The Burial of the Dead
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
https://ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity
You will please forgive me but I am struggling with betraying every illusion. My mother’s family pioneered Kentucky in 1740. What a long strange trip George had in 1776 when the mysterious stranger from Krakow paid a visit with the recommendation of Ben Franklin and provided Ayahusca to enable him to become President instead of hang from Hessian gallows.
What a Wasteland and no science fiction poet better than T.S. Eliot to describe it. Thomas Stearns Eliot, (born September 26, 1888, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S. who died January 4, 1965, London, England), American-English poet, playwright, literary critic, and editor, a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry in such works as The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943 I Eliot encountered in 1974 my American Literature survey class on the Moderns.
There is a famous line you probably recall from 1922 and the Wasteland. 1922 about stakhanovite worker for the big city the coal went to. Grateful Dead riffed off that line.
can't stay here much longer, Melinda
The sun is getting high
I can't help you with your troubles
If you won't help with mine
I gotta get down
I gotta get down
Gotta get down to the mine
In the year of our Eliot Anno Domini 2023 anything is possible and as the Kinks sing up about Lola I see Dylan. Ironic to think of the Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and Iconic Symbol once upon a month ago for Bud Light and now for Maybelline …wait wait don’t tell me it’s not the cosmetic company but the Mystery Babylon Holding Company run by the Big Brother Ball and Chain Holding Company. Their joint venture with Satan is the Sign and Symbol Image Company. Dylan works as brand influencer 1099 and a bag of cocaine.
What I’m trying to say is America it really honestly is Tis of Thee I Sing after the Ides of March.
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—
I too awaited the expected guest.
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows one final patronising kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .
She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
'Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.’
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smooths her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.
Our empty space today stirring wrath in a citizen
https://twitter.com/KCPayTreeIt/status/1651336863267926018
Not to be outdone with the April Fool
https://twitter.com/KCPayTreeIt/status/1651363774924767234
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In San Francisco the Whole Foods at 8th and Market by the Civic Center has closed due to theft and crime. A few blocks from City Hall of course with theater space on the other side of Market in Civic Center.
Each breath, in, out, betrays. I tried at 40 to learn to play the Digeri Do at a North Beach music store but could not master circular breathing and after 6 months of crossing town from the Mission to the store I gave it up. I had no faith. I was a Realist.
I suspect calm prayer is the best. In this I follow also my Polish father. His family was devout Catholic as I have mentioned anecdotally time to time. Ohio was his homeland.
Father went to a Catholic college in Toldeo for two years on a basketball scholarship until the Depression shut it down Dad was born before WW1 and my Kentucky mother in 1918. The Kentucky side is from my Mother. Prayerfully breathing down by the river in Peabody coal lands like my family. Or in Toledo, Ohio where the Catholic sun rose and still shines bright enough today with this corrupt global corporation. Biden is President and he boasts about the power of the office from piped in words in this harsh Spring noon of twilight in America, a darkness with mixture like a in Turner canvass of sailors on a ship in a storm at sea, the waves grabbing as hands of Neptune.