This Tyrannical Need

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw4nUqk5cdU

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What do we see when we look at each other?

Or, what are we seeking to find to see?

Don’t you look for yourself when you look 

in my eyes? Don’t I look into your eyes for me?

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Today on a street on the upper west side 

I espied a distraught and leashed yipping

chihuahua deriding a large German Shepherd 

who with a disinterested languor passed by

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on his own leash held comfortably by his 

middle-aged steward, a small bald mustached 

portly man dressed in tweed. The chihuahua’s 

companion, a tall lean young woman in t-shirt

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and jeans who’d allowed her chihuahua to rush 

to the Shepherd to get it to stop and take heed,

now looked up from the dogs to the man 

who glanced back at her, after which she and he

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fled in their separate directions as fast as they 

could from the scene. What had they seen in each 

other that made them vamoose at such speed? 

Did they not find themselves in each other’s

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inspection? Is that why they both had to leave?

Is finding myself in your eyes the sole proof 

that I’m here I’ll believe? Is Narcissus the symbol 

for this predilection to meet this tyrannical need? 

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If Creation has a Problem

https://youtu.be/JGNgfCiXHCo

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If Creation has a problem it is not that some

jejune or inattentive aspect of the Maker put

the purple where the blue should be, or that

too many flies or too few bees were requisitioned

for immediate delivery to swamps or farms

or linden trees, or that a vitriolic reflex has

become the norm in homo sapiens communities.

Creation does the work we call creation for no

other reason than it has no other thing to do.

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From its points of view, it comes out perfectly.

That it may not suit our purpose is not only not

a problem but not so much as a gluon of concern

to that mysterious proclivity that pumps out

theater props and futons and banana splits

and digital antiphonally remixed covers for

the songs you never liked. Not one bit of creation

isn’t spiked to make somebody doped or sober,

or to waver over and above the greater part of All

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so that the greater part of All and it will likely

never meet – until by chance an unsuspected

several drops of it break through your mother’s

skin into her reproductive system like invading

mitochondria to reassort the synthesizing DNA

that had already started to construe the interesting

unfathomable thing that one day would be you.

What problem to Creation could you be?

Uh-oh. Irrefutably, perhaps, one day we’ll see.

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Homo Habilis

The city's no less natural

than prairies, woods or seas -

Cities are to citizens

what bee-hives are to bees.

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Bridges, tunnels, restaurants

are what, en masse, we do.

If God makes us, and we make

porno, God makes porno too.

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