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

perhaps keelhauling is the best medicine for prevaricating politicians and the invasive species

keelhauling

This below was posted at Facebook by a Key West radio talk show host and musician, who bills himself as "Soundman From Hell."

Gary

Politics in America:

"Republicans lie, and the Democrats leave out key parts of the truth."

- Chris Rock

Guy

We need to get rid of both parties no Democrats no Republicans it's just another form of prejudice in order to not get anything done

Gary

Guy I agree

Sloan Bashinsky

Guy political parties are secular religions, cults; some claim they represent God; good luck getting rid of them. I ran 10 times for local public office in so-called paradise, as the “independent” candidate. My position on every issue was against the grain, out of the box. Perhaps an alien invasion to capture the planet and enslave humanity would bring humanity together? Into sync? When pigs fly? 

Gary

Sloan Bashinsky yeah it's a lot like picking up sports team for the super bowl or whatever they call it.

Sloan Bashinsky

Gary  I dunno, Soundman. I don't see picking and rooting for a pro football winner take all game compares to voting for candidates for public office. I never saw a pro football championship game damage America. I saw local elected officials in "paradise" give it away to real estate developers. I saw them put in $$$ we trust into their pledge of allegiance. I saw them vote against Mother Nature repeatedly, and for property rights incessantly. I saw the ocean around the Florida Keys become polluted. I saw 90 percent of the coral reef die. I saw it become unsafe to swim in the ocean, because it was full of MRSA flesh-eating bacteria. I saw polluted waters signs/flags at public beaches. I watched sea-killing cruise ships become more necessary to Key West's economy than all its water sports combined. I saw the voters keep electing candidates who went along with all of that. Become of its ethnic, racial and gender diversity, Key West was a proxy for all of America. I really do think it will take an alien invasion, or a giant meteor strike like the meteor that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, to save the planet from the invasive species - humanity.

Guy

Sloan Bashinsky yeah I understand it will never happen just like when did Jehovah witness come by and say everyone will get together and be happy there's no way so long as we're human beings and have love hate lust all the things that make us up there will always be strife

Sloan Bashinsky

Guy No Jehovah witness ever came by and told me everyone will get together and we all will be happy. I took to telling them sometimes that I was Jewish, or Mormon, and they thanked me and left. Other times, I told them if they lived in my skin, they might wish there was no Jehovah . Sometimes I gave them examples of my personal experiences with angels mentioned in the Bible. Nothing seemed to sink into their minds. But then, if a Martian stood before them, would they know it was a Martian, even if its skin color was green? Would they even be able to see the Martian, even though it was in plain view? 

Guy 

Sloan Bashinsky we are the Martian Invaders of this beautiful planet

Sloan Bashinsky

Guy I dunno, perhaps taking that view insults Martians? Perhaps we are Klingons? 

Guy

Sloan Bashinsky we are something that we are not native

Sloan Bashinsky

Guy  If we humans were native to this planet we call Earth, wouldn't we be slightly more inclined to take care of our home? Under the law, we have the legal right to use lethal force against people who break into our homes. I keep wondering when Earth will use lethal force to defend herself from humans? 

 

During my 18-year stint living in so-called paradise, there was much talk about doing something about invasive species, such as iguanas, which the real invasive species, humans, had introduced into the Florida Keys. I kept saying, humans are the invasive species in the Florida Keys. They brought the iguanas into the Keys. They destroyed the Keys. Perhaps a mother of all hurricanes will restore the Keys to what they were like before the white people came there. That line wasn't a great vote getter. 

 

Nor was it, when I was asked at a county commission candidate forum in 2006: What did I think about bringing Mosquito Control back into the county government versus Mosquito Control continuing as an independent government authority? I said I would get rid of Mosquito Control, because the sprays it used were more dangerous than the mosquitoes. I wish I also had thought to say, the mosquitoes are Mother Nature's natural defense against the invasive species, humans. 

 

This editorial cartoon was in the Key West Citizen in 2008, when I was running for county commission and was asked at a county commission candidate forum: What did I think were the three greatest threats to the Florida Keys? I said, "The Gang of Three." The three notorious sitting county commissioners, who had been bought and paid for by real estate developers and their lawyers.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

Would you wear my eyes?

At Poetic Outlaws:

Would You Wear My Eyes?

By: Erik Rittenberry

Every time I open my big mouth

I put my soul in it.

It takes so much to be nothing,

to shroud the mind’s eye

from the gaudy theater

of the head.

Hey subscribers, it’s Friday and I feel like sharing a poem with you all from one of my all-time favorite Beat Poets — the great Bob Kaufman.

Kaufman was an American poet, a street poet, a jazz poet, “a poet of the people.” He wasn’t mainstream and unfortunately (or fortunately) he never captured worldwide notoriety like his contemporaries Ginsburg, Kerouac, Burroughs, and Gary Snyder.

He was a poet who preferred the hidden shadows of the city over the seduction of fame and fortune.

Kaufman grew up in New Orleans reading Henry James, Proust, Melville, Flaubert, and many others. At 18, he became a laborer and then joined the Merchant Marine. It was at this time during the Eisenhower years that the Beat literary movement slithered out of the arid American soil of conventionality and monotony.

The Beat poets were young spiritual renegades on a quest for the deeper meaning of it all. Their hyperbolic writings and wild antics sparked that infamous movement of what sociologists labeled “the counter-culture”— that youthful explosion of art, music, sex, psychedelics, and rebellion.

These poets and writers were in defiance against, in the words of Kerouac, “the middle-class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time…”

There they were — Walt Whitman’s illegitimate children, poetic bohemians, metaphysical dissidents, ramblin’ around the country in complete defiance of the banal, television-watchin’, materialistic charade of a lifestyle that was sweeping across the nation.

It was around this time that Kaufman headed to San Fran where he met the king of the Beats himself, Jack Kerouac. Shortly after the encounter, Kaufman reinvented himself as a poet, spiritually and in the flesh. He refused to work pointless jobs and accepted the inevitable poverty and hardships that came with pursuing the arts.

He once wrote: “I want to be anonymous. I don’t know how you get involved with uninvolvment, but I don’t want to be involved. My ambition is to be completely forgotten.”

Poetry was it for him, his “golden eternity,” and he would do it with nothing to fall back on. He was arrested numerous times, locked up and beaten, and then spit back onto the cold streets of the city. And he still wrote. Relentlessly.

During the times that he wasn’t in jail, you might find Kaufman on any given day standing on the tables in some hipster café or on some midnight corner under a lamplight reciting his own poetry for any and everyone to hear.

Bob Kaufman was a voyager, a madman with a moonburnt soul, a “wanderer of the heart, wanderer of star worlds, off to a million tomorrows.” As he once wrote:

When I die,

I won’t stay

Dead.

I hope you enjoy this poem as much as I do. You can find it in the Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman

Would You Wear My Eyes?

My body is a torn mattress,

Disheveled throbbing place

For the comings and goings

Of loveless transients.

The whole of me

Is an unfurnished room

Filled with dank breath

Escaping in gasps to nowhere.

Before completely objective mirrors

I have shot myself with my eyes,

But death refused my advances.

I have walked on my walls each night

Through strange landscapes in my head.

I have brushed my teeth with orange peel,

Iced with cold blood from the dripping faucets.

My face is covered with maps of dead nations;

My hair is littered with drying ragweed.

Bitter raisins drip haphazardly from my nostrils

While schools of glowing minnows swim from my mouth.

The nipples of my breasts are sun-browned cockleburrs;

Long-forgotten Indian tribes fight battles on my chest

Unaware of the sunken ships rotting in my stomach.

My legs are charred remains of burned cypress trees;

My feet are covered with moss from bayous, flowing

across my floor.

I can’t go out anymore.

I shall sit on my ceiling.

Would you wear my eyes?

Sloan Bashinsky

Although it wasn't much fun, and it was because I ran out of money, I lived on and off the street for several years, and during that time I sometimes slept in a tent or vehicle, but mostly it was on the ground and sometimes in the front lobby of a police station. Sometimes I stayed nights in homeless shelters, sometimes I stayed in the homes of friends. Sometimes I was accused of being homeless on purpose, or I was researching a book. I never wanted to disappear and never be heard, and often I was quite noisy via things I wrote, first by email, then a blog, and things I said at city and county government meetings and in churches. I was always out of the box; I claimed much of what I said or wrote was inspired by angels known in the Bible, who had and still were turning me every which a way but loose and upside down and inside out. Some really jolting to me poetry leaped out of me during that time, but most of the poetry had come earlier and some came later, when I was living inside. I think the core of actually living is, we engage what comes our way, the best we can, and sometimes we simply let it pass by or through us, and we keep on going, like stranger than fiction, or strangers in a strange land, which was a really important novel by Robert Heinlein.

Meanwhile, at Facebook:

Jim

Why do news idiots keep calling SSI and Medicare entitlements.....

Laura

So they can convince you that your $$ is actually their$$..

Sloan Bashinsky

Laura because we are entitled to get what we bought?

Laura

Sloan Bashinsky no!!according to the government..you didn't "buy" anything..it's an allotment being bestowed upon you at their discretion..so we should all be grateful..

Sloan Bashinsky

Laura Nobody from the government ever told me that. In fact, I did pay for it with US dollars. From all I hear around and see online and on TV, it's the Republicans that want to take away what I bought. So, my suggestion to them is, o, my suggestion to them is, they take it away from Republicans, MAGAs, Libertarians and anyone else who is on Social Security who wants to take away what I bought.

Am now reminded of back when Alabama's hospitals were full of Covid-19 patients, who had declined to be vaccinated, people with serious medical problems, such as heart attack, stroke, could not. get into those hospitals. When President Trump came to Alabama during that time and urged his followers in Cullman, Alabama to get vaccinated, they booted him. Alabama Governor Kay Ivey, a very conservative Republican, finally broke ranks and urged the unvaccinated people in Alabama to get vaccinated. I took up saying posting online that people who declined to get vaccinated and hen caught Covid-19 should not be allowed into hospitals that receive federal funding. I was accused of wanting people to die. I replied that it was people who didn't get vaccinated that wanted to die, and so let them die and leave hospitals for people who want to live.

Laura

Sloan Bashinsky yeah, I get angry when government talks about my social security being an "entitlement". That's my money! I think if I choose I should be able to get a lump sum and any interest accumulated. My heirs should be entitled to it upon my death.Instead it's now become the largest "tax" ever levied on us. Guess they need to get the $$ from somewhere to redistribute.

Sloan Bashinsky

Laura I never looked at my Social Security as an asset that passed on to my heirs. I viewed it as something to help me get by financially (the monthly payments) and medically (Medicare and Medicaid. If I had a wife, then she should get it after I croaked. But I don't have a wife, so it ends when I die, if the right side of the American political-religious spectrum don't take it away sooner. Some of them want to abolish the IRS and the federal income tax, and leave taxation to the states. Imagine what would happen church coffers, if the federal income tax deduction for gifts to churches was eliminated. 

 

W/hen I was in Costa Rica in 2000, I needed medical attention and it was provided for free. When I told that to people when I was back in America, they went off on some kind of rant against socialism, or they had something to say against free medical treatment. I told them the reason Costa Rica could do that was it didn't have a huge national military to pay for. The last time the American military perhaps defended me was when I was a tot during World War II.

Laura

Sloan Bashinsky Lyndon Johnson used it as a trove of untapped resources..saw a huge amount of our $$ ready to be spent (redistributed). I would be better served if I had been able to keep that huge chunk every paycheck. How about the many who have no dependents and die before receiving any SSI "benefits"? Who gets that $$?...uncle sam..

Sloan Bashinsky

Laura Yes, after last replying to you, I realized I had not included our dependents, especially minor children. 

 

I didn't know about President Johnson, perhaps he inspired today's Republicans to follow suit?

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

political, literary and poetic correctness are terminal spiritual diseases - all hail irreverence!!!

Now all over the news, U.S. Energy Department says Covid-19 likely resulted from lab leak in China, but was not being developed as a weapon. If Covid-19 truly was a novel coronavirus, then how’d it get into a Chinese lab, if it wasn’t made there? And, why make it, unless as a weapon?

Meanwhile, some off the beaten path mischiefs...

Poetic Outlaws

The Bookstore

By Julia Vinograd

I went down to the bookstore this evening

and found myself in the poetry section.

But for every thin book of poems

there was a thick biography of the poet

and an even thicker book

by someone who’s supposed to know

explaining what the poet

is supposed to’ve said and why he didn’t.

So you don’t have to waste your time

on the best the writer could do,

the words he fought the darkness and himself for,

the unequal battle with beauty.

Instead you can read comfortably

about the worst the writer could do:

the mess he made of his life,

how he fought with his family,

cheated on his lovers, didn’t pay his debts

and not only drank too much

but all the stupid things

he ever said to the bartender

just before getting 86’d will be printed for you

and they’re just as stupid

as the things everyone says just before getting 86’d.

The books explaining the poet

are themselves inexplicable.

The students who have to read them

cheat.

I left the poetry section

thinking about burning the bookstore down.

Some of a poet’s work comes from his life, ok.

But most of a poet’s work comes

in spite of his life, in spite of everything,

even in spite of bookstores.

So I went to the next section

and bought a murder mystery but I haven’t read it yet.

I find I don’t want to know who done it

and why;

I want to do it myself.

 

Sloan Bashinsky

What an exquisite ... indictment

In 2003, shortly before I was diagnosed with seriously life-threatening MRSA, this leaped out of me one day as fast as I could write it ...

I AM A MAN

I am a man.

I said,

I am a man!

What means it,

being a man?

A man is a warrior:

he lives by a code of honor,

his word is reliable,

his actions confirm his words,

his commitment is holiness,

his enemies are welcome at his hearth,

he fears but moves forward,

he cries and gets up again,

he hates but forgives,

he loves and let’s go,

he doubts but trusts God,

he’s a good friend,

he seeks resolutions,

he demands nothing,

he risks everything,

he regrets his mistakes,

he seeks to make amends,

he puts others’ welfare first,

he accepts apologies truly made,

he expects nothing back,

he lives ready to die,

he laughs when he “should” scream,

he screams when he “should” laugh,

he sings just because,

he shrugs off insults,

he learns from misfortune,

he cusses God for making him,

he wishes he was done,

he loves children and animals,

he relishes a woman’s scent,

he smiles when he’s content,

he knows God’s his master,

he walks in rainbows,

his garden is the world,

his way is nature,

he loves fishing,

his wife is his soul,

his food is life,

his pay is whatever he receives.

Yep, he’s crazy.

Poetic Outlaws

Affirmation

By: Donald Hall

To grow old is to lose everything.

Aging, everybody knows it.

Even when we are young,

we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads

when a grandfather dies.

Then we row for years on the midsummer

pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,

that began without harm, scatters

into debris on the shore,

and a friend from school drops

cold on a rocky strand.

If a new love carries us

past middle age, our wife will die

at her strongest and most beautiful.

New women come and go. All go.

The pretty lover who announces

that she is temporary

is temporary. The bold woman,

middle-aged against our old age,

sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.

Another friend of decades estranges himself

in words that pollute thirty years.

Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge

and affirm that it is fitting

and delicious to lose everything.

Sloan Bashinsky

Heh, we grouchy old men do have some tales and memories. I heard years ago that once we reuin our reputation we can be free. A number of women, one at a time, somehow woke up parts of me I didn't know existed. But for them, I might still be who I was before they came along. Perhaps old men, and old women, don't look forward much to coming attractions, like we once did. I tend to wake up mornings wondering why I'm still here? The Mother Ship used to abduct me and then grow tired of me and bring me back, until they figured out it wasn't worth their trouble. The Smithsonian then captured me and stuck me in a room with other grandfossils for what seemed like aeons. Then, I got lucky and sweet-talked and ruckused them into letting me out during the daytime to roam around. Lumbering toward the White House, where I'd seen on CNN and FOX were only slightly edible creatures called politicians, I snuck behind a large bush and gnawed off my right hind foot to which the zoo keepers had fastened a tracker. I've been roaming loose ever since, keeping an ever watchful eye over my hindquarters for bounty hunters.

Poetic Outlaws

Teachers, Censorship, and Banned Books

By: Pat Conroy

A LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF THE CHARLESTON GAZETTE

I received an urgent e-mail from a high school student named Makenzie Hatfield of Charleston, West Virginia. She informed me of a group of parents who were attempting to suppress the teaching of two of my novels, The Prince of Tides and Beach Music. I heard rumors of this controversy as I was completing my latest filthy, vomit-inducing work. These controversies are so commonplace in my life that I no longer get involved. But my knowledge of mountain lore is strong enough to know the dangers of refusing to help a Hatfield of West Virginia. I also do not mess with McCoys.

I’ve enjoyed a lifetime love affair with English teachers, just like the ones who are being abused in Charleston, West Virginia, today. My English teachers pushed me to be smart and inquisitive, and they taught me the great books of the world with passion and cunning and love. 

Like your English teachers, they didn’t have any money either, but they lived in the bright fires of their imaginations, and they taught because they were born to teach the prettiest language in the world. I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid. They take an unutterable joy in opening up the known world to their students, but they are dishonored and unpraised because of the scandalous paychecks they receive. In my travels around this country, I have discovered that America hates its teachers, and I could not tell you why. Charleston, West Virginia, is showing clear signs of really hurting theirs, and I would be cautious about the word getting out.

In 1961, I entered the classroom of the great Eugene Norris, who set about in a thousand ways to change my life. It was the year I read The Catcher in the Rye, under Gene’s careful tutelage, and I adore that book to this very day. Later, a parent complained to the school board, and Gene Norris was called before the board to defend his teaching of this book. He asked me to write an essay describing the book’s galvanic effect on me, which I did. But Gene’s defense of The Catcher in the Rye was so brilliant and convincing in its sheer power that it carried the day. I stayed close to Gene Norris till the day he died. I delivered a eulogy at his memorial service and was one of the executors of his will.

Few in the world have ever loved English teachers as I have, and I loathe it when they are bullied by know-nothing parents or cowardly school boards.

About the novels your county just censored: The Prince of Tides and Beach Music are two of my darlings which I would place before the altar of God and say, “Lord, this is how I found the world you made.” They contain scenes of violence, but I was the son of a Marine Corps fighter pilot who killed hundreds of men in Korea, beat my mother and his seven kids whenever he felt like it, and fought in three wars. My youngest brother, Tom, committed suicide by jumping off a fourteen-story building; my French teacher ended her life with a pistol; my aunt was brutally raped in Atlanta; eight of my classmates at The Citadel were killed in Vietnam; and my best friend was killed in a car wreck in Mississippi last summer. Violence has always been a part of my world. I write about it in my books and make no apology to anyone. In Beach Music, I wrote about the Holocaust and lack the literary powers to make that historical event anything other than grotesque.

People cuss in my books. People cuss in my real life. I cuss, especially at Citadel basketball games. I’m perfectly sure that Steve Shamblin and other teachers prepared their students well for any encounters with violence or profanity in my books just as Gene Norris prepared me for the profane language in The Catcher in the Rye forty-eight years ago.

The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in Lonesome Dove and had nightmares about slavery in Beloved and walked the streets of Dublin in Ulysses and made up a hundred stories in The Arabian Nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in A Prayer for Owen Meany. 

I’ve been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career, all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give. I cherish and praise them and thank them for finding me when I was a boy and presenting me with the precious gift of the English language.

The school board of Charleston, West Virginia, has sullied that gift and shamed themselves and their community. You’ve now entered the ranks of censors, book-banners, and teacher-haters, and the word will spread. Good teachers will avoid you as though you had cholera. But here is my favorite thing: Because you banned my books, every kid in that county will read them, every single one of them. Because bookbanners are invariably idiots, they don’t know how the world works— but writers and English teachers do.

I salute the English teachers of Charleston, West Virginia, and send my affection to their students. West Virginians, you’ve just done what history warned you against—you’ve riled a Hatfield.

Sincerely,

Pat Conroy

Sloan Bashinsky

Fuck all, Pat! Kapow!!!

And now some pure raw beauty that made angels sing forever...

Mary Chapin Carpenter's 

"I Take My Chances"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqoGFBSjHcY

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com