[Newspoetry] LET UNDERMINING BEAVERS BORE...

[Donald L Emerick]

LET UNDERMINING BEAVERS BORE...

Contextual prologue of poetic writing:
I don't want to just explore my feelings,
I don't want to exploit sympathies in others.
I do want to show some associations of thought,
as it were, for thoughts are not transparencies,
to be placed on a projector, shown overhead,
reduced down to a few lines to be traced over,
by an eye that grasps lines as some forms,
becomes informed that those lines show a form,
at least one that seems standing out, just now.

Gestalt shift is possible, to see another form,
in those same lines, taken from another view,
as also standing out, visual ambiguity occurs,
as formal optic occlusion shines on one form,
standing out from clearings on which lines stand.

Is any of that poetic, or just some idle musing,
trying to think back to discontent on last night,
for a man whose politics I generally despise
appeared on the Letterman show as guest.

This would be John Ashcroft, Attorney General,
former Senator of Missouri where I once lived,
former Governor, former AttyGenl of Missouri,
son of a religious scholar, perhaps a theological child.

It would not be jealousy on my part to recall
these pseudo-facts from his biographic resume,
his curriculum vitae in the schools of politics,
his passing grades as elected-appointed roles.
I never ran for such offices, but, more importantly,
I doubt that I could have won an election contest
against Big John, and this would be so because,
I suspect, I am not as politically skilled as he is,
but I'd rather say that he is more corrupt than I,
I'd rather say that he evokes, wittingly or not,
bias and prejudice and unsympathetic stands
from those who listen to him preaching politics.

I could talk substantively, ad nausea, which I do,
about what Big John's substantive stances are,
as pernicious influences, preservative of known evils,
reinvents and restores evil to reinvigorate the good.

I think and suppose that Big John is aware of evil,
as an actual quality that attends every man or woman,
every day, as more than a possibility of harming others,
that almost any action or intention produces harm,
that almost nothing that one does is good in itself.
I suspect Big John disavows his own evil,
as I find that I disavow my own, too often,
by referring to the great net utility calculus,
that short circuits infinity into some instant,
pretending to discount all of time yet to come.
I try to avoid as illogical such cruel calculus.

I try to say atemporal logic looks on eternally
at the forms dancing in and out of its music,
sees the passing forms as all material to itself,
the only substantive is always already incarnate.

Big John was on the Letterman show because...
and here I have to stumble through surmises
based on speculations of others, on questions
that they might not answer if I had then asked or
that they would not answer fully if they answered,
that they could not, anyway, answer truthfully.
I would ask, "Why are you here doing that?"
I ask that same utility question all the time,
whence comes a nausea that I mention above
because I think the question is worthy of me,
as one that matters that I assay to answer it,
even in the face of my conviction that I can not.

Big John was on the Letterman show to sing,
if Dave could have persuaded Big John to do that,
for Dave has lately been making me somewhat sick,
playing a snip of Big John singing one of his tunes,
that patriotic love song, "Let the Eagles Soar."
And I, who has no voice for singing, at all,
Whose son said to him, at less than age 2,
When I use to sing (or to think that I sang)
a nightly nursery rhyme for him at bedtime,
Winken, Blinken and Nod: "Dad, don't sing."
And, I did stop singing (or what I called singing)
for a long time: no one welcomes my rough voice.
(Only later could I think he might have spoken
Declaratively, sans comma, and not imperatively.)

Big John can sing in a voice that pleases others.
I'd like to say that he is a politician as I am not.
Politicians know how to make pleasant sounds
appear to be meaningful sounds and thus true,
Politicians say sound sound sounds fine to me.
Politicians would not say it that way, though,
Because they know that way of speaking
requires a thinking and that thinking might fail.
"To talk to people, speak as you would to an idiot,
relying on no uncertain possible sound thinking at all."
I quote this unexpressed truth directly and inferentially
from negatives of statements made by almost all politicians.
(In business, we taught new hires to speak BusinessEase,
a wasteland language barren of flowers, wasting no words.)
One of the positives from which this negative truth comes:
be sure to tell the people that it is right to think this way,
be sure to sound off your sound by reassuring the people
that nodding your head "yes, yes" is just like thinking,
that if you nod your head "yes, yes," they think you think.

Cassandra (I would wish to be as good as she) knows
That negatives, opposing positives, are most likely to fail:
they were voted that way by their senior year in school.
Everyone knows the negative is what you must oppose.

I stand before you, on today's show, then,
desiring to be seen in the negative,
desiring to be in a minority,
desiring of pleading guilty,
desiring to be convicted,
desperately seeking your disapproval,
to validate my sense of self-approval
Where gestalt shifts, erratically, perhaps,
trying to persuade you by hidden persuaders,
moving randomly through the restless crowd,
to find me as guilty as you found Socrates,
even though I am not nearly as worthy as he.

Thanks for listening,
to this beaver gnawing on a log,
making another dam,
blocking another flow,
building another home
for silt to settle and fill,
Donald L Emerick