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Mother Nature lover activist Jerry Weinststock, M.D., Psychiatry, retired, replied to yesterday’s Vultures, Bums, Murderers, Poets, Angels, Skeptics and Sniper II: Black Comedy in Paradise Pretend, compliments Key West Chamber of Commerce, Florida Keys Tourist Development Council, and their favorite politicians – ya’ll come!!! post at goodmorningkeywest.com:

Donna judges poetry for the Robert Frost event—she also knows everything —figure of speech
but we can’t afford to lose you—-justa part time job may be for a few bucks for a while could help-
I will inquire for you…!! this is serious—sincerely Jerry

I replied:

Thanks, Jerry, let me know if part-time job shows itself, maybe that would sway the angels to ease up on me a bit, maybe I’m dreaming, or, well, delusional :-).

Yes, this is serious; that’s what you and I have been saying for some time now to the vulture worshipers :-), not meaning my coin purse vulture :-).

During 2007-2010, when I had an efficiency apartment behind Wyland Gallery, my outside door facing then city hall, I judged Robert Frost poetry slams at Sippin’ Internet Cafe. I personally don’t like poetry slams, because more than the poems themselves are judged, and often the best performers, not the best poems, win. I tended to shade my scores toward the best poems :-), which sometimes made the overall scoring a little more interesting :-).

One especially talented young poet was there one time with his mother, and I gave him my top score, for his poetry, not for his performance. He and his mother had talked during intermissions about the poetry workshops he was attending and getting help with his poems, and poetry gurus he was studying under, and afterward I took him and his mother aside and told them that was not the way to do it; he just ought to write whatever poetry came to him, and if no poetry was coming to him, he ought to do something else.

Forget the rules of learning how to learn and write poetry, I told him; let it write you. That’s what “Dead Poet’s Society” was about, wasn’t it?

For further example, I said,

Who invented the rule that poetry must rhyme, have pentameter, be cast into verse, be politically correct or stay on the safe side of the fence? Yes, please tell me who invented that stupid fucking rule? Shorley it warn’t de maka ob de furst ston - udderwise der’d be no stons to brake all dem slavin’ ruls!

Don’t know if his mother could hear me, I wasn’t talking to her, but to her son’s soul. Hope it went in.

It was announced at last night’s Poetry Guild reading that there will be a juried contest for a poem about Tennessee Williams. Don’t recall the exact guidelines, but it struck me as contrived and constricting, rhymes with smothered, but maybe if I get the guidelines, something outrageous will come out of me. Tennessee himself was pretty outrageous, I hear tell, and not particularly nice to people all the time.

Heard tell just de udder day dat dey named de theater at de communionity college after old Tennesse, thinkin’, or hopin’, he wuz gonna bequest dat der college a heap ob money, but wen de Lawd took dat sly Tennessee, he hadn’t left dat college nothin’. I said, well, ain’t that a fine howdy do? He got what he wanted for nuttin’!

Maybe dat’s a poem, certainly it’s mightily poetic. Perhaps name it “Molten Tin on a Cat’s Head”, or “The Iguana Strikes Back in the Night!”

Fuck, Jerry, maybe they never should have made dat movie :-).

P.S.
Oh, I now remember, before I told the mother and her son the poem banishing rules, I told dem dis un:

I happened upon a mockingbird
singing its fool head off –
I asked it how and why it sang?
But all it did was look ahead,
all it did was sing.
It never turned to see if I was watching,
or listened for money jingling in my pockets,
or asked if I liked its music,
or expected a recording contract –
It was too busy singing
to pay any attention to me.
Thus did I learn
the greatest sin of all
is to kill a mockingbird.

Jerry wrote a little after midnight:

SLOAN: Harper Lee didn’t know Mockingbirds are aggressive if not brutal .
We are a registered with Cornell as an international ornithological site -have over 300 birds
sometimes -as well as white crowned pigeons-slightly after dawn
when they can see the birdseed and about 4:00 PM.
Mockingbirds can go after a mangrove snake dive bombing without mercy.
They wait till my tomatoes are just ripe and drill them to bits.
They can be killing machines …

I Will talk to Donna right now to keep her receptacles open job wise
for you —-who knows .??????

You are right Poetry is spontaneous -or it is stilled and not good.
other poets can give inspiration but not formal direction or teaching.
creativity the key to many aspects of life….Jerry
(some unsuspected.)

I replied this morning:

Ah, but Jerry - mockingbirds are what Mother Nature made them to be :-); to eat your tomatoes and torment you :-); to pester mangrove snakes; to sing other birds’ songs better than they sing their own song :-).

Mockingbirds also love to dive bomb cats, I learned from my wonderful cat, McPolecat, when I was still doing the lawyer thing in Birmingham. McPolecat liked to play with mockingbirds in the way Mother Nature designed McPolecat. Knowing mockingbirds loved to dive bomb him, he would lie on his back in our backyard, eyes almost closed, looking as if he was asleep, to taunt mocking birds to dive bomb him. And dive bomb him they just had to do, because that’s what they were made to do. And closer and closer they would get with each succeeding bombing run, until one of them got just close enough, and McPolecat snatched the saucy mockingbird out of the air with his claws and into McPolecat’s mouth - mockingbird sandwich, yum, yum.

To Kill a Mockingbird was, and still is, divine; doing the right thing, regardless. I knew when the poem fell out of me, the Mockingbird was Jesus. I was in a dark night of the soul, and I knew the poem had come to me at that moment to encourage me to hang in there, not give up. I knew the song was a template for my life ahead, in which I would live and sing that poem. I knew the poem was about the struggle between my capitalist father and where I was headed, which he could not comprehend. I knew I was the mockingbird, and, boy, did that turn out to include pestering a lot of people who did not like mockingbirds :-).

I found myself wondering yesterday after replying to yours, where I would find the energy for a part-time secular job? I have a full-time job, I work all the time, even when I’m asleep; it leaves me barely hanging on much of the time, and the pay is not of this world, although I keep thinking it would be nice to get paid money for doing it, if it is so important to some people that I keep doing it. For this world’s standard of measure is money, that’s just how it is, and that’s what Allen Meece tears to shreds in his poetry collection, Drifting in Paradise, which I reviewed in yesterday’s post, to which you responded.

My social security retirement benefit is $745 a month. One fellow signed into Paypal to donate $10 a month. I was awarded $17 a month for food stamps. That’s my total revenue. My rent is $300 a month, and how long I will be able to stay here is questionable. This is not a room my landlady historically rents out long term. It is her guest bedroom. She told me yesterday she needs the room for almost a week in March, for a guest. I can sleep on the living room couch. She needs the room again in June for a longer period.

The mechanic told me yesterday it took him a month to get my car pretty so someone might wish to buy it. I canceled the insurance on it yesterday. I will not become a vicious van dweller criminal, therefore. KOTS [Key West’s overnight homeless shelter] may be looming, for there is no way now I can live outside like I once did in Key West, and survive. The spirit load, which translates into a physical load, is too great; I am a lot older; my physical apparatus is a lot more worn out; and the local cops are a lot more vicious toward homeless people, mirroring their bosses in city hall, mirroring the fine one human family pretend who elected them.

But who knows? Maybe the great speckled mockingbird has a bombing run to make, which will alter my circumstances and put me back to only worrying about how I’m going to do, and survive, the incredibly heavy and rigorous 24-7, 365 job I have been given? I suppose at some level I applied for it, but I must not have read the fine print :-). And, yes, at moments this job is sublime, there is joy, but, I swan, it does grind, and grind, and grind, and perhaps when it’s done grinding, I will be polished. Meanwhile, the grinding continues.

Sloan

Paul Williams, formerly of Key West, now living in Homestead, Florida, where he can afford the rent, continued his and my discussion reported in yesterday’s post at this website:

Hi Sloan,

I am googling Allen Meece.
Enclosed, here’s one by Auden for you. Of all the poems Auden wrote, he thought that a couple had been “given to him”.
For what it’s worth, I think your buddy Weinstock’s sense of foreboding is entirely warranted. Neither Republicrats nor Communists are even close to being able to deal with the real Shotcallers.
They clearly were not in September of ’39. They’re not a whit more able today.

“September 1, 1939″
by W. H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,”
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

People - New York Glitterati for the most part, have picked this thing apart as though it were some piñata gigante Talmud text. Some … value packed contest to see who is most erudite.
Pinheads.
I’m not sure I can support the vague, slim assertion of hope in the final Stanza.
So what?
It’s the slow, relentless drift of the thing.
The immensity of the foreboding…
It is a POEM, after all.

Anyway, I think Weinstock is, basically, reading the global weather accurately. That only means: I agree with him.

Listen Sloan, I been loading too much stuff into your inbox the past few days. I ‘m gonna give it a rest, now, and just read other peoples’ stuff for a good while.
Will be looking for Meece today.

Thanks!

later

An old member of The Resistance sent:

From: HPowell___@aol.com
Date: Sun, 1 Feb 2015 15:49:59 -0500
Subject: Albequerque NM police article New Yorker Magazine this week
To: najagirard@yahoo.com; sloanbashinsky@outlook.com; tohara@keysnews.com; news@flkeysmedia.com; jstaletovich@miamiherald.com

They have been even more ruthless and uncaring than our people here. Wish I could send to you , but you should read it! Outstanding article and discouraging too.

I replied to Harry, copied to ALL:

Hi, Harry - here’s a link I found at the top of the page by googling “Albuquerque police New Yorker article”:

Shot by the Police in Albuquerque - The New Yorker

Shot by the Police in Albuquerque - The New Yorker

www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/.../son-decease...

12 hours ago - In the five years before Christopher’s death, the Albuquerque Police….. an article on investigative grand juries in the Albuquerque Journal, by a …

A really long article, comprehensive. I wonder if one person who read it decided to steer clear of Albuquerque? I wonder the same about the blue paper articles and CBS reports on the Eimers case causing one person not to come to Key West?

Maybe Albuquerque is the worst city in America for police out of control, but you’d get plenty of argument about that from Key West homeless people.

When I see cops go into frenzies, rush to a scene where they are not needed, I’m thinking, hmmm, mass demonic possession.

When I see cops behave like those cops in the Albuquerque and Charles Eimers cases, rough up an unarmed, not-aggressive person, I’m thinking, hmmm, mass demonic possession.

I realize people do not like thinking in that way, but that is the only way I can think about such rabid group behavior. I suppose psychiatrists might call it mass psychosis. But what it is, is mass demonic possession. Literally.

It’s not just confined to police departments.

Sloan

Harry replied to me, copied to ALL:

Good job. BTW NPR news did a seg this am re same - Eimers , Key Werst.

I replied to Harry, copied to ALL:

Harry, unable to find NPR/Charles Eimers case using Google. And at NPR’s website, nothing comes up when I enter Charles Eimers.

I keep wondering what kind of deal with KWPD Office Gary Lee Lovette was made behind the scenes, for him to agree to take the full rap? If that’s what he did.

There is a rule of evidence called “res gestae”, which includes spontaneous remarks made in the heat of a situation being admissible and having probity. I imagine the federal judge would have charged the jury that any spontaneous remarks made by Lovette, recorded by his taser, or made by him to other people, the heat of the moment, could be viewed by the jury as true statements. This is no news, of course, to the lawyers involved in the case, it’s basic law school knowledge.

What irony, the only cop who told the truth, albeit perhaps not aware he was tattling on himself when his taser recorder was running, is suspended 5 days for making it up. And the Police Chief, Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Grand Jury, State Attorney and Mayor Cates and the six city commissions, with straight faces, and even Lovette, stuck to the story that he made it all up.

What does that tell about all of those people?

Frankly, that’s what I expect from police departments, and I suppose I should have my head examined for hoping, albeit only slightly, the rest of them would have taken Officer Lovette’s damning remarks as the truth.

Refer back to my previous email to you:

“It’s not just confined to police departments.”

You and others up the Key Deer way ran squarely into mass demonic possession in the Cudjoe Regional Sewer District grinder pump boondoggle. Florida Keys Aqueduct Authority, Florida Department of Environmental Protection, Monroe County.

Maybe if you troll bigpinekey.com’s Coconut Telegraph blog with the right kind of sexy bait, you will get a strike from someone who knows how to fix mass demonic possession. I certainly don’t know how, and the angel bosses of me don’t seen inclined to step in and cast out any demons. Maybe they like watching the drama?

Sloan

Harry sent just to me:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Res_gestae

Res gestae

I replied just to Harry:

Tonight in Old City Hall, the mayor and six city commissioners will render their verdict on accepting the $900,000 Charles Eimers settlement, which came about after the city and its cops were tried and convicted by their own liability insurance carrier and its defense lawyers. I never heard of such a thing happening before it happened the other day in Key West. I wonder if the mayor and city commissioners will ever understand (cop to) what their insurance carrier and its lawyers did? Not if the devil can help it.

There were a couple of other bombing runs yesterday, which I wrote up last night, but my ensuing dreams didn’t leave me feeling the angel bosses of me liked it, nor the bombing run to Harry Powell, et. al, but since I’m under orders to be at the city commission meeting tonight, where the Charles Eimers settlement is on the table, I’m including the Harry Powell instigated bombing run in this post today, and if the angels who trained me to look at life so darkly beat me up for it, then maybe they will get into a frenzy and finish me off.

Meanwhile, it’s another sunny day in paradise pretend, where we ain’t freezing like lots of people up north are. I imagine Charles Eimers came to Key West to get away from freezing weather. I bet he was surprised to learn how cold it really can get in Key West. Stone cold. Dead.

sloanbashinsky@outlook.com