When Statesman gravely say "We must be realistic",
The chances are they're weak and, therefore, pacifistic,
But when they speak of Principles, look out: perhaps
Their generals are already poring over maps.

-Auden

a little merwin

The Unwritten

Inside this pencil
crouch words that have never been written
never been spoken
never been taught

they’re hiding

they’re awake in there
dark in the dark
hearing us
but they won’t come out
not for love not for time not for fire

even when the dark has worn away
they’ll still be there
hiding in the air
multitudes in days to come may walk through them
breathe them
be none the wiser

what script can it be
that they won’t unroll
in what language
would I recognize it
would I be able to follow it
to make out the real names
of everything

maybe there aren’t
many
it could be that there’s only one word
and it’s all we need
it’s here in this pencil

every pencil in the world
is like this

This is what I really do at the library

I just made the astounding discovery that Vader, as in Darth Vader, is actually in Microsoft Word’s dictionary (I won't go into explanations to try to explain how I stumbled upon this). So I checked some other names just to see, and these are all in there:

Skywalker
Baryshnikov
Gonzo
Pollack
Flintstone
Austen
Scooby (although, oddly, Doo is not)
Hemingway
Reagan
Capote
Audi
Marquez

A few that are not:

Auden
Kubrick
Kandinsky
Godard
Calvino
Nabokov
Doo (as mentioned above)

Yellow

She doesn’t like the color yellow. No, actually the color by itself is fine. Yellow is quite nice when looked at impartially, a little bright for her taste, but that is more a question of tone. It’s too bad that over the years, yellow has gotten a bad rap. Crayon suns and the smiley face are the two biggest culprits, with smiley probably doing more damage single-handedly than all the lesser images put together. Then there is the cowardly “yeller,” which she doesn’t know the origins of but doesn’t really count, it not being about the actual color, and anyway isn’t that a cowboy thing?

Yellow is the cheerleader, always the bright one of the bunch. All the other colors probably snicker behind yellow’s back, feeling slightly guilty because they are not the colors that decorate the children’s ward at the hospital. Not blue, not green, and certainly not red. Only yellow, candy-striper yellow, after-school volunteering yellow. The paler you go, the more goody-goody you get, from sunbeam right down to creamy lemon.

She can’t help but be biased by all this. For instance, she has no yellow clothing. Not a mitten or a t-shirt, not a crazy patterned sock. Yellow offends her with all its happiness, the blind kind, thrown in her face.

But go the other way; now that is interesting. Perhaps there are hidden depths to yellow, things you would never suspect. Go darker, and yellow possesses everything that the rest of the colors are lacking. Luminescence, a melancholy glow. A fading ahhhh into silence, that is gold. Not the shiny kind, but the kind that you suspect you can wipe away in thin layers. The dull gold of aged appliances, of long-dead birch leaves, of ribbon-thin rushes snapping in the wind.

The real depth of gold is not the yellow. It is the film that is draped over the yellow, like colored clay that’s been glazed. A thick ceramic mug, warm and heavy, filled with broth and too big for your young hands, your senses still intact, focused on the touch of the world.

The Sow & The Donkey Man

by Anonymous Beat Poet Extraordinaire

donkey run
don key rum
rumkey donkey run
rrun key rum