Poetry, Too

"The moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies…"

― Milan Kundera, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"

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"I tell you, sometimes, sometimes when I take a look at you, I just keep looking and a-looking. I want to feel your body against me so bad, I think I'm going to bust. I keep trying to tell you in a lot of different ways. If just one time you could be sweet without no money around. I think I could - well, I'll tell you something. I've got poetry in me. I do. I've got poetry in me!"

― John McCabe, "McCabe & Mrs. Miller"

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Dear Kate,

"I am going to post a food pic today to show the world that I am not a hollow man."  I wonder if anyone posts a food pic ever speaks to oneself in so many and such precise words.

No one is a hollow man, but often we need to empty ourselves for the world to prove that to ourselves. 

"I've got poetry in me...too!" is what John McCabe really wants to say.  In fact that's how I recall this, one of the most memorable lines in one of the greatest American movies, "McCabe & Mrs. Miller."  For the longest while after I heard it (when I first fell in love with the movies, before knowing how to speak proper English), I walked around reciting it to myself as a way to address the world, a world that I thought then knew not of the language of the heart that is both English and Chinese and neither and all.

Yet the word "too" was never there.  Maybe McCabe thinks not everyone has poetry in him/her.  Maybe the world does appear prosaic to him and himself a pedestrian.  Maybe the whoring around him demands a hollowing on his part to keep things moving, the frontier expanding, the horizon of human possibility unveiling.  Give to the world what they ask of you, and maybe you can keep a few crumbs of rhymes and reasons for ruminating, a turf in the deep of your interior that is not for sale.

"Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven."  So said Jesus.  So his followers said Jesus said and now saying to us all.  If it is only so easy, we answer, to be "pious" without whoring ourselves a little here and there.

Someone told me I need to speak in a way that people can understand.  As if I was chanting sonnets all these years.  I hope the food pic today somehow addresses her concern.

Yes, I cooked that.  Please Like me.

Yours, Alex