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[galactic_dev]

I have been experiencing good intestinal health for some time now, and it has affected my bathroom reading. I used to keep a book in there, but I spend such small amounts of time now on the toilet that I started putting the Tao Te Ching in there to read a few words and contemplate them. When that started getting boring, I started putting books of poetry in there.

Alan Dugan is my favorite poet. He is officially famous as poets go, but nobody I've spoken with seems to have heard of him. He seems to be a 20th century American existentialist poet who is especially good at articulating rage. He's like a mean-drunk version of Kurt Vonnegut.

I found him in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, and he and E.E. Cummings were the only poets that wrote more than 2-3 poems that I liked in that Anthology.

Anyway, I don't know much about poetry at all, so here are a couple poems of his:

STORY FOR ACTORS

There's a story that a traveling Greek actor
came to a Spanish town in Hellenistic times
to give a reading from Old Greek Tragedy,
but that when he went on in the amphitheater,
dressed in the horrible mask, the long robe,
and the high-soled star-actor's cothurni,
and roared out the terrible old lines
the poor hicks panicked, and some of them
got trampled to death in the stampede.
The municipal authorities were so stupid
that they banned Old Greek Tragedy forever
and executed the actor for mass murder.
That they killed him for being too great
is the greatest praise an actor could ever want,
but that they couldn't even write up his name
is proof of their own illiterate shittiness
and of his immortal anonymous fame.

And here's another poem of his:

LAST STATEMENT FOR A LAST ORACLE

After this oracle there will be no more oracles.
The precinct is hereby desanctified. You wanted it,
you have it. From now on everything I say
will be a lie said for cash. Now, for the last time,
here's the truth: You have won with your horse power
and numbers from the north. You will go on
winning forever -- this is your damnation --
until your conquests and the insides of your heads
are alike, and you and I know what it's like
in there, so if some dirty beast remembers,
on some future dirty night, what it was like
once to have been a human being and pleasing to me
in a fair exchange of pure sacrifice for pure prophecy
he will throw himself into a fire and howl to death.
I will now drop back into the fire you are
so curious about. When you get drunk tonight
and pee on it, you and I will go out like the light
and an acid yellow smoke will take the place of our souls.
We will have to go on living a lie for a while, however,
in the unspeakable condition I have referred to in passing.