“We hope this has struck a personal chord in your own life and that you’ll continue to join us as Pearl and I work out the kinks in assisting baffled seekers to uncover psychic secrets”
“We hope this has struck a personal chord in your own life and that you’ll continue to join us as Pearl and I work out the kinks in assisting baffled seekers to uncover psychic secrets”
Address for Donations, Complaints, Brickbats, and — oh yes — Donations
In Memory Of W.B. Yeats
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
from “1054 AD”
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
Your Say
My Thinking Hat
My Back Pages
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Search American Digest’s Back Pages
The People Yes
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
Camouflage
Sourdough Mountain Lookout
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
Chimes of Freedom
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
The Vault
My Back Pages
Byzantium
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
De Breanski
VAN GOGH
Hillegas
To the Stonecutters
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
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
from “1054 AD”
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
Comments on this entry are closed.
& two facts ’bout possums you didn’t know….
sorry not safe for work, you’ll havta look them up yourself, and one’s fact, th’other’s fiction.
Well, there’s seven minutes I’ll never get back. I tortured myself to see where it was going…and it went nowhere.
Come back as a possum?
Shit, why not…
JWM
So who’s the squirrel?
Sometime I’ll tell you my possum story. Oh, that’s right, I already did.
“The mind is a terrible thing.”
–dan quayle
Theres five pounds of possum in my headlights tonight… Make that twenty…Thanksgiving coming right up. Help ’em reincarnate.
I had heard that Nancy Pelosi had a sister, but wasn’t completely sure until I saw that video.
I put out a deer feeder a few weeks ago and set up a game camera. I had plenty of deer on the SD card but I also had a butt load of raccoons and ‘possums’ who were climbing up the legs of the feeder and sweeping the corn from the feed chutes onto the ground for all the little animals. After watching those varmints go through 100 lbs of corn I wagged off to the local feed store and bought a pair of traps called ‘coon cuffs’.
Coon cuffs are designed to catch coons and possums when they stick their paw into the trap to pull out some goodies and I caught several that I had to dispose of because the traps don’t kill upon catching. They just hold them until the owner returns and dispatches the varmints, preferably with a .22 to the noodle, which is what I had to do.
I really don’t have any problem killing predators because these two varmints will destroy turkey nests on the ground and coons in particular will kill and eat young fawns but I told a friend who lives on a farm a few miles from me and she said that possums eat ticks, so I checked it out on the vastly accurate internet and discovered they can eat 5K ticks a season. In the Deep South, where I live, the Brazilian Fire Ant helps get rid of them too and those tiny little monsters eat the eggs, larvae and ticks in all stages of their lives.
I had never heard that and the only time I’ve ever really seen possums in the wild, during the day, is when you catch one with a full belly waddling out of the inside of the carcass of a dead cow or deer. They crawl up inside the carcass and eat until they can barely walk….and most of the time they’re covered with green flies. In a word, they’re repulsive and they carry and spread any number of different diseases that can affect people and domestic animals.
So, I hope that this seer has the insight to realize that those possums might give her a good case of leprosy or TB, Lepto, tularemia or any other of a dozen or so other cooties that might kill her. Maybe that spirit of the squirrel is holding out on her; I know I probably would.
Nancy Pelosi doing an impersonation of Nancy Pelosi. Now that was fun.
Oh….sorry I kicked your ratty little ass off my deck last night.
Stay out of the cat food & we’ll be OK.