Poetry is invincible! Zelda's has outlasted many venue's; the Planet X crowd kept meeting and reading after the place burned down, even in the face of a tornado warning we met under an awning and read poetry.
Politics must serve poetry, not poetry politics
exercise: looking closely at some small part of our new meeting space:
I don't know what you call these decorate carvings - scrollwork? finials? - on the columns, curled like the fiddleheads of ferns, arching out from the column where it meets the bottom point of the arch, a bouquet of them
i see seashells, I see horse heads, I see maidens with bent heads, I see leaping tigers, I see fountain-jets of water spraying up into th octagonal mounding where the column meets the arch
right below, a string-chain of plastic flowers, red and yellow, violets, green leaves, plastic; knowing that the carving are maybe a century and a half old, older than any living human, and the cheap plastic flowers are today
a zen monk tried to hide the cheap plastic flowers an old woman left on the altar; the master told him, it is your mind that is made of plastic
cobwebs and dust you can only see from up here on the scaffold, dust older than I am, some dust older than I'll ever be
dust! invincible dust! plant pollen and animal hair and microscopic bits of meteorite from space
and paint peeling flaking with age unable to hang on any longer, not rubbed off but just falling away under its own weight
the ones who carved these, now one with the dust, having fallen away under their own weight
glorious impermanence - even God's house falls apart
"stone sees much in its time" - Suzie