Hey babe, I just wanted to call you
and tell you that I just ate lunch,
so um, you can’t have lunch with me
because I was hungry and um...
I’m excited to see you.
I wish I was with you.
I’m kind of like lonely and bored and wish
I was with you, hanging out.
And I called Kevin to talk to him about dinner
and he was all like hanging out with Holly
and you could hear him like laugh in the background,
and I was like “Man, I want to hang out with my husband.”
Anyway, I love you.
I hope you’re having fun and being productive.
And you checked emails, right?
Are you checking email, your email?
Check your email right before you leave
so that we can, you know, see if we get
that HUD to know how much money we need.
OK.
So, I’ll see you at 5:30.
OK bye.
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A Poem for Ted Kennedy’s Passing. 8/27/09
Ted Kennedy just died.
Health care reform was his pride
And sick joy. He had other sick joys.
Like booze.
Let’s be clear.
More sickness
is what Ted wanted. More and more of it.
And poverty. more and more of it.
Ted wanted sickness and poverty for all,
where once stood, like a battalion
of beaming soldiers,
amber waves of grain.
Let’s be clear. For himself,
and perhaps for a few others,
Ted wanted power, power,
and the pleasures of the flesh,
and more and more of it,
while taking it away from many others,
like your neighbor,
and your child.
Ted Kennedy just died.
At times like these it is fitting
to reflect on the life of the departed,
and to be clear,
lest our feelings ruin our minds,
lest the fickleness of our flighty hearts chips away
at our collective national wisdom.
Ted’s life.
He was handsome.
Ted’s life.
He yearned to please the memory of a demanding father,
and the ghosts of prideful, prideful brothers
for which yearning we ought to have sympathy,
but not very much sympathy.
Let’s be clear.
Yes, I have respect for the dead.
I respect a man for leaving when it’s best that he leaves.
May his replacement be better,
may America be better,
may we all achieve a higher plane,
and grow anew our amber waves of grain,
in the thickness of the soil that hides Teddy’s brain.
Perhaps I am cruel, and wrong,
and perhaps America would be better without me,
and without this poem.
A Wonderful Poem I Found
Dear Readers,
I’m blogging in the comment section again because my computer at the high school where I teach English is weird. Here’s a wonderful poem I found in our literature textbook, “Elements of Literature.”
"Conversation Among Mountains"
You ask why I live
in these green mountains
I smile
can’t answer
I am completely at peace
a peach blossom
sails past
on the current
there are worlds
beyond this one
(written by Li Po, translated by David Young)
I love that poem because it takes me away from the troubles I’m currently facing. My job is hard. I just wrote a poem lashing out at Ted Kennedy. Lashing out at a dead person, while the family is still grieving. Yep, that’s Telemoonfa right now. I’m not sure if Ted deserves the harshness of my poem or not. But I think that Ted was kind of a bad man, you know? And I think that a lot of times when bad people die, people romanticize them, and I’m just trying to say “Wait a minute, Ted Kennedy wasn’t that great.”
At least Michael Jackson, as twisted as he was, gave the world wonderful songs and wonderful dance moves. What did Ted Kennedy give to the world? More sickness and poverty, in my opinion.
Moving on…
I love the ending of the poem, “Conversation Among Mountains.” Somehow nature and the quiet life leads the speaker of the poem to reverently know that “there are worlds/ beyond this one.” No one taught him about the reality of the unseen world, but years and years of living in the mountains endowed him with secret knowledge. I say “secret,” but it’s not really secret. Anyone can know it. Just sit by a river for a long, long time.
I also like the line, “I am completely at peace.” That sounds like a positive affirmation. If you repeat it to yourself over and over, it becomes true. They are magic words.
Li Po also draws a distinction between the enlightened and the unenlightened. In the poem, “You” are unenlightened, and the speaker is enlightened. You had to ask why the speaker of the poem lives in the mountains, away from materialistic concerns of the city. You didn't just silently sit beside him and look at the peach blossom floating on the stream, and slowly come to understand why the speaker of the poem lives the idyllic pastoral life, you had to go and disturb his meditation by talking.
But hopefully by the end of the poem, you, the reader, are enlightened. (The “you” in the poem doesn’t have to refer to the reader, it could refer to another character within the world of the poem. Either way.)
I think this is one of my new favorite poems.
Thank you, Li Po.
I am completely at peace.
Sincerely,
Telemoonfa
AWWWWWWW!!! Your wife is so adorable!!!
I hope it made your day to hear that on your answering machine.
and you must've listened to it more than once cuz you wrote it down.
youre romantic!!!
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