False Reason leaps at Beauty’s throat.
The grinning beast you thought was your only hope
lives only to kill.
What wisdom leads only to death?

Death is unwise.
You wring yourself dry
while growing grass
splits mountains.

If truth is despair,
what is truth?
Elsewhere.
Consider: an open eye
looks up as well as down.
What is closed in us?

(Probably around 1972)

It’s nice to be an anticommuting operator,
driving along the thoroughfares of life.
I’m happy to be on mass shell as a propagator,
planning a long-term future with my wife.

I come when everyone would go,
and go when they all come.
I doubt what others claim to know,
act smart when they act dumb.

When others’ interactions
are strongly inelastic,
I get my satisfactions
from tripping light fantastic.

So stay out of the mainstream,
ignore what others say.
Follow up your own dream
and go the other way!

Originally intended to be a song in the style and to the tune of Monty Python’s “Always look on the sunny side of death“, this was written in 1969 or 1970 when I and my new (first) wife, Suzanne, were living in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco and I was commuting across the Bay to Berkeley every day, while she commuted to Stanford.  Crazy kids!

Wild as a watermelon feast,
red-ripe in the summer rains,
making the very most at least,
gorging sweet ill-gotten gains,
I sit bloated to inaction,
spitting seeds in satisfaction.