Just Follow Bliss [Today's News Poem, June 21, 2010]

Just Follow Bliss [Today's News Poem, June 21, 2010]

The forests of charcoal, the meat from the bushes
On sale in the market: a mote on the surface.
Another distraction. A sorrow I'm passing
En route to my bliss. And I'm over the legends
Of sorrow—I'm flying my way to a tropic
Of pleasure—away from my mansion of plastic.
I'm seeding the clouds with exhaust as I journey
And savor escape—a respite from my anguish
That hides in routine, in the margins of ledgers
I keep for my score. I can measure my triumphs,
Ignoring the losses I cannot consider:
Unless it is burning; unless there is screaming,
I name them as fiction, a story to please me.

“Until recently, biologists believed that manatees rarely ventured west of peninsular Florida, where, so far, no oil has appeared. But in 2007, Ruth Carmichael, who leads the Dauphin Island team, began documenting a relatively large summer migration of manatees to Mobile Bay, Ala. — leading them directly into and through the path of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak. From a couple of dozen to as many as 100 come to Mobile Bay for the summer, out of a total North American population of 5,000, she said.”
– John Leland, The New York Times, June 20, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/21/us/21manatee.html?hpw

“And yet there was something in Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns that had captured Dunning’s imagination. I wanted to know more, and so I e-mailed him: why are you so obsessed with Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns?” Here is his answer: If I were given carte blanche to write about any topic I could, it would be about how much our ignorance, in general, shapes our lives in ways we do not know about. Put simply, people tend to do what they know and fail to do that which they have no conception of. In that way, ignorance profoundly channels the course we take in life. And unknown unknowns constitute a grand swath of everybody’s field of ignorance.”
– Errol Morris, The New York Times, June 20, 2010
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/the-anosognosics-dilemma-1



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