While waiting

[lazariuk]

It was 38 years since you brought him to see me
In front of two witnesses he said I was whistling
We three told him it was the radio 10 feet away
The whistling was very happy, I wasn't at all sad
He couldn't let go and someone else shut the radio

You asked if I minded that he was there
In a way I could never understand
And I told you that I didn't mind

You said it was likely
He would always be there
I appreciated the warning

He invited me to his house once
And coffee was made and poured
And we took it out to the deck
That he made with his own hands

He got so angry with me
For sitting so comfortably
And looking out over the water
He wanted to know why I
Should enjoy so much
What he worked so hard to make

He did tell me once
That speaking with me
Was like a visit to the
Mos Eisley Cantina
From Star Wars
Not completely
Without it's charm
He laughed

You brought him to me
He is never a burden
As all you ever ask
Is just to let him live

[Rel Constant]

I like this one, but find it kind of disturbing. Appreciated the Star Wars Cantina, was overjoyed to see it in the movie, it reminded me of my favourite bar at the time.

[lazariuk]

I like this one, but find it kind of disturbing. Appreciated the Star Wars Cantina, was overjoyed to see it in the movie, it reminded me of my favourite bar at the time.

Thanks. Yes I can see how it might have a disturbing feel to it. I don't think he would have voiced the Cantina part before he had experienced the charm part.

The way that happened was that one day I just decided to have some fun and to make a few people including him laugh. I made some stationary for a fictitious legal firm and wrote a letter to the Canadian Government on his behalf and acting as his lawyer. I tried to see if I really understood things from his point of view and if I could make a case that he would agree with. He loved it. Even thought I think I called the firm something like Sleazy Lying Lawyers for People Guilty as Hell he was still calling friends and reading the letter out to them and everyone was laughing so much because I did seem to have really caught his point of view. The letter covered a very wide variety of things that were annoying him and I made the case that it was everyone's fault but his own.

I started getting calls from his friends - "write me a letter"

[Rel Constant]

Thank you for the amusing story. Did the poem arise from the document for the "Govt"? Did "he" love the document, the poem or both? BTW, is he a friend, relative or albatross, or some combination? No more questions, bye.

[lazariuk]

Thank you for the amusing story. Did the poem arise from the document for the "Govt"? Did "he" love the document, the poem or both? BTW, is he a friend, relative or albatross, or some combination? No more questions, bye.

Thanks for your questions. I am thinking about how best to answer them but maybe while you are waiting for my answer you can tell me why you found the poem to be disturbing.

[Rel Constant]

Hi and thanks.

RE: disturbingness in your poem:

Shadowy vagueness in first part; got the initial impression of perhaps threatening stranger, who required warning about from another person in poem, but never being told why.

I didn't find the second part disturbing. The ending was actually comforting.

Thanks for posting this poem.

[Rel Constant]

Sorry to bug you again.

Please do not answer my questions. Poems should not be interrogated after all, and whatever questions I have should just be part of the poem itself. Anyway. an idea just dawned on me about who the poem is about, except the whistling is mysterious.

Take it easy,

RC

[Lion of Lions]

Please do not answer my questions. Poems should not be interrogated after all,
RC

"I showed your post to a doctor (of literature)
he said it was just full of shit
he said you'd made up a proscription
there's nothing that's wrong with a crit."

Poems should be interrogated re(a)l constant(ly), otherwise the writer loses the chance to learn and improve.

Lion of Lions

"stick that thin green candle where it hurts, babeeeeeeeee"

[Rel Constant]

Please do not answer my questions. Poems should not be interrogated after all,
RC

"I showed your post to a doctor (of literature)
he said it was just full of shit
he said you'd made up a proscription
there's nothing that's wrong with a crit."

Poems should be interrogated re(a)l constant(ly), otherwise the writer loses the chance to learn and improve.

Lion of Lions

"stick that thin green candle where it hurts, babeeeeeeeee"

Hello LO, you do have a point, when it comes to criticizing. But when you've accepted a poem as a completed entity, you should not fire off questions about the content, whys and wherefores of mood and meaning. Poems can lead to questions that if not answered in the text, you might not get to know explicitly.

[Lion of Lions]

hey, all I wanted to do was use the word "proscription" in a "poem". I don't have any strong views on anything in this world (although, rather oddly, I have 5 strong views about other worldy matters).

Lion of Lions

There's no inhibition
on using proscription
(and no proscription
on using inhibition)
(obviously)

[lazariuk]

Hello LO, you do have a point, when it comes to criticizing. But when you've accepted a poem as a completed entity, you should not fire off questions about the content, whys and wherefores of mood and meaning. Poems can lead to questions that if not answered in the text, you might not get to know explicitly.

Hi Rel

I did write what i thought was a very detailed response to your questions. I also considered the concern you may have about questions being answered. It is not my intent in writing to be giving out names and addresses of who i am writing about even though I always try to convey abstract things by using experiences of real encounters. It is a fine line. They were your questions though and so if you want I can send my response to you and leave it to you to decide if I should post it. When you say that you think you know who it is about you are knowing more than me because I don't know people well enough to determine that.

[lazariuk]

except the whistling is mysterious.

I will either take away or add to the mystery.

The whistling was the following playing on the radio
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcIjUxfN5oU

I was two feet away from him and the radio was about 10 to 15 feet away.
He thought it was me whistling and that seemed to bother him greatly. I plus two others told him that it was playing on the radio. He wouldn't believe us and someone had to turn off the radio so that he wouldn't go crazy.

[Rel Constant]

Sorry I'v been flip-flopping about the questions. If you have written the answers please post or PM (you decide) Thankye.

[lazariuk]

Sorry I'v been flip-flopping about the questions. If you have written the answers please post or PM (you decide) Thankye.

Hi Rel

I appreciate the interest you have shown in what I have written. It has given me a lot to think about. I can understand what you mean by vagueness. Here is something that I have noticed.
What is important to me usually comes in waves. Abstract things that come in a concrete way.
With the first wave it is just strange. I ask myself "What the fuck was that?" and so in this case it was someone who I felt was very angry with me projecting something onto me that had nothing to do with me. That it was so was very clear. But a mystery. The first part of the poem was about that first wave. And nothing gets learned from it except that you know it happened.

The second time the wave comes it occurs to me that this has happened before and so I get the feeling that there is something required of me and I pay it more attention and try to see where I fit in and do what I can to participate according to the little information i have. The second part of the poem was about the second wave. With the second wave I am left thinking. Well it happened twice so maybe this is one of those waves things and now i am on the lookout for it to happen again. I can consider when it happened first and then when it happened second and get a sense that if it is one of those waves when i should expect it to happen again.

When it does happen again at the expected time then I know for certain that it is something meant for me.

That is usually when I start looking back at the previous times to see what were the commonalities and I can really begin learning.
I never get anything right the first time. I maybe get a little bit better the second time but still unable to act intelligently enough.
With the third time as I am still unprepared because I only realize it is a wave after it hits but I am not totally unprepared and I am a little less afraid to dive deeply into it and earnestly try to participate with the knowledge that it will be the fourth time around that will really matter.

It is the forth time around where I think the event can be experienced joyfully. The reason diamonds are so hard is that their molecules are joined in a tetrahedral way. Fourfoldness of experience I think is important and that people should not be too concerned that they don't get things right the first few times around because if it is meant for you it will come again. Maybe some luck out the first time around. I don't seem to be one of those. I mean maybe I am lucking out and doing what I was suppose to do but the joy seems incomplete.

To answer the questions that you had about the second wave:
The man seemed at first to be an enemy but he had heard from people he trusted that I could be very helpful to him and so one day he asked me to accompany him to his office to look at some computer problem he had and offered me a reasonable amount of money to do so. I fixed his problem and got my money. At the same time he was not shy about speaking about the kind of person he was which I found very distasteful. He had some attitudes toward women that were very troubling and I didn't like him at all. But since I had just demonstrated to him that I was able to solve his computer problems and since he had been told by others that my skills went far beyond computer skills he then gave me an invitation. He told me what others had told him about how I may be able to help him and asked me how i could. I told him that i didn't know and so the following is what he said " I don't know how you can help me but i trust the people who say you can and so I would like to pay you to hang around with me to try to figure out the way to do so" I accepted his offer.
He never specified how I was to help him and what his aim was but I am pretty sure that he was thinking that I could help him make a lot of money. That is how I had helped some of his friends.

I did what I could. He and a number of people worked out of his house and so i spent a lot of time there. Who i was seemed to be a great source of amusement for him and some others like the fact that while there I would spend a lot of time writing to a Leonard Cohen newsgroup and even talking about poetry. I guess it was funny but he was paying me to be doing it there at his place. It actually came in handy for him.

One time he was about to enter what could have turned into a very ugly pissing match with some other business man and i suggested that i write the man a letter. The man really didn't know what he was getting into and so I wrote him part of a leonard Cohen song. In my own words I wrote basically that the man I was writing for had men to do his biding and broken bones to teach the value of his pardon and the shadow of his reach. we never heard any more problems from him again.

Although I found his way of conducting himself distasteful I had much earlier in my life had an experience that told me in an abstract way that I don't get to scorn anyone. that there was no one at all deserving of my scorn and that I would behave exactly as anyone else would behave if i were to be in their set of circumstances. Of course when an intuition like that comes it does not come with the experience of all the specific cases but for me to discredit the experience I would need to have it demonstrated to me to my satisfaction that it is not so. That hasn't happened yet. The more that I look into anyone's set of circumstances the more assured I get that if I was that person having the experiences they were having I would be the exact same way. I think that is why he liked my legal brief. I did really try to see things from his point of view and to the extent that i was able to do so he seemed to be behaving in a very logical way. I thought there was a lie involved. The lie he was holding onto I think was that everyone was out to harm him while in fact everyone was there to help him.

I am not sure if i was ever able to help him in any significant way but I did get to see a woman help him and I am pretty confident that I helped her.

Did I answer your question. You helped me as I have changed the title to Waiting for the Forth Wave. Now I know what I am waiting for.

[Rel Constant]

Hi Jack, wow what an answer! It is definitely thorough. velly interesting. 4 waves. hmmmmm
thanks a million,
RC