When Boredom Gnaws Your Soul

When boredom gnaws your soul, you back-street whore,
You have the world lined up at your door,
The better to obey the jungle's law:
One heart per day, to exercise your jaw!
Your eyes shine bright to advertise your wares,
Like colored lights strung up at country fairs.
What arrogance, to have at your command
A power whose use you cannot understand.

You are the cruel mistress of misrule,
A leech, a blind machine, a useful tool.
How can you show no shame, or see no sign,
When every mirror mimics your decline?
The meaning of this evil you must do -
Hasn't it ever once occurred to you
That nature uses it for her own ends?
Through you - an animal, a queen of sins -
Creates her geniuses from human slime?
Disgusting majesty! dunghill sublime!

- Charles Pierre Baudelaire (1821-1867)

Sumo

Such a figure must confound and torment
the shrewdest tailor. Better simply to go swaddled
in next to nothing, a loin cloth, a bath garment.
And forget shoes--that pendulous waddle

would defeat them. Even the flagstones seem depressed
by their near failure, and benches sulk
beneath those buttocks, exuberantly fleshed.
What fool would hurl his will against such bulk?

To try is to be rebuked, repulsed, mocked
as something trifling, a mere pinch, a penny's worth,
deluded to believe oneself a man of stock
and substance without such gravitas, such girth.

Will those limbs find rest in any spot?
Do they even build bedframes so vast, so strong?
How does one person grow so huge? Ah, but she’s not
one person, now is she. Not quite. Not for long.

- Gabriel Spera

Tao Te Ching #3

If you over-esteem great men,
people become powerless.
If you overvalue possessions,
people begin to steal.

The Master leads
by emptying people’s minds
and filling their cores,
by weakening their ambition
and toughening their resolve.
He helps people lose everything
they know, everything they desire,
and creates confusion
in those who think that they know.

Practice not-doing,
and everything will fall into place.

- Lao-tzu (550? B.C.E.)