Congenital stupidity is nothing to be ashamed of, it is not a character flaw, it is a part of the characteristics one is dealt in life, like one’s race and sex and hair colour. On the other hand, wilful stupidity – the conscious refusal to think, to consider alternative ideas, to imagine the lives of others who are different from oneself – is a crime against humanity.
Today the rain is blue,
it smells of dying leaves,
it splashes in itself,
it plops in drops and drips;
today the rain is soft;
today the rain is warm;
the music of the rain
gives thought staccato form;
it washes off the dust,
it makes the pavement shine;
the street is flowing past;
the song of rain is mine!
The world sees you in terms of opposites: light and dark, love and hate,
good and evil…
and that is how you learn to see yourself.
You throw yourself from one extreme to another, turning your life into
tragedy performed in the binary rhythm of a farce;
you adopt grand poses and build unbelievable justifications, Don Quixote
fighting conventional windmills…
How precious then is your reflection in the eyes of a child, where
values become unimportant
and you can simply be.
Clowns – the soul of the circus.
Not an act as such – a connection between the worlds.
They engage our empathy and cruelty, provoke kindness and fear…
Coulrophobia is translated as “the fear of clowns”, it means “the fear of self”.
Tell me what makes you laugh and show me who you are.
Their bodies litter our roads:
expected, almost unnoticed, left by the wayside…
not murdered –
killed accidentally by inattention to familiar routes,
too trivial for pathos, too pointless for tragedy.
We live our lives next to each other,
leaving behind little corpses of our selves and of others’,
unseen, extinguished by inattention of habit:
road-kill.
I wonder how much will be left alive
by the end of the day?
Little yellow flowers grow on the crumbling bricks of a ruined building.
They dance in the warm spring air, they bring life to stillness and desolation.
Their faint smell mixes with the sour odour of decay and makes it complex:
no longer one note of sadness, but a palette to chose from.
They bring joy to my eyes.
In time, my eyes will turn to dust and – who knows – may be made into bricks
for little yellow flowers to grow on.
I would be glad to repay the favour.
