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Counting calories
is bad for your health:
It'll give you high blood pressure
Reveling only in paucity.
Running when you don't want to
is bad for your health:
It'll destroy your knees and hips
To feel dragged rather than drawn.
And what did you learn in kindergarten
If not that there's more to the world than
number lines? That ABCs are for
screaming
in the worm-thrashing dirt and the butterfly wind?
Stepping on the scale
is bad for your health:
It'll give you cancer
thinking less of you is
more the answer.
Feeling guilty about a day off
is bad for your health:
It'll swell you allergic
thinking fat is only a holiday
and not also a purpose.
And who the fuck are you to
judge a Spring-ripe berry pie?
When a soft hug, snuck in from behind,
feels so good, besides.
That habit of stretching and
weight-swinging
is bad for your health:
It'll make you tense
sweating and groaning, same and same –
flushing without coming.
Talking about how you've stayed healthy
is bad for your health:
everything meta-analytical degrades
itself, cannibal,
like dream-thinking “not real”;
like an omphaloskeptic Ouroboros
And everybody dies.
To chase away the ants and flies
is bad for your health:
To cry without too laughing
on my rotten face,
when it finds a place
to not-move after
so long moving
moving moving,
is bad for
your
health.
* Thanks David K. (dry pool & berry pie), Julie P. (head-over-heels), Rob K. (military press), Brigitte H. (sick man in repose), Jomeline B. (sucker shark) Hilary D. (San Ynez grapes), and Chris “the photog” Hansen (quail – CA valley) for making this collage full.
ReplyDeleteA poem after Garrison Keillor's reflection on drinking and smoking (how TO and how to NOT - well worth reading), originally from the September issue of Men's Health, which I read in the re-print “Of vice and Men” in the 5 October 2012 edition of The Week. If I had to paraphrase: “So much of life is inherently set; people smoke to 100, people die in their jogging vests. What is under our control? Passion, sensation, the vapors of our soul.” – 25 April 2013
In a world where everything under the sun, and even the sun itself, will give you cancer, the most important thing in life is pleasure. I agree that mankind is too fascinated with the physical aspect of life, where your weight or the circumference of your biceps is more important than your genuine happiness. We spend so much time refining our image that we no longer have control over ourselves. Our actions are decided by the thoughts of strangers, which we assume to be judging us by the imperfections that we fabricate and give meaning to. I especially like your statement that we are “cannibals” for living this lifestyle. It carries a lot of weight; exposing to us the sad truth of our lifestyle. A lifestyle where we devour ourselves physically through eating disorders, and psychologically due to low self-esteem results in a life of misery; a life that we actively try to extend through diets that lower our cholesterol and exercise routines that are guaranteed to shrink our waistline. But this results in a life without hope, and if you have nothing to live for, why live at all?
ReplyDeleteI agree: ethical hedonism is due for a comeback (or a first-coming, or maybe just the meager but resolute cult following that it has always had).
DeleteThis poem struck my interest, especially since sienzenso is in the title, which is a ceremony I have read about before. But your poem brought a new light to the idea of living funerals by relating it to our culture. Your poem, as discussed in previous comments, explores the catch 22 of our recent culture, where we are in a never ending cycle to improve ourselves to be happy, yet this is just a technique of procrastination, because if we keep trying to improve ourselves, we loose time to actually achieve happiness. But the living funeral is a ceremony with the purpose to celebrate life and the happiness you have achieved during life when near death. If one is stuck in the never ending loop, which makes us the embodiment of Ouroboros, which you mentioned in the poem, we have no need to hold a living funeral since life was spent trying to improve oneself to eventually achieve happiness(which was likely never fully achieved). This leaves us with one question that we need to ask ourselves: "If I hold a living funeral before I die (some time in the future), will I have anything to celebrate?"
ReplyDeleteEmily, you pointed out the important part of the living funeral perfectly: that accepting the end of your life while you are still living allows you to pass judgement on the past, and decided if you wasted your life or not. And the important thing that I think JK's trying to point out is that by "counting calories" or obsessing about health in any way, we are trying to fight of death, "chase away the ants and flies" from our decaying bodies, trying to make something alive that was always going to die. So not only are we wasting precious time in our life by worrying, but we are worrying about something that is inevitable anyway, and therefore, completely fruitless.
Delete(...and if you spend your life distracted from the essential value of living, doesn't that make your life one big suffocating box? i.e., a living funeral :) )
DeleteThe idea I am getting from this poem is that one should not waste his or her life worrying about how they may come off externally, or feeling guilty for taking care of himself or herself. Personal happiness is paramount, and it should not be overtaken by such miniscule concerns and thoughts. I feel as if one of the main ideas of this poem is summed up in the line "It'll destroy your knees and hips to feel dragged rather than drawn." At least for me, the fact that if you force yourself to do something you are not willing to do, it will only destroy what is paramount - your personal happiness. Additionally, the first few lines at the beginning of the poem express the idea that associating and defining yourself with numbers will only add more heaviness into your head, thus making you feel worse when you have the option not to. The title reflects the people who fall into this numbers trap, since they live their lives not actually living. They are basically killing themselves with unnecessary labels.
ReplyDelete