When bad things happen to good people

About 20 or 30 years ago someone wrote a well intentioned book titled "when bad things happen to good people." Right from the outset the clumsiness of this title, and the enormous assumptions which underpin it, irked me, but tonight while lying in a hot bath it suddenly struck me how I might highlight these more lightly than with some outraged, and probably boring, polemic. So here goes an attempt to render my reservations in slightly more poetic form: 

When bad things happen to good people
when good things happen to bad people
when bad things happen to bad people
when good things happen to good people

when good people turn out to be a bit bad
when bad people turn out to be a bit good
when the categorising mind takes a  lunch break
when most people turn out to be bad and good

when bad things turn out to be not so bad
when good things turn out to be not so good
when everything is in transition
and labels fall off like leaves in Autumn

when good people eat good animals
when nameless animals eat other nameless animals
when trending to good people make judgement calls other good people judge as bad
when bad people unwhittingly or knowingly do good perhaps because
they're having  the afternoon off

when green things push up through the cracks 
when the mind's circus stops whirling hither and thither
when everything begins in something else
like a great chain of clasped hands across the universe that slowly let go
'cos they've traced themselves back to the same body

when the burning question falls away

______________________________________

(then I see that what I dislike and fear I call bad
and what I like and embrace I call good
and what threatens what I am attached to I call bad
and what seems to support it I call good

when I am completely suspect
when people turn out not to be people
when things turn out not to be things)
____________________________

Uncle Dick
with plutonium rods up his arse
had a torrid time of it
on the medical
not so merry
go round
test
after
test
confirmed he was
dying
with many afflictions
(but not because of any one of them)
the tight-lipped doctors couldn't quite
put their fingers on the pulse
of what was wrong and
at night the obscure terms
specialists afflicted him with
chased themselves
around his brain
until sleep came
at 4am
in front of the television sprawled on the floor
waking bleary and blurry
a pool of drool
gathered at his chin

or made love to an assemblage of pixels on his
smart phone
(at least that still worked)
___________________
I moaned my moans
and wrote a few poems
_____________________


I am always ready to be anything
a permaculture farmer
a dog walker
a gag writer for a tv satire show
a technician or tradesman
with a useful skill
a guru
a lecturer
a counsellor
a radio personality
a quiz show kid
constantly beginning again
like a spreading puddle
I flow from nowhere
to nowhere
looking for a large pair
of cupping hands
___________________

I am wanting to have an affair
with a large breasted
wasp waisted being
to compliment my hairy pot belly
and greying hair
and she will not mind
how I wish to play with her body
will be easy being Chava
to the secret stirrings of my every Adam
and most importantly to the fantasy
from our joinings and partings
no suffering
will be born
___________________
INTEGRITY

Despite my best efforts
to corrupt my spinifex hoppers
with free handouts
of easy food
they still after four years
bolt from my hand
remaining true to their
G-dly mouse
nature

__________________________
G-d made everything in two colours:
red and white
I try to keep them separate
but inconveniently
they keep on coming together again
I open the cupboard
looking for milk
but find blood

G-d made everything in 3 colours:
black, white
and red
pulsing underneath
only held in check by a layer thin
as skin

______________
Psychoillogical Stories

There was a ghost
called inadequacy
living in my house
I tried to avoid it
but kept on bumping into it
I tried not to think about it
but the thoughts returned
like familiar friends
so one day i sat down with inadequacy
over a cup of tea
and invited him to tell me his story
and this is what he said (to me):
I am your friend
when I sometimes worry
or tell you you're not enough
it keeps you from
not knowing
and that's much worse than me
this way you don't
have to take risks

_______________________ 



To a tuna 

Once you swam in the sea
then you became part of my body
if ever one day the cemetery
lies submerged under a rising sea
perhaps your descendants will sup on me
thus favours returned
eternally
__________________________

A school hat with a name in it
of a child who has long since left the school
a small photograph of a woman who
has long since left this world
a pigeon flying overhead
carrying the DNA
for a thousand future generations of pigeons
all cross my path
now
___________

yesterday I received a promotional offer from an insurance company

to win $25 000  so that "you can wake up anywhere in the world."

Ok then, I choose to wake up
right now
right here

__________

Family

Its eleven o clock

at night

we're all tired

I'm rounding soft and crumbly walnuts and dates

into coconut coated balls

and wondering how we're going to pay the bills

and slow to a trickle

the changes in my body

and how instead of

lethargic and sombre and heavy 

I can become

vital and youthful again

just for long enough to

get us to somewhere 

safe
_____________________

Different kinds of robots: Jewbots; Islamobots; Bhuddistbots; Pub-bots;
progressivebots, conservobots; coparatebots; sportsbots; 

_____________
I tried to speak to the girl
I watched in the playground
and held in my mind
on my bed
but was too afraid
my voice and leg would shake
or my face go red
so that great emotion
remained unsaid
______________

The sonic landscape of Jimi Hendrix
a wall of scrap metal
arranged in inventive
protean sculptures
Bach on steroids
with a flattened fourth note
________________

A Love Letter

Dear Immanuel

I will not with hold my love from you any more

Love and respect
Immanuel

__________________

My next poetry collection, G-d willing, will either be called

A Way with Words
or

Skipping in the House of G-d
or

something else. 

It may just be a collection of titles with no poems.

Feeling my way towards a poem - bird on a wing, of Thee I sing

I saw a National Geographic article by Jonathan Franzen on the way songbirds ( to my mind beautiful and largely harmless creatures) are snared shot caged blinded trapped and generally maimed and killed in their millions as they migrate across Europe and Arabia on their way to Africa.

There were several photographs of delicate limbs broken by traps, of the very symbols of freedom, wings in flight, glued helplessly to a twig coated with lime. Besides the theological conundrum this always evokes for me, as do most acts of seemingly wanton destruction (and see my previous post), I needed to try and process the not unfamiliar feelings and responses these pictures evoked. (Pictures courtesy of National Geographic and David Guttenfelder)

Here is one poemlet that came up:

Its only a bird
trapped in a snare
that fills my heart
with bleak despair

but then I start looking for a redemptive way of framing what seems like the end of joy, the cutting down of song, and the human in all its mad destructive aggressive and indifferent nakedness, the human as angel of death and deliverer of suffering, then my poemlets take a different direction: And I am powerless to halt or change all this that goes on before me, after me, beyond my reach. So how does a good G-d allow this? My angles of attack are

a) what is this this? I have no access to the experience of these birds, it is all conjecture and assumption but, if common sense empathy supports the idea that there is pain as I know and dread pain then

b) the pain in those pictures is already past, gone, and as Byron Katie says "the great thing about suffering is that its always in the past" (unless I keep on dragging it back into the present)

c) the hope that pain and suffering are the birthpangs into some great freedom beyond name and form, a birth into invulnerability and eternity. (And I refer you, tangenitally, to David Sedaris's beautiful short piece "the squirell and the chipmunk" which awakens in the heart that great longing for Avinu shebashamayim, tzur Yisrael ve goaloh,  for the rock from which we are hewed.)

I saw a bird that flew
that flew  
I saw its wings ensnared
with glue
I hope by then it knew
it knew
(may this be true)
the spark of life


OR

I saw a bird that flew
that flew  
I saw its wings ensnared
with glue
I hope that then it knew
it knew
that IT was only passing through
may this be true
be true
be true

OR

A bird that soared and sung and flew
was trapped on a twig smeared with glue
I'd feel much better if I knew
that some indweller just passing through
this world of name and form

But here is Hatikva...the hope: a man using his spittle to clean a rescued bird

________________________________

Notes towards...

then there was the falcoln whose eyes were sown up and flew off blind:

they took away your flight
they took away your sight