11
Out
of the Ashes
The nastiest,
beastliest purgation
striking from God knows where,
combustible spark, cigarette butt,
lightning bolt from heaven—
eighty-eight thousand souls
displaced from safe haven,
forfeiting happy gain—
God knows when the purging will end
and life reclaimed from the ashes
of their weary soul, but the spirit of wild
rose country cannot be broken, and
the Phoenix will rise again.
12
Mount
Ulysses
Sunday,
May 8, 2016, 8:51 A. M.
Mother’s Day, Penny hoisted her
book into the air and declared,
“Yea! Done!” That was her reaction
to the greatest novel of the 20th Century,
Ulysses, by James Joyce, and when
asked what she thought of it,
she reflected, and said,
“Yea! Done!”
13
On the Menu Today
Coincidence or
editorial play, I do not know,
three articles side
by side in my Sunday Star;
in the middle,
wedged in like a freshly dug grave,
90-year-old retired
senator and his 40-year-old
male lover, 15-year
affair now marital bliss. The
senator was married
before to his great love
of 38 years, their
children older than his lover
who filled the hole
in his life when his wife died
of acute leukemia, the
second great love of his
nonagenarian life; to
the left of Harris and Matthew
an article on the
Freegan Pony restaurant in Paris,
meals prepared from dumpster
food from Rungis
international food market,
and to the right of
Matthew and Harris
an article on Laab dib,
a northern Thai
specialty of raw blood, bile,
and herbs, an
acquired taste—
“a meal to die for.”
14
My Struggle
“What emerged from
this
was myself,” wrote
the voluble
author of My Struggle. “This was
what was me.” But
how many pages
did it take the
Norwegian writer to
see himself as his
life had shaped him?
I know the story
well. Book after book
after book my
struggle told itself, but
never in full; until
one day, I don’t
know when, Old Whore
Life
showed her face, and
I saw
that she was me!
15
Alchemy of the Self
The agony of my life
was being
a stranger to myself,
because the
person who was me was
not the
person I wanted to
be; so I broke
the mirror of my
life and suffered
the pain of putting myself
together
again into the person
I was meant
to be; and now I no
longer suffer
the agony of being a
stranger to
myself, because I am me.
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