mixedgreens

Is Life Getting Better?

If you want to make the world a better place first
you will have to take everything you know about the
world and pretend that you don’t know it and then
you can begin to look

at things to look at the ocean after
forgetting everything you ever knew about the ocean:
the water, the sand crabs, the sand gnats, the sand
dollars, sand castles, the jelly fish you put in sand
castle dungeons, the old fashioned lollipops,
and so you wandered out to Myrtle Beach in a tuxedo
and patent leather shoes and looked in the giant
blue shape of water and you thought you might
and swim out to the dark blue line between the ocean
and the sky, but wait, as you are swimming, you realize
that the line is just the edge of the ocean before you
get to outer space, and that you will never get
to outer space, and so you are left swimming, until
you get to Sierra Leone or somewhere

where a tribe of hunter gatherers picks you up
on the beach and nurses you back to life with
some berries they foraged in the woods, but they
are strange people who share everything, including
clothes, so they strip you naked and divide your clothes
up among the other tribespeople, and so you are left with
one tiny square piece of white tee shirt to cover up your
penis, and everywhere else you are going to sunburn, and
you have no idea how to hunt for jungle pigs, so
the kids in the tribe make fun of you, and you end
up mating with a girl from a neighboring tribe who
also washed up along the beach, but her white skin
has long ago turned brown, so you make a nest full
of babies with her, and she doesn’t speak English
she speaks French Canadian and you wonder what the
fuck she is doing here

all the other not civilized people play music
out of hollow sticks, which are not a lot like American musical
instruments, but maybe like Canadian musical instruments but I don’t know if you know, because in this story you have forgotten all your previous knowledge so you decide to compose an opera for your beautiful wife to sing and it is based loosely on Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini’s Tosca, but you don’t know that and the violin part of the opera is performed using the two horns of a rhinoceros strung with hairs from jungle
pigs and performed in conjunction with many other musical
instruments you create in what might be called your
golden period of creativity that would have never happened
until you forgot everything you knew about the world

and then your roommate from freshman year of college
walks up with a whole lot of people who look
like they are about his age, and they are all carrying
bibles, but you don’t recognize that they are bibles, you
just keep singing tribal operas with your wife and
the village children who are not hunting or fishing
or cleaning up the huts, and your roommate says to you
who he doesn’t recognize either because you are brown now
and not a white student from the university of Georgia who
is used to his sort of people, and always have a defense
ready for missionaries who knock on your door, asks you if you have ever met Jesus, and you say

to him because no you have not met Jesus, because you
forgot everything you ever knew about the world and everything you ever knew about fighting back against Christian missionaries, so he tells you about Jesus and you actually listen for the first time in your life and then he says he is building a church in another village and you decide to go with him and you hear other people talking about love and you have never heard this before and so you are converted to Christianity and taken in an airplane across the ocean and back to Georgia, where you started,

but now you are a brown Christian and you are knocking on
doors, and everyone you see you have never seen before even
though you have and you think that these people are a lot like the wife you left in Sierra Leone, and then you knock on your parents door and you look at them and they begin to say that they are not interested and you look back and you wonder why

but this poem is not about finding Jesus, or finding your parents or finding a beautiful French Canadian women to make babies with, this poem is about two things

1. if you pretend you don’t know well then really do you not know anything about the world or do you instead look at things through and through again another lens

2. in Bhutan the tourists have stomped the holy grounds for the last time says the king to his people who restrict most people from coming into the Kingdom of Bhutan where the king is a small wise round man with eye glasses and he listens to the people who are small-eyed and don’t know anything but persistently laugh