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All posts for the month February, 2011
Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something
This poem does not cover:
(a) Measure walking-sticks or the like (9017)
or ITC (HS) Code of Fork-lift trucks
or the situation of the church,
or the situation with deerskins, turtles and fruit, especially bananas.
This poem describes the feel of the Tang Warrior as he moves his finger along the rim of a very early model silver spring pocket watch in a country home with 12 Knives; 12 Dinner Forks; 12 Salad Forks; 12 Soup Spoons while riding on a 480 spin hinge fork-lift truck (or a similar work truck fitted with lifting or handling equipment).
To begin the poem, Dorothy Perkins should be on your left on the other side of the road.
Walk from the grave to the left tree, counting the number of steps.
Take in some of the rugged scenery.
Then walk behind gardeners holding hand-held lawn trimmer.
Gradually work your way up to walking behind trucks, buses, electric vehicles, fork lifts and scooters.
If you’re in the right place, it is approximately an 8 minute walk north until you come to a Dutch silver miniature child peering through an empty wooden frame saying:
“Natural polymers include such things as tar and shellac, tortoise shell and whalebone and whalebone hair, horns, antlers, hooves, nails, claws, and beaks.”
Return to your house.
A walk through your house will reinforce this concept as you consider all cleaned, recycled pet flakes and pellets, knives, spoons and forks, cafeteria trays, grocery store meat trays as well as your tobacco spinning machine, blow-pipe, suction fan, rice drill, walking cultivator, gas blow-pipe, wind car, root slicer, walk scraper, other forks and rakes, axes, bill hooks, spindles and spindle flyers, spinning ring and ring travelers, walking-sticks, seat-sticks, whips, riding-crops and the like.
For the purposes of this poem, “the like” includes electric reapers, reapers and binders, millstones, rakes for livestock feeders, root slicers (machine-driven), boxes for motors, knives that were once parts of machines, cutting blow pipes, penknives, grafting tools, pruning shears, other bill hooks, syringes for spraying insecticides, reamers, weeding forks and similar apparatus.
For the purposes of this poem, “similar apparatus” includes foam branch pipes, water branch pipes, fog, blow torches and similar self-contained torches, picks, hoes, more forks and more rakes and more axes, still more bill hooks, pipe cutters, bolt cutters, perforating punches and similar hand tools.
For the purposes of this poem “similar hand tools” include the following: spades, shovels, mattocks, picks, hoes, any additional forks and rakes and axes, bill hooks that on initial inspection do not appear to be bill hooks but really are, and similar hewing tools.
For the purposes of this poem “similar hewing tools” includes a belly-roll, a caving-rake, any bill hooks not seen before, a chaff-cutter, and a cheese-cutter and a little teeny tiny baby blow torch.
Find and count 27,112,005 Axes;
add a Scythe to that number
and count that number of Scythes,
which would be 27,112,006, Scythes.
The remainder of the poem
begins on the line after the next line which is written in invisible ink
Banks’ farmers’ boiler
is circular
of sheet-metal
Double- mold-board plow!
You can see this by walking atop Banks’ wall
(say 3 metres/second)
and looking at it.
Title from a line in Ezra Pound’s “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” published in the March 1913 issue of “Poetry.”
Posted by Tom Busillo on February 27, 2011
http://monsterbegood.com/2011/02/27/use-no-superfluous-word-no-adjective-which-does-not-reveal-something/
The Hardy Boys – The Mysterious Caravan – Chapter 1 (no. 1)
they advertised no storms
in the beach house
they gave a fluttering light
for several seconds
before expiring
Now in total darkness,
trying to be heard above the screaming,
“Feel this swaying, it’s dancing the calypso.”
“All we need now is a plagued thing
a flashlight
a front window
a few seconds in a deep trough
a pounding
the whistling gale, the lights
a victim we might be able to rescue
a year in The Tower
The velvet sky backdrop for branches
giant spiders seeking refuge from rain
each gurgling wave, the possible
the strung out sea
a dance ahead
palm trees bent
an object lying to timber
a crack, the nothingness
the branch, the rise,
the rocking to and fro
the others skinned
a change of things.”
No answer.
“Listen. I remember.”
“here”
“Where”
“Who knows”
a shiver of fear
sucked in
the raging sea
surely drowned
We’ll have to put damp clothes on again.
poem composed by blacking out text in Chapter 1 of “The Hardy Boys – The Mysterious Caravan” then putting the remaining text into lines and stanzas.
I’d like to get a copy of the real book and do the same thing, but keeping the text in situ.
I’m also thinking of attempting to do the entire book in a fashion similar to Ronald Johnson’s “Radi Os”, in which he used the technique on Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”
Actually, redacting the redacted poem, I sort of like:
no storms in the beach house
dancing the calypso
“All we need now is a plagued thing
a victim we might be able to rescue.”
as an alternate
Update: Chapter 2 is posted here.
Posted by Tom Busillo on February 26, 2011
http://monsterbegood.com/2011/02/26/the-hardy-boys-%e2%80%93-the-mysterious-cavern-%e2%80%93-chapter-1-no-1/
Dream Resume
OBJECTIVE
A unified theory of unreality, done-reality, sure-reality, shore-realty, sworn-fealty, and swarms of bees.
SUMMARY OF QUALIFICATIONS
Demonstrated record of being pursued, falling, time-travel, telekinesis, shape-shifting, partnering with historical figures, becoming airborne, looking for lost things and people, all coupled with an innate ability to know when I should stop running from the killer.
EXPERIENCE HIGHLIGHTS
Vehicle Management
- Drove friend’s red Miata convertible backwards into large pit.
- Piloted small motorboat down Atlantic Coast and inland across Georgia to a party for old high school friend on a dock somewhere on Georgia/Alabama border and became frustrated the next morning when I found the dock was located on a small lake with no tributaries.
- Made motorcycle with a big clear plastic box around it – similar to a wrap-around windshield – and failed to convince the policewoman who pulled me over that since I had driver’s license for a car, and a car is bigger than a motorcycle, in effect, I had more than a license to drive a motorcycle and should not be ticketed.
Armed Combat
- Jousted against a grade school friend who had a horse, heavy armor and a lance by standing stationary as he charged me while I wore only a grey t-shirt and a lacrosse helmet and held a wooden bucket.
- Survived street mugging in the Logan Square section of Philadelphia by pulling off my leg at the kneecap and brandishing it as a weapon – causing my assailant to flee.
- Achieved seemingly impossible height and hang-time in martial arts combat and while in mid-air had the sudden realization that if I could just hang in the air long enough, all the ninjas would eventually get frustrated and go away (they did).
Digging
- Assisted dozen unknown men in vaguely familiar basement digging a tunnel to a secret location.
- Extended the depth of an elevator shaft in the rear of Boyd’s men’s store while the elevator was still in operation.
Entrepreneurial Management
- Ran small café in Weimar Germany and was able to successfully book the Dresden Dolls for a gig that was cut short halfway through due to failing a spot inspection by the fire marshall for a minor infraction.
- Successfully built a rent-a-bird-in-a-balloon business in Central Park in which the balloons all contained live birds who would return each night.
- Developed a kiosk-based business involving disembodied heads floated in a murky green substance who came to life and confessed all of their life’s secrets if you dropped in a quarter in the slot.
EDUCATION
- In high school, I brought a burrito wrapped in tin foil in for lunch and unwrapped it in our cafeteria only to realize that it contained my black cat Nero, alive and whole, who jumped out of the burrito and upon hitting the floor broke into hundreds of tiny black cats, which I scurried on my hands and knees to pick up while everyone laughed at me.
- I took a history class that was held in a barn with live horses.
- I’ve sat for numerous college-level calculus finals and started at all the arcane squiggles and Greek letters thinking “I should have kept up with the homework.”
- On the day of college graduation, I often find out that I can’t graduate yet because I miscalculated my credits and still need to take another theology class.
SPECIALIZED TRAINING
- I was trained by the CIA to detect forged medieval manuscripts.
- My childhood neighbor taught me how to gut fish and keep all of the entrails inside of a wishing well.
OUTSIDE INTERESTS AND ACTIVITIES
- Discovering secret underground passages leading in impossibly short distances to locations that seem to have no rational commonality; for example, the passage that in roughly 200 yards lead from my old tennis club in West Deptford, NJ to the first floor of the St. Joseph’s University library.
- Participated in a Survivor-like game show where I was left on an island and was pursued by Army Rangers, but was assisted by other, friendly Army Rangers who were actually angels. The point of the game was not to survive, but to make it to a series of stone altars within protective cones containing a loaf of bread, a knife, and detailed instructions on how a single slice of bread was to be cut – points were given based on how well the slice of bread conformed with the specifications given in the instructions.
REFERENCES
- Three members of the New York Giants secondary stayed at my parents house in New Jersey before an Eagles home game.
- An old woman on the street kept asking me questions in a foreign language that I couldn’t understand, but somehow I knew that even if I could understand them, I wouldn’t be able to answer them.
My dream resume, using the Surrealist technique of composing a resume based solely on activities in dreams you’ve actually had.
And yes, I dreamed all of the above.
Posted by Tom Busillo on February 25, 2011
http://monsterbegood.com/2011/02/25/dream-resume/
Redactions
I want to , believe we can’t see anything we don’t have a word for.
When I look out the window and say green I mean sea green,
I mean moss green, I mean gray , I mean pale and also
electrically flecked with white and I mean green
in its damp way of glowing off a leaf.
Schiele’s Green, the green of Renaissance painters
is a sodium carbonate solution heated to ninety degrees
as arsenious oxide is stirred in Sodium displaces copper,
resulting in a green precipitate that is sometimes used
as insecticide When I say green I mean
a shiny green bug eating a yellow leaf.
Before synthetics not every painter could afford a swathe
of blue. Shocking pink, aka neon aka kinky pink,
wasn’t even on the market. I want to believe Andy Warhol
invented it in 1967 and ever since no one’s eyes
have been the same. There were sunsets before,
but without that hot shocking neon Marilyn, a desert sky
was just cataract smears I want to believe this.
The pale green of lichen and half-finished leaves
filling my window is a palette very far from carnation
or bougainvillea, but to look out is to understand it is not,
is to understand what it is not. I stare out the window a lot.
Between the beginning and the end the leaves unfolded.
I looked out one morning and everything was unfamiliar
as if I was looking at the green you could only see
if you’d never known synthetic colors existed
I’ve drawn into myself people say.
We understand they say.
There are people who only have words for red
and black and white, and I wonder if they even see
the trees at the edge of the grass
or the green storms coming out of the west.
There are people who use the same word for green
and red and brown, and I wonder if red
seems so urgently bright pouring from the body
when there is no green for it to fall against.
In his treatise on color Wittgenstein asked,
Can’t we imagine certain people
having a different geometry of colour than we do?”
I want to believe the eye doesn’t see green until it has a name,
because I don’t want anything to look the way it did before.
Van Gogh painted pink flowers, but the pink faded
and curators labeled the work “White Roses” by mistake.
The world in my window is a color the Greeks called chlorol.
When I learned the word I was newly pregnant
and the first pale lichens had just speckled the silver branches.
The pines and the lichens in the chill drizzle were glowing green
and a book in my lap said chlorol was one of the untranslatable
words. The vibrating glow pleased me then, as a finger
dipped in sugar pleased me then. I said the word aloud
for the baby to hear. Chlorol. I imagined the baby
could only see hot pink and crimson inside its tiny universe,
but if you can see what I’m seeing, the word for it
is chlorol. It’s one of the things you’ll like out here.
Nineteenth-century critics mocked painters who cast shadows
in unexpected colors. After noticing green cypresses do drop red
shadows, Goethe chastised them. “The eye demands
completeness and seeks to eke out the colorific circle in itself.”
He tells of a trick of light that had him pacing a row of poppies
to see the flaming petals again and figure out why.
Over and over again Wittgenstein frets the problem of translucence.
Why is there no clear white?
He wants to see the world through white-tinted glasses,
but all he finds is mist.
At first I felt as if the baby had fallen away
like a blue shadow on the snow
Then I felt like I killed the baby
in the way you can be thinking about something else
and drop a heavy platter by mistake
Sometimes I feel like I was stupid
to have thought I was pregnant at all
Color is an illusion, a response to the vibrating universe
of electrons. Light strikes a leaf and there’s an explosion
where it lands. When colors change, electromagnetic fields
are colliding. The wind is not the only thing moving the trees.
Once when I went into those woods I saw a single hot pink orchid
on the hillside and I had to keep reminding myself not to
tell the baby about the beautiful small things I was seeing
So, hot pink has been here forever and I don’t even care
about that color or how Andy Warhol showed me an orchid
I hate pink. It makes my eyes burn.
I followed a link to the Redactions literary journal, thinking that it was a journal of poetry devoted to nothing but redacted poems (or erasure poems). I was “disappointed” only in the sense that it did not contain poems using the technique of visual redaction, as seems like a really terrific publication from what I was able to peruse while I was there.
I clicked a link to its list of Pushcart Prize nominations and the first one on the list was Kathryn Nuernberger’s “Translations,” which is a truly amazing poem, and Ms. Nuernberger is well-deserving of the accolades. You can read it here.
The above redaction uses “Translations” as the base text.
Posted by Tom Busillo on February 24, 2011
http://monsterbegood.com/2011/02/24/redactions/
feast: God
the fat dogs named their feast God
and the fate gods feasted on dog
so grow aged
soft Degas
fade off stage
oft-staged
off slanted land
and fog
Posted by Tom Busillo on February 23, 2011
http://monsterbegood.com/2011/02/23/feast-god/
between your soles and the floor
dose safer in good safeness
feed the adages to the neighbors’ sons
feed them fake neon nostalgia
blinking lights and bar room fights
clinking rites and
bare ass girls sans their tights
that’s how it all went right?
feed them a saga sensed by the no’s
a saga guessed, a saga confessed
but eased with safe songs
safe gloves, safe distance
held apart in the memory tongs
the hidden grooves of your record
the hidden words of the songs
tonight we recite the last of last rites
and last of the last ofs, a slaying of nights
a laying of hands that used to be white
like that fine collar of yours that never fit right
like the snap of the doves neck –
wouldn’t that be a sight?
with you hanging two feet in the air
from a mere twelve-foot height
with all eternity between your soles and the floor
Posted by Tom Busillo on February 22, 2011
http://monsterbegood.com/2011/02/22/between-your-soles-and-the-floor/
Easter (no. 1)
pureed fast by education
in cafes and carafes
in destinations
at tables where they never serve a feast
on wards where your feathers matter least
these goodies come in two’s
drunk down in the halls
so bring the sweaters and your knees and
the medicine balls
but leave out the kiss
we’ve lent ten borrowed lips in torn ragged strips
to a secret Eden’s inn
and there’s no kiss when a lifetime is remiss
twin toy nuclei bearing thread, bearing whisps
bearing out, bearing in
your head’s feeling thin, starved on memories
of crooked hose routed and scorched –
we checked once at the door
maybe now under the porch
the pieces we thought whole
look just like the one’s of old
that the years have torn to pieces
when on our crosses we met Jesus
– It’s us you want, not blooms from the East?
thin drafts and far often hindrance
a purse of sand
my kingdom for an ant’s smile
any takers, any hands
to bear a dead cold kingdom
dead cold?
so spin if you will, bring the East in
we’ve won the one about the sergeant surging ahead
and dying for your sin
the fine fellows in their ships
who kept Virgil lit and withered
the Viking seekers wallowed lame until dec(r)eased
when their boats were finally tethered
Gosh, doll. You’re over-brimming with measurements
treasures you have pending, waiting to be sent
to lands without any olive glades
not missing our sacks of moths
cold hands and freezing rain
the hacks at months away
like some fate that went astray
in theatre fever, getting shirred
smiling at hairshirts meant for Tunis
give me my rhyme in three-color lemonade
give me a golem in my den, foals soft like fleece
all our scars labeled, snapped, snapped, snapped
then ceased
the good earth is a good slayer
of the little things, and as the slain go
we are wry, off our bees in gibes,
sometimes high, most times low
Gosh, doll. Straighten up then.
They’ll take no care here to free the able seekers
who prematurely end.
I think one of the great joys of writing is discovering something that you’ve written that you’ve totally forgotten about and really loving it (as opposed to the usual, which is discovering something you’ve forgotten about for good reason and cringe at). It’s like getting a surprise present from yourself. I wish it would happen more often.
I found about ¾’s of this over the weekend buried at the end of a file where I’m trying to work out anagrams for what seems to be a futile attempt to rewrite Gerad Manley Hopkins’ “Easter Communion” as one large anagram and I really liked it.
Posted by Tom Busillo on February 21, 2011
http://monsterbegood.com/2011/02/21/easter-no-1/
Ask Jeeves “Why Do Good People Die and Bad People Live On?”
Why do Good People Die and Bad People Live on?
This question has been asked in one form or another by people
who see their dead National Guard colleague’s wife and child
now have to live on without a husband and father.
In this context, it is tangentially related to the question of:
“Why is it that the ‘good’ young men and women of our country
have to die in a war against religious fanatics bent on the destruction of freedom
and devoted to the subjugation of the world to their ideology?”
However, some people say there is only one question which really matters:
“Why do bad things happen to good people?”
And that all other theological conversation is intellectually diverting.
* * * * *
Bad things happen to good people everyday.
Bad things happen to all people and life often seems very unfair.
The Bible takes an entire book to deal with this mind-bending problem of ‘bad things to good people’ in the life of Job. He loses his children, his wealth and his health.
All he has left is a wife.
A few years ago, a Jewish rabbi wrote a book entitled, “Why bad things happen to good people,” which was widely reported in the news. As always, brilliant stuff.
Harold S. Kushner experienced tragedy first hand when his son died at age 14. Kushner explores many of the ways that people try to understand why terrible things happen to their loved ones.
He writes: “I have seen the wrong people get sick, the wrong people be hurt, the wrong people die young.”
So why do good people suffer such bad things?
The Rabbi’s answer is that “God wants the righteous to live peaceful, happy lives, but sometimes even He can’t bring that about” (p. 43). Why? Because God Himself “is not perfect…” (p. 148). If God were all-perfect the world would not be so imperfect as it obviously is.
But I still want to know why do bad people live until their one hundred and good people can die at nineteen?
* * * * *
I’m an Indigo child and I truthfully have no idea why.
This is confusing since most people would assume that
my belief is that good people are taken from this world
because God needs them more than we do.
For example, because God just can’t wait to make them angels.
(remember how God took Enoch into heaven?)
It’s said that the length of your life has nothing to do with if one is “good” or “bad”.
But for me, i always think good people live a shorter life
and bad people live a longer life.
Innocent people seem to suffer a lot. even innocent children and babies die.
i don’t know its coincidence or what,
but most of the time, for those who die young,
most of them seems to have a very nice character
For example, when school kids/teenagers die,
the headteacher ALWAYS knew them well,
and they were ALWAYS good, respectful pupils
who were ALWAYS the most popular person in the school.
People ask “Why did god kill them by making the air bag fail?”
* * * * *
It could be that bad people live longer
because God is still being merciful enough
to let them have their fun in this life
because he knows in hell the party is over.
It could be that God intervenes because the soul in question still needs saving or still has more work to do (not good enough to die yet).
Says the Lord GOD, ‘I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live.’
I’m not willing to accept that explanation.
* * * * *
Good people die young. Bad people will live to 100. Marathon runners drop dead from heart attacks. Good kids turn bad. I’ve seen people swim on beaches with shark warnings posted. I’ve watched divers, without a clue about how to put on their fins, sink to 170 feet, get lost, and surface right next to the boat.
Billions of People are Expected to Die Under Current Codex Alimentarius
Random cells go cancerous in good people. Random car accidents happen and kill both good and bad people.
Sgt. Nathaniel T. Swindell honored this country with two tours and was proud to be an infantry soldier. He never gave up! He was shot by “friendly fire” and nothing happened to his killer. This is the world we live in! Good people die, bad men win, and families are destroyed.
In movies beautiful young lovers can die tragically of slow, painful wasting diseases and your jaw doesn’t even quiver once because you’re too busy thinking about how good they look despite the illness makeup.
* * * * *
Good people die, bad people live and horrible injustices are done all the time
But good things happen too!
One time my friends met Wink Martindale and I at the Victoria pub in the afternoon,
where we spent a good amount of hours chatting about vajazzles –
people who sleep with corgis.
We have The American Prospect and The Drudge Report.
The hearthtrob Robert Pattison’s heartthrob smooches go for $20,000 apiece at the Cannes amfAR benefit
Somehow Rey managed to struggle free from the rope strung around his neck, after being left to die a slow death by strangulation as punishment for being a bad Spanish greyhound.
There’s the first night of The Bachelorette.
In Castletownbere Harbour people are able to get a ready market for their butter, eggs and fowl, and are able to live in fairly good circumstances
We are capable of finding the fun in good math and shredding bad math and squashing the crackpots who espouse it
* * * * *
Good news: people are living longer.
Bad news: clients who do not expect to live long should not buy longevity insurance, and should stay away from variable annuity living benefit riders or immediate annuities as well. Like most insurance products, options are available to customize .
* * * * *
Good news: Sometimes Good people die and the BAD people continue to live and not make much difference.
* * * * *
But it does seem that good people appear to die young while rogues live for much longer.
In a fair world good people would live forever.
They would never lack food or drink, and anything they could possibly need or even want would be theirs for the asking. Meanwhile, bad people would perish from off the face of the earth.
* * * * *
Brigadier General Francis Hummel is a man of honour.
For years he has watched good men die while engaged in covert operations.
It would be easy for him to walk around saying
“Why is this world so unfair? Please don’t tell me ‘We can’t understand G-d’s ways.’ I am sick of hearing that. I want an explanation.”
But he doesn’t.
* * * * *
Most people want to lives and never die.
They want power to never have to suffer at all, but rather live their lives as gods.
(i.e. “Summer is almost over – hurry, live now!”)
Sometimes, famous people like Bill Gates may start to wonder if “fate and history” have chosen them.
I know it’s not a pleasant thought, and they didn’t tell you this stuff in seminary, but this is the world we live in.
* * * * *
Maybe there aren’t just good people and bad people???
I’ve never really been easy with this. It just seems so complex.
The biblical answer is there are no “good” people. The Bible makes it abundantly clear that all of us are tainted by and infected with sin.
Unfortunately, we live in a society that does label people.
Thin people good (healthy)? Fat people bad (could die)?
Good or Bad? (Does it make you who you are?)
Several characters talk of “good people” and “bad people” in Lost.
The ancients taught that the Universe is in perfect balance and, as such, we live in a world of duality. Everything you see in the world has its opposite: light/dark, up/down, male/female, hot/cold, Michael Knight and his fancy sportscar Kit/Evil Michael Knight and his evil sportscar, etc.
You cannot acknowledge “good” and “bad” things without acknowledging that there are absolute “good” and “bad” or “evil” in the world. By this acknowledgment, one is believing in a universal truth; whether intentionally or not.
You can imagine a bad person like Rush Limbaugh – an admitted drug addict who manipulated his maid into buying him drugs and has become very rich getting everyday Americans to act against their own self-interest – saying:
“Where do you get off condemning others?
What do you know about self destructive habits or ‘drugging’?
Who are these ‘horrible people’ ?
Is it fair that I die before you because I have ‘self-destructive habits’ ??
There are no ‘good’ or ‘bad” people; ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are only human perceptions.
Yes, I once was confident that there was a certain level of evil that only a “bad person” could commit, that there was some invisible line.
But then I started taking Percocet and didn’t worry about it.”
* * * * *
Often we forget that the line between good and evil runs inside all of us.
(WOW!!! He seems like such an Angel.)
(Mussolini made the trains run on time and Hitler was very kind to his dogs.)
* * * * *
Life isn’t fair, and sometimes good people die (Scofield), while bad people live (Tony Soprano).
And sometimes, the bad people aren’t completely bad. Sometimes, their dirty methods can be completely justified (Tony Soprano).
Nero outlawed mimes in Rome–which may mean that he wasn’t such a bad man after all.
* * * * *
There is no assurance that when you do good you die well.
After all, Christianity was never about death insurance policy.
The law of sowing and reaping, or what goes around comes around, is in effect,
but we live in a VERY imperfect world.
Some real bad sinners die horribly(Hitler did) while some die in a peaceful bed(Pol-pot).
In the New Testament it says that once a person dies, he is “acquitted from his sin.” (Romans 6:7, 23)
But if both good and bad people die and nobody experiences suffering after death, where is God’s justice?
* * * * *
Levon Helms might have said, “So can we reconcile the record with the sons and the daughters that cry; All I can say without reservation is it’s awkward when bad people die”
But did you know that when Jeffery Dahmer, Tim McVie, and other human monsters die is it actually healthy to be happy?
It’s not the loss of life we celebrate but rather the fact that many people will live because this person(s) died
(assuming they would have killed more people, which is a safe assumption).
* * * * *
Cynics say that for good people to do bad things all it take is religion.
As for this point about religion having some sort of special ability to make good people do bad things…
Some do. Some don’t.
* * * * *
In summary, I have not expressed my feelings about a Divine overseer so much as I’ve expressed frustration at an often arbitrary and cruel world where seemingly good and decent people die while far less deserving souls prosper.
Moral questions do not have easy solutions, and even the hard solutions aren’t perfect.
Bad things happen to all people and life often seems very unfair.
Death is rarely fair. A bullet has no conscience; neither does a malignant tumor or an automobile gone out of control. The good people die and the bad people live. That is the way of the world and there is nothing anyone can do about it.
A rose by any other name is just another battle and war and pain and death from beginning to end, with small bits of personal peace and reward.
Good people die, and bad people live too long?
Good people die young, and it just seems like bad people live forever?
I don’t have a perfect answer for you, I’m quite sure that many individuals are disappointed by this, but what I do know is that trials and tribulation cause us to grow
Every moment Incredible joy and sorrow are but a few minutes away.
What matters more is what you do about it next.
People need to value everything and everyone they have.
I hope this brings you some understanding and hope.
word collage of AskJeeves.com search results snippets for the phrase “Why Do Good People Die and Bad People Live On?” with some additional text added.
Of the source material that I found, I think one of the saddest lines was “Some real bad sinners die horribly(Hitler did)” for a variety of reasons, one of them being the sheer level of historical inaccuracy.
Posted by Tom Busillo on February 20, 2011
http://monsterbegood.com/2011/02/20/ask-jeeves-why-do-good-people-die-and-bad-people-live-on/
This Rational Man
This rational man transcribing
their accounts, their ledger books
dying above a wasteland,
his body outward,
addition into everything
descending, rising.
He forgot how
to be visible,
separate from the sea’s bottom.
His elbows fused together. This man
you refute, an ugly thing – a no thing
cowardly certain, running away,
dispersed into ether.
This is triumph
fictionalized?
He lay outside soothing silence,
came uncoupled, playing out, unraveling
as he unmade himself apart.
From his defeat,
here the shards and fireworks
float on
a rare, nonsensical quiet mumbling,
“Is there no more land willing
to fill a well-fed desert?”
A reworking of Keats’ “A Crazed Girl,” taking the original and trying to “write the opposite” of each word.
I had a version where I kept the same line breaks and stanzas, but I liked this one better.
Posted by Tom Busillo on February 19, 2011
http://monsterbegood.com/2011/02/19/this-rational-man/
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