The Absolutely Huge and Incredible Injustice in the World
(fragments)
"I can't be a saint,
I am not even a religious person, I am hardly a person at all
except when I look at you and think
that this life with you must go on forever
because it is so perfect, with all its imperfections,
like your waistline that exists a little too much,
like my hairline that doesn't exist at all!
Which means that my bald head feels good
on your soft round belly that feels good too.
If only everyone were us!
But sometimes we are everyone, we get mad
at the world and mean as all get-out,
which means we want to tell the world to get out
of this, our world. Who are all these awful people?
Why, it's your own grandma, who was so nice to you—
you mistook her for someone else. She actually was
someone else, but you had no way of knowing that,
just as you had no way of knowing that the taxi driver
saves his pennies all year
to go to Paris for Racine at the Comédie Francaise.
Now he is reciting a long speech in French from Andromache
and you arrive at the corner of This and That
and though Andromache's noble husband Hector has been killed
and his corpse has been dragged around the walls of Troy by an
unusually mean Achilles,
although she is forced into slavery and a marriage
to save the life of her son, and then people around her
get killed, commit suicide, and go crazy, the driver is in paradise,
he has taken you back to his very mean teacher
in the unhappy school in Port-au-Prince and then
to Paris and back to the French language of the seventeenth century
and then to ancient Greece and then to the corner of This and That.
Only a mean world would have this man driving around in a city
where for no reason someone is going to fire a bullet into the back of
his head!'
"Long ago Zeus said he was tired
and went to bed: if you're not going to exist
it's best to be asleep.
The Christian God is like a cranky two-thousand-year-old baby
whose fatigue delivers him into an endless tantrum.
He will never grow up
because you can't grow up unless people listen to you,
and they can't listen because they are too busy being mean
or fearing the meanness of others.
How can I blame them?"
"In some cultures it is normal to eat bugs or people
or to smear placenta on your face at night, to buy
a car whose price would feed a village for thirty years,
to waste your life and, while you're at it, waste everyone
else's too!
Hello, America. It is dawn,
wake up and smell yourselves.
You smell normal."
After Reverdy
I would never have wanted to see your sad face again
Your cheeks and your windy hair
I went all across the country
Under this humid woodpecker
Day and night
Under the sun and the rain
Now we are face to face again
What does one say to my face
Once I rested up against a tree
So long
I got stuck to it
That kind of love is terrible.
How to Be Perfect
(fragments)
"Don't give advice."
"Eat an orange every morning."
"Hope for everything. Expect nothing."
"Take care of things close to home first. Straighten up your room before you save the world. Then save the world."
"Make eye contact with a tree."
"Be kind to old people, even when they are obnoxious. When you become old, be kind to young people. Do not throw your cane at them when they call you Grandpa. They are your grandchildren!"
"Expect society to be defective. Then weep when you find that it is far more defective than you imagined."
"Look at that bird over there."
"Visit foreign countries, except those whose inhabitants have
expressed a desire to kill you.
"Don't expect your children to love you, so they can, if they want to."
"Forgive your country every once in a while. If that is not possible, go to another one."
"Don't be depressed about growing older. It will make you feel even older. Which is depressing."
"Do not wander through train stations muttering, "We're all going to
die!"
"Enjoy sex, but don't become obsessed with it. Except for brief periods
in your adolescence, youth, middle age, and old age."
"Be good.
Walk down different streets.
Backwards."
"Take out the trash.
Love life.
Use exact change.
When there's shooting in the street, don't go near the window."
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