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Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
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That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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Biden cannot last much longer, and his departure from the White House—natural or otherwise—would seem to open up the presidency to Harris. Assuming she makes it there—and that depends upon those shadowy types who really run things—she will have my absolute approval. Being both a natural optimist and a natural though rather cut-rate misanthrope, I see that a Harris “presidency” would provide much comedic value, a veritable treasure trove of hilarity and amusement both domestically and among foreigners.
The USA will thus become the first civilization in all of History that died through laughter.
I had much the same thought. It seems completely appropriate and right that this female takes over as “leader of the free world”. She epitomizes the intellectual, moral and spiritual heart of today’s culture and is a near perfect representative of the USA and the west. And it will bring a level of amusement and absurdity rarely seen in human history. Biden’s demented maunderings are of the past. The vapid tripe issuing from this female define today.
Heh.
What?
Uh oh! I’m starting to understand her!
Quick! Have a shot of whiskey!
It’s too late! Suddenly the Medicare doughnut hole, the IRS Code, and Professor Backwards all make sense to me.
If Barry was a stump turtle, what does that make Kamela?
Also on the stump. But impaled.
Impaled? Gerard, are you channeling your inner Vlad Țepeș? Not that I at all disapprove. On the contrary. Done correctly, impalement would provide quite the show.
I’ve been sharpening stakes for a while, on the oft chance I get the opportunity..
Off, dammit. Hate splell checkers.
turtle spread.
I think she was gibbering about the passage of time.
Time may have come today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIqwzQ7g-Cc
Listen, Kamala knows about time so shut it. Behold –
“It is time for us to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day.”
You simply cannot argue with that logic.
The mind of a child, the body of an ancient wore out krak ho.
a symbol of the 21st century amerikan diktat
I like how she slightly nods her head to make sure you are keeping up with her…
Lance, awesome, thank you. I don’t know how to do that. If I were able, I’d follow up your timely contribution with
The Kinks 20th Century Man, the longgggg version. Hell I’ve dug out The Kinks, “ Muswell Hillbillies CD disc 1, it’s on now and it’s also Timely.
Dirk
LIVE version.
needs more cowbell
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_I4S61Do-Qs
Nice! Actually classy. Was that Bill Graham doing the intro. “ I think so”
I’m asking cuz I fucked up thinking a past venue was Winterland. Got stomped, rightfully so. My wrong assumption had consequences, live and learn
It’s becoming apparent that both Biden AND Harris have such low cognitive abilities that the only thing keeping them going is their absolute fealty to leftist ideals. Harris seems to be able to hold one little, simple thought in her head at any given moment, and she repeats that little thought over and over with different permutations…..and then expects people to applaud her BRILLIANCE!! Maybe the significance of the passage of time will see her put out to pasture somewhere where she won’t have access to sharp objects and her meds are controlled.
This is simply baffling to me, I cannot understand how any sane individual, however distorted and slanted their views are, cannot laugh in her face as she continually exhibits the babbling of a 5 year old. The scary part is that as she continues to do this and get away without being called on it, she get worse.
OK. The government is a complete sham in this country. Kamala is stupid. Biden has dementia. Both are evil and are puppets of the shadow government, globalists, etc. Next phase, keep the majority fooled and distracted enough so the totalitarian boot is really on our faces and cannot be removed.