(Simone is 8. Pearl is 6. I am 41. The days and weeks and months are passing. Another birthday is here and with it another poem. I’ve neglected the blog for months, working on three different book projects, all of which are looking good.)
The god of dancing stars.
1.
The Greeks believed
Hermes carried
dead souls to the afterlife.
His winged feet allowed him to split
into a thousand selves
almost everywhere at once.
He carried jokes, pranks, tricks, gags.
He’s a vicious laugh.
A sneering terror.
The Greeks saw Dionysus
as the god of wine and revelry,
but also of ritual, madness and fertility.
His followers stripped off their clothes
and tore people limb from limb.
He’s a laugh, too.
Only the laughter hides tears,
and tormenting ecstasy.
Hermes is cruel.
Dionysus is deranged.
Which god do you pray to?
The god of drunken madness or the god of laughing tears?
Please don’t answer with Zeus.
Patriarchal rapist who cracks the earth with lightning.
Or Hera.
Displeasure and vengeance in equal portions.
Not Apollo.
Arrogance and rapaciousness
cloaked in sunshine.
Not Athena.
Wisdom skulking in the gloomy shadows.
There are no new gods.
Is this the source of human misery?
2.
When I dance, I dance.
Montaigne said that.
Hard to do.
I find
in getting older
that I know so little about myself.
I don’t sleep well.
(The bad never do.)
I watch too many movies.
I find myself consumed with worry.
Unexpected tears.
My daughter said to me just yesterday,
“Daddy, I’ve never seen you cry.”
I’ve hidden too much from the world.
When I eat, I read.
When I drink, I talk.
When I walk, I wonder.
The world is so exquisite.
But I don’t want to see it.
Life is a gift I often reject.
3.
As a child, I was motivated by joy.
As a teen, by loneliness.
As a young man, by fear.
Of death
Of obscurity
Of missing out on the exotic thrills of the world.
And now? By sadness.
I romanticized bad behavior.
I wanted to be a Bukowski, or a Miller.
A rake with no conscience.
No consideration of others.
It never fit.
I never tried.
I have a shroud of goodness
cloaking my tarry insides.
It’s a burden. Many have it.
I want to help, be useful.
But the wolves of resentment
bite those helpful heels.
I often feel good but not kind.
Is there a god of kindness?
There’s a major deity of charity somewhere.
Some goddesses of peace.
But most ancient people
did not consider peace or love
the highest ideals.
This seems important.
We live in conflict with ourselves.
I used to value kindness.
Now I’m not so sure.
What does it mean
And what does it matter?
A few seconds of empathy
in the torrents of time?
I remember,
as a teen
I stopped a prank on a friend.
Others put pepper in his coke.
He didn’t thank me.
Instead, he spit in my drink.
I tried to be kind
and he didn’t care.
I was horrified, wounded.
Yet somehow,
as I get older
he seems to be right.
What does kindness get you?
4.
The ancients dominate my imagination.
Duty and cruelty a jumble.
River gods morphing into nymphs
nymphs birthing heroes and godlings
heroes slaying monsters
and the gods appearing once again.
A circular celestial dance.
When a king died,
His servants were often buried with him.
That’s all they thought about individual suffering.
Individual people just didn’t matter.
The concept wasn’t codified.
There were gods
and there were men
all subject to the same solar vicissitudes.
Prometheus had a brother
Epimetheus, husband to Pandora.
A titan who loved humans.
Prometheus was good and kind,
yet he ended up tormented in Hades,
his liver a regenerating feast
for giant birds.
Epimetheus is forgotten.
His name means afterthought.
Hercules was a grand destroyer.
A hunter-god from prehistory.
Reconfigured into Zeus’s son.
Killer of the world’s monsters,
Every child knows him.
I suppose he’s a hero.
The point:
Hercules is remembered.
Epimetheus isn’t.
What does that say about the value
of meekness and decency?
5.
So.
To the ancient thoughts.
The Epicureans:
Live simply,
seek pleasure,
die well.
The Stoics:
Accept your fate,
choose tragedy,
die well.
The Skeptics:
Nothing from nothing.
And the non-engagement.
Who knows? (not me.)
There’s never been a cult
or philosophy
dedicated to kindness.
And why would there be?
Who cares for caring people?
Really—who gives a fuck?
Jesus was close.
A loving spirit.
But even he
railed on of the gnashing teeth
the fiery pit
and the sword in his mouth.
Meanwhile,
Pascal died at 39
—a younger man than I am now—
of a brain hemorrhage.
What does his wager say about that?
6.
Dance is magic.
An ancient ritual.
Dionysus arriving.
I wake up most mornings
ringed by mental illness.
A castaway treading water
in a cratered sea of volcanoes.
The sludge and suffering of others.
I don’t visit Dionysus very often.
And he rarely arrives.
Hermes saturates my world
While Ares buttfucks Kronos with our president’s dick.
Athena has retreated to the dark side of the moon.
Apollo tweets while Pan is disembodied in the world.
Smiling is an act of courage.
Survival an act of defiance.
But what does anything matter,
in our black iron world?
What’s that line in Lear?
Break, heart!
Or in Magnolia?
The goddamned regret!
7.
Life is often waiting
in doctor’s offices
or for the bus
Magazines are a poor window
to view the world.
I sometimes see another life
inside my own.
Writing ad copy and asinine features
approving photo spreads
and fretting over site visits.
There’s more money in it,
more prestige.
But when did I ever worry about finances?
Always. And never.
For we all sit at the oily feet of Mammon.
We all live in Mammon’s world.
8.
Mammon.
The god of money.
Ancient deity of greed and ambition.
A fish-footed god with death in its eyes.
America’s god.
A middle east transplant
shrouded in Christ’s raiment.
I cannot pray to Mammon.
But he is ever-present.
The fallen demiurge
Incarnate whenever money changes hands.
We live in the era of Mammon.
Hermes and Dionysus
have been hounded
by torches and stones
harried into tidepools and caves
by Mammon’s followers.
The goddesses are all drowned.
This world is a vale of tears.
Saint Jerome said that.
(The patron saint of librarians.)
With the passing years it’s hard to deny.
Sadness is a futile emotion.
No one cares.
The goddess melancholia gives no devotion.
Who prays to the god of tears?
9.
I can’t think of any sad gods.
Jesus wept, but once.
Buddha is always smiling.
Odin and Thor and Freya
maim and murder.
The reptile gods of Egypt fuck and dismember.
Where is the god of tears?
Sadness is a force, too.
Like water.
Boring through stone
through erosive drip drip
of millennia.
Sadness is useless,
but it matters. It shapes.
It pulls. It devours.
10.
One cold winter day,
I sit alone in a theater,
yet surrounded by children.
Sobbing as a make-believe family
euthanizes their dog on screen.
The ice, the iron
have frayed.
My heart is too close to the skin.
Tears flow freely.
The drip drip drip of sadness.
Goddamn the movies.
Goddamn myself.
11.
I would sacrifice to Dionysus freely
give up something of myself
to redirect the world’s attentions
from the tarry talons of Mammon
over to the panicked delight
of the god of song and wine.
But I can’t see a way past
Ba’al and the thorny gates.
12.
Frank Bidart says it best:
It can drink till it’s sick,
But it cannot drink till it’s satisfied.
Preach, brother Bidart.
That’s life, mine and yours.
Some days,
I wonder:
Do America and I suffer from the exact same illness?
A malady of lost belief?
Drinking for sickness
and not satisfaction?
What we don’t eat dies anyway.
Tis a hard fact,
And only one among many.
Born to die.
Born to suffer.
Imperfect machines.
Conscious of our consciousness.
A circular maze with no exit.
Thoughts breeding thoughts breeding thoughts.
While the arm moves before the brain wills it.
Humanity is Mammon.
Greedy reactions to the outer stimuli.
13.
On bad days,
I conceive of a new god.
A lonely, sad creature.
Slouchy and melancholic,
Capable of minor miracles
Often smiling in its gaseous cosmos
But incapacitated by despair.
My new god has a single
redeeming feature.
It cries empty tears.
On other days, I say:
Fuck that noise.
Anyone can weep.
Anyone can be sad.
Living with laughter is the brave calling.
The rejection of Mammon requires joy.
Maybe I worship Hermes after all.
Mercury, god of the in-between.
Hermes—even if you are only an idea—
I beseech thee.
My god of dancing stars,
Laugh for us, your miserable worshippers.
And then,
with Dionysus by our side,
let’s all dance the night away.
simoneandthesilversurfer 