Go
“
JUST USE YOUR FEET ON THE PEDALS AND IT WILL TAKE YOU!”
-Overheard little girl,
shouting at her sister
Question
What does it mean to be free? Is it the ability to let go of control and go with the flow? Is it a choice or an inherent way of being? Are some people born into this world less free than others? Or do the odds of being always tip positively? (We’re alive!) What about those who hold on to get by? The physically, mentally, socially “unfit?” The disadvantaged? And what kind of people can love us/them without conflating notions of freedom?
Question
Can we place irrationalities in a hierarchy or is everyone equal across inevitable irrationality? And if so, who decides?
* Thinking back to this question, this Huxley quote, and about the role of bioethicists and medical professionals in determining who can choose for themselves/others what.
Sinking in
else
keep me
in the lies
we tell self
i’ll become your
nothing else
leave for the quiet
only to learn
everything hums
Deforestation
“
Nothing in all the world is quite so lonely as a lover who wants to love but loses his beloved in a jungle the two of them helped one another create, plant by tree by vine. Nothing in all the world is so pathetic as a lover who thinks he wants to stand but always finds himself lying down, thinks he wants to speak but constantly falls silent. Nothing in all the world is so helpless as a lover lost in a jungle he has helped to make and cannot find even the edge of.
There is no escaping, either for the lover or for his beloved, when the vines have closed off the sun, when the trees have closed off the wind, when the plants have grown into a thick wall that no foot was ever meant to penetrate. Escape is never a possibility, anyway. The only possibility is demolition — either the jungle or themselves. They must choose. No one else can choose for them, and they cannot escape the choice. It is their choice. They will live with it forever.”
-Burton Raffel
Lovers Losing Lovers
Question
Can psychedelic therapy allow people to return to physical/structural origin without shame and denial? (This includes the biological, sexual, and thanatological.)
Could this therapy, if done well, and over time, decondition cultural norms (gender, too) and help people become more ambiguous and self-actualized, and lead to more tolerant, progressive societies?
Salvation from the evils of earthly existence
Poems for Pedro
(x of xx)
vii
sea shells he brought for me
stained with my ankle’s blood
ix
it’s just sun on a page
until you look away
at another man with a suitcase
x
as soon as I drank him,
I went into a trance
and knew exactly what to do
oh no my pages run up quite soon
didn’t know he’d take up so much space
xii
everything else
the ink leaves out
xv
he wouldn’t want to rush anything
all these weddings around me
a man sprints past
a woman poses
a boy in Doc Martens shamefully stuffs
a plastic checkered picnic blanket
into an overfilled trash bin
a little girl screams
“FLOWERS!”
xvi
all the leaves
I can’t collect or recollect
still fell
xvii
two men on their way
with a gallon of cooking oil,
preparing love
xviii
eye contact with a skater
as he bombs the hill I climb
it’s all happening in front of me
while I’m busy writing it down
xix
back through
the same alley I entered
of course I can’t breathe
with my nose plugged
xx
he gave me a poem