Beauty of Nature

Live for the Future

Live for the future says the Optimist.
Live in case of the future says the Pessimist.
The hoary mist hangs idly on choices,
Wafted on the breeze like sheep's wool on barbed wire.
To be decisive when indifference becomes a bore;
To direct randomness through one gilded doorway
While rejecting another whose paint itches and peels;
To select the berry which lodges no grub:
Here is the province of magistrates and infants,
One using ossified nouns, the other rashness and greed.
But there is too much ego and too much id,
Too much black and white for my grey indolence.
How much more like Nature to drift with tide and wind,
To swirl with the other dust and filth,
To find a personal place in that kaleidoscope
Among the crackling leaves and dry stones,
Skipping an honest freedom between society's stilletoed heels,
Ignorant of cycles slumping past in the gutter press.

Live for the past says the Reactionary.
Die for the future says the Revolutionary.
In a while we must present our mean lives to Death.
Must we then live a death in our present?
Listen for the call of an unborn heart
To penetrate the crimes of ages past.
Hear the impassioned prayer of one to come,
One who is many, and not yet to blame.
Hark to the pleas of the seed of mankind:

Live until the future: none can say more.
Die only to end life, and gild another door.

Luke Mastin - June 1981

Speed of Sound

How long before I get in?
Before it starts, before I begin?
How long before you decide?
Before I know what it feels like?
Where To, where do I go?
If you never try, then you'll never know.
How long do I have to climb,
Up on the side of this mountain of mine?

Look up, I look up at night,
Planets are moving at the speed of light.
Climb up, up in the trees,
every chance that you get,
is a chance you seize.
How long am I gonna stand,
with my head stuck under the sand?
I'll start before I can stop,
before I see things the right way up.

All that noise, and all that sound,
All those places I got found.
And birds go flying at the speed of sound,
to show you how it all began.
Birds came flying from the underground,
if you could see it then you'd understand?

Ideas that you'll never find,
All the inventors could never design.
The buildings that you put up,
Japan and China all lit up.
The sign that I couldn't read,
or a light that I couldn't see,
some things you have to believe,
but others are puzzles, puzzling me.

All those signs, I knew what they meant.
Some things you can invent.
Some get made, and some get sent,
Ooh?
Birds go flying at the speed of sound,
to show you how it all began.
Birds came flying from the underground,
if you could see it then you'd understand,
ah, when you see it then you'll understand?




I come before you at the speed of light.
But my ideas at the speed of sound.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

By F. Scott Fitzgerald
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/Fitzgerald/jazz/benjamin/benjamin1.htm

Life can only be understood backward
Yet...
It must be lived forward.

December.