mervin

I always love your particular use of repetition. The emphasis lends a serious situation a kind of wry sense of humor, which is almost at the same time, an acceptance, coming to terms. I feel your personality in it. This is one of the things I can't do when I dabble, but only one.

Also, you have a lot of food/empty bowl images. Classical feel. My diss. was on The Golden Bowl, which made much of the emptiness of a flawed bowl. It carried the entire representational, figural burden of the main characters' marriage. It perpetually emptied itself. Henry James's idea came from some classical allusion, but I've forgotten it, and I'm too lazy to go look it up.

"The Long Moment"--I can't get that poem out of my head. I hear its lines when I'm doing my morning coffee. That's a good thing, isn't it? For the poem, anyway.

I'll break my own rule for this, because I recall my bowl image is derivative. I learned it from Mr. Joyce when I read "Portrait of the Artist", when I was a young man. If the poems bring you pleasure that is a good thing.

Are you sure this isn't a pop quiz?

Don't quote me but I think shyness is a kind of apprehension of others and more like a trait or personal property and shame is part of self as it appears for others. Both have internal and external features but shame seem to correspond to an external standard while shyness to an internal one.

I'll have to think about the semantics here a while. I know it is generally understood that people are "born" introverts or extraverts. Psychology literature, some of which I've edited for a living, says that extraversion and introversion are two of the most clearly inborn, immutable personality traits. They are not subject to conditioning the way other traits are. That's why some people are thrill seekers and others, like me, are "safety posturing" at all costs. Of course, it is a continuum, not binary.

I guess introverts aren't necessarily shy, though. Introverts, rather, are more comfortable by themselves and quickly come to sense that people "drain" them, drain their energy. That isn't the same thing as fear of people, or even apprehesion; it is just a tendency to "turn inward." Maybe what you mean by "shy" is what I think of as "introversion," or "reserve"; whereas, I do fundamentally link "shyness" to feelings of inadequacy, fear of people's judgment.

I think more introverts than extraverts end up being also "shy." Not sure why this would be, except what you said about there being "internal" and "external" features of all terms.

I guess there might be shame-based extraverts, even exhibitionist, too. Then we wouldn't exactly call such creatures "shy." I guess introversion is necessarily, but not sufficient, to make one "shy." Introversion (inborn personality) + shame (conditioning) = shy. That's how I typically use the language, anyway.

Of course, the internal/external distinction is always suspect, theoretically. In graduate school thay taught us that there was no such thing as a "self"--the day after they showed us there was no God. It is funny how automatically we fall into not just Plato's language of inner "self," as if there plainly is such an animal, but Freud's. I do think Freud more deeply influenced modern thought than anyone else--reaching even our subconscious habits of expression.

i wish i could get with you on the shame thing. i'm there intellectually, but emotionally i know i still give power away to other people, to allow them to control my emotions to some degree. this giving away power is alledgedly a choice. doesn't always feel that way!

but naked before god . . . yeah, doesn't phase me, no need to disclaim.

I'm a shame-based creature in almost every respect, and I goddamn sure don't choose it. I only cope with shame, overcompensate for it, on a good day. I don't even need other living people to kindle it. I have plenty of ghosts in my heart who can stike the flint. Like my drunk-ass dad who drank himself to death after promising me he wouldn't because he loved me. Somehow that made his death my fault = not lovable enough. Now l do "know" better, but memory burns in the gullet, sublimating the voice box and the neocortex.

Also, when I was a child I was born with crossed eyes. Because I had to wear a patch over my eye for years, no child in nursery school would so much as hold my hand when we went double-file down steep stairs to recess. I spent every fucking recess hiding in a huge pipe, a conduit to nothing but future construction that luckily never came. It was full of spiders I feared. My teacher found me hiding one day and taught me how to hold the spiders and not be afraid of them. It was preferable to people, and she seemed to know it, too. Only the teachers were ever nonvenomous humans, which is I guess the reason I went to school to become a teacher.

You can really fuck people up forever when they are children. By the way, there's no pill for that. I checked.

This is my cock.
It and your mouth used to be such familiar things,
My cock...your mouth...
My cock...your mouth...
My cock...
By process of association, I used to get a hard on,
every time you would speak or smile, and you used to do that
a lot.
My hand, I smell my fingers and I can't smell you.
I've had these four fingers so deep inside you,
I could hear your heart beat.
Remember ...
While I try to be bitter about your leaving,
bitter about all the times I grabbed you by the hair and
you tilted your head back and screamed as we came ...
Screamed...
Rememeber
While I try to be bitter about the smell,
we had to air out the rooms before we could entertain ...
Sex, it always smelled like sex.
I will try to be bitter because you stole it all when you left,
all except memory and this:
this is my cock.

03/01/1994 bpbpdb (bad poet, bad poet, down boy)

My mind is a place for transients.
Check in check out lovers weekends,
noone stays long, in the registers everyone is named jones.
Clean sheets, fresh towels tiny mints and sealed shampoos.
That's how I like it.
Lately its like some angry heavy band has come and stayed
and broken all the mirrors.
Closed for rennovations
and opened again almost magically.

"Sorrow floats."

Stanely Tucci - Undercover Blues

Sometimes poetry is just personal. And I have been journalizing for some 20yrs. This poem has come around again and I am no better equipped for coping now than then. Chasing what cannot be captured. But, I think I'm learning something.

i really enjoyed reading that, dear.