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opponent

September 21, 2024

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choose well your opponent my friend/especially those with whom you cannot win/age and injustice and mindlessness for instance

and do be a friendly opponent/when challenged to a competition or other game/and let courtesy and goodwill flavor your efforts

your ultimate opponent is your dark self/and worse than laziness or other neglect/worse than weight gain or other addictive earmarks/is the scornful dislike of self/that comes with the self-scolding and self-rage and self-flagellation

those behaviors just keep you where you don’t want to be/and dig more deep the hole/you wish to escape

but when you laugh at realized absurdities/when you realize that massaging a problem works more effectively than tackling it/and that sometimes cooperation and not opposition will yield success/a burden will lift/and heaviness lighten

lightning might be spectacular/but lightening can be even more so though less dazzling

and enlightenment/ah enlightenment/dissolves chains

belly interesting

time was when my belly did not throw

a shadow

and wasn’t out warping the woof of my pants.

but sure as my hero is sweet rā

chel maddow

the shelf of my undergut looks me askance.

the trouble is that food is just meant to

be eaten

and I have forsaken such vices as gambling

so i have what’s fit for a glutton

to sweeten

my near-term desirings as through life

I’m shambling.

**

Afterword: I’ve racked up more than two years of compulsive-gambling sobriety, and I don’t smoke and rarely drink and don’t use any recreational drugs, but lately my eating habits have gotten excessive, which for a diabetic is at its very least mildly self-destructive. At the same time, though, it is hugely enjoyable, so there’s a quality-of-life struggle going on, complete with the creeping guilt that compels me to mutter “You Belly-Worshipper, you” as I waddle away from an all-you-can-eat buffet. So this blog post is my way of naming the beast that I hope to defeat.

Testing 1 2 Three

January 15, 2013

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Here is the text of the acrostic sonnet:

The challenges that meet us every day
Essentially define us over time
So if we promptly Act–get off the dime–
That which seemed insurmountable–is Hay.
If Wishes turned to Courses, we’d all Golf
Not much else COULD we do, there’d be so many,
Got Jokes–enough to make a young man Henny–

1-liners fit for each Tom, Dick and Rolf.

2 live the Here and Now is much more serious

Travail avails itself of every life,
Heroics may be needed when the strife
Ramps up from Not Too Bad to Deleterious.
Each Crisis Met puts more tools on your shelf
Enabling reaching farther than yourself.

–Which, granted, is SO much easier said than done. But, Friends, it would have been easier for me to say Help Yourself or You Can Do It and have done with this blog post. Struggling through fourteen lines of acrosticized iambic pentameter to tie in with a crucial line from a Who song has made me a little bit better poetically. I wish you well with your own struggles to be a better You.