 Hi. Thanks for joining me. I've got an exciting read for you today. It's one of my favorite poems from one of my favorite poets. So I hope you too enjoy as well and drop those comments and let me know because this is a fragment of the poem and I could make three or four more videos like this to continue with this poem if there's interest in you. So onward and forward let's cut the cake. Thomas Merton from the Collected Poems of Thomas Merton published by a New Directions paperback today. We'll begin. Cables to the Ace or familiar literities of misunderstanding. 1968 for Robert Lacks. Prologue. You, dear reader, need no prologue. Do you think these Horation Oaks are all about you? Far from the new wine to need a bundle. You are no bundle. Go advertise yourself. Why not more pictures? Why not more rhythms, melodies, etc. All suitable questions to be answered some other time. The realm of spirit is two doors down the hall. There you can obtain more soul than you are ready to cope with, Buster. The poet has not announced these mosaics on purpose. Furthermore, he has changed his address and his poetics are on vacation. He is not roaring in the old tunnel. Go shake hands with the comics if you demand a preface. My attitudes are common and my ironies are no less usual than the bright pages of your favorite magazine. The soaps, the smells, the liquors, the insurance, the third dull, gin-soaked cheer. What more do you want? Rabble? Go write your own prologue. I am the incarnation of everybody and the zones of reassurance. I am the obstetrician of good fortune. I live in the social cages of joy. It is morning, afternoon, or evening. Begin. I too have slept here in my stolen Cadillac. I too have understudied the paradise swan, May 1967. Cables to the ace. Lament of Ortega. The crowd has revolted. Now there are bathrooms everywhere. Life is exempt from every restriction. One. Edifying cables can be made musical if played and sung by full armed societies doomed to an electric war. A heavy imperturbable beat. No indication where to stop. No messages to decode. Cables are never causes. Noises are never values. With the unending vroom, vroom, vroom of the guitars, we will all learn a new kind of obstinacy. Together with massive lessons of irony and refusal, we assist once again at the marriage of heaven and hell. Two. A seer interprets the ministry of the stars. The broken gear of a bird. He tests the quality of stone lights. Ashen fruits of a fire's forgotten service. He registers their clarity with each new lurch into suspicion. He does not regret for he does not know. He plots the nativity of the pole star, but it neither sets nor rises. Snow melts on the surface of the young brown river, and there are two lids. The petals of sleep. The sayings of the saints are put away in air conditioned archives. Three. Decoding the looks of opposites. Writing down their silences. Words replaced by moods. Actions punctuated by the hard fall of imperatives. More and more smoke. Since language has become a medium in which we are totally immersed, there is no longer any need to say anything. The saying says itself all around us. No one need attend. Listening is obsolete. So is silence. Each one travels alone in a small blue capsule of indignation. Some of the better informed have declared war on language. Four. Ledgers to a corridor. Put the whole family out into the hall. Plato. Now they are outside receiving those hard cosmic cables without interception. Ideas, productions, answers. Sand in the eye. He who has the most sand in his eye thinks he sees everything. It is written to see the whole world in a grain of sand. Science, politics, theology, sandstorms. Does anybody sing? Some will try the following hymn. Five. Gem notes of the examiner or terminal declarations. The directors have engineered a surprise you will not easily discover. Escape in a carload of irritated pets before the examination. Come shyly to the main question. There is dishonor in these wires. You will first hesitate, then repeat, then sing louder to the drivers of ironic mechanisms as they map your political void. You will be approved for parakeets and lights for many original side effects. Each nominal conceit will be shot down by an electric eye. Your poem is played back to you from your own trump card. Until all titles are taken away, events are finally obscure forever. You wake and wonder whose case history you composed as your confessions are filed in the dialect of bureau and electrons. Six. You taught me language and my profit on it is I know how to curse. The red plague rigged you for learning me your language. Caliban seven. Original sin. A memorial anthem for father's day. Weep, weep little day for the fathers of the lame. Experts are looking for his name. Weep, weep little day for your father's bone. All the expeditions dig him one. He went on one leg or maybe four. Science cautious says two or more. Weep, weep little day for his walking and talking. He walked on two syllables or maybe none. Weep little history for the words he offended one by one beating them grievously with a shin bone. Eight. Write a prayer to a computer. But first of all, you have to find out how it thinks. Does it dig prayer? More important still. Does it dig me and father, mother, etc. etc. How does one begin? Oh, thou great, unalarm and humorless electric sense. You start out wrong and you give instant offense. You may find yourself shipped off to the camps in a freight car. Prayer is a virtue. But don't begin with the wrong number. Nine. I am doubted. Therefore I am. Does this mean that if I insist on making everybody doubt me more I will become more real? It is enough to doubt them back. By this mutual service we make one another complete, a metaphysic of universal suspicion. These words were once heard, uttered by a lonely disembodied voice, seemingly in a cloud. No one was impressed by them and they were immediately forgotten. Ten. Warm sun. Perhaps these yellow wild flowers have the minds of little girls. My worship is a blue sky and 10,000 crickets in the deep wet hay of the field. My vow is the silence under their song. I admire the woodpecker and the dove in simple mathematics of flight. Together we study practical norms. The plowed and pleasant field is red as a brick in the sun and says, now my turn. Several of us begin to sing. 11. What do you teach me, mama my cow, my delicate forefathers wink in their sleep? Seek advancement then as now and never learn to weep. What do you want of me, mama my wit, while the water runs and the world spins? All the successful ride in their buicks and grow double chins. What do you seek of me, mama my ocean, while the fire sleeps in well-baked mud? Take your shotgun and put it in the bank. For money is blood. 12. Another sunny birthday. I am tormented by poetry and loss. The summer morning approaches with shy, tentative mandibles. There are perhaps better solutions than to be delicately eaten by an entirely favorable day. But the day is bright with love and with riches for the unconcerned. A black butterfly dances on the blonde light of hot cement. My loneliness is nourished by the smell of freshly cut grass and the distant complaint of a freight train. Nine even strokes of the bell fall like a slowly counted fortune into the far end of my mind while I walk out at the other end of awareness into a very new hot morning in which all the symbols have to be moved. Here is another smiling Jewish new year and the myths are about to be changed. We will start up brand new religious engines in the multiple temples. Tonight the dark will come alive with fireworks and age will have scored another minor festival. 13. The planet over eastern parkway. In the region of daffodils and accurate fears we seek the layout, the scene of claims. We expect 8 a.m. with cries of racers. Here is the entrance to the start and the smart pistol glints in the eyes of an eternal chief. He sees executives begin to run over fresh cut graves. The whole civic order of salads, blessed and green by order of the town. Then the machine with sterling efforts keeps in trim. In tune with oil, though it needs essential grooves, say the keepers. And you are always turning it off, says the owner. So now it is over. The day of executions. Malfeasances are over and done in all the books of law. And the cartwheel planet goes down in the silos of earth whose parkways vanish in the steam of ocean feeling or the houses of oil men. Go home, go home and get your picture taken in a bronze western, an ocean of free admissions to the houses of night to the sandy electric stars and the remaining adventures of profiteers. 14. Some may say that the electric world is a suspicious village or better a jungle where all the howls are banal. No, the electric jungle is a village where howling is not suspicious. Without it, we would be afraid that fear was usual. 15. They improve their imitable wire to discover where speech is trying to go. They guess it goes to the sign of the ear talking of portable affairs. 16. Splitting into little mills of magnets and seconds, the everlasting carbon vine, a smooth investigation. Paying off into all the vessels and portals of known law givers who learn the time of their carrier and the arrival. Relaxed war gods unlock the newest ministry of doors with capital letters. The seeing line discovers dread, tracks silvery dooms inventive car through all electric walks and expert lights. It commands dawn riders. Lenses discover blue flame in the mouths of fatal children. Parades and takeovers follow the parable wherever normal. 16. Light choirs of educated men compose their shaken elements and present academies. Let's start over. 16. Let choirs of educated men compose their shaken elements and present academies of electronic renown with better languages, knowing health and marital status, first of all they must provide automatic spelling devices or money making conundrums to program the next ice age from end to end in mournful proverbs. Let such choirs in tone more deep insulted shades that mime the arts of diction. Four-footed metaphors must then parade firm resolution or superb command of the wrong innuendo. You may indeed be given free of charge an uninhibited guess three pensive norms but no norm is necessary for scholars and ages. Then in the last resort suggestions will be wishful and make up erratic formulas to obtain the best vowel or most expensive consummate. If you agree in the end that in most cases the best word of all is only 17 how it can be done without delay we are seeking ambitious men who have captured the sheer fascination of Marcus Aurelius, Havlock Ellis, and the Marquis de Sade. We can afford top pliable nails who have always been boys at heart drag racing through darkest Esquire ready to become style leaders and medium shapes hard as nails mean as the half stewed owls we detest taking double breasted advice on barbells and heart attacks with friendliness and sex at instant command able to afford new areas of mind with habit frequency and jags and breathless weekends of instant mind power for the unusual partner or the executive bald on top but ready to switch and meet the challenge of the next instant always looking six inches taller 18 he speaks cautiously to the t-phone when it invites he considers the valeties of 60 he has biblical manners of his sleeve this old master he will often eat fresh flowers he is without imperative urges he worries in his sleep worries about the code when he wakes he will have forgotten all his lines can such a one have presence of mind his sons will not be as he is for he is never strange 19 studies of man's friendly competitor the rat have shown that pencils of control can find ways out for the withdrawn methods are right here says dr. a for one hiding the sockets in a troubled man whose friendly competitor the rat is pressing buttons and having fun man's friendly rat the competitor can prove wearing a cap on the vulnerable skull that the absence of any motive is itself a mo a mover he suddenly looked around he spoke out loud he met and talked with normal minds and research found 50 persons all with wires in the pleasure center they were being moved by rats there was more bliss in the tingling doorbell of long dead reward another man had periodic spells and even ecstasies could he help it if the rat kept pressing it was a joy for epileptics to wire home to their dead fathers a long distance call via your own brain it is like a good feeling it is like a good feeling but where will it end split second doses of motivation keep you in stitches the potential is enormous and the pointless smile will freeze without delay an entire parlor after warning the rat he worked his own button to death back went the fires of ecstasy and blew the rat sky high will my rat ever recover will he call again ringing the septum septal region that earthly paradise in the head two millimeters away from my sinus infection political man must learn to work the pleasure button and cut off the controlling rat science is very near but the morbid animal might always win it works like a bomb he declared after for a split second the competitor beams all the lighted windows suddenly shine together like a big city and at the end of the line stands Santa Claus with his ho friendly to man maybe it could last if the defenders smile were fixed in place by a clever surgeon it can be made to last on rats studies of man's friendly competitor the rat has shown 20 part a to sons not to be numb be alone dog little brother and paddle down the crowded street with sleep in your eye killing all the fathers with your cigarette in the lobbies and elevators be a cloud of hailstones a visible episode or a migrant flame feeding on nothing an anti-profit a dry homeless tree with a knife in your side and many skinny years to die in as a life member of the unemployed 20 part b to daughters to study history fin fin tribal and double wide awake rocks the fatal craft cut lash fin fin to kill time before and aft air he sinks his fin again in his own wake thank you for joining me for another episode on rhythms riddle i am your host tons gauntlet please subscribe and browse my playlists and comment how did you like the poem today how do you like the reading that's only about a quarter of it if you'd like me to go on uh drop your good words and once again that was cables to the ace by thomas merton