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A Poem for Mark Murray on the Occasion of His 70th Birthday

To Teach Is

To stretch your giving heart so bright newness can climb inside.

To be safe soil, earthy incubator,
even when seeds are hard and unwilling.
Even when they would rather stay tight inside themselves,
all possibility encaged.

To point out common miracles and uncommon beauty.
 
To find joy in joy and joy in complexity.

To show what it is to face life’s contradictions,
tease apart the knotty bits
Learning worthy, unworthy, strong and true.

To guide a cultivation of self, to help formulate these life questions that perch in our souls.

What our hearts ask the world.
What the world answers back.

And so sort ourselves out
And so prize our love and hope even when others have no place for them.

To give a gift that ripples out and through, wide worlds unbound.
And from the smallness you once harbored
arose trees to vault the sky.
A whole forest that thinks of you, Mark Murray, with great love.

 

[Mark Murray was my teacher at the Sacramento Waldorf School, 4th through 8th grades. He is also the father of our friend, Ben.]

[ Topic Fiction and Snobbery, Poetry | No Comments ]

Dirty-Looking Hipsters Overrun By Actually Dirty Hipsters!

“‘Crusty Punk’ sounds fittingly like a euphemism for syphilis.”

Let’s see:

a) I can barely tell the difference between emaciated cokeheads who spent hours making themselves look dirty and emaciated junkies who look dirty because they sleep in dirt. I suppose the nose will know(s).

b) “Gutter Punk” is so ’90s. “Crusty Punk” sounds fittingly like a euphemism for syphilis.

c) Williamsburg is not a “family neighborhood”.

d) Hilarious that the half-built luxury condos are now infested.

e) This is why I shun (and loathe) panhandlers. I have ever since living between the Upper and Lower Haight in SF. Fie on middle-class kids who don’t want to work but call me yuppie whatevs while simultaneously trying to wheedle money.

[ Topic Diversity, Housing, Ridiculosity, Society | No Comments ]