I'm learning to say thank you. And I'm learning to say please. And I'm learning to use Kleenex, Not my sweater, when I sneeze. And I'm learning not to dribble. And I'm learning not to slurp. And I'm learning (though it sometimes really hurts me) Not to burp. And I'm learning to chew softer When I eat corn on the cob. And I'm learning that it's much Much easier to be a slob.

A great find! This poem resonates with me much because I had issues about some of these things in my relationships, sometimes the most trivial things matter so much that the most/more important things are fogotten. Some of my fav sonnets in Vikram Seth's Golden Gate, deal with these questions. But what can I say, I have learnt some and I still am.

Lord let me suffer much and then die

Let me walk through silence and leave nothing behind not even fear

Make the world continue let the ocean kiss the sand just as before

Let the grass stay green so that the frogs can hide in it

so that someone can bury his face in it and sob out his love

Make the day rise brightly as if there were no more pain

And let my poem stand clear as a windowpane bumped by a bumblebee's head

2002:11:28 09:00 Atlanta

I was searching for a poem to read today at a Thanksgiving table that I had been invited to, as I couldn't get around to writing one myself. So late yesterday evening I went to the bookstore to look at one of my fav anthologies of poetry: A Book of Luminous Things by Czeslaw Milosz,also winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature. In that book I found this beautiful poem written by an old Polish woman who apparently was a deeply resonant spirit. I think that comes out in this poem.

So happy Thanksgiving everyone. It's good to reflect on things that have been given and things that have been taken away, all in a process of restoring this tiny universe we live to a place of perfect balance, the balance of poem as clear as a windowpane with bees bumping into it.

Much joy! S

PS: One should also listen to Bach's Cello Suite No 1 by Yo Yo Ma as one reads the above poem!

The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople.

-it's no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than the squarerootofminusone. You and I are human beings:mostpeople are snobs.

Take the matter of being born. What does being born mean to mostpeople? Catastrophe unmitigated. Socialrevolution. The cultured aristocrat yanked out of his hyperexclusively ultra voluptuous superpalazzo,and dumped into an incredibly vulgar detentioncamp swarming with every conceivable species of undesirable organism. Mostpeople fancy a guaranteed birthproof safetysuit of nondestructible selflessness. If mostpeople were to be born twice they'd improbably call it dying-

you and I are not snobs. We can never be born enough. We are human beings;for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery,the mystery of growing:the mystery which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves. You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming. Life,for eternal us,is now;and now is much too busy being a little more than everything to seem anything,catastrophic included.

Life,for mostpeople,simply isn't. Take the socalled standardof living. What do mostpeople mean by 'living'? They don't mean living. They mean the latest and closest plural approximation to singular prenatal passivity which science,in its finite but unbounded wisdom,has succeeded in selling their wives. If science could fail,a mountain's a mammal. Mostpeople's wives can spot a genuine delusion of embryonic omnipotence immediately and will accept no substitutes.

-luckily for us,a mountain is a mammal. The plusorminus movie to end moving,the strictly scientific parlourgame of real unreality,the tyranny conceived in misconception and dedicated to the proposition that every man is a woman and any woman a king,hasn't a wheel to stand on. What their most synthetic not to mention transparent majesty,mrsadmr collective foetus,would improbably call a ghost is walking. He isn't an undream of anaesthetized impersons,or a cosmic comfortstation,or a transcendentally sterilized lookiesoundiefeelietastiesmellie. He is a healthily complex,a naturally homogeneous,citizen of immortality. The now of his each pitying free imperfect gesture,his any birth or breathing,insults perfected inframortally millenniums of slavishness. He is a little more than everything,he is democracy; he is alive:he is ourselves.

Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are by somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn,a human being;somebody who said to those near him,when his fingers would not hold a brush 'tie it into my hand'-

nothing proving or sick or partial. Nothing false,nothing difficult or easy or small or colossal. Nothing ordinary or extraordinary,nothing emptied or filled,real or unreal;nothing feeble and known or clumsy and guessed. Everywhere tints childrening, innocent spontaneous,true. Nowhere possibly what flesh and impossibly such a garden,but actually flowers which breasts are among the very mouths of light. Nothing believed or doubted; brain over heart, surface:nowhere hating or to fear;shadow, mind without soul. Only how measureless cool flames of making;only each other building always distinct selves of mutual entirely opening;only alive. Never the murdered finalities of wherewhen and yesno,impotent nongames of wrongright and rightwrong;never to gain or pause,never the soft adventure of undoom,greedy anguishes and cringing ecstasies of inexistence; never to rest and never to have:only to grow.

Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.