Another Day Flushed Away
TUESDAY 5 SEPTEMBER
Today’s my day to work on Scruffy.
My boat.
Get him sealed up for winter. Paint, caulk, etcetera.
Turns out I got nothing done.
Another day flushed away.
I could’ve visited the Vodka Museum for what it’s worth.
Vodka museum located in Verkhniye Mandrogi, Leningrad Oblast.
I could’ve hung out at the office all damned day wasting my time on a blog post.
Scratching my ass.
I could’ve read a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Okay…say I did.
Poor Bastard died miserable.
Alas for man! day after day may rise,
Where are the nine?
Night may shade his thankless head,
He sees no God in the bright, morning skies
He sings no praises from his guarded bed.
Fucker’s depressing.
Better to read some Browning.
Robert not Elizabeth.
Fucker had some fire in his loins.
Fear death?—to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face,
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
I am nearing the place,
The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe;
Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,
Yet the strong man must go:
For the journey is done and the summit attained,
And the barriers fall,
Though a battle’s to fight ere the guerdon be gained,
The reward of it all.
I was ever a fighter, so—one fight more,
The best and the last!
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes and forbore,
And bade me creep past.
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers
The heroes of old,
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life’s arrears
Of pain, darkness and cold.
For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
The black minute’s at end,
And the elements’ rage, the fiend-voices that rave,
Shall dwindle, shall blend,
Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,
Then a light, then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest!
Prospice by Robert Browning
In other words he’s saying I’ll take you all on, motherfuckers!
Or something like that.
I got nothing to say
I had a lot of shit I needed to get done today.
So what did I do?
Nothing.
Worse than nothing. I read some poetry. Nineteenth century poetry.
J.P. Morgan
“You’re just a fucking loser.”
“Yeah, I know, J.P.”
“A real man gets shit done…and what do you do? You read poetry.”
“Yeah.”
“Nineteenth century Poetry.”
“Sad.”
“This is why you can’t seem to make it.”
“Ahhh…..”
“Loser!”
He did not wear his scarlet coat,
Oscar Wilde
For blood and wine are red,
And blood and wine were on his hands
When they found him with the dead,
The poor dead woman whom he loved,
And murdered in her bed.
Okay, he should not have killed her.
Yeah…but at least he was doing something.
I mean…even that’s getting something done.
Meanwhile, I’m scratching my ass. Reading nineteenth century poetry.
“Loser, loser, loser!” J.P. Screams.
Oh, yeah. And now I’m dealing with this little prick.
Matter of fact!
They’re all coming around.
The Grim Reaper.
I’m no loser to these dudes.
I’m a winner.
A Bread Winner!
But then, they don’t read nineteenth century poetry.
They need to get shit done.
Like Survive.
3 thoughts on “Another Day Flushed Away”
Great post, Gloomy:
Rather than recall those 19th Century effetes, here is a poem on death that is a winter of truth.
Aubade
BY PHILIP LARKIN
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
Forgot to include a poem on death by Pablo Neruda (here in translation) I heard heard, both in Spanish by the poet; and in English, by Robert Bly.
Nothing But Death
There are cemeteries that are lonely,
graves full of bones that do not make a sound,
the heart moving through a tunnel,
in it darkness, darkness, darkness,
like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves,
as though we were drowning inside our hearts,
as though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul.
And there are corpses,
feet made of cold and sticky clay,
death is inside the bones,
like a barking where there are no dogs,
coming out from bells somewhere, from graves somewhere,
growing in the damp air like tears of rain.
Sometimes I see alone
coffins under sail,
embarking with the pale dead, with women that have dead hair,
with bakers who are as white as angels,
and pensive young girls married to notary publics,
caskets sailing up the vertical river of the dead,
the river of dark purple,
moving upstream with sails filled out by the sound of death,
filled by the sound of death which is silence.
Death arrives among all that sound
like a shoe with no foot in it, like a suit with no man in it,
comes and knocks, using a ring with no stone in it, with no
finger in it,
comes and shouts with no mouth, with no tongue, with no
throat.
Nevertheless its steps can be heard
and its clothing makes a hushed sound, like a tree.
I’m not sure, I understand only a little, I can hardly see,
but it seems to me that its singing has the color of damp violets,
of violets that are at home in the earth,
because the face of death is green,
and the look death gives is green,
with the penetrating dampness of a violet leaf
and the somber color of embittered winter.
But death also goes through the world dressed as a broom,
lapping the floor, looking for dead bodies,
death is inside the broom,
the broom is the tongue of death looking for corpses,
it is the needle of death looking for thread.
Death is inside the folding cots:
it spends its life sleeping on the slow mattresses,
in the black blankets, and suddenly breathes out:
it blows out a mournful sound that swells the sheets,
and the beds go sailing toward a port
where death is waiting, dressed like an admiral.
Hey Gloomy, Speaking of another day flushed away, be glad you weren’t on the Delta flight forced to turn back due to to one passenger’s diarrhea, No shit. Check out the CNN headline
Almost 30 Million People Have Watched A Video Showing The Shocking Aftermath Of A Passenger’s Diarrhea Incident On A Delta Flight
“It was pretty bad. It was dribbled down the aisle, smelled horrible. The vanilla scented disinfectant used on it only made it smell like vanilla s***.”