Certain Words

Apart from their unfortunate attachments, two of my favorite words are syphilis and diphtheria.  Their mellifluous sounds roll off the tongue. However, their baggage consigns them to the unutterable column. Such a waste of lyricism.

Emergent, is another word I admire not for saying but for what it contains. It has urgency, even emergency. It is dynamic, seeded with something new.

Also, hiding in emergent is the word merge. I’m all for it. The way column A drifts over to column B. Sweet and sour, hot and pungent. Some films, seemingly big, are also notable for small moments. Amid the high decibels and extravagant (extra vagrant) production, are artful scenes, possibly memorable.

Could it be that categories are our feeble way of trying to organize the chaos?

 If you think you know me, you don’t know the half. Apple-pears and fusion food. Hybrid gender. Hybrid cars. Quantum particles, Quantum waves. 

For the unknowing eye baseball is boring; football, brutal and basketball is swagger. For those of us with arrested development like myself, basketball is balletic, football is chess with fractures and baseball, life itself.

When Donald first reared his artificial head I saw Bozo the Clown, P.T. Barnum, then Jim Jones, Huey Long and finally Adolf or Benito. The question still remains: handcuffs or straight jacket or both? His mouth is a weapon of mass destruction. The soulless manipulator and mindless sociopath have merged, and we must now confront our underbelly.

In the literary world a memoir is likely to have as much fiction as a novel and a biography can be cherry-picked into a hagiography. Some narrative poetry reads like a conversational anecdote.

I started writing poetry about fifty years ago in between labels as a pharmacist. After my work found its way into literary journals, I began to question what made this a poem and not a paragraph. There began the merging. Some words sing; some need line breaks but others shed the stanza and are comfortable as prose or blogs. There may be poetry hiding in the sentences.

My first book is entitled The Marriage of Everything. I see life as a web of connective tissue. The rose with its petals; the rose with its nettles. Life can be both enhancing and death-defying. The two in a melodic dirge. The Streets of Laredo. Mack the Knife.

In the merging, what emerges is not necessarily progressive. Maybe we needed this historical moment to pause, value what we cherish and experience its fragility as the fabric trembles. Latent strains of racism and misogyny have been uncaged and legitimized. The malady of our times is as malignant as syphilis or diphtheria.