Forced to become blog literate

Forced to become blog-literate

There are times in ones life when you think that all before was prologue and what is to come is brand new. This is one of these times. My team mates think I should now set up my own blog from scratch. Sheeit! I am still a luddite, but here goes anyway.
Now, finding the picture I want:
OK. I've got Greta Garbo...Guess that tells me
all about myself, borderline Poofta. Now I try to bring in some more copy.


Recently, on the internet, lady genre writers have been excited over expressing passion in a character, perhaps so much passion that it may overshadow the plot.
Don't know about my own writing. I've certainly been described as an actual character on many occasions. But when it comes to my own characters, there is passion aplenty.
And there are times when emotions are so powerfully felt, they must be put in the shape of a poem, for here is where you can express these emotions.
Something published quite some time ago in a Town of Newmarket promotional magazine (I knew the editor personally, a lady):



Love Poem

He saw the teardrop on the rose
And again, he saw the teardrop on a rose
And he knew he could never melt the teardrop
And he knew this was already the end.

So he kissed he face of the evening wife
As he had kissed it before, in all its vaying forms
And again said hello to the precipice of silence
A precipice of silence
For his eighteen months of loving

The Queen of Swords is crossed over
And all the king's horses and all the king's men
Are trying to get her together again
like me
To no avail

Gigolo and Gigolet
This side of the lake of mutilation
Strike a match
And the hotel burns

There is only
this path of silence
As we dump our gods
And become like them

--Ivan

And here is the experience that gave rise to the poem, though I fear the writer, at the time was more experienced than talented:

YUPPIES THREW ME OUT

Life lays down strange ashpalt for men to tread on in the dark and I have just left Yuppie City.
She was gorgeous, but she was expensive, the other guy had more and so defeat has left me divided, anger was very much in my taste and I contained within myself all the bitter exhaustions of a 47-year-old man while maintaining the cockiness of a bright boy:
Yuppies threw me out.
I was on the edges of what first seemed a literary circle, new friends high on Jung and something mysterious late at night that I was not quite privy to until I met the one I loved, heretofore a clearspoken and articulate girl rolling her O's like an idiot and really strung out on wgat nust surely have been heroin.
.
Life lays downs strange asphalt and who knows whoat people do in Hell, especially when the other man was driving a new BMW, mustachioed Italian, his Newsboy hat on, tweed jacket with elbow patches, the pimp outfit, and you were still stuck in second gear.This was all so far ahead of you, they and their hiss of long cigarette lighters, the spoons, the garbled talk, as if they were driving a bottlemobile.

There is an old B movie abut voguish modern people who were allowed to party all the days of their lives, it seemed, till you realized that down below, there was a vicious mutant ant colony that would snare the revelers, one by one and stick them into a cocoon for later, casual devourment.
Yes, they were all down there south of Finch Avenue where the grass was dream grass and women would come and call themselves lonely.
How does it come to a man just hitting his prime, at the top of his professional form, in the middle of his success to be snared on a path that must surely be evil and only the strength of the mad can save him as the Chicklety
smell of crack is high upstairs and the one you love in the clutches of a beast?
The middle class can sometimes be a class of bozos.
They always seek definitions, rathere than seeing things for what they actually are. They try to define pornography, for instance, withouth realizing its palpable effect on them and other people; they toy with concepts of personal freedom without realizing that outright pimps snare beautiful women ever day, even from the apartments where they live. It's not all heaven in those gated communities, but more like like wiveswaping and uppermiddleclass peeping tomism while while the beat goes on and the roses fade.
An old Russian proverb says untruth did not begin with us, nor will it end with us, nor will it end with us; praying kneads no dough.
I had no dough, prayed often, and Yuppies threw me out.
Can it be, can it just be that money is all there is, that people will prostitute themselves for it, live in hell for it and worhip is as the newly rich do, even unto the gates of organized crime? For that is the sinister "safety net": At the bottom of the drinking the sex and the drungs and the open marriages are the Masters who make the rules for the wise men and the fools in a lower branch of Yuppiedom, the unholy collusion of Big Business, Big Government and organized crime.
It was an expensive education for an aging don still high on literature, a onetime luminary at the college, but now known by all to have gone more than a little to seed, especially by the company he was keeping.

First came the unofficial literary circle, then the intruduction to an "open marriage" (a strange concept to me in those times, even though everybody seemed to be doing it), and then the inevitable jealousy, the pain and the final revulsion. What a shitty documentary I was in.
Nevertheless, it was the Yuppies who threw me out.

At first I resisted. One-on-one relationships were less complicated, the only ones that would work in the end.

After the first contact, I stayed away-- chaste fiance' , hah-- dated no one. I wanted my love all to myself, not ad hoc, not in some strange daisy chain on the edges of Hell.

Until the frightening realization came to me that evil was just as much in me as in them and that I was beginning to love this woman very much and would almost gladly go to the ends of hell for her.
And she had told me that I was not the only one.
A half-fucked fox in the middle of a forest fire.

She bought me a toaster one day and I did not understand.
She paid my rent one day and I did not understand.
She said she wanted "out" and I did not understand.
And now the Beast is with her and I finally understand.

I did not have the guts or the intelligence, dumb prof, to go through the depth of Hades to rescue her and now must go through another hell of considering how weak I had been, how bad my timing had been. I was no better than those phonies at the literary circle, that collection of poseurs and wife-swappers and the fault was all mine.

She passed my door on night sobbing.
She had been beaten up and was high on blow.
I raced out the door to be with her, but she was gone in her bright grey BMW.
Even in the world of l988, demons, witches and warlocks still inhabited the landscape.
She had not been crying for me, but for her demon lover, of whom I somehow was now a part.
I stood there high on German exhaust, considering a badly remembered poem.

I had a mother and a father
Who I knew were mine.
I had perfect eyesight,
so I could see the imperfections of nature.
I had wisdom
that lay like an asp
at the bottom of the well

And when the unworthy plrince came
I turned
and in all my beaty
Rejected him.

I stood there in the rain like some old Hemingway and realized that the asp in the bottom of the well was a guy richer, smarter and sexier than I was.
I couldn't bllame Yuppies. I couldn't blame the drugs. I couldn't blame orgznized crime.
I could only blame myself, for I needn't have gone downtown for my answer.
I only needed to stay in Newmarket and pray in the rain.

--Ivan