“FOR OUR MATCHLESS FRIENDS”
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WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020
Gerard Van der Leun
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way.
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles –
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.
Gary Snyder
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
— BY THEODORE ROETHKE
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
Comments on this entry are closed.
An awful lot of work to get 12″ off the ground.
Matches have a crappy energy-density.
Seven hundred fifty hours of meticulous toil to produce that prodigiously sulphurous squib. Can’t wait to see further consequences of the cabin fever & boredom induced by the Chinese Virus shelter-in-place/stay-at-home regime.
Matchless. Ha ha.
Yeah, he doesn’t have a girlfriend.
Walmart’s best price on wooden matches is $10.50 (free shipping) for 1000, so 1,000,000 would be about $10,500.00 right?
He gets a 10 for execution but a rather disappointing 2 or maybe 3 for performance.
Kinda’ underwhelming.
He could have made a hell of a pipe bomb with all that, and it would have made a big ass BOOM. Maybe even destroyed something useless.
JWM
The video of cats starting a falling dominoes chain reaction was a lot more entertaining, IMHO, and a lot less likely to bring the local firefighters to show up on your doorstep.
First thought was where did he get the black-headed matches?
My primitive cave stocks what is available:red-headed ones.
Bit of research reveals match heads come in the whole crayon box of colors.
Who knew??
Grandparents,probably.
A+ to MatchGuy for effort,and good video. Those prodigious sulphurous fumes made my eyes & nose water…
Ghost,
He probably ordered them in bulk for a better price. Shipped direct from Wuhan.
E for effort… F for results. Proving once again that some people just have way too much time on their hands.
The patience of Renfield, only with matches.
Spectacular, but it sure didn’t get far. Hope he was satisfied, but my reaction was “is that all?”
Back in high school, I used matchstick heads to power CO2 cartridge rockets; they’d go like the blazes for a half mile or so. They worked so well that soon I was gifted by two visitors: one from the Police Dept. and the other from the Fire Dept. For some reason they wanted to talk to my parents!
Their timing wasn’t too good though- they arrived just as the Boy Scouts Council was meeting in my living room. For a while there I was the talk of the town!