I walk a lot here in Southern Maryland, and sometimes (including today) I remember to take my Palm Zire 71 with me so I can take pictures. I've ended up taking a lot of pictures of tiny things, of dead and broken things, and as I walked I wondered "why?" My poems aren't quite as obsessed with death and failure and banality as the pictures I've been taking, but that stuff's surely there. Was I a true grandchild of Baudelaire and Duchamp after all, a younger cousin of Foucault and Derrida?
Nah. There's no way I know of to take a "pretty" picture with the camera on that thing (prettiness is petty anyway) and I can't pretend to beauty in a medium I only play with. The Palm does take extreme closeups — an inch or two — better than all but very expensive cameras, and death is always striking. So I do what I can with the tools I have. It's all any of us can do.
I hope my toolset for poems is better than what I bring to photography, but the poem I made after walking and thinking and showering isn't at all the poem I thought I'd make when I posted earlier today. It's clearly related to that still unwritten poem, though, and here it is:
Grant love is sanctioned lust, glory really shame,
All gods mere nothings formed to justify
Plunder and rape, and beauty just a name
For neurons firing as they're made to lie;
Acknowledge that we'll never know a truth
Worth naming truth and say we're always fools,
Or not quite fools, perhaps, but foolish youth
Reciting history taught in biased schools;
Agree that each of us must actually
Construct the world convenient to our use
And that that use is always death; agree
That any use will be construed abuse.
Accept it all — what difference should it make?
Should I despair for merely half-truth's sake?
First sonnet I've written in a while, and if it stays close to its present form I'll probably use the first clause for a title. I've put the pictures from my walks here. In Maryland I live at the door on the left of the little white building in the middle of this picture. Sometime this week I'll update my links for the blogs I found via the Stick.
8:17:11 PM 
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