Fields of Emerald and Steel -- Gee, I Wish I'd Written That

Mystique by Arthur Rimbaud

On the dark side of the slope, angels revolving
Their dresses of wool, in fields of emerald and steel.

Flames shoot out of meadows, to the top of the hill.
To the left, the face of the ascent is pitted,
By all homicides and every battle,
And the sounds of disaster string out on a curve.
Behind the ascent on the right, the orient line of progression.

And while this band in the distance
Is made of the whirling, leaping sounds
Of conch shells and human nights,

The flowery softness of the stars and all the sky
Flows over the side of the slope
Like a basket poured out in our face,
And turns the abyss beneath us a flowering blue.

Journaling

So, do you, too, have authors like this? Authors you like so much that you space out their books, being careful not to read them all at once? For me, Sheri S. Tepper is one of those authors. I've loved her for some time, but I only read a book or two of hers every year. I just finished Six Moon Dance, which I think may be one of her best.

And, do you do this: do you fold over the pages with absolutely amazing passages so that you can copy those passages into your journal? I've kept a journal since I was young enough for that to be presumptuous. And going back once every couple of years and re-reading all my journals, and remembering where I learned a particular concept or turn of phrase is one of my real pleasures. I'm going to turn fifty in a few weeks, and I'll probably go back and start with my first journal and read all the way up through my current one. Interestingly enough, my father was a "journalist" and my grandmother even used the same kind of notebooks that I use to keep her journals. So I at least figure that I come by it honestly.

Here are some of the passages that I'll be copying from Six Moon Dance into my journal. I think you can read them and not find any real spoilers.

* Who could feel claustrophobic in space? One either was well off inside or one was outside and dead.

*Simon leaned forward and laid a rough hand on his shoulder. "Look, Mouche, you've got to understand what Newholme men are about, not from Madame's point of view but from our own. Now most men get taught early on that being dutiful is good, so they think they're being good when they work themselves into exhaustion and meanness. And most men know that pleasure distracts them from duty, so that teaches then pleasure is shameful. But at the same time, we have these restless brains inside that tell us to keep pushing toward the top so we can make a hole, crawl through, and see what's up there. All of us, even Consorts and supernumes, figure we've got a natural right to be there, on top and we use whatever we've got to get there. Humor. Or eloquence. Or skill. Whatever.

Bayne and Dyre, now they've got the idea mutual pleasure is sissy stuff, so the only pleasure they get is sniggering and bullying and destruction. And they don't like duty either, so they avoid it. The only thing that gives them satisfaction is anger, so being angry is how they go looking for themselves, like vandals taking a city: throw, hit break, kill, shatter -- it's all one to them. Destroy enough stuff, suddenly they'll find the hidden door with heaven behind it."

Simon looked at his glass, swirling the liquid in it, watching the patterns it made. "I try to tell you boys, best I can, that there isn't any door. You climb over people, you push and shove and get up there on top, it's empty. I try to tell you pleasure is a good thing, and it's easier with Hunks than most, because you're being trained to give it. And I try to tell you that duty's good, too, but you've got to balance it. And you've got to study yourself to know how much of each you need, for no one man is a measure of all."

* "What does fathers and mothers have to do with who you are? Your planet is your mother; time is your father. Your insides know this! All life outside you is your kin-folk. Even we dosha are your kin, born of another planet but with same father as you. Starflame makes your materials and live-planet assembles them, and time designs what you are, not your fathers and mothers. Pff. You could be genetic assemblage; Bofusdiaga could make you without fathers or mothers; and you would still be persons! But you could not have material without stars, or life without planet, or intelligence without time and be any way at all. It is your stars and your world and long time gives you legs to dance and brains to plan and voices to sing. "

* "We are made of the stuff of stars, given our lives by a living world, given our selves by time. We are brother to the trees and sister to the sun. We are of such glorious stuff we need not carry pain around like a label. Our duty, as living things, is to be sure that pain is not our whole story, for we can choose to be otherwise. As Ellin says, we can choose to dance."

*She complained, "But the Hags didn't have to choose that way of doing things. Surely there's a better solution!"

"If you can suggest one, I know they'd be happy to hear it. They aren't monsters, Questy. They're the descendents of the cultural historians on the second ship, and their ancestresses knew very well that surpluses breed contempt. Too much of anything reduces the honor in which it is held: too many men, too many women, too many children, too many people. "

Six moons. How would our world be different, how would we be different if we had six moons? How would we be different if we weren't afraid of pleasure, if there weren't too many of us?

It Doesn't Get Any Simpler Than This

Once more, slowly, and in short declarative sentences, with pictures for those whose minds have been almost destroyed by listening to Chris Matthews.

The Scariest Words in the English Language

Last night, my lovely friend Angela identified THE five scariest words in the English Language:

1. Michael
2. Moore
3. Ann
4. Coulter
5. Slash

Goddamn, This Pisses Me Off

Bush is selling off our national forests.

Let's be clear. This is nothing but a transfer of wealth. Bush is funding tax cuts for the richest Americans by selling off national treasures, and, given that these are irreplacable assets, no matter what he gets for the forests, he'll be selling them off at bargain basement prices. Those are your forests that are being transferred into new Hummers and plasma screen tvs and Juicy Couture sweat suits for people who are so much wealthier than you are that it's difficult for you to truly imagine how well off they are. But you and your children and your grandchildren and your great grand children are buying them their brand new Hummers.

Small, mean, petty, and viscious

One of the things I like about getting older is that I can do things I was afraid to do when I was younger. Had a late lunch with a friend today at the Old Ebbitt Grill and ate raw oysters and drank white wine and generally gossiped and chatted and had a fine old time.

But the most fun was before we were seated, when John Ashcroft came pushing his sour old face through the crowd at the door and had to walk right past us. I had plenty of time to give him the evil eye, which, I admit, I would have done when I was younger. But when he was directly even with us, I launched into a loud discussion about calico cats, loud, and rude, and mean-spirited. He turned the most satisfying shade of red, from the neck of his long wool coat to the top of his Criscoed-hair, got bug-eyed, and pushed his way out the door. As my friend Katrina likes to say: “I’m only going to get worse.”

I’d have kicked him, but I wanted to get my lunch. Which was very good.

A Nation of Indentured Servants

Yesterday, I was reading T. Thorn Coyle’s Musings concerning the difference between wanting something and needing something, between being hungry and being starved. My first reaction was negative; I adore language and enjoy the colorful use of language. What’s the big deal about saying you’re starving when you’re merely ravenous or that you’re ravenous when you’re merely hungry?

And, yet, Ms. Coyle does have a point, I think. In America today, we’ve more or less lost the distinction between wanting something and needing something. Of course, we have an entire industry -- advertising -- devoted to blurring that distinction and to making us “need” things we’d never even heard of before. Then, today, I began reading about Howard Karger’s new book, Shortchanged.

Mr. Karger looks at the growing “fringe economy” devoted to providing credit -- at usurious rates -- to poor and, increasingly, to middle class Americans. As Karger points out, there have always been pawn shops, rent-to-own furniture stores, and payday loan joints. What struck me is his description of how America’s increasingly cash-strapped, debt-ridden middle class is turning to these operations. Karger says, “Some readers may be put off by the book’s focus on the economic straits of the poor and the middle class, thinking that it minimizes the true impact on the poor. I had originally titled the book Scamming the Poor , but as I dug deeper, I soon realized that the fringe economy is also affecting a growing number of functionally poor households — those with above average incomes but with little or no assets and high debt. Indeed, many financial transactions have become so tricky that the middle class, especially the functionally poor middle class, is also vulnerable to the predations of the fringe economy. As Shortchanged illustrates, the lines between the fringe and mainstream economies are blurred, and the interests of the poor and the functionally poor middle class are growing closer.”

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. Americans aren’t special, no matter how much we believe that we are. The world doesn’t owe us anything, including Chinese credit. We can’t, either as individuals, as families, or as a nation keep living beyond our means and using more than our fair share of the world’s resources. Quit living on credit. Get your credit cards paid off. Get at least six month’s net salary in a liquid form of savings. This is all about the two topics I’ve been pondering this year: fear and thriving. Living in debt means living in fear. Thriving is about so much more than acquiring new things. What do you need?

Odds and Ends

Several odds and ends today.

First, my brilliant friend Elizabeth sent me two interesting articles. She works with a group that focuses on the use of technology in education, so the No Child Left Behind program is a special bugaboo of hers. She notes that: "Bush is proposing eliminating Enhancing Education Through Technology funds (for the second year in a row). His idiotic No Child Left Behind legislation
requires "highly qualified" teachers. EETT funds are the ONLY funds in the entire federal budget that are specifically there for professional development for teachers and school administrators.

So no funds for EETT that is a direct support for
NCLB, but sure, you can have federal money to send
your kid to a private (religious) school! ARGH!!!!!"

She also pointed me to Garrison Keillor’s column in Slate in which he points out that: "Republicans believe in smaller government and deregulation, but it takes more and more of their friends and loved ones to not regulate us, and who can blame them? Washington is the perfect place for the slacker child who flubbed his way through college and flopped in business and whom friends and family kept having to prop up -- find him a government job. Government service is a broadening experience. It certainly has been for Mr. Bush. He has traveled to China and Europe and other places that never interested him before." And, interestingly enough, as Atrios reports, Republican spawn can apparently get jobs telling scientists what to say without even bothering to finish college.

Second, a bit of pimping.

(1) The D.C. Radical Faeries are having their Feast of the Red Dragon this Saturday, February 11th from 2pm – 5pm at the Universalist National Memorial Church, 16th ST and S St NW, Washington, D.C. Funds raised at the Feast of the Red Dragon will go to support the work at Grandma’s House. Grandma's House operates five homes in NW D.C. which care for HIV infected infants and children. The children range in age from newborns to 10 years, and require 24-hour attention. This is always a fantastic event, admission and food are only $10 and if you’re in or near D.C. you have GOT to go!

Shit.Fuck.Damn. I Hate This Goddamn Disease.

So, when I had breast cancer, I didn't enjoy the surgery or the chemo or the radiation or the five years of Tamoxifen. I didn't enjoy the fights with the morons who regularly lost my films or losing my hair or learning to live with the idea that, sooner or later, IT is likely coming back to finish me off, for good. But I'll tell you what I really hated. I really hated the way that having breast cancer defined me in a lot of people's minds. i became a "breast cancer survivor" first and Hecate second.

I.Am.Not.Breast.Cancer. I.Am.Hecate.

But, today, an aquaintance called me to tell me that she has to go in tomorrow for some more pictures because something suspicious showed up on her latest mammogram. She called me because, to her, I'm a "breast cancer survivor." We chatted for a while and it was clear that she's really worried, really freaked out. She's a single woman, fifty years old, all her family is in other countries and other states. And, then, offhand, I said, "Would you like me to come with you?" Her relief was palpable, even over the phone.

So send me a bit of light and compassion tomorrow. I'm short on compassion. I'm not good at warm and fuzzy. I'm going to have to beg off a conference call to do this and, well, if the news is bad, I'm going to take her out for martinis at the Palm and tell her, well, what can I tell her? When you're going through Hell, keep going? What doesn't kill you makes you stronger? Hair and boobs are overrated? You'll either live through this or you'll wish halfway through chemo that you were dead? If you fight really hard with the radiologist you can make them use markers instead of the tatoos they want to use to mark you up for radiation? Good thing you don't have a lover right now because mine left me as soon as he heard the word "cancer"?

I'm really fuckng glad we've spent so much money killing people in some country halfway across the world instead of finding a cure for this mother-fucking obscene dirty obnoxious miserable excuse for a disease.

Postscript: I never cease to be amazed at the support and kindness of this "community." Thanks to everyone for their kind words. And, if you're a woman, please remember to do self exams every month. Put a reminder on your calendar. If you're a man who loves a woman, you could remind her to do self exams. And, women, please insist that your doctor send you for a mammogram any time you feel something. I've heard too many tales of women whose doctors told them not to worry and then, a year later, found out that, if they'd had a mammogram, they could have caught the cancer before it turned into Stage 4. Early detection is still the best way to beat breast cancer.

Post Postscript: Good news. "Normal aging of breast tissue; no follow-up indicated." So we still had martinis mid-afternoon, but they were celebratory, rather than for solace. Here's to normal aging!

Sacred Places in the Modern World -- The First in a Continuing Series

So, celebrating Imbolc this week, and continuing to ponder how we thrive in today's less-than-gentle world, I got to thinking about the sacred wells where the Goddess Brigit, whom we honor on Imbolc, was worshipped. When the xians conquered Ireland and Scotland, many of Brigit's sacred wells became the sites of xian churches, often dedicated to St. Brigid or to the Great Mother Mary. Most peoples have found places in the natural world that seemed to them especially blessed, places where we Wiccans say that the veil between this mundane world and that "other world" that we sense is out there is thinner than it is in other places.

You can find lamenting in the Pagan community, and, Goddess knows, much of it is valid, that our sacred places are disappearing, being paved over, turned into dumps, strip malls, office parks. You can also find mystics who show us that every place is sacred, that a plastic bag blowing through a city street can be a thing of immense beauty, an avatar of East/Wind/Swords. The simple truth is that many, if not most, Pagans today live in apartments in cities, not in small cottages, surronded by herb gardens at the foot of Stonehenge. I'd love to wander the fields like Mary Oliver, but almost 99 days out of 100, I drive to an office building in a big city and then back to a suburb, stopping at a large grocery store, or the dry cleaners, or the taqueria on the way back.

So, how do we thirive? What do we do when we need to be in a sacred space? Where do we go? What places in the modern world help us to remember that Earth is alive, we're part of a larger whole, our entire lives are shot through with connection and glory, and, emobodied consciousness that we are, with sensual delight?

I'm not a New Yorker, but my first Sacred Space in the Modern World is Central Park. Watch the video. Take a deep breath. Sacred Space: wherever you go, there you are.

May the Goddess Guard Her. May She Find Her Way to the Summerlands. May her Friends and Family Know Peace

Thanks, Betty. You saved my life.

From Chapter 2 of the Feminine Mystique:

In the early 1960's McCall'shas been the fastest growing of the women's magazines. Its contents are a fairly accurate representation of the image of the American woman presented, and in part created, by the large-circulation magazines. Here are the complete editorial contents of a typical issue of McCall's(July 1960):

1. A lead article on "increasing baldness in women." caused by too much brushing and dyeing.

2. A long poem in primer-size type about a child, called "A Boy Is A Boy."

3. A short story about how a teenager who doesn't go to college gets a man away from a bright college girl.

4. A short story about the minute sensations of a baby throwing his bottle out of the crib.

5. The first of a two-part intimate "up-to-date" account by the Duke of Windsor on "How the Duchess and I now live and spend our time. The influence of clothes on me and vice versa."

6. A short story about a nineteen-year-old girl sent to a charm school to learn how to bat her eyelashes and lose at tennis. ("You're nineteen, and by normal American standards, I now am entitled to have you taken off my hands, legally and financially, by some beardless youth who will spirit you away to a one-and-a-half-room apartment in the Village while he learns the chicanery of selling bonds. And no beardless youth is going to do that as long as you volley to his backhand.")

7. The story of a honeymoon couple commuting between separate bedrooms after an argument over gambling at Las Vegas.

8. An article on "how to overcome an inferiority complex."

9. A story called "Wedding Day."

10. The story of a teenager's mother who leerns how to dance rock-and-roll.

11. Six pages of glamorous pictures of models in maternity clothes.

12. Four glamorous pages on "reduce the way the models do."

13. An article on airline delays.

14. Patterns for home sewing.

15. Patterns with which to make "Folding Screens--Bewitching Magic."

16. An article called "An Encyclopedic Approach to Finding a Second Husband."

17. A "barbecue bonanza," dedicated "to the Great American Mister who stands, chef's cap on head, fork in hand, on terrace or back porch, in patio or backyard anywhere in the land, watching his roast turning on the spit. And to his wife wit without whom (sometimes) the barbecue could never be the smashing summer success it undoubtedly is . . ."

An All Volunteer Army

Go buy the New Yorker and read the article entitled “Swamp Nurse” by Katherine Boo. It will break your heart.

Boo follows Luwana Marts, a nurse in Louisiana’s Nurse-Family partnership, whose job is visiting poor young mothers in an effort to improve their babies’ lives. The mothers’ lives are chaotic; they move from one ruined trailer to another crowded apartment. They move from one convicted felon to another drug dealer. They don’t bother to have themselves tested for the hepatitis that Marts suspects they have since they can’t afford medical care anyway or they stop taking their hepatitis medicine because it makes them too tired for their cleaning jobs. And, then, they find out that their newborn has hepatitis.

Boo reports: ”Jose, who was with Maggie, [the young mother of the infected infant], then took her hand. Together, they informed Luwana [Marts] that decisions bigger than high school had also been made. Jose was joining the Marines, and he and Maggie had decided to marry. In the telling, their mouths were straight lines. Love and patriotism were not much on their minds.

“I’m less nervous about Iraq than I am about marrying Maggie,” Jose told the nurse as he and Maggie took turns pushing the talkative eighteen-month-old Maia around in an empty diaper box. Since they lived in a community with a particularly high death rate in the war, Maggie saw the Marine Corps and marriage as equally distressing propositions. But the couple had made a hard calculation, and there were two more things they wanted for their daughter that they didn’t know another way to get: good, possibly life-extending medical care and a habitable dwelling in which she might grow up.”

I’ve heard many times that we have a volunteer army. No we don’t. We have a system of enforced poverty and lack of access to basic human necessities that forces young men (including those like Jose who don’t have the sense that the Goddess gave a garbanzo bean) into the service in order to keep their children from dying of hepatitis. And we wonder why the oligarchs are against abortion and contraception and sex education?

Alanis, Where Are You When We Need You?

As Ms. Morissette would say, "Isn't it ironic?

I'm still too angry over Cindy Sheehan's treatment to write sensibly about it. This will have to serve for now.

May the Goddess Guard Her. May She Find Her Way to the Summerlands. May Her Friends and Family Know Peace.

The beautiful ballerina, Moira Shearer has died. She was best known for her role in the film The Red Shoes in which she played a ballerina.

Is Nausea Enough?

It’s not very often that I agree with Jack Danforth. In fact, his name simply conjures up for me bad memories of the way Anita Hill was treated. But my brilliant friend Elizabeth pointed out this article to me in today’s WaPo and I’m glad to see Mr. Danforth saying what he says. I especially agree with him about the meanness that is, for me, at least, the predominant characteristic of today’s Evangelicals.

The article quotes Samuel Lloyd, dean of the National Cathedral, who says, ”My hope and my guess is that there is a fair amount of revulsion and that the moment is right for one or more candidates who want to appeal to a more generous spirit in the American people.” I think that’s what I’m trying to get at with my discussions of Galway Kinnell’s poem about St. Francis and the Sow. When the poet says, “though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing,”
I think of America, which seems rather desperately in need of someone who can reteach it its loveliness, who can retell it in words and in touch that it is lovely, until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing.

Danforth says he’s “counting on nausea” to turn politics around. I’m not so sure that’s enough. I’m wondering a lot these days about the role of heroes and heroines. Do we need someone who can articulate for America what is good about it and remind it of its better nature? Or is it something that lots of smaller someones can do? And if so, how? Or is Danforth right and nausea alone will turn the tide?

Find a Sacred Well and Read Some Poetry -- or Write Some!

Happy Imbolc! February 2nd is one of the eight major Pagan holidays. It goes by several names, but in my Circle, we call it Imbolc. It’s been almost six weeks since the Winter Solstice and you really can tell that the days are getting longer. Spring’s not here yet, but we can tell that it’s coming.

We celebrate and honor the Celtic Goddess Brigit (pronounced Breed). Brigit was worshipped at various sacred wells throughout Ireland and Scotland. She was the goddess of, among other things, blacksmiths and poets. I’ve always loved that juxtaposition -- blacksmiths and poets. The connection, for me at least, is that they both work with fire.

I’ve been thinking lately about what poor poetry, what poor art in general, totalitarian regimes tend to produce. And here’s what I believe, although I know of no study that backs this up: I believe that the side with the best poets always wins in the end. In the sixties, the anti-war side had, by far, the better poets, albeit that those poets tended to put their poetry to music.

And, I’m wondering, where are our poets today? Who’s writing good poetry that explains what’s wrong with the theocracy that is being installed in the White House, Capitol, and Court Houses across America? Who’s writing the poetry that will, in the words of the poem by Kinnell, help America to remember how to blossom from within of self-blessing?

The Gift

So today pretty much sucked. In fact, it started sucking last night, when my throat started to feel scratchy and when our new moon ritual was only kinda ok, which happens sometimes, but it's so much nicer when everyone really clicks. And then, the cloture vote. Less said at the moment, the better. I'm still trying to process what to do next. At five o'clock, an absurdly early hour for me, I gave up and drove home, getting more despondent every minute.

When I opened the door, there on my floor was a package that the mailman had brought to me from one of the many dear friends I have that I've never met. For no reason at all, except to wish me a happy holy day on Imbolc, February, 2nd, was this amazingly gorgeous new tarot deck. And it's some kind of serendipity because, last night at the dark moon, we cleansed and consecrated divination tools, which for almost all the women in my group, means tarot cards. And, today, I have a beautiful and meaningful new tarot deck.

It's amazing, isn't it, how a kind act can help us to remember that we live in an enchanted world, in spite of the George Bushes and the Haliburtons, and the cold germs? Once, when I was doing chemotherapy, had just been abandoned by my lover of twenty-some years, and was about as sorry for myself as it was possible to feel, I was sitting in a restaurant trying to make myself eat something. I called for the check and the waitress said, "A man saw you sitting in the window, came in and paid for your meal. He left this." It was a tiny, dirty scrap of paper, torn off of an envelope and it said: "Believe." I still have that scrap of paper and it keeps me going sometimes when I feel like giving up.

So, while I don't have any grand strategy to save the Republic (the song I keep hearing in my head is "I need a hero!"), nor any deep philosophical explanation for what happened today, other than to say that evil, as it sometimes does, temporarily prevailed, I can say that I'm not giving up. I'm bloody, but I am not yet bowed.

And, because I've been reminded today of the power of gifts, I'll gift you with a tarot reading, if you like. Click on Lunaea's link in my Wicca section, ask a question, and pick a card from her oracle. Tell me in comments what you pulled and I'll read for you. As they said in Dr. Zhivago, "Ah, well then, it's a gift."

I Am Begging You

Call today and demand that Senators filibuster Judge Alito. Just go here for all the information on who to call and how to reach them. DON'T limit yourself to only calling your own Senators. Call the ones that blogger Thersites lists and tell them that if they can’t stand up for women, you won’t be donating any more time or money to the DNC or the DLC and that you’ll be telling the DNC and DLC which Senators are to blame.

The Sow

I love this poem very much. And, lately, I've been thinking of it because it seems to me that America is quite a bit like the sow in Kinnell's poem. She needs to be reminded that she can "flower, from within, of self-blessing." She needs a St. Francis,or maybe a whole bunch of St. Francises, to remind her what it is about her that's beautiful. I know America has always been far from perfect. That's true, as far as I can tell, for every society on Earth. But there was much in America's "bud" that was lovely: the idea of the rule of law, the notion of self-governance, the fearlessness of her people as they faced the trip across the oceans, or the trip across the prairie, or the depression, or Hitler, or the need to change ideas about race. America's generosity to the rest of the world has, for a long time, been part of her loveliness. America's willingness to accept all immigrants and to become stronger because of diversity rather than weaker has always been a part of her loveliness.

But the Bush administration has made America forget her "long perfect loveliness." Now, we're given to believe that we're a nation terrified of a few terrorists, although the rest of the world manages to live with the threat of terrorism all the time. In fact, America lived with terrorism for 200 years, from the attacks on Native Americans, to the KKK, to Timothy McVeigh, and no one ever suggested we give up our rights, let Big Brother spy on us, allow the government to seize people and throw them in secret jails without charges or access to lawyers. I don't believe it.

We need a St. Francis, or maybe a St. Frances, to remind America "from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of
the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking
and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow."

Galway Kinnell - St. Francis And The Sow

The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as St. Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of
the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking
and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

The Mad Ones

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars . . . . "

~Jack Kerouac