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The Favorite Beach

They turned me on and off like a light bulb.
Lying in the surgical stage with needles
And tubes wired inside me.
I heard the anesthesiologist say
"Think about your favorite beach."
My mind went to several in a second or two,
And then went blank.
Next I knew I was in a different room
With a cast about my repaired ankle-
A simple job of cut, sew, and staple em’ up.

How long was I dead to the world,
Dreamless and dead as stone?
An hour, a century?
Then suddenly I was alive.
Thinking of my favorite beach.

So this is death.
Nothing to fear.
It does not hurt.
There’s nothing there.
Nothing.

My life will end in the middle of a sentence,
Like everyone else.
I don’t know why I ever thought
It would be different.
I might be thinking of favorite beaches
Trying to choose the best.

But I cannot decide-
The one in Tasmania,
Called Wine Glass Beach...
The one on that island
Near Zanzibar, Mnemba...
In Rockaway Beach Brooklyn
Making love under the moonlight...
The one in...

Does it matter?
Now that I am alive again,
Nothing matters more.

Editing stage: 

Comments

Many years ago a friend of mine died and came back to life
I asked him about the experience, his response was that life was overrated
Conversely my wife died when only a child and her experience was a powerful out of body experience as a traveling body electric
and she says that she chose inexplicably to return to her life which all and all was a repugnant experience
well I ponder the imponderables like an idiot
What is death and what is sleep
Does the soul in death experience sleeping and wakefulness?

Love the writing, No I don't want to quibble. pinch, niggle, ankle bite in a critique
I never ask others to be what their not
Your straight and true unless you feel stuck and in search of something
else
I'm curious.,
Do you feel like your missing something?
Do you think your work is memorable or does it even matter to you?
Do you feel an absence of some ineffable something?
Do you feel refined out of existence with nothing to say but need to keep saying it?
If not are you in stasis/
Or what??????

The Best always Z

I liked the theme and the message "fear not death" the way I read it...
....................................................................

raj (sublime_ocean)

yes, but also a roundabout way of urging the importance of feeling alive.

Thanks for coming around!

Eumolpus
I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance
ee cummings

author comment

I think the poem is as much about death as living, living as life matters. Certainly, the recent experience of anesthesia spooked me. It feels like you are waking from death, not a sleep.

Of the many (many) people who have influenced my life, shaped me, is Jiddu Krishnamurti. If you don't know him, check him out without any preconceived notions. He is the most honest human, and most powerful mind I have encountered. You don't "follow" him, as he would have hated that. He is a guide to spiritual completeness without god, without fame, asking deeply all those questions you ask. To some I have found answers to, to others I am a seeker.
One thing Krishnamurti stresses is the need of relationship with other people. We do not exist alone, and as humans both need and define ourselves through contact. So I am thankful for your presence.

I was an obsessed poetry writer from ages 18-25, then took up classical guitar to fill the hours with my need of artistic fulfillment. (I am a professional) I picked up writing a few years ago at 68 when I retired from my business (graphic arts printing and dyeing) and became again obsessed, with now time to write and play. I did not plan it.I just started writing, and now do so every day.

I had been an avid reader of poetry always, it's what I read. Do I want fame? Only after I know I have created my own voice which has great literary merit. Poetry is an art, which requires craft, and it might feel good to know others will read you when you are gone. But I am not there yet, but after a few years of craft, hosting and attending workshops I am a little on the path. It may be thought of as a goal, as the force which accompanies the need to write. If so it's a good thing, and whether I achieve it or not will not diminish the act. Art is its own religion, the worship of imagination.

Do I think I have something to say? I feel I am filled with paradox, opinions, an intense love of nature, and some artistic imagination which comes out in some poems. More importantly poetry reaches into me in its way, as does music. The words, the sounds, the images...

In the death scene with Eumolpus in the Fellini Satryicon, he is lying on a steaming landsacpe in sunrise, saying to Encolpio:

"If I were rich like Trimachio
I'd leave you an estate or a ship
But I can only leave you
What I had myself
I leave you poetry.
I leave you the seasons
Especially spring and summer
I leave you the wind, the sun
And the sea, the good sea.
I earth is good too,
The moutains, streams the rivers,
And the great clouds that float by
So solemn and light
You'll look at them and perhaps remmeber
Our brief friendship.
I leave you the trees
and the nimble creatues therein
I leave you love
tears, joy and stars.
Sounds, songs, noises
The voice of man
Which is the most
Harmonius of music
I leave you...."

I feel my heart, I feel the force of life when I read that. That's why I write.

Eumolpus
I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance
ee cummings

author comment

Yes to Krishnamurti, and arcane initiations, yes to Krishna and the Gita, yes to the Vedas, yes to the Kabbala, yes to long hours of meditation, yes to being conceptualess, and being full of conceptions, yes to the occult. to Alister Crowley and the Golden Dawn, yes to Astrology, and a cosmos of relationships and correspondence's with people and things

Yes my friend,
having said that the last time I read Krishnimurti I was 16 or so in a small room that smelled like the slight stench of piss and wet dog tongue circa 1968 on the lower east side ironically near mad with loneness and studying art at the art students league
I adore music and always wanted to sing very badly and in fact do sing very badly :O

Like your self i have been aspirational, but in the visual arts, sculpture, painter, printmaker and with my wife of 35 yrs have a boutique art publishing company in Florance Mass
I never felt like I could write but started about 3 yrs ago after swooning over William Blake
I have no idea where I stand as a writer but it gives me enormous pleasure to write. My learning comes from reading and some process of assimilation, word searches etc. a kind of emotional learning. The only thing that gives me the confidence to write is to reserve my right to be stupid. Content wise, more than anything for the most part is my fascination / obsession with women in the most perverse of ways escalated by websites that featured the darkly erotic. the fetishy underbelly of eroticism , sex, death, and regeneration
Or Aphrodite chained in a torn dress drooling as a no taboo submissive in a feral swoon with Hades ( eroto comatose lucidity) and have the great pleasure of the company of many women who are of the same, insane predisposition, YAHOOOO!!!

So on that note ill take my leave with this little girl on girl amusement and I hope it puts a smile on your face..
I very much appreciate your kind friendship, and luminance

TWO LADIES
two ladies
dressed to kill
give me a shiver
give me a thrill

they kiss each other
their mouths pink and bright
tender and cruel
a kiss then a bite

breasts brush soft
vulva's get wet
hands grope panties
drools like a pet

nipples explode
spasms and creams
hands touching thighs
sizzling dreams

oh they love
all candy and cum
shadowed eyes
lips like rum

ones a slave
the other her queen
then they switch
kiss and scream

its hotter then hot
a burning cunt sun
melting butter slits
a tempest of fun

doing the rumba
pretty dance feet
swaying hips
gawd its sweet

lovely behinds
moving in place
what i want always
is booty mouth face

A nice composed work and to the point. Erotic and well crafted.

The most outrageous book I ever read of sexual debauchery is by the great (GREAT) French poet Guillaume Apollinaire "The Debauched Hospodar". Raunchy is an understatement. Page after page...
For poetry, I would suggest works by Sappho, Francois Villon, 15 century French poet (The Ballad of Fat Madge, a madam of a whore house), and "Sex" by Stefan Brecht, a beat poet.

A little off the topic of my poem, but that is how comments go from time to time.
All good stuff

Eumolpus
I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance
ee cummings

author comment

A nice composed work and to the point. Erotic and well crafted.

The most outrageous book I ever read of sexual debauchery is by the great (GREAT) French poet Guillaume Apollinaire "The Debauched Hospodar". Raunchy is an understatement. Page after page...
For poetry, I would suggest works by Sappho, Francois Villon, 15 century French poet (The Ballad of Fat Madge, a madam of a whore house), and "Sex" by Stefan Brecht, a beat poet.

A little off the topic of my poem, but that is how comments go from time to time.
All good stuff

Eumolpus
I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance
ee cummings

author comment

My youth was characterized by intense desire, over whelming romantic impulses and no understanding at all of my deepest hungers nor that of women Quite honestly I had no idea at all what they saw in me or men in general for that matter If I had sex I pretty much thought of it as a mercy fuck, and her impulse to some strange sense of duty, but perhaps some vague desire and so I felt shame and lost. At 68 fuckin yrs of age ( god damn I'm a retard ) I finally really learned the heart of at least some women changing everything finding it profoundly liberating and became a pig at the trough, or as my wife says I'm a late bloomer Haahaahaa :)

Yes, your experience feels like an eye opening truth, as if you get to peek to the beyond.
Your interpretation, although makes a great poem, is not completely accurate.
You were not dead, you were sleeping. Normal deep sleep feels very similar but you do not call it death.
Death is a deeper sleep, it gives a chance to your genetic material to be renewed and repacked, if you agree that you are encoded by your genes, than you live as long as your genes practically immortal.
If you say you are also your memories, i would say good luck keeping them, because I don't think you remember much about yourself, you probably know more common-knowledge-facts like Eliot's poems or arithmetic.
How do you like this optimistic thought?

IRiz

it's just the experience of anesthesia is so freaky it feels so... deathly.

I think I somewhat agree with 2 things. Nabokov once said (paraphrase)
"life is full of so many surprises why should death be any different?"

The other by Krishnamurti (paraphrase)
"don't bother concerning yourself with things you can't possibly ever know the answer to (like death), just live your life fully"

thanks for the read and the optimism. But it all is just so right now- my body feels alive, so I am alive. What the genes can remember will be a different thing. I wish they could read poetry!

Eumolpus
I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance
ee cummings

author comment

They will. Lol.

IRiz

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