there! there! there! she blows! she blows!”

“Where-away?”

“On the lee-beam, about two miles off! a school of them!”

Instantly all was commotion.

The Sperm Whale blows as a clock ticks, with the same undeviating and reliable uniformity. And thereby whalemen distinguish this fish from other tribes of his genus.

“There go flukes!” was now the cry from Tashtego; and the whales disappeared.

“Quick, steward!” cried Ahab. “Time! time!”

Dough-Boy hurried below, glanced at the watch, and reported the exact minute to Ahab.

The ship was now kept away from the wind, and she went gently rolling before it. Tashtego reporting that the whales had gone down heading to leeward, we confidently looked to see them again directly in advance of our bows. For that singular craft at times evinced by the Sperm Whale when, sounding with his head in one direction, he nevertheless, while concealed beneath the surface, mills round, and swiftly swims off in the opposite quarter—this deceitfulness of his could not now be in action; for there was no reason to suppose that the fish seen by Tashtego had been in any way alarmed, or indeed knew at all of our vicinity. One of the men selected for shipkeepers — that is, those not appointed to the boats, by this time relieved the Indian at the main-mast head. The sailors at the fore and mizzen had come down; the line tubs were fixed in their places; the cranes were thrust out; the mainyard was backed, and the three boats swung over the sea like three samphire baskets over high cliffs. Outside of the bulwarks their eager crews with one hand clung to the rail, while one foot was expectantly poised on the gunwale. So look the long line of man-of-war’s men about to throw themselves on board an enemy’s ship.

But at this critical instant a sudden exclamation was heard that took every eye from the whale. With a start all glared at dark Ahab, who was surrounded by five dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air.

Bartleby: This is for the scrap book.

Amble: Yeah?

Bartleby: We need the part about Fate, free will, and chance.

Amble: But what about the God?

Bartleby: I don’t know. It’s not covered in the chapter.

Amble: But what about when Marcus Aurelius said that of course there were gods — how else to explain that one time?

Bartleby: That can be another scrap, although the gods are not the God. They’re too blessed and immortal to worry about us.

Amble: And The God isn’t???

Bartleby: The God is the Love. The Fate is God’s body, which is to say: All created things: all time spaces, all universes, all matter, all mind, all this interwoven commotion. The gods are incidental. Free will is following one’s truest nature, which is the same as interpreting the God as that Love shines through your conscious moment into feeling, thinking, speaking, and acting. Free will is the poetry of singing the infinite God through these finite modes of human thought and action. Free will is standing up straight within yourself, pushing out from within, and letting the Light flow through with minimal distortions. And so the God — who creates all, including Fate and chance, acts within Fate and chance by being life-overflowing, Love-overflowing.

Amble: I guess so. It was Epicurus who said that line about the gods. That can go in the scrapbook too.

Bartleby: Maybe, towards the end. We will, however, need to circle round and “that logos is self-defeating”.

Amble: Like vultures.

Bartleby: Yes, our heads are bald so we can better nuzzle into bloody carcasses, our wide wings — made for floating — folded at our sides.

Amble: I hate vultures.

Bartleby: They’re just animals.

Amble: I hate chickens more. You feed a chicken, and the beastly little dinosaur almost takes your finger off, and if you can catch the tiny round glassy eyes, this is what you see: “if he trips, I need to move fast so I can get some of that flesh before these other chickens start in.”

Bartleby: All just animals.

Amble: That’s no excuse. Humans are animals. And they are sometimes capable of actions other than waiting around for a weak moment to feed upon.

Bartleby: Yeah?

Amble: Well, sure. Humans are capable of rising above the silly earthy, woodsy game of eat-or-be-eaten, mate-or-fail-forever. In fact, to some degree, they always live in and through and for spiritual Love.

Bartleby: So do chickens.

Amble: Yeah, but just barely.

Bartleby: It’s in them, and they dissolve into it when they die. It’s not their fault that their mental spaces are so narrow and confusing.

Amble: We should grow our conscious spaces, so we can be more free, more one with the Love that choose everyone.

Bartleby: Okay, but what happened to the scrapbook?

Amble: I don’t know. But we’re putting this in. That bit about the loom. I think it points towards some kind of gist of an accuracy.

Bartleby: For sure! We’re in the scrapbook now, and we’ve brought that chapter with us.

Listen
I have a plan
And we get married
And I’m a good choice, not at all like I seem
And we have a nice life, with healthy children in a safe place
And there’s no bombs dismembering everyone we loved
And there’s no imprisonment for disagreeing with the government
And nobody cares if your more of a mystic than like a dogmatist
And the sun is so bright and we most certainly float on the rays of sun and everything goes amazing well and we’re not alone or lonely or sad
And then
like other stuff
good things
And we don’t have it all figured out, but it mostly drives itself
Democracy and the boundaries
And within the safe space we together go into the mystic
where we giggle along with the Giggle
Did I tell you about the Giggle?
What Is has no needs; It needs neither to be nor not to be
And these two streams of infinite non-need crash into each other
And from that meeting, the Giggle bursts forth
And that is all the universes
They don’t really exist, but they are filled with the Love that does exist
Well, It shines through them
And It giggles alone with them
And it’s a jolly time for all, a merry time
I have a plan
And we get married
And it’s not a stupid idea for you to do that
But a good idea
And
all this other stuff
We’ll have to save the country, but it’ll be easy
Because we’ll go into the mystic together
so it won’t be lonely
It’s scary to go into the mystic
You don’t know what you’ll find, or what it’ll make you feel, think, say and do
But it won’t be scary, because we’ll be together, holding hands
See?
It’s a great plan
It can’t fail

I’m not sure about him
I’m not sure he’s reliable
I’m not sure he’s a reliable narrator
I’m not sure about him

Don’t
Alone
Water
Too late
I remember the scene in Red Sonja where one of the workers in the evil queen’s palace gets stuck under a round door that rolls into a place. A very heavy stone door and he’s crushed to death. And Red Sonja’s not allowed to be with any man except the one who bests her in combat and at the end she and Arnold Schwarzenegger when young and tan and only muscles and before he’d gotten the hang of acting — anyway, there they are at the end battling with broad swords in a clearing in the tall grasses, and neither can gain the upper hand, but then somehow there swords meet and neck down and away and the two are close enough to bend in for a kiss, and they do, and that’s the end of the movie, and she looked really good in her fur bikini that’s the best outfit for defeating evil empires

I’ve no formula

There must be a way

But there’s many steps, and several are impossible

There must be a way

I don’t think so; I think just let it go, stop making trouble

There must be a way

Step one A is impossible; step two A was already extremely improbable, before we had to add in the impossible step one; step three A requires another and here’s where you just make trouble like we’ve seen more than once and anyway she’d have to be a fool even were it not for step one, which we’ve already pointed out is impossible; step one B is a riddle you can’t even formulate, let alone solve; step one C feels like a silly vanity project, given the difficulties we’re having with A and B.

There must be a way. Step A has one possible route; somebody did it; is doing it.

Yeah, but for how long? And not well enough to ask for step 3. Anyway, step 2 was already too steep a climb. Already, step 2 made step 3 to be a silly, selfish, self-deluded request. And we’ve seen no convincing solution to step one, and even if you could wriggle your way through, it’ll take time.

There must be a way. If I go into the mystic. I just need to be a little more disciplined. In the mystic I can do it. I can feel the hints. I can feel my way to the correct turns. I can thread the needle. Remember the rich man who followed the camel through the needle’s eye into the Kingdom of Heaven? And the mustard seed that commanded the mountain to jump into the sea? See? It can be done. There are precedents.

There’s no way for project A. Already you stumble and already you drift down through the chasm. It’s just mean to ask anyone to go nowhere with that little precious time that bridges a life to itself

I don’t want to give up on project A. It’s the only project I ever really cared about. Project B I felt I ought to do and I could do by virtue of the magic I thought words could conjure. Project C, well, that’s vague, and largely in support of project A. Please, I don’t want to give up on project A. There must be a way.

I’m praying for a wisdom meme. I’m praying for an idea that helps. I’m praying for a song that guides us through the confusion back home. I’m asking for a way to not melt into alone while the sand castles are rolled over by the rising tide. I’m asking for projects A through C. I’m asking for a way. And the Hurt must somehow also come forward, must somehow be released, must somehow be forgiven. We must somehow move beyond these little hiccups. If Love is Real, we must let Love be Real.

I most certainly do
Cool air from our desert night
blows through barred window
a small stone cell
Canvas cot full of the dried odors slimes mistakes
of the men before and now me and then
One tries to believe
That seems the critical element of preparation
But it all seems so fantastical
The hood just some simple soft cotton or rough burlap or medium linen cloth
like any other, but now used to hide my bulging-eyed end from the eager early morning crowd
if anyone shows
The rope
Scratching and have other necks already known this final embrace
seems like they could at least get a new rope
And the same pleasant sun of this warm seaside world
where I’ve always
And never again
So much as a woman’s hair brushing against my face
A day wasted coffee wine and cigarettes on the balcony
watching the people pass certain of their futures and me too believing then as I did in tomorrow

Sometimes
the Fates redirect
and you must go
through the windshield into the tree

Sometimes
the lines turn out to converge
quicker than you’d supposed
In wartime the bombs destroy everything everyone and you must watch and then again as you’re folded into the dark
the void that only goes one way, like a blackhole
In peacetime everybody sad and talk about what a fighter and you almost believe it
but you know
It’s just bedtime; there aren’t even bombs involved this time; you don’t even have to watch your world erased; you just watch your body disassemble and listen while people say how it is as the uncontested mystery coasts to another ridiculously easy victory

So we all fall
for what feels like forever
especially early years
when, after that brief dreamtime in misty smooshed-together chaos shot through by eternal Love, you’ve gotten acclimated to living and, if lucky, being safe and loved and never watching the violence tramping and hacking into your town
A free fall that feels like a nice safe snug home
So we fall
flailing reaching trying to grab and hold onto
And the lonely comes circling round
like a tiger
when you’re caught out in the woods far from the thatched roofs, odor of the cooking you’ve always known has always seemed like real, gossip boasts kind words empty ones angry ones words
And you think
this is a big deal
But then
I guess your foot slipped
and you feel within the falling
and now you’re eyes bulge just like the mouse
with the snapped back
so close to the little dollop of peanut butter
it was your design
whose design is this?

When you fly through the windshield
And I am run through by this joke or the next one
Do we go through the same point?
Do we all meet we all everyone even though we speak now of planets of universes of timepspaces of so much conscious motion?
Where did you go?
Where will I go?
What counts as success?
Or is it like the Kafka story?
Whatever you tell yourself and other people, you never reach the Law though you wait all your life, and then your breath loses interest and quits on you and as the oxygen leaves you, your watching watches the guard and the door that you’d never been able to bribe or steal or cheat or beg or sneak your way beyond, and you hear your throat asking how it can be that all seek the Law, so how is it that in all these years no one’s ever come here to be at the door with you?, and he is so tall and powerful and his beard so thick and terrible but his teeth and eyes seem mild and kindly and I’ve known cobras like this but that’s another type of poison for another type of essay and so what I mean to say is that at the end he says, in the story, he goes, “This door was just for you; now I’m closing it.”
?
And then
and only then
into the mystic

I should think not
surely we can go into the mystic now
surely we must
surely there’s no delay
anymore
given the failures
of various systems near and far

A healthy young man in any easy sunny life on cobblestones
hidden away from the harsh realities from the meanness and the danger
with a wife and a family in a little town that curves with the glittering sea
and yet somehow
to not be
a fool
to not
take such blessings for granted

And now?
In this world, the Fates always win.
In the world beyond within and through: the God the Love the kind delight giggling over with always more to joyously share: that’s what always wins there
In the mystic
perhaps we could
be both here and there
and then

What then?
I can’t tell you anymore
A man prepares for death
Every step he feels all through from the footfall to the connection with the sidewalk to the rolling forward to the way the impact gently spreads up the leg into the hip and gut and torso flowing with the swaying arms this old idea you never quite inhabited and now
What will the Fates do?
The nice part is we know what the God will do; that’s always the same and that’s only good.
But the Fates aren’t like that; they aren’t mean, but they know this is an illusion and that sooner or later you must also know that
That’s all fine and good; it’s just lonely to think we are all One in the Soul, and so there’s no particular anybody to be my home and me hers and this illusion of human love will never carry us home to where we belong
or
well
A man prepares for life or death
he tries for life
he accepts death is already there and that he is already a hollowed tree standing lifeless but yet somehow watching in the forest full of such trees

What can I do?
How can I organize what’s within my reach?
To be what you need?
Or if that’s just not possible
How can I organize what’s within my reach
To do what’s best for everyone
which strictly speaking should be a goal anyway
?

That you can write yourself well in all the ways a person needs to be well — from the interaction of conscious awareness feeling and thought with the spiritual core shining through each conscious moment, out through your felt-thought, into ideas, words, symbols, actions; and even out into the wider layers of yourself: communities, organizations, governments, worlds.

For the irony of human life is that in one sense we are completely alone with God, locked within individual conscious spaces that are comprised of Godlight shining through feeling/thinking/acting; but in a deeper sense, that feeling/thinking/acting is not really real, not really us, and so we are simply Godlight shining more immediately through our “own” semi-sealed conscious moment, but also through everything we experience, everyone we interact with, all the systems, organizations, assumptions, governments that we live within and that shape our “reality”.

How is it that

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength; and your neighbor as yourself?

And

The wise rest on interdependence and impermanence as seagulls rest on warm air rolling up off the sloshing sea.

And

By suspending all belief, the Academic Skeptics were pleasantly surprised to discover a sense of Blessedness?

All point to the same Truth?

Human language — from baby’s first words through literature, math, science, and so on — is fit only for poetry, only for pointing-towards realities and Reality. For example, science is “real” to the degree it points towards a completely accurate picture of what we discover when we discover when we pair our inborn logical assumptions (of which mathematics is a part) with our inborn sense perceptions and inborn assumptions about how sense perception and logic fit together; but science is “Real” only to the degree it points an observer towards the Love that contains within Itself and transcends Beauty = Truth = Goodness = Fair Play/The Well-Ordering of Systems (from an individual human’s system for organizing themselves around the Love shining through each conscious moment, to larger systems to various degrees informal and informal — like families, schools, churches, friend groups, towns, nation-states, et cetera).

Yes, we replaced “Justice” with “Fair Play/The Well-Ordering of Systems”. You could use “Justice” there, as Plato did in his Republic, to mean, “every part knowing and performing its function”, but the notion of parts “knowing” their place has created a great deal of trouble; and using the word “Justice” without any kind of careful formulation mostly just seems to make trouble. Beauty, Truth, Goodness, and Justice are all spiritual Goods — the concepts point past human ideas and feelings to some angle of our deeper inner sense of what is really going on, what really matters, and how we should move with what’s really going on towards what’s best for all — ; but “Justice” is a highly flammable concept; people are so ready to confuse it for “revenge” that it often seems more trouble than it is worth.

The Reality is spiritual Love, an infinite eternal Love that chooses everyone, and that creates, sustains, and shines through all things. The Reality is Pure Love: an infinite joyous giving. Everything else is illusion. We are Real to the degree we are free to the degree we are our truest nature, which is Pure Love. To the degree we remain our own ideas and feelings, we are the big interconnected daydream of information, minds, bodies, all running together in accordance with the laws of cause and effect. But to the degree we live in and through and for Love we allow Pure Love to go from being the transcendent cause of all things to the immanent cause of all things. Naturally, the process is never perfect, and we are always somewhat — perhaps even largely — illusionary, but moments of consciously living Pure Love do to meaningful degrees happen. And it is worthwhile to practice awareness, honesty, clarity, compassion, loving kindness, and joyful sharing: it is worthwhile to follow those inborn tools towards the inborn Way, towards communion with the Love that is prior to ideas and feelings. To the degree we don’t, life is too boring and lonely for us to understand, believe in, or care about. The Absurd is the sense of alienation we experience when we try to suspend all belief. The Truth is the explosion of Pure Love we experience when we suspend all belief, and are left with our own conscious moments at a point beyond all stories (which are always a mixture of feelings and ideas).

That is itself only poetry. We writers, speakers, friends, and lovers are (after all) stuck here in the way words and deeds flow in and out of ideas and feelings. But feelings are wider, deeper, and vaguer than ideas and words; and yet by working to feel, think, and act more aware, honest, clear, compassionate, and joyfully sharing we can get better and better at relating feelings to ideas and words. So why not use a similar process to get better and better at relating feelings, ideas, words, and deeds to the Love shining through everything (including each conscious moment)?

Poetry heaped upon poetry. Your shoulders still getting tense. Still need to get to work soon. Still worried about x and y and z.

To “write yourself well” was never just writing. The writing was just supposed to be a path to put all together. To feel your way to health, and also to the mystic, and also to a way of living both in Pure Love — which is outside of timespace, and all particulars — and in this human world, where you need love and work, and to somehow find a way for that love and work to be more in service of Love than in service of animal hoots and hollers, and other things that are fine and neat and if they weren’t, why bother creating all this?, but that are, when all is said and done, not quite Real, not quite free-cause, not quite us, not the core of what we’re here to learn.

But time space, motion, and information have a way of drilling through, hollowing out, disassembling every project. A person is a project. A life is a project. Relationships are projects. Organizations. Every human endeavor is an organization, a system, a project. Time space, motion, information; and the admixtures of these elements: All illusions, but some illusions point human conscious experiences better towards the Truth than others.

The jig is up.
We’re found out.
And tomorrow we hang.
The gods in the heavens are too blessed and immortal to notice.
The Great God beyond all timespace, motion, information, feelings, ideas: that God Knows that all is well, and so that God also will not stay the hangman’s hand, though his noose-y fingers kill us, and each time he uses them, he wears his heartmind down a little thinner, kills himself a little more.
So that leaves us, but we’re no match for the tumbling stones and the spraying lava, and soot that in a great poof first fills and them seems to become the sky.

Author: Bartleby Willard
Technical Assistant: Amble Whistletown
Copyright and standing on the platform as the last train chugs out the station, just out of reach: Andy Watson

But in this place
And in this time

We learned an evil song
it wasn’t very good
but it wasn’t very long

We wore a shabby robe
It wasn’t very nice
But it kept out the cold

We believed ten thousand lies
It felt like walking dead
But we’d hoped to win a prize!

We looked for love and flowers
We found cheap beer and shows to binge
And so dripped by the years, slow hour ‘pon stolen hour.

In peacetime we schemed for fancy homes
In wartime we dreamed of safe respite
We hadn’t known what we’d not been shown.

Who will pardon Adam’s seed
When mixing with Adam’s rib
It turned to awful contorted deeds
And always answered so pep so glib
?

Who will forgive us when we turn to ash
high up on Mount Horeb
?
We were young; insecure; silly; rash.

I’ve seen the art of the demagogue
It was no art, but merely a type of crime
against the soul, athwart the heart, betraying the mind
and I’ve seen us turn, cog upon cog
within this evil worn like mink stole
remember? We were so proud. And then the folds
of age and shared misery wore through
what we’d said about me about you
about our love and friendship too
yes we saw ourselves and we knew
we were liars through and through

Author: The Man the Egg the Dream, Mr. Humpty Dumpty!
Crew: Bartleby Willard, Amble Whistletown — We don’t care what you think because you are stupid anyway
Copyright: Andy Watson — also thinks you’re stupid anyway

be healthy, wealthy, wise
help the country
find my wife and family
sell Pure Love
write for real

how?
when I feel only zero
when I think only blah
when pills get stuck halfway down the line and spit seeps at the corners
when surely I’m done
and the country’s woes
and my various vaunting ambitions
and even just a little honest abiding love
were all always anyways way
out of my league?

A thin man, sinewy, not tall; his face
so craggy ageless as an old oak tree.
Already ancient when he took his place
in yon medieval cloister o’er the sea —
on crooked layered lichen-splashéd cliff
above calm steel-blue, in loughs foaming white,
cold northern sea — where peacefully he’s lived
these thousand secret years out of mind though oft in sight.
A druid: seer, priest, judge; well versed
in ancient arts — forgotten now; by science, faith, and law all cursed.

What magic — now banished, obsolete — play
has him so well so long in plain view hid?
Don’t know. But mornings, while his brother’s pray,
he opes stone walls and ups stairs curving amid
the starry vacuum of space into black hole door
out which not light nor thought nor soul may pour.

How does he come and go where nothing can?
Don’t know. But within this impossible place,
a salvation machine floats, not just stands.
A machine built of thought where man comes face
to face with God outside timespace. Yet God’s
no face, but only Purest Love divine
that shines beyond our human piecemeal thought —
a Light past feeling body and thinking mind.
A salvation machine is layered because
Salvation’s layered. The machine does what it does
‘fore time and space; before what’s hoped or feared;
‘fore will of man or God; ‘fore chance; before the wyrd.

A self’s an overlapping collection
of lies — evolving, and more near or far
the Truth. The wiser know that perfection
of knowledge or ignorance are both a bar
too high for mortal reach. To hold the fancy’s flights
of self and other aloft whilst aware
of how they do and don’t reflect the Light:
This wisdom practice will salvation bear:
Salvation in layers like a jigsaw onion
Salvation through every myth and perversion
of the one Light that Eden saw play,
of the Real ‘neath twists of everywhichway.

All day into each night he plies the gears
and levers, threading from his seat in formless giving joy
through fateful warps and chancey woofs to guide all us children here —
felt-stories of self and other, of nation, tribe and town: all this noise
about how I’m this or that, my allegiance and/or boundaries lie here or there –.
I cannot say if his work touches our world or if he’s spun another one
from ghostly dreams he’s gathered as shells all glittering in the summer sun.

Who shall be saved? What spared the fire
that burns every feeling, thought or deed
not born in through and for the Love that never tires?
I wanted too to help, to let the evil bleed
away. I too wished to find a poetry
to heal our souls and the structures that we
both operate and seem sometimes to be.

But waxen wings and all I tumble down
to slow blue sea. I saw you and conceived
disdain: “Such little people”, I said and with a frown.
So very small of art and thought I believed
you to be. But now, my body torn and heart washing up
on the pebbly shore — my mind catching and tossing up
the sunlit edges of tilting waves —
I think I’d wheeled ’round to gore
a wounded, tusk-foaming, gloss-eyed boar.
Seems a shame, to die violent, enraged.
A vengeful death; a low rebirth.
A hateful charge burns up much worth.
Everyone’s flimsy, equally zero and nil.
But caverns broken by the Love past will
and won’t, past is and not: they ope
upon a vista bright and infinite in scope.

Ah well, let it ride, our druid was cast out
for telling his fellow lawgivers that Law
forbade the wicker man, ignored any pleas and shouts
they might heap up on burning human flesh and all
such false and erring mystical buffoonery.
But now he hides in the gear-works of a refined sorcery
and all he touches blossoms like roses in springtime,
as age upon he forgets his life, recalling only something sublime —
some little thing; I know not what; I know only that it somehow twinkles in his still-young eyes;
and that every morning he yet does rise and to his work he yet flies, with no demands and no earthbound or heaven-found why, our salvation yet — best he only ever can he tries and tries — for to ply.

Author: Dr. Humphrey Dumphrey
Production Crew: Our Bartleby and Our Amble
Copyright: Andrew M. Watson
Lesson: We give up; we are tired; when our mother, the sea nymph Thetis, dipped us into the sea — that every spot of what we were that felt old Ocean’s cold salty kiss all mortal wounds would on-ever outrun –, she held us by our infant ankles, and that is why a lucky shot by a third-string archer has laid us out upon the dusty killing fields of ancient wind-swept Troy.