Art gives us the illusion of liberation from the sordid business of living?

From a Facebook group I joined in early 2023:

Poetic Outlaws 

Art gives us the illusion 
of liberation from the 
sordid business 
of being.

~ Fernando Pessoa 

Sloan Bashinsky 

And here I thought art, in its various forms, is the soul's expression of that sordid and sometimes beautiful business.

I can only speak for myself: that when my Muse flows, I feel a lot more alive and whole, and sometimes I see her handiwork playing out in my life. 

Poetic Outlaws 

The great Charles Bukowski died on this day in 1994: 

“There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. They don't honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can't hear it. Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.”

Sloan Bahsinsky

All hail irreverence! The truth will set us free, but first it will piss us off! Ka-pow!

But then, when my 7 weeks-old son died of sudden infant death syndrome my senior year in law school, my heart was ripped out of my chest and shredded by a bush hog for a very long time. It was a long time before I appreciated his death had so unhinged me, that no matter how hard I tired, I was unable to fit myself into the programs and dreams my family, their religion, my friends, women I loved, society and I had for me. And one day a poem came out of me that perhaps he had something to do with. Actually, there were lots of poems he perhaps had something to do with, but this was the first:

Living Poets

Dead poets are poets who never write

Who obey shoulds and oughts

Who live to please others

Who value money over God

Who die without ever having lived

Death is their mark 

 

Dead poets are remembered by the living.

Living poets are remembered by time

Dead poets never sing their song

Living poets nover stop singing it

The difference between the two is this:

One worships fear, the other life

To be a dead poet is hard

It requires being someone else

To be a living poet is easy

It only means being myself

One choice is hell, the other heaven

That is what is meant by free will

 

The next poem that came:  

I happened upon a mockingbird

singing his fool head off.

I asked him how and why he sang?

But all he did was look ahead,

all he did was sing.

He never turned to see if I was watching,

Or listened for money jingling in my pockets,

Or asked if I liked his music,

Or expected a recording contract.

He was too busy singing

to pay any attention to me.

Thus did I learn

the greatest sin of all

is to kill a mockingbird.  

 

And another:

Who invented the rule that poetry must rhyme, have pentameter, be cast into verse? Yes, please tell me, who, just who, invented that really silly rule? Surely it wasn't the maker of the first stone - otherwise, there'd be no stones to break all those slavin' rules!  

And another:

He feels deep beauty in the dark pool from which his writings flow. She clings to him like fine silk, precious oil. She feels solid, compressed, like … a black pearl, growing from inside out, ever larger with each stroke of his pen, pushing her precious waters over her banks into his dreams and life...  

And another:

Earth...

The sacred prism

through which souls are refracted

into their elemental parts,

purified in Holy Fire,

then one-forged

and sent on their way

to not even God knows where,

simply because they are all

unique emanations of God,

evolving ...

Here's a link to HEAVY WAIT: A Strange Tale, which fell out of me during April, May and June 2000. The storyline was provided by.a Key West street performer, whose jaw dropped when I told him I'd lived half the plot the year prior. This often stranger than fiction novel is a free read, with no ads, at internet library archives. It demonstrates/manifests all of the poems above.

https://archive.org/details/heavy-wait-a-strange-tale_202212/mode/2up

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com