On Sadness
I noticed something strange and beautiful about the word “sad.” It’s the only emotion word that you can use for a general situation and also for how a person feels.
You can say “I’m sad.” And when someone dies or love is gone you can say “It’s so sad.”
You can’t say (about a situation) “It’s happy” or “It’s anxious” or “It’s ashamed” or “It’s angry.”
I don’t do sad very well. It seems to be the hardest emotional state to accept and even to honor or celebrate.
I want to leap immediately from “I’m sad” to “The world is ugly and the people are sad.”
Or “I’m sad so the world is fucked up so I want to blow up the world.”
Or “I’m sad and then it will pass and I’ll be happy again.”
You always asked: What do I feel like doing? I always ask: What should I be? Those are two very different ways of being sad
or happy. That’s why your death fell like a sea on me. Sadness flopped violently at my feet
then it died too, and now the remnants of sadness lie scattered about the situation, like bones and salt.
On Beauty
Firstly, you are beautiful,
moonfaced brothers and sisters.
But after that, what
is not open to question?
To pick up the torn wing
and paperclip it onto the angel
is a distortion rapidly done.
Distortion is beautiful,
and loud hearty laughter
as of the gods.
Beauty moves upwards from the leaf,
downwards from the root.
Beauty is quietly
born from boredom
into fabulousness or plainness.
Don’t ask whether it exists.
It’s a redundancy to say real.
Beauty is truth? Don’t ask.
Ask for inner resources unlimited.
Ask for a goldfinch feather
in a balsawood box.
Look not at what is loved
but what stimulates and soothes.
Brothers and sisters,
are words beautiful or ugly
because we mean them
so very deeply?
