On His Birthday

“There is no such thing as a good father because the role itself is bad. Strict fathers, soft fathers, nice moderate fathers — one's as bad as another. They stand in the way of our progress while they try to burden us with their inferiority complexes, and their unrealized aspirations, and their resentments, and their ideals, and the weaknesses they've never told anyone about, and their sins, and their sweeter-than-honey dreams, and the maxims they've never had the courage to live by — they'd like to unload all that silly crap on us, all of it! They're suspicious of anything creative, anxious to whittle the world down into something puny they can handle. A father is a reality-concealing machine for dishing up lies to kids, and that isn't even the worst of it - secretly he believes that he represents reality".

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“Do I, then, belong to the heavens?

Why, if not so, should the heavens

Fix me thus with their ceaseless blue stare,

Luring me on, and my mind, higher

Ever higher, up into the sky,

Drawing me ceaselessly up

To heights far, far above the human?

Why, when balance has been strictly studied

And flight calculated with the best of reason

Till no aberrant element should, by rights, remain-

Why, still, should the lust for ascension

Seem, in itself, so close to madness?

Nothing is that can satisfy me;

Earthly novelty is too soon dulled;

I am drawn higher and higher, more unstable,

Closer and closer to the sun's effulgence.

Why do these rays of reason destroy me?

Villages below and meandering streams

Grow tolerable as our distance grows.

Why do they plead, approve, lure me

With promise that I may love the human

If only it is seen, thus, from afar-

Although the goal could never have been love, 

Nor, had it been, could I ever have

Belonged to the heavens?

I have not envied the bird its freedom

Nor have I longed for the ease of Nature,

Driven by naught save this strange yearning

For the higher, and the closer, to plunge myself

Into the deep sky's blue, so contrary

To all organic joys, so far

From pleasures of superiority 

But higher, and higher,

Dazzled, perhaps, by the dizzy incandescence

Of waxen wings.

Or do I then 

Belong, after all, to the earth?

Why, if not so, should the earth

Show such swiftness to encompass my fall?

Granting no space to think or feel,

Why did the soft, indolent earth thus

Greet me with the shock of steel plate?

Did the soft earth thus turn to steel

Only to show me my own softness?

That Nature might bring home to me

That to fall, not to fly, is in the order of things,

More natural by far than that improbable passion?

Is the blue of the sky then a dream?

Was it devised by the earth, to which I belonged,

On account of the fleeting, white-hot intoxication

Achieved for a moment by waxen wings?

And did the heavens abet the plan to punish me?

To punish me for not believing in myself 

Or for believing too much;

Too eager to know where lay my allegiance

Or vainly assuming that already I knew all;

For wanting to fly off

To the unknown

Or the known:

Both of them a single, blue speck of an idea?” 

Sun and Steel