1. Boots and Bonnets
Ah! Here we are - our final junana.
I’m glad you made it with me all this way.
At times we stopped and rested upon a
hill to admire the view and rest our clay.
But mostly we’ve been treading on and on,
enjoying one another’s company,
braving varied weather from dusk to dawn,
and now and then having a friendly spat.
I laugh at you when you make fun of me,
and you’re not mad when I give you a flat.
Together we’ve penned this bunch of sonnets,
at least a few of which are pretty fine.
Half a year. We’ve worn out boots and bonnets.
I can’t tell which are yours and which are mine.
2. Together Through Life
Many great ideas we tossed around.
Some we kept, some got kicked into the mud.
A bunch of them I’d say were fairly sound,
though now and then our discourse gave way to a dud.
Conversation sometimes leads to dead-ends,
including many one has with oneself.
I say something awkward, my face reddens,
I catch a grimace of fright on my mirrored elf.
Oscar Wilde’s famous tale contains a truth:
We’re together through life with our double
and mostly fail to notice that he’s aged.
Now lo and behold, he’s missing a tooth,
and his skin seems patched beneath the stubble.
He asks if our ongoing verve is true or staged.
3. Leaving Nary a Trace
But cheer up, semblable! We’re young at heart.
As Dylan sang, “I’m younger than that now!”
We often put our horse behind its cart,
age ourselves ass backwards and wonder how.
(And Dylan had that insight early on
as he contemplated his back pages.
He’s piped it with his nasal clarion
through six full decades on countless stages.)
There’s always, always so much left to do -
just like Willy Wonka says to Charlie.
And you’re only through if you think you’re through.
We can grow old without growing gnarly!
Let’s emulate B. Button’s “curious case”
and wind death into birth, leaving nary a trace!
4. Happiness as Premise and Conclusion
Aging, indeed, has been one of our themes.
In many ways I would it weren’t so!
We wish we were ageless as enthymemes
that scholars through numberless ages crow.
It’s nice to learn that aging ain’t so bad,
despite the loss of height, the aches and pains,
the obsession to leave more than a tad
of something besides corporal remains
to be remembered by when we are gone.
For it’s easy to overcomplicate
the matter of what we’ll leave for our spawn
after we have crossed the expiry date.
Don’t fill your life with syllogistic menace.
Let happiness be both conclusion and premise!
5. Lineated Joys
But hell, my friend, just look at all we’ve done.
Heaps and heaps of these lineated joys,
each one packed with a moral or a pun.
We’re waiting for them all - the girls and boys -
to be inspired and put them to music,
to memorize them and call them their own
and render them back as something runic
to symbolize once more the great unknown.
Who can say what the next generation
will do or even be able to do,
given such assaults on recreation
from the venal AI billionaire crew
as serve the discouragement of high art -
a problem with which young poets will have to start.
6. Impossible Suture (or, Dialectic of Endarkenment)
Perhaps it’s like this in every era.
Maybe art can’t really do without it -
all the smog and shit that Mother Terra
soaks up as her skies and seas are clouded
with the latest rubbish from her humans
who seldom put their science to good use,
despite dire warnings from ancient druids
who sensed that nature would suffer abuse
in some vague, indeterminate future
that they guessed at by careful inference.
Art suggests an impossible suture,
and music placates Mom with a miracle rinse.
Adorno and Horkheimer argued this.
If they knew things wouldn’t change, they’d be mad as piss!
7. Modernity, Progress, and Reaction
And as long as we’re mentioning those guys…
another valid point that we’ve discussed:
modern vulnerability to lies.
We thought modernity would have it sussed -
the ways in which most of us still are duped
by superstition, charlatans, and priests.
Progress with reaction is strictly looped.
We slave for billionaires and serve their feasts
while they make arguments that dumb us down,
despite their choplogic and sophistry
and their reliance on a puppet clown
whose gift to satirical poetry
may make us chuckle at human foibles -
small recompense as he snatches his grifted spoils.
8. Up the Hill Backwards. Will It Be Alright?
Our struggle often seems Sisyphean.
“Up the hill backwards, it will be alright.”
So sang Bowie in the early ‘80s.
Mostly we look for some ledge to lean on
and ponder a cleaner path to the height -
one with fewer mines and false deities.
We often tell ourselves, so far so good,
are fine with what we deem a glass half full.
And soon the empty half is understood
as something to remove with the scaffold,
as this edifice that we’ve built is grand,
and thoughts of emptiness will make us sad.
Later we gaze down upon poisoned land
and recall that half-empty glass. “So far so bad!”
9. Haze or Shine
But there I go again. Forgive me, friend!
How easy we succumb to this malaise.
Once again, it’s that default downward trend
we’re prey to when we get caught in the haze.
There’s much to appreciate, haze or shine;
we’ve demonstrated this along the way.
Bollocks to the world! For we’ve turned out fine
as people with their something else to say.
Yes, “something else” is always our savior.
Humans are good at conceiving the new.
Conception may get lost in the labor,
but its essence smears into labor’s skew.
Art’s not our last, but our next to last hope.
For past each peak, there’s always a hidden next slope.
10. Made for Love
Its ours - this mess, this remainder, this skew.
No, not exactly what we had in mind!
It’s always the stuff obstructing our view
with which our dearest hopes and ambitions are lined.
And of course it’s not what we expected.
For now we’re stuck with shit and junk and dross
scattered among these walls we’ve erected -
stuff that we’d sooner attribute to waste and loss.
But waste and loss is what we need the most,
for in it lies our chance to be redeemed -
our self-made Jesu, our heavenly host,
our Santa’s shop of which poets have always dreamed.
In it, we find ourselves and what we’re of.
We make, discard, recreate, and are made for love.
11. Full Anamnesis
And art always circles back to this theme,
confirmed by Near Death Experiences
(do an Internet search on NDEs):
We live to love, though life is but a dream
that limits us to our lower senses.
This dream is but one in an endless frieze
of mementos gilding our karmic path
we’ll admire as in a gallery walk
upon resuming our eternal posts
(each death is a spiritual intermath)
and recollect the love and thought and talk
that filled our lives on former globes and coasts.
For we are blessed with full anamnesis
in transits from life to life. Yes, that’s my thesis!
12. Young and Fresh as Aeneas
Haha! Don’t we have funny ideas
about this great big universe of ours?
Some days I’m young and fresh as Aeneas,
returning as a hero from the wars,
stretching my gaze into the starry sky,
imagining I’ll somehow get there, too,
to study the ultimate how and why
and hail our source with a humble “How do you do?”
Today’s troubles push us to fancy’s edge,
though maybe we’ve been like this all along.
We conjure first what later we allege,
then at last we get science and prove ourselves wrong.
And today, science means mechanical quanta,
which are hard for me, so I really don’t wanna!
13. Double Basis
But, friend, do physicists have the answers?
They seem to get lost in the granular.
From great to small there are slick bannisters,
and which kind of woman or man you are
depends on whether you slide up or down
to largest questions of greatest import
or actions below the threshold of sound…
and on the venue in which you file your report.
And ours of course is this ancient habit
that moderns may regard as trivial.
Voilà! This toothy and rhyme-worn rabbit!
Ahem! Boo! Hiss! But at least it’s convivial.
Scientia versus poiesis?
Or yin and yang, John and Paul - a double basis?
14. An Endless Pile of Marios
Semblable, in our next incarnation,
I’ll take Vergil and let you be Newton.
We’ll get a double look at creation,
then turn to faith healing like Freud or Rasputin.
It’s good to devote a few lives to pranks
and wishy washy stuff like pantomime,
which serve as fervent forms of giving thanks
for the healthy slack that’s cut into space and time.
For in the end there ain’t no need to rush,
as opportunity never runs out.
With extra Marios we’re fully flush,
though few of them seem to know what it’s all about.
Not all of them are made to think above
or beyond this terminal life, this partial love.
15. Looking for Something Else to Do
Enough, my friend. It’s time we said so long.
You know what Shakespeare claimed about parting.
To recite that, though, we both would be wrong.
For some time now your eyes have been darting;
for all we have to say, we’ve said for now,
and you’re looking for something else to do.
You’ve signaled that with your furrowing brow,
and something else is ready for me, too.
But yes, we’ve had fun, and parting is hard,
though we’ll meet again in the by and by.
A final maxim from our Zimmerbard:
“It takes a lot to laugh, a train to cry.”
(I’ve never been sure what he meant by that.
But love, as we know, is replete with senseless scat!)
16. Before Our Days Are Done
Someday we’ll want to repeat this journey.
I’m sure that we’ll have plenty more to say.
You’ll wheel me up this hill on a gurney,
and we’ll take in the sunset on my dying day…
But no, that thought is rather premature.
For we’ve both got several stages left
of life and vicissitudes to endure
before our breath and boasts leave our bodies bereft.
We’ve still got hills to climb and miles to walk,
many unspoken sentences to speak.
This tree here that’s little more than a stalk…
we’ll return to view it dignifying this peak.
So long for now, dear friend. We’ve had great fun,
and we’ll have it again before our days are done.
17. Coda: Our Sentences
Our “so far” has concluded with “so good.”
We’ve paved a road that then was merely dust.
Our sentences have done the work they could;
our sentences shall do the work they must.
They’ll help us love, they’ll help us make pretend.
We’ll find for each of them some special use.
Our sentences will aid us on the mend;
our sentences will challenge our abuse.
And as we thought them out, they helped us cope
with evils signaling a downward trend.
Our sentences are filled with joy and hope;
our sentences will save us in the end.
Our sentences will fight to set us free.
Our sentences are as much as we’ll ever be.
[Some Sentences: 170 Sonnets homepage]