Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Don't Wait Up

This is a song I wrote about my emotionally abusive father, who has been dead to me for two years.  (He was never physically abusive, though I sometimes feared he would lash out at me in his anger.)  I really do have nightmares about him, although these last few months they've been fewer and farther between.  I actually did dream once, back when I was in high school, that he was choking me "just for fun" (in front of other people, too, which made it humiliating as well as painful), and belittling me when I didn't see the humor in it.  Fortunately, he never really did anything that extreme, but I was regularly the butt of his mockery when I was growing up, and he couldn't bring himself to understand why I didn't exactly appreciate it.

So why does it have to be this way?
You ask when I'll come home and I say
When you stop showing up in my nightmares
You might find me at your door one day
So don't wait up
Don't leave the light on for me

Playfully you try to choke me
Back off and say it's just a joke, see?
It's so damn funny to provoke me
But the red marks on my neck are sore
And my throat hurts too much to laugh

So why does it have to be this way?
You ask when I'm coming home and I say
If these wounds ever heal without scars
You might find me at your door one day
So don't wait up
Don't leave the light on for me
And get angry when you see the electric bill

It's not my fault but go ahead, blame me
If it makes you feel better, go ahead, maim me
If it's so damn funny then go ahead, shame me
You say you're laughing with me, not at me
Funny thing is, I'm not laughing
So go ahead, strike me, push me, shove me
Tell me it's because you love me

All bulbs burn out eventually
So don't get up now
To turn the light on for me

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Pudendum

The thing itself is lovely, but
the woman who has taken unto herself
that timeless synecdoche -
a shameful thing indeed.

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Vernal Verdancy

When I was fourteen I wrote this poem to celebrate the coming of spring.  It's an intricate paean elaborating upon the parallels between the vernal equinox and the sunrise.  (It should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me that I grew up to be fascinated by tables of correspondences.)  Reading back over this poem for the first time in a decade, I'm almost surprised how truly awful it isn't.  Actually, though half a lifetime ago I thought it quite an ambitious project, it pretty much does exactly what I wanted it to do!  Enjoy it for what it's worth, along with my best wishes for a season of happiness.

The sun is rising in the east
O'er 'scapes still marked by winter's hand,
For only now has newborn Spring
Come in to warm and wake the land.

O sun, now rise, and fill the skies,
And summon vernal verdancy!
Come, morning sun, for Spring's begun!
Arouse the land from dormancy.

How fast the sun seems now to move!
How much the day in brightness grows!
How eagerly the plants awake,
Released from burdens nights impose!

The birds all sing their songs of Spring,
Their praises of the verdant land.
They all rejoice, each in its voice,
Elated in this season grand.

O sun, bring warmth, bring light, to make
The flowers from their buds explode!
Bring warmth, bring light, that there may be
New wonders bursting from each node.

May ever flower bloom this hour,
This time of new Spring's sun's first light,
When night and day in balance play,
When day is pushing back the night!

The sun has risen now at last,
And vernal verdancy is near.
The night, like winter, now is past.
The day, like newborn Spring, is here!

Saturday, March 12, 2011

The Last Acceptable Prejudice

I've had the subject of "the last acceptable prejudice" in mind as a topic to write about for a long time, having heard that expression used several times in the course of a two- or three-month period last year, referring to a different "prejudice" each time.  As part of my research I Googled the phrase, and quickly discovered a whole website dedicated to the concept of "last acceptable prejudices."  It seems to be the personal project of one Adam Kotsko, who promises "Up-to-the-minute coverage of who it's okay to make fun of" (although judging from the tone of his commentary, his primary target of mockery is the persecuted, whiny attitude the phrase represents, rather than any of the allegedly mistreated groups).  Kotsko has managed to collect no fewer than fifteen "last acceptable prejudices."  Clearly the human tendency to divide the world into "us" and "them" isn't going away any time soon - and neither is the smug outrage that rises from a sense of being broadly and singularly persecuted.

Some of the prejudices that have made Kotsko's list clearly don't belong there.  If an "acceptable" prejudice can be defined as one that goes unchallenged by a majority of society, including those channels (such as the mainstream news and entertainment media) that speak for the culture as a whole, "anti-Semitism" and "homophobia" clearly don't qualify.  I'm not at all denying that bias against Jews or gays exists, or suggesting that there's anything trivial about such bias when it does manifest itself.  What I find hard to believe is that anyone could consider either one to be a socially acceptable prejudice.  If anything, these are two groups mainstream society - mainstream American society, at any rate, and much of European society as well - bends over backwards at every turn not to offend.  Of course, the condescending "tolerance" so often shown to both groups clearly indicates that we still see them as outsiders to a considerable degree.  It's increasingly hard to find a series on network TV that doesn't have a lovable homosexual or two among the cast of characters, but central characters are almost universally straight: gays may be good to have around, but we're not really expected to be able to relate to one.  The cause of gay rights, in particular, has a long way to go, with the debate still open as to whether marrying the person you love can authentically be considered a civil right.  On the whole, however, really cruel treatment directed at either Jews or gays is swiftly censured in this society.  Not so for several other groups.

Take atheists, for example.  If an American presidential candidate told a gay journalist that he didn't consider homosexuals to be real American citizens, his political career would be over - but that's exactly what George H.W. Bush allegedly did to an atheist news reporter on the campaign trail in 1987.  "I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens," Bush said, "nor should they be considered patriots."  The ensuing offended uproar was confined almost exclusively to the atheist community.  Twenty years later, Mitt Romney, defending himself against those who claimed that his Mormonism made him unfit for the highest office in the land, insisted that "the nation does need to have people of different faiths, but we need to have a person of faith lead the country."  "Freedom requires religion," he opined.  Anti-atheist bigotry isn't limited to the sphere of politics, either.  The Boy Scouts of America has been repeatedly condemned for refusing to allow known homosexuals as adult volunteers or youth leaders, but there's far less sound and fury about the fact that atheists and agnostics are barred from membership entirely.  (The BSA, as a private organization, has a right to set its own standards for membership and to exclude those who don't meet the requirements, but as far as "acceptable prejudice" goes, there seem to be far more heterosexuals who object when a private organization excludes gays than theists, however casual, who protest a private organization's exclusion of nonbelievers.)  Ceteris paribus, a churchgoing parent is often given preference over an atheist parent in a child custody case, and some schools have refused to support the formation of atheist student groups.  Although a handful of TV shows have featured atheist characters (including the protagonists of two of my favorite dramas, House and Bones), they're often, in the words of an anonymous Wikipedian, stereotyped as "profoundly emotionally screwed-up intellectuals" (in the shows I mentioned, Dr. Gregory House is a curmudgeonly, misanthropic antihero, while Dr. Temperance "Bones" Brennan is an outspoken elitist who disdains anything that smacks of sentimentality or superstition to her rational mind, but the audience loves her anyway because we can tell that her callous posturing protects a tender heart).

Then again, it's hard to find an intellectual on TV who's not "profoundly emotionally screwed-up," in one way or another.  "Bones" Brennan is typical of the way intellectuals are portrayed in the media: snobbish, out of touch with people and their feelings, and completely clueless about modern mass culture, while bursting with knowledge on more esoteric subjects.  Characters such as Dr. Spencer Reid in Criminal Minds and Dr. Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory may be quite likable, but they're presented as objects of admiration, amusement, and/or curiosity rather than truly relatable protagonists.  (Perhaps this is unintentional, but the fact that a number of these characters have been depicted as having the gift of eidetic memory only serves to emphasize how isolated they are in their ivory towers.  I'm not at all interested in the personal lives of celebrities, so it's almost embarrassing how many times I've found myself able to fill in the blanks for a more starstruck acquaintance trying to remember whatshisname, you know, the guy Britney Spears is dating now, simply because I skimmed an issue of People in a friend's bathroom for five minutes.)  Just as often, it seems, "nerds" are depicted as hopeless losers with messy hair and thick, ugly glasses: targets for mockery, pure and simple.  Does anyone stop to ask what message this sends to unusually intelligent children who love to read and study but also yearn for acceptance and respect?  Perhaps more crucially, what message does it send to people of more average intelligence about where their priorities should lie, and how it's appropriate to treat people they don't always quite understand?

How about introversion?  How often have you seen the word used as if it were synonymous with "shyness"?  How often do you see the assumption go unquestioned that introverts are either lonely losers, or antisocial misanthropes?  Motivational speaker Florence Littauer is perhaps best-known for her promotion of a system of personality typing based on the four humours of ancient medicine; in the assessment test she uses, the taker is presented with groups of four personality traits (not connected in any way, except that all four start with the same letter), and asked to choose the one most applicable to him- or herself.  There's a section for strengths, and one for weaknesses.  Guess what section "Introvert" appears in?  (Hint: the other items in its cluster are "Inconsistent," "Intolerant," and "Indifferent.")  "In our extrovertist society," writes Jonathan Rauch, "being outgoing is considered normal and therefore desirable. . . . Extroverts are seen as bighearted, vibrant, warm, empathetic.  'People person' is a compliment.  Introverts are described with words like 'guarded,' 'loner,' 'reserved,' 'taciturn,' 'self-contained,' 'private' - narrow, ungenerous words, words that suggest emotional parsimony and smallness of personality."  I've had people try to convince me that I'm not really introverted, in the same tone they'd use to contradict me if I'd said I was boring or physically unattractive - as if no one with a positive self-image could possibly identify as an introvert.  (Their evidence?  I'm friendly, caring, and interested in people.  I occasionally make small talk with a neighbor when I'm out for a walk.  I'm not particuarly shy, I can be quite outspoken, I enjoy the spotlight on occasion and I've never been nervous performing in front of a crowd.  None of this changes the fact that I am most refreshed and stimulated by solitary activities or one-on-one interaction with a close friend.)  This prejudice takes a damaging turn in the mental health system, where "isolating" is treated by default as a symptom of emotional disturbance.  I can't tell you how many doctors I've had observe that I'd been spending most of the day holed up in my hospital room instead of out in the dayroom associating with the other patients, and ask me if I thought maybe I needed a medication adjustment - only to hear me respond, "No, the meds are working great!  It's been so long since I had the peace of mind to lose myself in a book for hours!"

Neither anti-atheist bias, nor nerd-bashing, nor loner-labeling has yet made an appearance on Kotsko's site, although all three clearly, to at least some degree, fall into the category of socially acceptable prejudices.  One subject Kotsko does have covered - in fact, it has four entries in its category, more than any other single item on the list - is obesity.  Now, I'll freely admit that I could easily stand to lose about half of my body weight - and I want to.  I'm not going to argue, as some do, that morbid obesity is beautiful.  I'm not campaigning for wider chairs and doors.  I believe fat people should be encouraged to get their weight within a more healthy range.  That said, there's no excuse for some of the hateful invective that's been directed against the overweight.  Is it any wonder, though, considering how fat people are portrayed by the media?  In 2009, BBC News Magazine published an article on the subject of anti-fat bias.  Although the article is framed around the story of an overweight woman who was physically assaulted on a train by a fellow passenger, who berated her for being a "big fat pig" who took up two seats, Marsha Coupe's stunned, battered face doesn't appear until halfway down the page.  The first (and largest) picture included with the article is of a bare, hairy, bulging male torso, with a tailor's tape measure wrapped around the abdomen.  The "face" BBC News Magazine puts on the issue of anti-fat prejudice isn't a face at all.  Do a Google Images search for "obesity" and you'll see dozens of images of flabby butts and massive bellies with no faces attached.  These are images calculated to inspire disgust and contempt, not sympathy or interest - and yet a number of them accompany serious news articles.

If anything, the treatment given the overweight by our storytelling media is even worse.  You'll never see a fat person in a movie or on a scripted television program, particularly a fat woman, unless his/her weight has something to do with the storyline, and/or s/he is an object of mockery.  Even children's books get in on the act.  Writer and bookstore owner Elizabeth Bluemle has written about her disgust with "descriptions of fat used deliberately as shorthand to indicate a character's villainy, isolation, absurdity, and/or repulsiveness,"  which she claims to have seen with increasing frequency over the past two decades.  "Maybe it's just me," she writes, "but I've grown particularly weary of pudgy-fingered villains with small 'piggy' eyes in big moon faces.  And the fat kid who serves as clumsy comic relief, or is automatically assumed to have no romantic prospects.  Etcetera.  We all know the cliches."  I know exactly what she's talking about, and it makes me cringe.  In a day when one in three American youngsters is overweight, it's almost beyond comprehension that writers who claim to take a great interest in the emotional lives of children would continue to take cheap potshots at a considerable plurality of their target market - and yet they do.  It's no wonder that size-acceptance activists have dubbed anti-fat bias the last acceptable prejudice.

Do a search for the phrase "last acceptable prejudice" on Amazon, and you'll pull up two volumes with the phrase as subtitle.  The main titles are The New Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in America.  If you're interested in the subject but aren't willing to shell out fifteen dollars for one of the books, you can get a pretty thorough introduction by scanning the annual Reports on Anti-Catholicism issued by the Catholic League, each one an exhaustive collection of offenses divided up into categories such as Arts, Business, Education, Government, and Media.  Some of the so-called anti-Catholic activity seems rather more directed at conservative social opinions or Christians in general (and indeed, fundamentalist Christians have also laid claim to the "last acceptable prejudice" title), but the Arts and Media categories in particular are full of blatant examples of Catholic-bashing.  I can't help thinking the Catholic League can be a little hypersensitive; sometimes I get the impression they can't tell the difference between gentle ribbing, harsh but well-meaning satire, and brutal mockery, and the idea that sober and respectful criticism of Catholic doctrines and traditions has a legitimate place in a free society often seems to be lost on them.  But there's no denying that Catholicism and its adherents are fair game for derision in America these days in a way that other religions simply aren't - a point driven home by conservative activist Brent Bozell in a column titled "A Year of Anti-Religious Bigotry," in which he recasts some of the incidents described in the 2009 Catholic League report as if they'd been directed at Islam and Muslims.  "None of the foregoing was true," he admits at the end.  "Hollywood would never dare ridicule Islam this way."  He's right; anyone who dared to suggest in public that all Muslims were suicide bombers just looking for the opportunity to detonate would be immediately, harshly, and rightfully denounced as a religious bigot - yet pedophile-priest jokes have become a staple of late-night television talk show host monologues.

Catholic-bashing may result in a lot of hurt feelings, but in the case of transsexuals, hatred and fear can be deadly.  I hesitated to mention "transphobia" here, because there's been so much progress lately in the way transsexuality and transgenderism are treated by the mainstream media.  Several TV shows have featured transsexual characters, and a beautiful transwoman named Isis King appeared on the eleventh season of America's Next Top Model.  Except for conservative or religious news outlets, which regularly describe transsexuals in terms of chromosomal sex rather than gender identity (the most respectable organizations, at least, can usually resist the smug, hateful temptation to refer to a person as "it"), the media have generally adopted the habit of referring to transsexual individuals by their names, pronouns, and other descriptors of choice.  Yet beneath the surface, the transsexual-acceptance movement has a long way to go.  Even reasonably open-minded people often miss the point that transsexuality is about what's between a person's ears, not what's between his/her legs.  (The friend who told me about Isis King hastily pointed out that she wasn't "really" a woman "yet" at the time she appeared on the show because she still had a penis; my response was that the reason she didn't want a penis is that she's a woman.)  Transsexuals often have difficulty finding or keeping a job.  Few insurance plans cover sex reassignment surgery, as it's still widely considered, like cosmetic surgery, to be an "elective" procedure, instead of a form of reconstructive surgery (which many plans do cover).  Perpetrators of violence against transsexuals have used a "trans-panic" defense: the idea that a reasonable person, discovering that someone's (particularly a potential sex partner's) genitals don't match the gender s/he believed that person to be, could be provoked into such a state of shock and anxiety as to use deliberate deadly force - and that this mitigates his/her culpability.

Perhaps most horrifying, and least comprehensible, is the treatment some transsexuals have received at the hands of the medical profession.  When Robert Eads, a transman who still had female reproductive organs, was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, over two dozen doctors refused to treat him, fearing that taking him on might harm their reputations.  Even more egregious is the story of Tyra Hunter.  When a firefighter treating her at the scene of a car accident uncovered her genitalia, he backed away from her and joked, "This ain't no bitch."  One of his colleagues mocked, "Look, it's got a cock and balls."  These professional rescuers abandoned her treatment while they stood around laughing at her.  There's no guarantee that either Eads or Hunter would be alive today if they'd received more compassionate and timely care, but the fact is that they're both dead and we'll never know if they would have had a chance.  What we do know for sure is that they both suffered more than they had to, emotionally as well as physically, because those they should have been able to trust as healers betrayed them.  Both these incidents happened in the mid-1990s, but it was only eight years ago that I was shown to my room in a psychiatric hospital and found several members of the staff taunting my new roommate, laughing and insisting, "You're a woman, Rosalyn," while my roommate earnestly protested, "I'm a man, and my name is Ross!"

Of course, in a long-term psych facility, a "woman" who thinks "she" is a man, no matter how earnestly and consistently, could very well pass for just another psychotic.  (Believe me, Ross had other problems.)  But even if we can safely assume that the hospital staff thought his masculine identity was a delusion arising from his mental illness, that raises another question: what were nurses and psych techs - licensed medical professionals - doing making fun of a patient?  Can you imagine a physical therapist mocking an amputee's clumsy walk as he stumbled around getting used to his prosthesis?  How about the career prospects of a hospital janitor who poked fun at the skinny bald kids on the pediatric oncology ward?  Over the course of my years in the mental health system, I have been mocked, been dismissed when raising a serious concern in a sane and respectful manner (including matters of health and safety, and provable inaccuracies in my medical record), had my personal preferences and values inappropriately disregarded (when I was served fish for dinner one evening and I protested that I was supposed to get a vegetarian meal, a nurse snapped "Vegetarians eat fish!" - shouldn't I know what I do and don't eat?), and even been lied to outright.  I find this disheartening, not only in its own right, but because I'd like to think that those who spend their days caring for the mentally ill would be at the front lines in the battle against the stigma that runs rampant in society.

Years before I ever heard anyone talk about "the last acceptable prejudice," I observed on my own that it seemed to be socially condoned to talk about and treat the mentally ill in ways that would be considered unacceptably degrading if they were directed at almost any other group of people.  "Dehumanizing slang still has a place in society," writes Jenny Westberg, "as long as you're talking about mental illness.  And it's not merely tolerated, it's defended.  If a reference to 'the crazies' hurts someone, that person is being overly sensitive.  They can't take a joke.  It's just a word.  They're getting upset over nothing.  They're - well, they're nuts."  Last summer, my mother and I were discussing unhealthy messages in advertising, when my brother walked into the room and heard what I was saying.  "You're mentally insane!" he sneered, before he launched into the reasons he disagreed with my position.  My mother didn't say a word; either it honestly didn't occur to her how an epithet like that would feel to someone with my history, or she was more worried about offending my brother by calling him on it than about reinforcing the insult by letting it slide.  (She's a lesbian, and I'm tempted to wonder how she would have responded if I'd stooped beneath my dignity and told my brother his use of degrading language was "so gay.")  I'm so used to hearing cruel slurs about mental illness and mental patients that I'm almost used to it.  Almost.  Nearly as bad, though much less frequent, are the times a well-meaning friend, whom I have trusted with the facts of my own condition, tries to convince me I'm not mentally ill after all, because I'm intelligent and a good person.  "If I hadn't known when I met you, I never would have guessed," a certain friend has told me more than once.  I know she means it as a compliment, but I can't help feeling like a light-skinned Negro trying to "pass."  The stigma isn't always just verbal, either; the dating service eHarmony refuses to provide matches for those who suffer severe depression, as if a person with a treatable chemical imbalance couldn't possibly make a good life partner.

Perhaps worst of all is the too-often unchallenged stereotype of the mentally ill as dangerous and violent.  This is inaccurate; the mentally ill population is only slightly more prone to acting out violently than the general population, and some mental disorders - including clinical depression, the most common mental illness - are associated with no greater risk of violence.  However, it's still painfully common to hear criminals described as "crazies" or "lunatics" even in cases when they were clearly motivated by some perfectly comprehensible motive such as greed, jealousy, or revenge.  Last year, mental health advocacy groups were outraged by a Burger King commerical that depicts the fast-food chain's cartoonish "King" character running through an office building, breaking windows, starting a fire, and shoving a man violently into a copy machine.  He's pursued by a team of white-coated psychiatrist types, shouting "Stop that king!  He's crazy!"  They finally catch up to him in the break room and tackle him to the floor.  "This king's insane," one of them remarks as they struggle to restrain him; he'd have to be out of touch with reality to offer his hamburgers at such a (debatably) low price while the rest of the world is cutting back.  Burger King has run some controversial, "edgy" ad campaigns before, but somehow I can't imagine even they would have dared to show the King being herded into a special education classroom, under the assumption that anyone who would set his prices so low must be retarded.  Perpetuating the stereotype of the violent mental patient is perfectly acceptable, however - and even some of the journalists who covered the story of the controversy generated by the "crazy King" ad couldn't bring themselves to take it seriously.  Washington Post staff writer Monica Hesse not only gave the official Burger King statement the last word in her article, she joked no fewer than three times in her article about the challenge of choosing language that wouldn't offend the mentally ill.  In the first paragraph, she claims that the ad "can best be described as completely bonk . . . er, nut . . . er, cucko . . . er, in poor taste."  There's more of same in the next paragraph, and then she turns her attentions to actually describing the ad and quoting some of the mental health advocates who were offended by it before concluding, "The real problem with the Burger King ads is that the King is a giant freak of nature with a grotesque plastic head, and that sane . . . er, normal . . . er, average people would look at him and be persuaded not to buy a hamburger but to sleep with a baseball bat next to their beds."  Apparently creepy mascots are a bigger problem than advertisements that stereotype and ridicule an entire group of people, or else we've got a case of socially acceptable prejudi . . . er, bigotr . . . er, journalistic bias on our hands.

Clearly the notion that there's any such thing in our society as a last acceptable prejudice, a single holdout against the all-encompassing wave of tolerance, is almost pathetically laughable.  Acceptable prejudices are a dime a dozen - if you know where to look.  The hardest part is looking there.

Actually, there's something dangerous about the concept of a "last acceptable prejudice" in the first place.  Too often, those who get swept up in this special kind of victimhood forget that there are other prejudices out there doing just as much or more damage, even those that aren't by any stretch of the imagination socially acceptable.  Those who harbor bigoted views about homosexuals or minority ethnic groups know that their opinions go against the grain, but that doesn't necessarily change the way they act.  Plenty of "unacceptable" prejudices are still very much a problem in the real world.  Jesuit priest James Martin, in an excellent article on anti-Catholicism, acknowledges the scope of the problem but admits that "anti-Catholicism is clearly not as virulent or violent as the prejudice directed against blacks, Jews and gays."  Of an archbishop who compared a Catholic-bashing television show with the Holocaust of Nazi Germany, Martin states, "This is solipsism at its worst and most dangerous."

You'd think that those who had been victimized by prejudice in any form would hate it enough to take a stand against it in all its forms.  Sadly, this is often not the case.  Hiding behind a notion of singular persecution only serves to isolate marginalized groups of people from each other, as well as from society.  The aforementioned Brent Bozell, who's written any number of columns about the media's repeated assaults on Catholics, Christians in general, and social conservatives, is a writer I can usually count on for logic and common sense, even when I happen to disagree with what he says - but he played right into another socially acceptable prejudice when  he reported on the BBC's "contemporary nativity play" depicting Mary and Joseph as foreign asylum seekers in Liverpool.  "Someone should be seeking asylum, all right," Bozell opined, "to put the BBC in a straitjacket and leave them there."  With that sentence, he managed to alienate me just as surely as he must feel alienated when Jay Leno makes a pedophile-priest joke.  Do we never learn?

That's the trouble with socially acceptable prejudices.  It's not always easy to recognize them for what they are, because they're so deeply ingrained into our collective consciousness that it's easy not to see them as prejudices at all.  As an overweight, depressive, introverted intellectual, I'm confronted on a daily basis with some of the biases I've discussed here.  Coming from a different background, I might have identified an entirely different set of "last acceptable prejudices" worth writing about.  I don't have any strong personal connection to the Catholic church, but discussions of anti-Catholicism have so often labeled it "the last acceptable prejudice" that I can't imagine any discussion of the phrase in question would be complete without it.  But I might never have thought to discuss bias against atheists and transsexuals, if it weren't for the years I spent in high school identifying as an atheist, or the dear friend who came out to me as transgendered a couple of years ago.

It makes me wonder: what have I neglected to include here?  Not for want of space, or because it was too esoteric or too similar to something else I'd already mentioned - but simply because it never occurred to me?  Whom have I been hurting unknowingly with my own thoughtless words?  What cruelties have I never opened my mind and heart enough to notice?

What is my last acceptable prejudice?

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Needful

Need you?  No.  Without you I
would carry on living, certainly.  The only thing in nature
stubborner than death is life itself.
I think of the bacteria
that boil colorfully in hot springs, the eyeless fish
that swim in black water at the bottom of
a cave, or the fungus that grows tightly
on the inside of a rock.

The structure of my days, without you in them,
would hardly change at all.  I'd plug along
with a fortitude that I'm sure would make you proud,
and it would be like knowing
that never again would I breathe the scent of moss and pine
on the side of the forested mountain, or walk into
the ocean to be carried by a surge
of swelling sea -

                            or that there would be no heaven
when I die.  From moment to moment there would be
nothing in the world different, nothing different at all.

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Driftin'

Over a decade ago, when I was in high school, I started writing songs.  I don't play an instrument or write musical notation, but I enjoy composing lyrics, and often the tunes just come to me.  I've made up silly little ditties since childhood (a heartfelt ballad I loved to sing in the bathtub when I was about eight, on the subject of "Green beans, stretched across the highway for miles and miles," seems to have earned a permanent place in our family lore), but I believe this was my first serious attempt at songwriting.  I've written several dozen more songs since then, but "Driftin'" remains a favorite.

Technically, the song doesn't begin with the first verse.  It's meant to open with a repeated "Na-na-na," sung to the tune of the chorus.  I wasn't about to type it all out, but in the interest of completeness I thought I should mention it.  Oh, and there's meant to be a second voice joining the singer for both the opening "Na-na-nas" and the final chorus.

It takes some sorrow now and then
To show how love can grow again
Without a few unhappy scenes
We could not know what true joy means
So stand up tall when things go wrong
For struggling will make us strong
Will make us strong

CHORUS:
And I know we're driftin' apart
But you have a place here in my heart
Too much we've shared, too much we've cared
To let this fall apart
So can we make a new start
No matter how far we're apart

I am always gonna find my way right back to you
And you will find you're driftin' back to me

We must forgive and be forgiven
If we desire joy in livin'
The seed of love that we two hold
Can linger through the winter's cold
And when the warmer breezes blow
That little seed will grow and grow
Will grow and grow

CHORUS

You are always gonna find your way right back to me
And I will find I'm driftin' back to you

Well, it won't always be easy
But we can make it through
There are some depths in me
That I can only share with you
Well, I know you need your space sometimes
And yeah, I need some too
But this is not the end, you see
Because I know that you love me
And I love you

CHORUS

I am always gonna find my way right back to you
Yes, we shall find we're driftin' back to us