Diversionary Tactics

The core question of politics is not "What should be done?" but rather "What should people be forced to do, and who has the right to force them?"

There are any number of defensible answers to this question, and there will never be a consensus on what answer is the best.  But let's at least stop wasting each other's time by pretending we're talking about something else.

Sunset, Midtown

Breaking onto 34th Street,
The wild sun,
Majestic in its dying,
Splashes a tender, violent orange
Over the pale cafés.

Above the Hudson,
The sky has split wide open;
It bleeds color.
Men become shadows
As they tread the rails of the crosswalks,
Cut out in stately black
Against a furious dusk.

Lights flare on.
Somber women bring coffee.
Night settles in around us,
Warm and expected as a shroud.

Don't Just Make – Make Something

What I've realized is, I don't love music; I love songs.  And I don't love theater; I love plays.  And I don't love cinema; I love movies.  And I don't love sequential art; I love comic books.

Basically, I'm far less interested in art forms than I am in what people do with them.

A Puzzlement Regarding the Avant-Garde

To my mind, the perfect piece of avant-garde theater is Stomp. It has no story, no characters, no dialogue, no conventional dramatic structure. It's pure theater. It's a celebration of rhythm and movement for their own sake.

And it works. It works like gangbusters. It's never boring; it's never artsy or pretentious; it's visceral and exciting and life-affirming and even funny. It's the kind of show you walk out of feeling grateful. It's an experience worth having. It's worth having more than once.

The funny thing is, I've never heard any advocate of avant-garde theater mention Stomp as a point of reference. If it comes up at all among theater insiders, it's spoken of dismissively, or even with contempt. I can only assume this is because it's too popular. After all, if a lot of people like it, then it can't really be art.

Beauty Hurts

Beauty hurts.
Beauty demands too much.
Beauty makes me feel small and skinless.

I like a little buffer of numbness
Between me and the world.
Just a little extra hide.
A carapace.
Is that wrong?
It works for me.
I'm open to experience.
I just don't need it to ravage me all the time.

I get caught out.
I get ambushed.
The beauty lurks in unexpected places,
Like a brigand,
And I am not always on my guard.
It leaps into my eyes. I close them.
It's too late.
It has already leapt in.

It stays with me.
Burned onto the brain.
I get no respite.
I close my eyes.
I get no respite.
The beauty burns and burns.

I am a small person.
All I want is to be small and comfortable.
The beauty mocks me with a glimpse of greatness.
A taste of deep feeling.
A hint of a higher grace.

I don't want that.
I want to wake up slowly from a blank sleep
And eat a little cereal
And read something sad in the newspaper
And shake my head
And have a muffin.
I don't need the sublime ache of awareness.
It doesn't help me.
It doesn't help me get through my day.

New York Blooms

One week a year, New York blooms.
Between their scarecrow bareness and their lush green plenitude,
The trees give a brief riot of white, as if to say

We are not so sad amid the gray and the brick;
We are not so tame as you may think we are;
We are Nature in her glory, and our bounty is a kind of overcoming.
Be thankful, and do not flatter yourselves;
You may flourish, but we flourish also.

New York does not reply.
She has other calls to answer.
But she relaxes her shoulders a little,
And begins to forgive the winter.

One Certainty

Crane your neck out the window
As the eve-lit trees rush by,
Or stroll among their twilight shapes
While starlight pricks the sky;
Stop and take a photograph,
But you can never win –
However hard or well you try,
You will never take it all in.

Face the trembling vagrant;
Do not avert your eyes –
And nurture in your deepest heart
The terror of goodbyes;
Take the coldest breath of life
And press it to your skin;
Smell the bullet; taste the knife;
You will never take it all in.