What changes is experience. Events stay the same, locked in cyclical motion, but man forgets and dies. We are molded to feel loss of opportunity, though the reality is that there was never another course of actions on can take. Acknowledge that what differentiates man from his competitors is that he is the catalyst of change in his environment, rather than his environment being the catalyst of change within him. Thusly, he has become so adaptive he stagnates and worries about possibilities beyond his control.

I spent an hour on the phone with my friend, because she was upset, “just for old time’s sake”. See, she’s been worried lately that thinks aren’t ever going her way, and that she can’t find happiness. She moved interstate to the country’s capitol city, she’s alone;

no friends,

no family,

no pets.

It took a lot of time for her to learn that things weren’t going to be any different for a while: “No one gets me like they do back home”, she says, “I want everything to go back to how it was, where I could walk down the street in my summer dress and not worry about traffic-stuck cars honking and pollution and shore-leave sailors and street hawkers, or guns and mobs, car accidents, muggers, public holidays and bus timetables!” I understand that, quietly, I tell her that.

It’s always something interstitial with her, though – too fat, too thin, too tall, too ugly, too white, too stupid, too maid-of-honour-bridesmaid-never-the-bride-backseat-vomitorium-too-much-vodka-and-punch – she doesn’t want to hear it. She wants to hear herself and my familiar voice.

She’s not happy.

Rich and powerful men have spent years cultivating it.
Gathering
elements
of joy.

But herein lies the fallacy – the harder you try, the less happy you’ll be.
So why try at all.

So a man will wonder:
what is the worst weapon of all?
And he observes
missiles, pens, planes, bacteria,
fire frenzy ash destruction,
the lens of a camera,
the bottom line,
the dotted line,
the barbed wire fence.
A bomb has more forms than flames, he knows.

So an old man will know:
man himself is the weapon.
He has grown to see his friends
live and die,
the vapour trail sizzle in the sky,
and observe -
man flies the jet,
man signs the plan,
man picks the target,
and the catastrophe left
is evidence.
So it was they laid blame on
God and Country,
but cast them off for peace and sanity.
A man has more excuses than sins,
he knows.

I’m a writer that works extemporaneously, so I don’t relish the idea of going through whatever I’ve written and picking through it. I do this very specifically because I feel that rehashing and disturbing what I’ve put out tampers with the product that I’ve created – for the same reason you can’t change how a fleck of paint hits a canvas by going back and painting over it. By working off the cuff and in a more stream of consciousness manner, I also think that I can capture a more resonating item for the reader.

In the interests of experimentation, however, I am willing to sully my pristine works with the vile canker of annotation. This is a piece that I haven’t published on the site yet, but will later – I’ll post the original here, then the edited version beneath:

“So a child will ask:
what is a weapon?
And he learns
that a weapon is a stone
or fist in any form
or a gun and its trigger
whether it hooks to a thorn.
A rose has more thorns than petals, he knows.

So a man will wonder:
what is the worst weapon of all?
And he observes
missiles, pens, planes, bacteria,
fire frenzy ash destruction,
the lens of a camera,
the bottom line,
the dotted line,
the barbed wire fence.
A bomb has more forms than flames, he knows.

So an old man will know:
man himself is the weapon.
He has grown to see his friends
live and die,
the vapour trail sizzle in the sky,
and observe -
man flies the jet,
man signs the plan,
man picks the target,
and the catastrophe left
is evidence.
So it was they laid blame on
God and Country,
but cast them off for peace and sanity.
A man has more excuses than sins,
he knows.”

“What age a child learns to ask,
‘What is a weapon?’
is too early to know,
but he learns so fast what forms it can take:
the fist so fast,
the stone so hard,
the stick so sharp,
the gun so deadly.
He learns those words so early, they have no meaning anymore.

When a boy becomes a man, he has used a weapon,
And he’s felt its weight in his hand and the look has been in his eye.
He asks ‘What weapon is worst?’
He dreams in his boxes about burning and boiling,
about cutting and killing,
about bombing and billing.
These words he tries to master,
Both in theory and in hand,
But the farther he goes,
The closer he gets to the truth.

The man grows to become old.
He has met his future and has nowhere left to go,
and he knows,
Man is the worst weapon.
Man always signs the papers that order trigger squeezes,
Man always pilots the planes and chambers the bullets,
and Man always knows how to shift the blame.”

It’s not up to me to say which is better. I’ll collect some opinions.

This is a real life example that happened to me two days ago, stemming from an incident that happened months beforehand where I’d submitted a poem to a poetry contest. Regardless of its crappy quality, I put my shoe in and put in a modified poem of mine from earlier in the year, and then promptly forgot about the whole incident.
Flash forward to about a month or however long it took for the next school newsletter to come out, and I see the faces of my fellow applicants and the names of the accepted poems to be passed onto the Dorothea competition. I wasn’t there, but that was fine because I never thought I’d be. I told my friend the chain of events, that I hadn’t gotten in or heard back and she said something to the affect of:
“Well, what do they know? Besides, it isn’t your kind of poetry, really. Think about how many poetry competitions Bukowski entered and how many he won. Forget about it.”
That’s all fair. She makes good points. She’s a good friend of mine, I was happy with the answer, I forgot about it.
Again, we move forward, this time to two days ago. I’m sitting with my teachers/supervisors for SDI and it somehow comes up in the conversation while I gave my terrible presentation that I actually had gotten into the Dorothea contest – in fact, the school’s judges liked my submission and I’d been invited to attend a small photo opportunity for the school newsletter for the article that was advertising the poets who had been selected; I had not turned up, so I was discounted.
I’m not going to complain here about the matter of me not being informed that I had an event to attend, and as such could not – this isn’t the place for that, and I’m sure they exhausted all possible avenues of communication to try and get in touch with me (after all, they only had my personal email address, my school email address, my house’s address, my personal phone number, my home phone number, my class schedule, all of my teachers within a call, my parent’s corresponding forms of contact, my emergency contact’s information and months of time – I mean, they aren’t miracle workers), so I just rolled with the punch and finished up the presentation. I told the same friend of mine that I had told beforehand about what I’d found out, and this is what she had to say:
“Fucking idiots.” Verbatim.

The same idiots that I submitted my work to? We get back to the convenience of dismissing criticism. If these people are idiots, why would I want to ask for their approval in the first place? Why listen to anyone if you can just dissolve their opinions.

Alfred Whitney Griswold said that the surest weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. That’s the ethic I try to bring into practice.