Le 14 juillet (le primier du millénium)
An idea can be sparked by any blacksmith
On the village square (an aristocratic piece of property).
But the cobblestones will catch them
Along with the carts of feces and corpses
Smolder over time,
The primeval alarm clock
To begin a day hastily to undo
A blacksmith’s job and a sorcerer’s livelihood.
Here’s one for you:
• Maintain a friendship after the last kiss Even if the romance was never realized in the first place. Continue the lines of open communication; allow the food to make the plant grow and the sun to age its leaves. And if she’s cold, offer a quick snuggle.
• Don’t drudge up a dormant past Of heated battles and broken tennis court oaths For lawyer’s tricks come to rest and die in a family’s home (So what if it isn’t Utah?) I can be a man of greatness and allow my Alabaster image to decompose and erode. Take the gun off the rack and wound the ego so you can finally fly.
• Let be a free market free For it was meant to be free For what does it mean for a land of the free To not maintain a business free all For the sake of keeping certain equal animals free and For the rest of the players not to be free?
• Never submit a treatise blindly For distance always hinders communication and points and commentary should never come with monopolistic price controls. So was the donut bad enough or the trip sheer misery? Was it an insulting remark or misaligned philosophy? Why the low mark? Support your thesis. Justify your answer.
• Class is not the U.N. and you are not the U.S. with your missile banks of psj® chads* and your children’s book of existentialist morality. Your wolf-like prowess shauns away the like-minded lupus in turn will cause your extinction in the hands of a rightful gun owner. You made the high marks but it will soon be microfiched (a useless invention that) and your shell will be lost in the vast void of the vniverse. So sleep on the couch and stare at your Ra.
• Sex is meant to be a life sentence in the old prison fortress By consenting adults who will soon be locked into the bird’s cage To find a new freedom and rekindle a dormant passion to speak in Norman tongues, A new task to unlock the numbers of Solomon’s data set of love A Sisyphus punishment to allegorize divine love (But it’s performed with a smile my love, my friend, my companion) After all, who says it’s cruel and unusual? Outdated some say but shall we declare nuptiae moratorium? (Yes someone was thinking of the children. Or were they?)
So has the spark smoldered the pine bush yet?
Have you been motivated to abandon historical/economic progression theory?
How about launching the missiles and having an orgasm while riding the bomb?
Or eating things that casts a shadow?
Or maybe wearing the ring while making love?
But I wish that you could look across the pond
And realize that the land mass holds the key to a greater future.
We read the holy book, play jazz and baseball and enjoy cookouts and potlucks.
This is the way we celebrate hard work and well earned cash.
All because of establishing residency at the expense of discarding the royal houses.
So leave behind failed paper trails of human dominance of Gaia
And get me a beer so I can watch the fireworks.
* Disclaimer: psj is a registered trademark jointly owned by psj, Stanford University and all the crazy voices in everybody’s head.
Date of First Draft: 14 July 2001
Commentary: This poem - like a lot of poems I seem to write - follows the same reasoning that inspired T.S. Eliot to write "The Waste Land." It seems to fit into the category of "rhythmic grumbling." Even though it's more theraputic than anything else, it does try to refer to the fact that it is Bastille Day [the French never call it that explicitly... the title of this poem is the correct French way of saying that day]. Everything else seems to be my own observations based on frustrations and personal experience.