Empathy: You can't take that away from me...
Poetry interrupted
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Each time I sit down to write poetry on a bench in a park in Europe, I’m interrupted by fresh hell coming from the Putin-Trump regime.
Dictators who corrupted their way into power, who need to smash domestic and international law to delay their Gaddafi endings, create fresh hell so you forget about their crimes against humanity, their deviancy, gluttony and thieving, their inability to feel empathy, their mountains of war crimes.
So when I’m trying to figure out a species of bird I’m seeing in Luxembourg Garden in Paris, or trying to capture a sunset the way it looks over Diamond Hill in Connemara, enjoying those moments when the heart is wrapped around something beautiful, it’s the despots who ruin the poetry.
More bombings! More murders! More lies!
Truth is inconvenient for the deviants — they just need cameras, and scripts of lies, and cameras, and scripts of lies — video clips to reveal their brutality — and maybe they’ll remain in power another day.
I like the stories I’m collecting about dictators who were tried in The Hague, or those who met their fate in blindfolds.
Even as I write this, a brutal dictator who trolled his way into power is facing justice in The Hague.
You might not know about Duterte’s plight, because Trump is dropping bombs, doing his clickbait fascism thing.
And the dummies and the ops in the For You feed on Twitter are singing about ‘regime change’ as if an autocrat killing democracy in his own country is interested in human rights in another.
So I write it all out of my system to make my way back to the poetry — it’s the poetry that matters. It might sound trivial, but I don’t think so. Poetry saves lives. Poetry documents truth. Poetry is the sister of empathy,
It’s the empathy that matters.
It’s the species of birds we identify in the parks that matter.
I marveled at the rose-ring parakeets, the eurasian blackbirds, magpies and starlings I saw on my last visit to Luxembourg Garden.
Things in trees are worthy of our attention.
They are desperate for our empathy.
War is bad for the birds.
The world needs more poets.
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Begin each day with a grateful heart.
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La Poubelle
I find art in piles of trash
Abandoned neatly on curbs and cobblestones
A music box playing La bohème
I turn the small crank like my life depends on it, because it might
In that moment
I picture Charles Aznavour’s wet eyes in Shoot the Piano Player
Sad and sincère
I cast myself as an extra in the scene where Boby Lapointe sings Framboise, because in Paris, you can be a piano bar singer and a mathematician
I collect fragments of conversations as I walk through the streets
“They have this romantic notion of Ireland”
“Her bus was stuck in traffic, on the day that Notre Dame burned”
“Do you think I’m moving too fast…”
“Le pain était délicat”
The music of Paris is heels in the 6th
Wheels of a suitcase on bass
Bump buh buh bump bump
At Cafe de Flore I see my friends, the warmth of the staff is the music of Paris
“A guy left without paying and now I owe 37 euros…”
I don’t have it, but I’ll find it, and make sure that debt is paid.
Oh. my. heart.
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