Sometimes my poems are cluttered with adverbs and adjectives,
subjunctive clauses, desultory detours like this front yard is overgrown
with weeds. When my poems gets like this. when you can’t see the structure,
it is time to bring out the whipper snipper. Time for a trim.
Matt has been hired by a plumbing company to sell toilets. His old man who works for the same company got him the job. What could Matt do but accept? He was good at nothing else.
Larry, a hotshot salesman goes out with him one day and lays it on the line: “I don’t tolerate laziness. It’s a form of treason,” he says.
Matt says it’s not his fault he’s not pulling in big figures. He has no sales experience and no one is willing to train him.
Larry shoots back, “Baptism by fire.”
But Matt whines and says it’s been over a year and he still has no idea what he’s doing.
Then Larry comes back with this: “Your job is to go out there every day and get your face kicked in. It’s the only path to Enlightenment.”
I don’t know if Larry and the Buddha were talking about the same kind of Enlightenment and if they were would the Buddha have agreed with Larry’s method?
Is Larry right? Or can’t you find Enlightenment through the toilet trade?
Are some trades/professions more inimical to Enlightenment than others? Can a politician find Enlightenment? would it help him in his job?
I am reading a manual called ‘The Kite and the String’
Because I have trouble getting my thoughts
off the ground;
They run away from me like that fifty dollar note
The wind caught while I was crossing
the main road;
the writer taught the need to ‘abandon’ and ‘control’;
a kite that lifts and a string that unspools just enough to let the kite
fly happily along
but not so much that it gets caught
In power-lines or entangled in its own tail.
I like that very much.
The kite is the thought
and the string the firm hand of the poet
that keep that thought aloft
Unstable Cliffs, the sign read. Extreme Danger. Stay Clear.
And I thought of the unstable Cliffs I had known:
The deputy that barked at me when I called in sick,
My cousin’s boyfriend who punched holes in the wall
Whenever he was denied,
And the glue-sniffing Cliff I taught in Year 11 who fell asleep
On the tracks and was run over by a train.
They should have come with warnings too.
John Malone 