Diner

 

Gift

I must learn

But need the desire

I’ve so much fuel to burn

Just give me the fire

 

               Wearily I trod

               Painfully I plod

               Though I know not where

               Perhaps I’ll find it there.

 

               It may be long

               But right or wrong

               There might be

               What interests, me

 

               I’ll tire along the way

               And probably want to stay

               By some quiet stream

               Lost within a dream

 

Yet I must learn

And need the desire

I’ve plenty to burn

Just give me the fire.

10/29/1966

                                                        Divination

Only once you may come upon it

Or maybe many times

Perhaps in a moments thoughts

Of Idleness

In a color

In a mood

In an afternoon leisure

In  restless night

Through the promptings of another

Or your own,

Or in a friend’s parting.

Once it may happen

And once is enough

                                                                            10/13/1966

Preference

A picture is worth a thousand words

A scene as many pictures

A fallen yellow leaf affords

Ten times a thousand scriptures.

 

A look belies a hundred caverns

A sentence cannot reach

By mask or gesture a knower learns

What volumes will not teach.

Better to see with your own clear eye

The frost upon a fold

Than idly submit and take away

What another might behold

A grazing steer of common stock

Or moss upon a stone

Outlive a fossiled rock

Or prehistoric bone.

A pebble or a grain of sand 

May gracefully attend

Forgotten fables of every land

From start until the end.

                                                                                            undated (1966)

Bookworm

Books and books, books high and low crowd me. I am stuck in a cardboard box full of books. Munching my way through the bindings and the pages, the lines are choking me, cloaking like the web of a spider, a spider that looks and never is seen, that spins her threads for the sages.

1966

Advantage at the cost of another's well-being is evil. Privilege that gives another the same privilege is far, and the only way to preserve the ultimate survival of that system of privilege. A system consists of two parties. If one of those parties comes out with less than he went in within the interaction, he will no longer support that system of interaction. 

The black man has entered or become put into the situation and finds that more often than not, interaction means loss, comparative to what the white man gets for the counter. The white man often took his pride as well as his services, both to bolster his own self-estimation and ego. 

1966