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ExistenceWeSummonYou

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I haven't really been around here since December, but on a whim a couple of days ago I decided to sign in and WHAM, to my delight I discover my poem "What Is Existence Someone Please Tell Me" fav.me/d4o8g8k has recently been featured as a Daily Deviation by the wonderful
BeccaJS . Many thanks to all who read, commented on, or faved that poem.

My absence has to do with my move to the San Francisco Bay Area where I'm busy pretending to be a tech entrepreneur. But I believe more in the primacy of words now than ever. Language allows us to breathe out our internal selves, to breathe in the personal consciousness of others. Writers are just those who breathe more deeply, but that much oxygen makes me light headed, and I can't always permit myself to get so giddy. However, I'm not sure I can afford not to either; the longer I'm away from poetry the more irritable and desolate I become. So everyone just stay calm and keep reading and writing; I'll try to do the same.

-Justin

p.s. I finally got a twitter handle, @JustinMHelms , though I'm still holding out against this whole Facebook madness (Mark Zuckerberg's real worried about it I'm sure). 
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The physical world is meaningless tonight
And there is no other. There is Ha-eé-me, who sits
And plays his guitar. Ha-eé-me is a beast.

Or perhaps his guitar is a beast or perhaps they are
Two beasts. But of the same kind - two conjugal beasts.
Ha-eé-me is the male beast...an imbecile,

Who knocks out a noise. The guitar is another beast
Beneath his tip-tap-tap. It is she that responds.
Two beasts but two of a kind and then not beasts.

Yet two not quite of a kind. It is like that here.
There are so many of these beasts that one never sees,
Moving so that the foot-falls are slight and almost nothing.

This afternoon the wind and the sea were like that -
And after a while, when He-eé-me has gone to sleep,
A great jaguar running will make a little sound.
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"As meteors pierce the sky's tin vault,
so molecules sail through the many

pores of my own enclosure, what trash what
treasure, piss and brilliance, a fleet of

snippets shed from the vast exterior's
chaos haystack, flop and fodder, there

is no NO, not here, not yet. I have been
forever, I am not yet born. Into the one

tremendous whistling laze of this, my
pulsed amalgam, I admit the all, a just lie

back and snap! arrangement, confetti
hoof and concertina, what blind mouth's

breath what pleasant nesting. I am
a composition, the one life's work I have

been forever, the loom and the wool and the mat
for dreaming. The song that's tensed

in past as happened "just like that" is
too much once, and lying back to bask in basking's

tongues of flash, I can't believe it.
One's quarantine's a peace pinched-in

with heavenly visits. A heavenly visit
has no close. Take the most exquisite

moment in the gallop, where all four
hooves now tread the air, and stretch it

taut indefinitely, shot through as it is
with hops and dung and does and loves,

and you have an inkling. An inkling sparks
half the congregation when you rub it right,

half the congregation when you rub it wrong.
I am song forever. I will not have sung."

From "Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit"... a book I recommend you go buy and read: www.amazon.com/Twenty-Seven-Pr…
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silvicultrix has a very thought provoking fav.me/d5bk7v0 post on her journal today, that I want to respond to:

While what constitutes "the classics" is a fuzzy, time variant set that's over-determined by established political forces, that doesn't mean it's a useless concept, if that's what's being implied. In fact, if we treated each of these bullet points as exclusion criteria for words, we'd only have a skeleton of a language left. The concepts of "right" and "wrong" are certainly overly influenced by political/economic power, that doesn't mean I shouldn't say "I try to do what's right." Shoot, even words like "orange" are somewhat subjective ("looks yellow to me").

To say "I only read the classics" perhaps just implies that one is a cultural conservative. And while I don't consider myself a cultural conservative (at least, I certainly don't only read the classics), I do think such people are useful in any society. They give our culture inertia, so people like me can't yank it around in a completely different direction too quickly... as a civilization continues to develop, they force us to take our time in deciding what we want to change and what we want to keep.

Most of what today is considered a classic was at some point considered radical or bad or just silly, from Laozi to Plato to Shakespeare to Dickinson. And the literary contributions that our generation makes will at some point be considered conservative, so I take comfort in knowing there will be people around two hundred years from now who "only read the classics," advocating on our behalf.
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I've been in quite a funk lately... if anyone has anything to jolt me back into my usual excited curiosity about life, it would be appreciated. Strange facts, surprising etymologies, links to philosophical or scientific articles, excerpts from religious texts, etc.
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Featured

Daily Deviation! by ExistenceWeSummonYou, journal

Jouga by Wallace Stevens by ExistenceWeSummonYou, journal

Birdsong from Inside the Egg by Timothy Donnelly by ExistenceWeSummonYou, journal

On 'On 'Reading The Classics'' by ExistenceWeSummonYou, journal

Stimulation, please... by ExistenceWeSummonYou, journal