Wednesday: Dateline Theesen

wednesday
German lessons
hiding the ADD
from the teacher
pretending to be there
when i'm not

old Heidigger stressed the being
and the being there
above the beingness
and i
can act them all

it's been forty years
in the making
this deficit of mine
and i can no longer
attend
to it
to you
to me
to anything

attention, attention,
the mind is in the room,
the garden,
the moon,
the last century,
the next,
i cannot find all the pieces
and if i did
i wouldn't sit still
long enough
to assemble them

i am a humble man
humbled by my inability
to display my proper ego
a terrible thing to see
if i could remember
where i left it

What was it then?

surely not love
I've known that
it is softer than this madness
we have shared

perhaps a passion shared
confused with love?

perhaps a need for something
nothing
anything?

I do not know you,
and I should not.

You are beautiful and wonderful
and obviously mad
and that I cannot live with
for I am growing old
and depend upon the memory
of honesty and trust
to get me through

what would i say if you sang out of tune?

i wouldn't stand up and walk out
but i'd put the tuning fork to your ear
until you could hum to it

hootenanny my mother annie
another thought that might make me
change my mind
change my shirt
and change my way of eating pasta

why do you think i cannot hear you
when you're standing right
between my ears

magnum sum
cogito ergo
sum ergo cogito
und so und so und sowieso
until the ducks and the chickens
and the me
are all elwedritchens
wading through a fountain
in the Pfalz

bringing color to the wine street
and sunshine to the wet cold north

jack and joe and john's poems (borrowed from another one of my blogs)

i was a Penn State poet in the late sixties and early seventies, hanging with Jack MacMannis and trying to get Joe Grucci to publish me. At least Jack was trying to get Joe to publish me. I was the last of the beatniks in a world moving into free love, free clothes, and free the Chicago Seven. It was the year before the Kent State Massacre. I had a bushy head and a scraggly beard and a scraggly head and a bushy beard and once went without a moustache for almost a month.There was Sartre and Beckett and Pynchon and yeah, there was Kerouac and Gary Snyder, and always, always, Hemingway and Pound. There was Zen and eventually, a Polish Pope, and my son was born and we had some very good dogs and I had some very good women in my life and some not and I was never the charm they thought I'd be. One loved Tolkien and Steeleye Span and another just liked to toke her way through her day. I smoked a briar pipe and Balkan Sobranie tobacco bought at Hall's Salvage for a dime.

schoenes wochenende

Yesterday, awedding
In an ancient barn
Today, Bad Salzuflen und zurueck, zu Fuss

The land and the people
Make me smile
Make me think
Make me happy

What more could I ask for
Save a wife, a child, a life

Alles Klar

A short visit
And I am once again lost
In this waking dream
Where time agrees
Only with consiousness
And the unconsious
Cannot understand it

I am aware of space
The folding kind
The author of the Black Hole
That is my mind
Assuming your gravity
As food for my own
Infintesmal smallness

The snallness of a Universe
Winding down

conversations on a country path (with apologies to Heidigger)

There are many ways of 'being there' , the German words Sein, Dasein, and Seiende are all used to express notions of existence and Heidigger in his "Being and Time" discussed them at length. I will talk about all three, neither in length, nor in depth, but as the artist, using Herford as his Dublin, and experiencing a day.

On this weekend, the sky was a brilliant blue, sometimes, for hours, before the clouds moved in. I had time to phrase some intelligent questions, and time to think about them. That is the differencee between philosophy and the other knowledge domains, in philosophy, the questions are always more interesting than the answers. Philosophy seeks to explain the universe.

an excerpt from Sundays in Herford

a rich cup of coffee
a brilliance of Sun
a chat with the neighbor
on the the balcony

leading into hiking round a lake
and chatting in the hut
a Sunday made for thinking
about eternities

not every Sunday
shines
not every one
is active
some are crippled by the rain
and the cold thoughts
it endues

but then the Sun will shine
in Bilefeld
and drift along the highway
to the little alley
where I live
and I will smile
and drink my coffee
knowing that I've much to learn

All Saints Day: 2004

Crisp, cool morning
In a German cemetery
No one I know living ther
But as dead as ny Father and Mother, my brother, and most of the aunts and uncles

A lot of life has passed in the few years since my manhood began and my childhood ended

I have lost loved to death
And stupidity
Have changed my life in body and in mind

Where did I leave that pride that Slavic pride which made me beam when women in bright kerchiefs said "Dobrij den' Profesor" and bowed there heads to the enormity of my thirty two years of wisdom?