An answer from a not-qualified source
I'm no scientist, and in attempt to be objective, I'm a pacifist afterall, thinking, or having faith in, the instictive guide of our natural selves, meaning; our bodies, will (and have already in places such as India, and several nations in Africa) act as mediators, inableing fertility, and leveling off.
And, by the looks of it, people keep being fertile, so I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
To Allen;
If you could see America now I often wonder what you would think. The materialism and technology and bureaucracy on the brink
of war torn nations, that forget of the wars
that make them the live ones.
And if you could see how violence has spread like swine flu
shootings in schools and churches and concerts
terrorists born an American.
And if you could see the earth-soul now breathing heavy, it’s oceans clogged with tooth-brushes and straws and plastic grocery-bags.
The fires that chase us, the mudslides and water-rushes,
and could you believe that politicians and people think it all to be a hoaxs?
I bet you could.
And if you could see the rumbling mouths all around.
No one knows who is true in speaking, and anyways it’s so hard to listen when all you hear are shouts.
And Black folks fill prisons still, just yesterday a noose was hung. Just yesterday someone had said, ‘there has never been a Black person lynched that didn’t deserve it’.
And in the age of social media, a phenomenon so foreign to you. People now sink away in their cell-phones. There are no birthday-cards. Just instagram posts. It would inrage you, I’m sure.
The separation of the middle class, from the 1%, continues to climb as the rich get rich and still get nothing yet.
Music has turned. Now to be successful you must also be sexually attractive. Let’s just say Jim Croce and his nose would not have made it in the industry.
And spirituality seekers stretch their visions far and wide, Yoga is practiced, however it’s appropriated by white wealthy women, who can pay for overpriced studios and overpriced yoga pants.
Meditation is encouraged, not scowled upon. Something I know you faced, in the clean-cut, evangelical 50s and the spiritually and racially tense 60s.
It seems also that to be queer in sexuality is at its peak of acceptance thus far in America’s life. Hopefully it will continue it’s glorious rise. Gender also is being put under microscope. No longer defined as inherent to our biology, rather it is a forced social order of things. Designed to keep women down and trans people out. I live a great life because I was not born ten years before I was born.
Women are collecting and shouting more loudly now than ever. Many powerful men have been fired, and hopefully more is to come. Harvey Weinstein is a mongrel, not a movie god.
And stories again have proven to be the most powerful weapon
in the arsenal of political and social prominence.
And you are still read. And I look up at the stars to try and find you. With God, with hope, with love, with optimism, and with humbleness.
#poetry #allenginsberg
Body Blueprint
A uterus.
No, two.
Two uteruses
or is it uteri?
Two kidneys
No, one.
One kidney.
Man?
No, girl.
Boy or girl.
Both?
A boy uses a tampon
monthly with the moon.
A boy tears his chest
hopes he dies soon.
A boy is caught
-a fixed world can be cruel-
she is he, he is she
and she will wear pants
to school.
He built me a body
or at least that’s what they say.
She built me a mind
and it turned the other way.
A walking joke,
a boy born with two
uteruses or uteri
walking the line of
sun break and of moon.
Serious Inquiries Only
I read an alert on Craigslist that said, “Serious inquiries only”. What is an inquiry if not serious? Serious to whom? If I am a less than serious person is it impossible for me to make any serious inquiries as all? As a result of the essential of my being, there are certain attributes I hold in order to not completely crumble into a cesspool of confused smog. One of those being my sense of humor or discourse in satire. I think the reason I am not serious is because I cannot take the pain that is chained to a pessimist’s reality. Especially when I have enough questions and doubt to begin with. Enough demons. Enough change. Sometimes I want more than anything else to feel a sense of paus. A rest in a symphony can be the most beautiful sound.
I don’t know quite yet
The laying people smell sour. Some of their eyeballs were gone now. A sweet blossom with a dirty scent grows through a laying person’s eye-hole. Their body is faced down but their head is reaching out to the side and they have no nose either. It rained all day yesterday and the laying people looked wet all over. Now the hot bright day makes them shine. I am thinking of water. Mark and I are getting water. I am thirsty. Mark says don’t lick the laying people. I am thirsty and want to lick the laying people because they shine with water on the bowls of their backs. I don’t lick the laying people.
Rich moss grows on some of the laying people and looks like blankets. It is spongy and smells of grime and snail-tail. Sometimes the laying people just look like earth and not people. Most of them are faced down. Most of them have holes in their cloths. The shoes and shirts have their scents more so than their bodies. I recognize some of their smells. Most of them have lost their smell slightly. Their prolonged laying in the outside sun and rain and cold and fog made their smell dusty. It sat idly on their backs and evaporated or sunk away.
Mark is puffing a smoking stick. Mark likes his sticks. He is never without his smoking sticks. They smell like Mark and burnt tree bark. Mark smells like salt and smoking stick and coffee bean and bitterness. Mark’s hair grows long and twisted on his back. The ends smell chalky and like his smoking sticks. Sometimes the long hairs fall to the ground when they are dry. My nose is dry when I lick it. I am thirsty.
Mark goes into the place with the slippery floors. He is humming. I can’t walk well here, and Mark chuckles at me as I slip and fall. I smell the chicken. I smell the salt and the sugar and the cold and the hot. I smell peanut butter and bread and candy and beef. I salivate because I smell all of it at once. We go to the chicken first. Mark opens the door into the cold closet and tears open the chicken boxes. He opens another cold closet and pours water into my water bowl. He sets them both on the ground.
Mark’s stick hangs from his lips, “Say hey Joe, it’s no race.”
Joe. I look up for only a half-second. That’s me. I continue to eat the chicken.
“We got all the time in the world.” Mark breathes deeply. I smell his bitter smokey breath. He sits down and eats some chicken.
II
We leave the place with the slippery floors and Mark has bags of food for us so we won’t have to walk back for awhile. Mark doesn’t like walking next to the laying people. I know because he smells more sour like them he is less confident when outside. They must be bad.
The small ringing bells grabbed my attention. “It’s that damn cat again,” We see lots of cats, but this cat bothers Mark especially. “So damn fat that cat.”
The cat is a considerable distance from us and is looking at us. I do not dare move. I can’t risk movement. I can’t blink, my foot was in their air before I realized of the cat and I still do not move it. The situation is too fragile.
“You’d think it’d be slow cuz it’s so damn fat. Allov the other cats are twigs and come to us for food’s sake. You’d think we could catch the fat one but it’s not needin food it seems. Maybe we’re just slow. Yeah, we’re probably slow. Or un-passionate.” Mark looks at me. He has eyes and the laying people don’t. He is warm and the laying people are only warm in the daytime when the sun makes them hot. Mark is warm throughout the night. “Oh, Joe.” He softens. “I love you.”
I love Mark and we are together always.
III
At home Mark reads and sometimes speaks the stories outloud. He gets excited and jumps around and I play too. It is great fun. Mark is the best. I love Mark. Tonight he reads and I watch him as he reads. I feel my eyelids sliding. I watch him until the last second. “Goddamn fucker murdered Desdemona!” He muttered, “No. That Iago bastard-well, did he? Joe,” I shot awake, “how come it’s so easy to convince a person of doin’ something so horrible?”
Mark feels upset. I walk to him, jump on his lap. He scratches my head with two fingers. “People are just tickin’ time bombs. Every last one-ov-um’. Emotional, impulsive, walkin’ sacks of blood and guts and bones and whatever else is in there. Souls I suppose.” Mark laughs but is not happy. “‘Least that’s what they tol’ me.”
I move closer and Mark has a small stomach and I can feel the inside hardness underneath him. Mark is the smokey smell after it has left for hours and just sits on the skin and soon becomes one with his person. He scratches me on my back now. My eyelids drop and I cannot open them anymore.
“Oh, Joe.” I hear him say.
as to why I run the old baseball games in the daytime
i have this thing. where i turn on the tv and don’t watch it. . .i don’t know why but recently i’ve started putting old baseball games on in my roommates room. this is because my roommate’s room has a tv, not because i’m weird. and yes there is a tv in the ‘shared living space’, but my roommate has apple tv and amazon fire tv. his tv is also the rather large and better quality tv, so you tell me what you would do. anyways, I put the old baseball games on the tv.
why do you think you do this?
well, it kind of feels like there’s someone there. with me.
someone, like who?
well, not who, really. .
. . .
. . .
than, what?
just, ive been lonely. lately. ive been lonely. somehow this always happens to me this time of year. i get lonely.
so the baseball is like having someone around?
*nodds*
why baseball?
*shrugs* i find it the most peaceful of american sports.
why did you start watching it in the first place?
my roommate started watching it once he got that tv, well it’s not his tv, but right now it is i guess.
who’s tv is it?
his girlfriend’s.
and why is it at your place and not his girlfriend’s?
well, *laughs* he has it for the world series.
okay so he’s a baseball fan.
a bit. he wanted to see the braves on the big screen, they’re out now, but. .
does he play baseball on the tv a lot when the two of you are home together?
yeah.
do you think that could be why you play the old baseball games? . . . because it’s like he’s there?
. . . *nodds*
(2)
when i smoke too much weed, and when i say too much i mean TOO MUCH, it’s really too much.
how much would you say?
in a day? i dunno. i dunnevenno when i got up this morning.
do you smoke everyday?
yes, the light days are when I only smoke one time in one day, the heavy days are when I burn through so much weed I forget my name.
you’ve forgotten your name?
yea, not proud of it, but yea. not that it matters much to me, but yea.
what doesn’t matter to you? your name or the act of forgetting your name?
both. all. names are just utterances like any other word. it's only us that thinks they’re special. like our names individualize us. make us a person. but that’s not true. a name like john or katie, mark or sarah. there’s nothing there, really. that’s why my name doesn’t matter much to me, nor the act of forgetting it.
but it is your name,
not really. I guess my name’s more my name than most peoples because I chose it when I was 19. did you chose your name?
no.
so how is it yours?
well, it was given to me. does something somebody gives to you not make it yours?
. . . i guess it does. and i don’t know about the nature of things, i don’t know if a name is independent or real or just nonsense, but what i do know is that when i changed my name, it seemed to affect people more so than it did me. that is what made me think that my name isn’t my name, that nothing is mine. other people own me. they tell me what i was and who i am to be. and when i didn’t do it anymore, when i stopped, threw down my hands and shouted let me go! let me go! all they thought was that i was being dramatic. that i was more a girl than a boy. when they told me those things that was how i knew they were wrong. girl and boy don’t exist in the same way your name doesn’t. it’s just what people call you. they don’t care how you view yourself, how you understand your gender or your name or anything for that matter. they see you and call you and you have no option but to oblige because you were already trapped. born trapped. die trapped.
. . .
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well. . .let’s go back to the weed smoking. why do you smoke weed everyday?
i don’t know if i have a choice, anymore. but i started when i was 15 because it was risky at the time and i wanted to be a risky adolescent. i thought it would make me something like the way a skateboard makes someone a skater...i don’t know who exactly I was wanting it to make me...and anyways it wasn’t until college when i -unknowingly- became a dopey, wake-n-bake stoner.
why do you joke?
if i took things seriously all the time i’d probably not be a dopey stoner then, would i?
*burp-chuckle* guess not. why do you call yourself a dopey stoner?
’cuz it’s true.
is it?
it would seem so.
…
…
do you want to stop? smoking weed, i mean?
uhhhhhh *stretches* no. no, no.
do you think you should stop?
wouldn’t matter either way. i should stop doing a lot of things. humanity should stop doing a lot of things. you should probably stop doing a lot of things.
what stops you from stopping?
oooooohhh, i don’t know. myself? fear? fear of never feeling high again. not too many things out there that can make you feel high without also making you feel low. weed seems to be something that i can do and also participate.
participate?
socially. like do school and work and go to family gatherings. pay for my rent. dog food. if i took to something like heroin i probably wouldn’t be able to participate.
do you want to participate?
sometimes.
what does it feel like when you’re participating?
it feels normal. like any other day because i’ve been participating forever. i’m participating right now and so are you.
what does it feel like when you’re not participating then?
i don’t know. you’d have to ask someone who’s done that. maybe a prisoner. a homeless person. or maybe it’s not that they’ve done that, but that it has been done to them.
as to why i think of somebody there with me when there is nobody there with me,
someone stalks the night, alone, in my room, and i think of them constantly, of who they could be, how they could take me out.
take you out?
of myself. i’m a nuisance to myself and sometimes i need someone to clear the world’s fumes from the tips of my nostrils.
what is it that somebody can give you that you cannot give to yourself now?
company.
. . .