The quoted phrase that concluded the last entry deserves an explanation. It comes from my first published poem in the Brooklyn College student newspaper, Kingsman. The poem appears below, and in my re-read I had to wonder why something so personal and revealing was ever offered up for public consumption.
A psychologist might see it as a cry for attention or help. Yes, it was a bit of public posturing, more to demonstrate to my friends and colleagues on the newspaper that there was a side of me beyond “who, what, why, when, where and how.”
It was also a badge that signified my membership in the Beat Generation. On weekends we changed from our chinos and white bucks, and dressed in black we were down in Greenwich Village listening to poetry and jazz in the wine bars and coffee houses. We immersed ourselves in a fashionable nihilism. Ours was the real “cancel culture” -living under the ominous shadow of an atomic cloud.
Reinforced, we would be back on campus on Monday preparing to resist the “duck and cover” rehearsals meant to protect us from a Soviet attack. The resistance eventually peaked in a mass sit down on the main steps to Boylan Hall, where the Administration worked and took cover. When President Harry Gideonse later demanded that we turn over glossy photos of the demonstrators, we refused. These confrontations usually presaged a change in the top editors, who would resign rather than comply. It was during one such episode that I moved from poet to editor.
Things haven’t changed much since those days - except that I am now in Russia on the business end of NATO missiles wondering how I could possibly “duck and cover” with my limited mobility. I guess I’ve aged out of my protesting stage.
Existentialism
I have no heart, I have no soul.
No reason for the bells to toll,
piercing through life’s hazy mist
to mourn for that which does not exist.
For I died long before my death
and all that’s left is a bitter breath
that spraks of things I dared not do
and sighs for love that’s never true.
Mortality is life’s meager lot
and none can escape the fickle heart
nor reach beyond the torpored sky
to touch the me that isn’t I.