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The sermon for Aug. 04, 2002 is: spoon
10:25 a.m. I've just written a poem, a jeu d'esprit, a mantissa; it's called "A philtre gone astray": love anointed the drink appointed to me and I was filled with a delicious sorrow so sweet it did seem to me sent by god oh never would I deliberately betray the vows of my chivalry, the trust of my family this love I swear is some enchanting some effect of the ocean, some wave of white sail oh never would I unknot the twisting chastity at your heart, my queen, though I'm greedy to mount steed and tilt spurs bloodied at that twinkling ring rip the prize loose and curry your favour gleaming in a wing of black sail I never know when I've stopped saying enough; my goal in poetry as it is in the conversations I hold in life is to strip away the obvious references, and to say only what lies beneath the common and the everyday. It seems obvious to me that I'm writing about poor delirious Sir Tristran, gulping down his cocktail of cock tale and leering at his sad charge, the sentimental Yseult, as they yacht it towards Cornwall and King Mark on ye olde original Love Boat. Of course I have no idea what I'm writing, since I'm rather heirophantic when it comes to poetry, and think more of sound than sense; and then bulldozer a story into the random syllables afterward. Hey, worked for Dylan Thomas. I never know when I've stopped saying enough. My goal in poetry as it is in the conversations I hold in life is to speak to someone who would respond to me in kind: since I think I'm askew, fifteen degrees off the mortal coil's plumb, and whenever I do attempt to say anything, I find I'm not telling you what it is I thought I was saying; "every word," as Beckett so cleverly put it, "is an unnecessary stain on the silence and the nothingness." Then again, he did say that. Then again, what did he mean? I wish to god I could just stop talking. I think of the last proposition in Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: "What we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence."  
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