RE: IT ALL COMES DOWN TO THIS….

I say: when two dishonest men get to squabbling, let em fight it out The Old Fashioned Way. Do the gene pool a favor.

Yesterday, I was browsing the used book store and came across a book of Arabian Love Poems by Nazir Kabbani. Cool stuff. He’s an octogenarian leftist who likes to f*** women, and how he has ever escaped execution, I do not know. Some of his stuff reminds me of Ferlinghetti. I am going to have to investigate him further. He wrote one poem where he compared his love for a woman to a white horse. I am saying: waaaaaiiiiit a minute, what’s this white horse bidness with these dam Ay-rabs?!? The poem concludes, however, with these lines, which I like

If you knew the yearnings of horses

You would fill my mouth

With cherries, almonds, pistachios.

But I was saying: it needs to be in stone. It needs to slow folks down on their hurry hurry from the Hark to Austin Hall.

Cuttin’ stuff into stone is my new art form. I have developed this property and I have spent a lot of money gussying up a detention basin that collects rainfall before sending it downstream where it can’t be handled in a gulp. Well, it looked awful, so I set a stonesetter to rocking the sides of it. Then I looked at the hill above it, and I thought “wow, let’s make it look like the 13th at Augusta.” And then I thought, instead of azalea, cherry trees, dogwoods, redbud. Now, I am going to get A.E. Housman’s poem “Loveliest of Trees” cut into several stones, and am going to set it, piece by piece, into the hillside, among the cherry and the dogwood, and the redbud and the crepe myrtle and the forsythia and the sugar maple and the sumac and the….

But I am just starting.

I said, this place needs a Celtic Cross! So I have commissioned a local artist to make me one, and then, because I am so antic, I will have him inscribe, in Latin, “On a hill far away, stands an old, rugged cross,” which is the ARCHETYPAL Protestant Hymn, and I am going to laugh, laugh, laugh for the rest of my days as the two sides struggle over the text and just don’t get the joke, if it is a joke.

I am also going to salt other bits of poems into the ground in the development where walkers can see them…”Nothing Gold Can Stay” by Robert Frost, a stanza from Keats’ “St. Agnes Eve,” a line from a Billie Joe Shaver song I greatly admire “Swarm in a loose herd, like the wild buffalo.” A line written by a dead friend of mine: “The end of style for honest men is clarity.” A stanza from Dylan Thomas’s “Poem in October,” which talks about mothers walking their children, which I hope will happen.

See, cutting things into stone is one big momento mori. I thought to myself, what are they gonna cut into my stone: “He helped white folks argue about money?” And I decided that what I wanted it to say was something like “He cut other folks words into rock so you, pilgrim, might stop thinking about money so much.”

Anyhow, the development is going great guns, and I am not using realtors to sell it which pisses them off. I tell them they should be happy because the people who are buying from me are going to be selling big-ass houses, and they will get the commission offa that, but they don’t see it that way. Because I am saving the realtors’ commission, what I do is, I get a price with my buyer, and we spit on our palms and shake on the deal. Then I give them a contract with a lower price, and I ask them to make a donation to local schools with the difference. They’re on their honor. I think of it as force multiplying. So far, I’m told that a local Catholic school that is on hard times and schools a lot of poor immigrant kids got $20,000, and that a program that trains poor folks for jobs got $4500, and a nursing program got $6000, and it just kinda rolls from there. I think it will be interesting to see just what develops out of this, probably nothing, but maybe, maybe, maybe something.