Poem: The Velvet Road

a reply to: Invision123

Do you have your own website? I've given some thought to going in that direction but would prefer to remain anonymous for now. Commenting, as I do sometimes, on controversial issues is not a problem for most people, but there are always some who want to extend their reactions beyond the print medium. If I were to write under my real name, I would not be able to say things I believe for fear of responses from people who can't tolerate free speech with which they disagree.

100 poems is a lot. ATS wants people to put all the poetry into one thread. This thread antedates that policy and the mods have been kind enough to tolerate it. Personally, I would prefer to keep my poems together, so I am grateful to them.

I'll be looking for your link.

Villanelle for Natali D.

I know that we are dead
More than we're alive.
Dead's easy, it is said.

Loaded guns to the head,
Buzzing in the hive,
I know that we are dead.

Forget what you have read.
It's just a lot of jive.
Dead's easy, it is said.

On the edge of the red bed,
Relieved that we survive,
I know that we are dead.

What mischief lies ahead?
The dead surely thrive.
Dead's easy, it is said.

No treadmill to tread,
No requirement to strive.
I know that we are dead.
Dead's easy, it is said.

This is a revision of a poem already printed here, above. One of problems of posting poetry in this format is that editing is possible only for a short period after posting. There are several poems in this thread that I would like to edit, and will if they ever go to print.

I also wanted to make some remarks on this particular poem. It is about the suicide pact undertaken by a well known actress in the porn industry, and a colleague of hers.

I don't know her real name, assuming that it is different from her "nom de porn plume". I've corrected the spelling of her first name and am omitting her second name even though I know it is likely an alias.

Her fans will know who she was and I was a huge fan of hers. I just loved her as much as anyone can love a screen idol.

She did lesbian oriented BDSM porn that was very "soft" and light, and fun to watch. There was almost always humor involved, intended or unintended.

When I found out about her suicide, I was completely shocked and still feel traumatized to the extent that fans are upset by this sort of thing.

People who commit suicide either don't think about it or think that it doesn't matter because once the body dies nothing else happens. Very few people (if any) commit suicide believing that they are consigning themselves to Hell or Heaven, or Purgatory.

But what if the death of the body isn't the end? In this poem, I tried to imagine Natali D's personality (as understood by me through her videos) dealing with that scenario.

I know she had lots of friends who loved her and who miss her, because some of them have posted on line about it. I loved her too and I want them to know that this poem was written from that point of view.

Champlain Heights (A prose poem)

Childhood in the woods and fields, before the oil refinery came, ducks' eggs and mud puddles, houses being built, mud, red winged blackbirds and scrub bushes, bird's nests and bull rushes, cattails and flowing waters, minnows and waterfalls, trickling streams, low animal paths through dense bush, forest clearings surrounded by stands of fir and spruce, lime green and dark green prickly needles, blisters from climbing and swinging and hanging, sticky sap on the hands darkened by dust, gravel pits and snow, launching ourselves off the precipice rim with abandon to land on the inner slopes chest deep in drifted snow, igloos, blizzards and childhood expeditions in the woods, waist deep in powdery snow, shoveling the driveway, shoveling the walks, snowdrifts up to the eaves of the house, sleet, rain, hail, skating on the crust of the snow, flooding the backyard rink, putting on gear, toting skates over the shoulder, laces around the hockey stick, straining to exhaustion, not good enough, moss covered logs, porcupines, chipmunks, lean-tos, and hatchets, hikes and sunshine, bicycles dripping in the fog on the way to play baseball, corner store candy, school and companions, first serious collisions of our hearts, skating, soccer, snowballs, rivalries, fraternity, becoming a community of children, our champion beating a visiting bully, chick-a-dees in the morning, calling their own name, bar-b-cues, toasted marshmallows, winter coats and boots, sunsets and lawn chairs and neighbors and squabbles and snobs and shunning and economic status, the rich and the poor heroic Love brothers, comic book entrepreneurs, house parties and road hockey, the gnarled trunks of trees, their bark, rough and moss covered, beads of spruce gum, strange fungi, rotten logs, humus and ants, beetles and caterpillars, worms, black flies, mosquitoes, and one idle early evening, alone in front of the house bouncing a red India rubber ball against the background of the red setting sun,

The red ball and the red setting sun.

I knew my body had become bigger in every way, everywhere, inside and out.

My brain must have changed. It must have enlarged, but my thinking had not changed, but everything about me had changed, but not that. I realized I must be like a driver in a truck. I realized that we don't change. It was a stunning thought. I bounced the ball. I knew that I knew something extraordinary.

I knew it for sure.

Postscript to Champlain Heights

Thought is reduced by materialists to activities of the brain, but brain functions can be reduced themselves to activities which are too simple to accomplish thought and finally to parts within the brain, down to the atomic level, which are too simple to accomplish thought.

Materialists will counter that it is combinations of these functions which are the thought carriers, but are unable to show how this mentation process works.

The argument becomes circular and one is always left hunting for the material object that "thinks", and yet, being able to reduce even that material object to combinations too simple for thought.

This leads inevitably to the idea of a "mind", which is different from the body, about which we can determine almost nothing, at this time, as to its construction or mechanism of action.

But then the whole reductio ad absurdum would begin again as one investigated this "thinking object", "mind", exactly as above.

One is led, logically and rigorously, to the conclusion, not just that the thinking element is not material, in the ordinary sense of the word, from the grossest objects down to the subatomic level, but that it cannot be material, since all material formations, in the search for the "thinker", are reduced to parts the individuals of which, even in combination, are too simple to be used for thought.

Discussing this is like being a dog chasing its own tail through ever tightening circles of self pursuit.

Turing posited a mathematical basis for morphogenesis and one wonders if such an approach might lead to a hypothetical mathematical basis for the generation of thought.

Some objections come to mind immediately.

The Turing approach would involve a massive number of "thought stutters" and more importantly is a "one way" process.

Also it just doesn't happen fast enough or with the kind of fluidity that one associates with thought. It is more believable in the realm of morphogenesis over billions of years, in Darwinian fashion, than in the genesis of thought and of thoughts, which are legion and rapidly produced.

One can't really say that Darwinian evolution is accelerating, but it might be. I just mention this in order to illustrate the immense qualitative difference between evolution of form, which is widely accepted and may be at root a mathematically driven process, as with Turing, and the evolution of thought, which either appears to have happened at an immensely more rapid rate or, what is more likely, if the result of some mathematical property, as morphogenesis is posited to be, must have begun at an immensely distant time in the past, before the appearance of biological entities on this planet.

Perhaps thought is not evolving at all or only at a pace comparable with mathematically driven morphogenesis, and it is only thoughts, as distinguished from thought itself, which are evolving quickly.

If thought is mathematically driven, in the Turing manner, it is still just another assemblage of parts, no individual of which is habitable to the activity we call thought. These mathematical agglomerations are in themselves particulated. If an agglomeration were habitable to the activity of thought, we would still be left with the question what part of it is the thinking part.

I think we are led inexorably and logically to the idea that the thinker within is inherently different from the body and brain it inhabits and, even if it is a "material object", way out of step with them in evolutionary terms.

Aphorism:

In the end we all come to one conclusion.

Aphorism: "On Knowing"

There is as much inside the mind as inside the universe and knowing consists of making the matches.

Haiku:

The nobody seen
In my wispy white haired still
Winter dream is me.

Observation

There is a moment one reaches as a writer when one realizes that one has inherited the mantle of responsibility for our human civilization, that the weight once viewed as having been carried by others, by exalted others, must now be borne by oneself, that, in fact, it is already being borne by oneself, never alone of course, never principally. The weight is carried to what small degree one can manage. One does feel the weight and does know that to some degree, sometimes over great distances, the force exerted against that weight is felt, even in distant capitals.

For America on the Historic Fourth

America has always been brash and rough, with diamonds too,
But what do you get when you scorn the example the diamonds set?

Wow.

The amount of content you put out here is incredible.
I respect your passion for words tremendously.
To a Poet and Saints in the Oddest places were my two personal favourites.
Keep it coming!!!!!!!

Edit to add;
I just realised I haven't read them all.
I finished page two and thought that was it.
Lol

Haiku for China

The Chinese gather
Their thoughts into a frenzy
Of ideograms.