NEVER BORED

Don’t say anything evil Don’t say anything good Be flowers Be flowers In these troubled times smoked out with coal Be roses and lilies

Wandering off under those astrological signs charted just for you, my quiet trekker—all those houses & planets so perfectly straight-faced but still baffling at birth—don't think badly of me when I'm dead & you've gone deep into the distance of love tangles, moneyed interests, & old-fashioned commutes—into life in other words—I did what I could for you, knowing it might not be enough—I see now that I can't save you from suffering, & trying to hurts if I'm not kind. Tho I still want your life to be untroubled, & am afraid for you, a fear made out of my own fear of a future I can't control— the world so often a human heart that eats itself— places like New Orleans the Swat Valley Fukushima— the names of those remote destinations for film crews and symposium panels are places people die native to those regions & out to kill or defend life from itself—there is so much misery there that refuses to call itself misery & that sees itself instead as the unimpeachable power of a righteous day. And there are criminals & dunces elsewhere— hideous partyline whips, Saxon in outlook and proud of it—there are the bodysnatched and the inane candy-stripers & the greedy and the martini narcissists high on the rising year— but let's take the long view: these are not your true companions, & out of my reach your life will make itself in struggle & love perhaps dependent on the strength that will come if I only let go when you step out the door as hazel-eyed now as always & maybe more so this morning in slate-gray Gore-Tex.

When I say “idleness,” I don’t mean doing nothing. I mean building time into your busy life to do things that don’t have a clear goal, with the understanding that breakthroughs will happen when you least expect them.

Our unpaid hours are filled with “networking”, fielding emails, constructing work-related online identities, boosting our professional affiliations and always being available in nebulous ways. As we nurture the professional relationships that substitute for friendships, our lives become ever more hijacked by employers, and a sense of vulnerability and guilt about our productivity.