standardkink

Thursday, July 2, 2015

Watching Crows Dive.

Watching Crows Dive

by james bezerra

I wonder if some of the crows

are wilder than others.

If there’s one out here with me

watching dust devils dance

who swoops up right above it,

wraps his wings around himself

and lets the gravity take him,

down

into the swirl of dirt and dust

and waits just that

half a second longer

than any other would -

because in that half a second there is everything -

before he snaps his wings out

and lets the hot air spit him out.

Down.

Up.

Testing the tenacity

of death

and the width

of his own

fortitude

while I just sit here

in the bed of this pick-up truck,

drinking a bottle of beer.

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The Predictability of Percentages.

The Predictability of Percentages

by james bezerra

90% of all the things

I ever worried about

never happened.

90% of all the things

that did happen,

happened too fast to fear.

The overlapping 10%

was always you.

All the Cats.

All the Cats

by james bezerra

It seems like there should be something said here about all the cats.

Because there have always been all the cats.

I like them,

I always do,

what with all their thoughtless selfishness

and finite love;

their claws

and wet eyes like dumb little gods,

but truth be told

every cat happened

because someone I loved

batted her eyes at me.

Said, “let’s get a(nother) cat.”

And every single time,

once she is gone –

because ultimately

she always ends up gone –

she never takes the cat.

There have been many cats,

but there has only ever been

this one story of the cats.

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Bad Hammer

by james bezerra

I don’t trust people

who use the word

“simulacrum”,

who invoke Hegel.

Which is odd;

I like having

a stiff drink

with a good Marxist,

adore the teenage-y angst of

a mustachioed Nietzschean,

I can even hang with

people who quote

Kierkegaard –

just not in the mornings

before I’ve had

my coffee.

But those simulacrumists

lodge a bur into my brain

like a grain of sand

in a sandwich.

I also dislike the use of the word “cacophony”

because it costs ten dollars

and doesn’t actually do a good job describing anything;

it’s a bad hammer.

How can you trust a guy

who listens to a bag of bolts roll down a staircase

and who chooses to use the word

“cacophonous” as if it’s good enough?

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Beloved.

The fantastic writer David Rakoff wrote this phrase and it is one of those things that when you hear it you ask yourself how you never thought to place those words in that order to express that idea:

Beloved by all, yet loved by none.

I guess we all feel that way sometimes. I don’t know which is sadder, that we all sometimes feel that way at occasional points in our lives, or that when we feel that way we also delude ourselves into thinking we are beloved.

Here’s how I learned about David Rakoff.