The writers, editors, and staff of theBillyLeePontificator.com are on vacation until July 15, 2016. Please hold all calls. We forgot you already, so don’t bother.
This woman is at work (she’s a swimsuit model); she has nothing to do with Billy Lee or anyone on his staff. She is not on vacation.
Readers may continue to visit and peruse the website free of charge, no questions asked.
Third-shift parking-lot attendant and janitor, Billy Lee JUNIOR, will review and approve all incoming comments and emails during the absence of our top executives.
Click here to read Billy Lee’sofficial vacation policy, which applies equally to all employees — except for Billy Lee JUNIOR, who is considered ”disruptive” and not a ”team player” by every member of the Editorial Board.
JUNIOR holds Pontificator Editorial Board member Ebenezer Hartless by his shirt during wage negotiations last year. JUNIOR demanded $8 per hour, which the Board rejected as outrageous and divisive.
Subscriber Alert:
Two days ago, on June 17,while TheBillyLeePontificator higher-ups (including Billy Lee) spent their yearly six-week sabbatical at the abandoned Trump Casino in New Jersey’s Atlantic City, JUNIOR took full advantage (we can scarcely believe it ourselves) to actually go and vent on FOX NEWS, where he ”exposed” the Pontificator for ”advocating tolerance of all races, religions, orientations, and sexual positions.”
JUNIOR told FOX(falsely) that our website places subversive messages inside purposely overly-long essays to better conceal them.
JUNIOR informed Fox News females (whose short skirts and long legs are supposed to convince morons they have press credentials) that Billy Lee’s essays are long too; too long, actually; and ”really, really boring.”
JUNIOR claimed that it’s not possible for anyone to read Billy Lee’s essays thoroughly; not carefully, anyway; not carefully enough to notice the ”hidden persuaders” he has strewn like so many grenades among the rocks of each essay’s thousands-of-words, which he cleverly rigs to flip anyone who stumble on them into becoming Communists, or worse.
JUNIOR accused Billy Lee of advocating for an amendment to the Second Amendment, which would effectively deny 90% of preschoolers the right to receive as gifts military-style assault rifles at Christmas and birthday parties; Billy Lee, he droned, supports 20 million-dollar limits on annual incomes; he pushes 400 million-dollar caps on the size of private estates; and on and so on.
The Editorial Board does not like to air its dirty laundry in public; not normally. But after this attack on our organization by one of our own, Billy Lee requested that we remind our subscribers that JUNIOR has a complicated history; he sometimes says crazy things he doesn’t mean and makes unreasonable demands that can’t be met — like the time he groveled during a performance-review for a ”fair” wage — $8 per hour — exactly $8 more than he agreed to when first he started working for us, more than two years ago.
Why can’t Billy Lee understand what’s going on? Why can’t he see the obvious? Doesn’t he get how JUNIOR diminishes us; how he undercuts the good work we are all trying to do, together, as one unified team?
How did Billy Lee not notice? — we turned down JUNIOR’S pay raise last year after the dude threatened to commit hari-kari in the parking lot with one of those plastic toothpick swords he always carries in his lunch-pail.
Despite numerous media leaks and vile rumors about JUNIOR spread by disgruntled co-workers, Billy Lee insists, ”JUNIOR is normal — an everyday employee like any other.”
”I have legal documents to prove it,” BillyLee likes to say. Old DNA test-results stuffed in a rusty file cabinet he’s kept in his basement for well-nigh twenty-five years prove that the 99.97% probability of paternity is far less than the 100% required for certainty.
”Billy LeeJUNIOR is not my son,” Billy Lee is always mumbling — often to no one in particular — while he nods alone late at night on his front-porch swing, neighbors claim.
Billy Lee continues to resist the Board’s demands that JUNIOR be fired; he seems to protect JUNIOR from the consequences of every incompetent and crazy thing he does; he even lets him sleep on a cot in his basement.
The Editorial Board categorically denies JUNIOR’S repeated requests for a pay raise. His demands are petty, insulting, stupid, silly, exorbitant, disruptive, offensive, frivolous, and foolish. JUNIOR has a choice; it’s time he made it: love our website or leave.
It’s that simple.
We are asking readers to ignore posts that might appear in the Pontificator between now and 15 July 2016, because it is likely JUNIOR will have typed them — slowly of course — he strikes the keys with one finger; he can’t type. He can’t spell his own name, for crying-out-loud.
We, the Editorial Board, intend to return from vacation to once-and-for-all end this dispute with Billy Lee’s favorite custodian and car-parker — JUNIOR; or as Billy Lee calls him: Billy Lee JUNIOR; usually followed by a little butt-tap and squeeze on the shoulder. Gag us with a spoon — seriously.
The mission of our website is to advocate for a progressive approach to the shaping of culture and social policy in America. We won’t allow a miscreant named JUNIOR, who happens to share some of his DNA with our founder, Billy Lee, to unravel our vision for the future.
The heart and soul of our favorite blog site, theBillyLeePontificator.com, is at stake, people. Nepotism between employees who share nothing except their first and last names and 99.97% of their DNA cannot be allowed to distract us from our noble work.
Listen up, JUNIOR: when we get back from our six-week vacation, YOU’RE FIRED!
The Billy Lee Pontificator Editorial Board
Lisen up, doods:
Ur late. I hirred a neu bord alredy. I emaled daddy. He dont like u neether. The nue bord calls me MR. JUNIUR.
Disclaimer by the Editorial Board: The following story, No Good Deed… is a work of fiction by Billy Lee. Events and persons depicted in the story exist only in the imagination of the writer and have no connection to living persons or actual events.
The old woman ahead of me in the checkout lane at the grocery sat in a battery-operated three-wheeler and struggled to move her purse off her wrist into the front basket. She couldn’t do it and gave up. She was grossly overweight; she couldn’t maneuver — her fat arms were black and blue right down to her fingernails. Diabetes, I thought.
I wondered if I should help, but she soon stopped and let the purse dangle where it was, on her wrist. It was a bad angle. It would be awkward for me to reach for it; and besides, it was her purse, a personal item she might try to defend. It was a good bet she fought this fight every time she shopped. No big deal. Let it go.
It was her own cart that she sat in, from the looks of it. She probably had used it for years. Held together by duct tape and bubble gum, it was dirty; a yellowed eggnog color; depressing to look at.
The cashier at the register — a black college-aged girl — finished the tally; the old woman sitting in the beat-up cart fumbled unsuccessfully to open her purse; the line of shoppers behind us continued to grow. It was busy. It was Christmas. I was in a hurry. What the heck… I reached over to the card reader and inserted my card. I’ll get this, I said. Merry Christmas.
The old lady looked up at me and said, thank you.
You look like you have enough to worry about, I said, beaming. We’ll make it one less thing.
Yes, she said. I worry about so many things these days. She fell silent and looked down. Something drippy fell from her mottled face into her lap. The eyes of the young black woman working the cash-register grew large and began to sparkle from tears, which she tried to hold back.
She would tell me later she had just immigrated from Ghana, Africa. She has stories, that girl, I would think to myself. The African regained her composure and gathered the old lady’s items.
As the cashier and myself exchanged a sympathetic look, the old woman with the black and blue arms and drippy face reached for a button on her cart and sped away. She didn’t remember to collect her receipt. I don’t think she felt embarrassed. Maybe she thought I might change my mind; make her pay for her own groceries, or something.
The cashier rang up my stuff. It was all good. I started to get that warm glow one gets when they’ve done something for someone, especially a stranger.
A melodic accent from somewhere out of Africa interrupted my reverie, Oh, look! Here is a bag of things. Are they yours? I think I forgot to give them to that person.
We checked the contents against the old woman’s receipt. Yup, they weren’t mine.
The cashier grabbed the bag and ran down the long aisle of the store to search for an old woman driving a beat-up mobility scooter with a missing bag of groceries. The folks in line behind me started to stir. A few threw unfriendly looks in my direction. My warm feeling turned to heat, then dread.
The cashier returned; she hadn’t found the customer. Since I had the receipt, I decided to take the groceries. If the old lady returned, she would be unable to convince anyone the groceries were hers, I reasoned.
I began to worry. It was Christmas. Undercover cops — temporaries with little training or empathy — lurked pretty much everywhere. They loved to patrol the parking lots, someone once told me.
What if store security decided to stop the old lady in the busy lot? What if they intercepted her before she could rendezvous with whoever was driving her home? Maybe she lived alone nearby, and there was no one to escort her. Minus the receipt, they might arrest her for shoplifting.
They might already have her in a little room somewhere, hidden from the public, to interrogate her. That’s why we couldn’t find her. I loosened my collar as my mind began to race. I felt sweat bead on the top of my head.
She would notice — under the intense pressure of questioning — one bag of groceries was missing. And she couldn’t produce the receipt. He took it, she’d realize. It was the old man! I could hear her screaming. She was cursing me — the old codger who had stood behind her and had the audacity to jump into her business for no good reason.
Of course she had the money to pay for everything, she screamed at the SWAT team as they held her down; as they restrained her. Of course she did. She didn’t need that smelly stranger’s credit card. And he stole a bag of her groceries! Arrest him! It was he, the grey-beard, who robbed her; it was he who took her receipt; it was he who confused her — and the cashier! He got her arrested. It was he, he, he — an old FART! — not her!
I imagined her anguish. By now she must realize that she would spend Christmas in prison; behind bars; isolated; alone; cold; away from family and a warm fire in the hearth — for I just knew she had no money for lawyers or bail.
I thought I could hear her weeping. I could hear her, but I would never be able to find her. No one else could hear her cries for mercy, no one would ever step forward to defend her and confirm her story. Take her out of here, I heard the arresting officer boom. Thief!
My parting words to the cashier were short enough. I hurried to my car and drove out of the busy parking lot, quickly, furtively. I cast a side-long glance into my rear-view mirror. No flashing lights. No siren. An old red van with a tree tied on top pulled up behind me.
It was Christmas; the most wonderful time of the year.
Miguel Angel Asturias won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967 during my freshman year at college. I must have been chasing girls the day of the announcement. I just don’t remember him. Until a few months ago, I didn’t know who he was.
While doing research on the Cuban Revolution and its leaders for recent blog-posts, Miguel’s name kept popping up here and there in various contexts, so I decided to learn more about the author by trying to take an inside-the-cover peek into his signature book, Men of Maize, on Amazon.com.
Was Asturias really that good that he could win a Nobel prize? What did he write about?
Miguel Angel Asturias, I’d already learned, was born in Guatemala and wrote in Spanish — a language I didn’t read or speak. I was able to find some English translations of his books on-line, but they seemed to be scarce and out-of-print.
On Amazon.com, Men of Maize(Hombres de Maiz) cost $50 — in used condition, of course. “Like-new” copies priced-out at over a hundred dollars. The titles didn’t feature Amazon’s inside-the-cover functionality either, so my free peek inside-the-cover strategy just wasn’t going to work.
Other books by Asturias were also unavailable in English, although a beat-up library copy of Strong Wind (Viento Fuerte) turned up on-line for sale at ten bucks. I decided to buy it and then search through libraries on-line for Men of Maize. It turned out that a solitary university library, which happened to be located nearby, owned a solitary English language copy, so I drove over to check it out.
Miguel Angel Asturias; born 19 Oct 1899; died 9 June 1974
According to the inside cover, the library acquired the book in 1993, the same year Hombres de Maiz was translated into English and incorporated into UNESCO’s World Heritage historical book collection. It had been forty-four years since it was first published, in Spanish. The librarian — who must have jumped out of her chair to place the order — probably thought the book would become a big hit among the institution’s forty-thousand English readers.
Sure enough, according to the book’s ledger, someone or other had already borrowed the award-winning novel five times: June 1996; February 1997; February 2001; July 2003; July 2009. And now a sixth borrower was stepping up to the plate — that would be me — to end the book’s most recent six-year no-hitter. Unless the forty-thousand folks who used the student library were reading it in Spanish, Corn Men wasn’t doing so good, not where I lived, anyway; not in English.
How does a critically acclaimed once-upon-a-time international best-seller written by a Nobel Prize winning author (unavailable in USA bookstores) generate a paltry six library reads in twenty-two years at a major university library that is also serving the public? I don’t know.
I took the book home to study it. Here is the opening sentence: Gasper[pronounced Jasper, like the blood-stone] Ilom lets them steal the sleep from the eyes of the land of Ilom. Ok, not sure what this is about, I’ll keep reading. Gasper Ilom lets them hack away the eyelids of the land of Ilom with axes…Huh? Gasper Ilom lets them scorch the leafy eyelashes of the land of Ilom with fires that turn the moon to furious red…Mmm. Keep reading. Keep reading. OK. End of page one. Gasper stretched himself out,…bound in sleep and in death by the snake of six-hundred-thousand coils of mud, moon, forests, rainstorms, mountains, lakes, birds, and echoes that pounded his bones until they turned to a black frijol paste dripping from the depths of the night.
Gerald Martin, translator.
Page one, I soon learned, was the weakest page in the book. On page two and beyond, the novel began to rise into a tour de force, a masterpiece, which had been lovingly captured and transformed into English by translator, Gerald Martin.
Asturias, I discovered, wrote in a style that critics would later call magic realism. It’s the style of One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Gabo), which also won a Nobel Prize and is required reading in many university literature programs. Gabo published his book in Argentina during the same year that Asturias won his Nobel Prize (1967).
For those familiar with Gabo’s book, it’s use of language is shallow compared to that of Asturias — though it is a fun and light-hearted read; I would say it is more entertaining to average readers interested in plot over word-play and character development. Gabo referred to his book as a kind of inside joke written for friends.
Whatever style anyone chooses to label Corn Men, Miguel Asturias was clearly a genius who knew unusual stuff, and he could write. That’s my view, anyway. His writing stands alone. Critics have compared him to Keats and Joyce, but I say, no. Those authors can sometimes depress the reader with their pedantic displays.
Not Miguel. He was humble, brilliant, knowledgeable, and direct. He didn’t grandstand. He didn’t show-off. He painted with a preternatural palette to portray ways of being which were lucid and compelling; and fabulously unusual. His writing sometimes took my breath away, because it was original, unpredictable, and paradigm-shattering.
Only Shakespeare himself rewires the brains of his readers like Asturias, I thought. Yes, references to Mayan culture might be arcane. But they didn’t impede the flow of the story or obscure its meaning. They simply provided rivulets to explore for those readers who might like to learn more than they know.
Popol Vuh is Mayan scripture. It contains accounts of creation, ancestry, history, and cosmology. It even references a great flood.
My interest in Corn Men, after reading it, has less to do with the story itself, or its backstory, than with its use of language — though all of it is incredible. For example, the Guatemalan writer — a Sorbonne trained ethnologist and bonafide expert in Maya culture — spent forty years transcribing and translating into Spanish the Mayan “bible”, Popol Vuh (Book of the People). His knowledge of Mayan culture saturates the novel.
Miguel Angel Asturias lived and breathed Guatemala, which for him sheltered a personal treasure-cache of Maya ruins, history, legends, culture, writings, and artifacts. Asturias was in love with all of it.
Guatemala should be of interest to all Americans, as well, because it is central to recent US history. In 1954 Guatemala became the second of several modern democracies the United States chose to overthrow. (The first was Iran, in 1953.)
Encouraged by the easy success of its military takeovers, the USA used Guatemala as a base of operations to try again, in 1961, to seize control of Cuba, but its Bay of Pigs invasion (modeled after its strategy in Guatemala), failed.
The USA was undeterred by miscalculation. It learned from its mistakes, made tweaks in its planning and, by the middle 1960s, began overthrowing governments in the Americas and around the world to further its economic and strategic interests.
Like falling dominoes, countries like Chile, Nicaragua, Panama, South Vietnam, and Iraq (there were others) fell to USA backed military coups and takeovers, until President Obama put a stop to it all in 2008. (Two exceptions continue to be Afghanistan and Syria, where takeover planning and operations are ongoing.)
Editors Note:As of 25 May 2018 destabilization of countries the USA dislikes seems to have resumed as a cornerstone of its foreign policy, which is to dominate all countries on the earth. The policy is called strategic strangulation; it’s like waterboarding except that it’s inflicted on countries; it’s being applied against Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, Brazil, Turkey, and many others — which some readers won’t have any trouble identifying. Readers should keep in mind that everything changed when the GOP and its Russian-Israeli backers seized power in the manipulated and rigged election of November 2016. Billy Lee published this essay during the final years of the Obama presidency.
Current problems in socialist democracies like Brazil, Columbia, and Venezuela appear (on the day of this writing) to be the work of wealthy power-brokers working outside the influence of traditional government agencies long associated with destabilization programs; the CIA and its labyrinth of agricultural-aid programs seem to be playing historically minor roles at the present time.
Jacobo Arbenz, Guatemalan President, 1951-1954
Not so in 1954. Back then USA proxies overpowered the popularly elected Guatemalan President, Jacobo Arbenz and forced him to stand naked before reporters before they put him on an airplane and threw him out.
They then stripped another prominent Guatemalan, our writer Miguel Angel Asturias, of his citizenship and expelled him (along with hundreds of his friends and acquaintances) from the country he loved.
Soon, over one-hundred thousand citizens fled to neighboring countries, after they learned that the military government was “disappearing” opponents — a terrifying practice that would spread to other USA backed dictatorships, like Argentina, in the decades to come.
Miguel’s exile (to Argentina and Chile) lasted eight years during which the United States transformed Guatemala into a training ground and staging area for CIA backed militias tasked to, among other things, protect dictators allied with American businesses, hunt down and kill leftist revolutionaries (one of them, Che Guevara), and capsize popularly elected socialist governments, like those in Chile and Nicaragua.
Maya Pyramid in the city of Tikal, Guatemala
As I said before, my interest in Corn Men lies beyond its compelling story and backstory. Yes, it is a novel about the indigenous Indians of Guatemala, who believed their skin was made of corn. Yes, it describes the marginalization and suppression of a native people by modern hi-tech agribusiness, which viewed corn as nothing more than a crop that could be sold.
Corn could not be one’s personal identity, the northern white-men of agribusiness insisted. Corn did not, could not, envelop, protect, and nurture ones soul.
According to the leaders of big agribusiness, corn was something to eat, nothing more. The Mayan Indians knew better. Corn was sacred. Corn was people. They were made from it.
Corn Men don’t remember.
Cross-cultural differences as wide as these, though fascinating, always seem to lead toward tragedy. On the book’s final page, in the epilogue, in the last paragraph, at the last sentence, Asturias shows us the horrific result: a degraded world where corn men become ants. They work on utopian ant farms harvesting kernels of corn. The glory and the magic of living inside skin made of corn has been flayed away.
The thrill of being Corn Men, the joy of being a fruit-like part of the earth, is not even remembered. From now on, corn men are worker ants. It becomes all about the work. It’s all about producing corn, selling corn, eating corn, buying corn, maybe even popping corn. It’s no longer about being corn.
Or is it?
Gerald Martin, the translator, thought Asturias may have intended the last paragraph to show that in the distant future the Indians would actually triumph; their descendants would win their fight to be corn people by establishing a kind of worker’s paradise; a communal corn-based utopia; a society based, presumably, on communism, where they would toil like joyful ants.
Who knows? Asturias never said. His ending remains ambiguous, open to interpretation and discussion. Good literature is like that, it seems.
The dilemmas which Asturias described are thought provoking for sure, but what made me love Corn Men was Miguel’s way with language; the way he used language to paint the surreal internal realities of the many indigenous persons he described. The literary techniques and devices he employed to craft the landscapes, animals, people, and action in Corn Men are complex, varied, and thrilling to encounter and embrace, at least for me.
To my mind, Miguel’ s prose is amazing, wondrous, dense, and sophisticated. Gerald Martin, his translator, preserved and amplified it all in a resplendent English version in 1993, which is the one I read.
Below are my personal picks of phrases from the book, Corn Men, (my proletarian version of the title) to give flavor to uninitiated readers; to acquaint them with the astonishing author, Asturias. And, as always, please, feel free to click on the links in this post to learn more.
Billy Lee
What follows are assorted tidbits from a few chapters in the 1993 Gerald Martin translation of Hombres de Maiz, by Miguel Angel Asturias, first published in 1949. Billy Lee hopes these vivid constructs will stimulate interest in the book for all those folks who like to write and read.The Editorial Board
…rabbits…turned into stars…
…word of the earth turned to flame by the sun almost set fire to the maize-leaf ears of the yellow rabbits in the sky…that planted themselves in the sky, turned into stars, and faded into the water like reflections with ears.
…rivers stagnant with wakefulness…
…he was swallowed by a toothless half moon which sucked him from the air, without biting him, like a small fish.
…ground sticky with cold…
…fingernails heavy as shotgun slugs…
…liquor…the water of war…
Gasper grew older as he talked…
His head fell to the ground like a flowerpot with buds of tiny thoughts.
His thoughts passed out of his ears…
…her hair combed by Gaspar’s teeth…
She shrank back like a blind hen.
A handful of sunflower seeds in her entrails.
…river that…rots…for wanting to sleep…
…river that sleeps as it flows and opens its eyes in the pools and rots for wanting to sleep…
…the earth that falls from the stars…
…creamy skies and butter rivers running low…
…shadow hard as the walls…
…gun fully loaded with seeds of darkness…
…skin like old bark, his hair sticking out over his forehead like the tip of a sucked mango…
…dog dyed red with ringworm…
…face the color of vinegar scum…
…shadowy corpses scattering handfuls of maize down from the sky in torrents of rain…
…firefly wizards…
…firefly wizards, who dwelt in tents of virgin doeskin…
…the mud gets more wrinkled year by year, like an aging face…
…sound of his breathing like water falling on porous earth…
…meat contorted in the fire as though the animals had come back to life and were being burned alive…
…boiling fat made rain bubbles in the tortilla dishes…
…men and women trembling like the leaves smacked by machetes.
…saffron colored mountains bathed in turpentine down to the valleys…
…baked puff-pastry faces…
…white root poison…
…sob chilled his nostrils…
…old fool…afraid of everything…
…his fears were just that, the tremors of an old fool who, because of his age, was starting to be afraid of everything.
…crawling children and warm legs…
Candy rosaries like sugared cartridge belts around young bosoms.
…a swarm of locusts on fire…like golden hailstones with wings…
…skeleton light of fireflies…
…deer like lunar sawdust in the fragile light…
…jaw trembling like a loose horseshoe…
…darkness streamed out of the anthills…
…everything was on fire…like the light at the beginning of the world…
…everything was on fire, without giving off either flame, smoke, or any smell of burning. The candle glow of the fireflies streamed down from his hat, behind his ears, over the collar of his embroidered shirt, over his shoulders, up the sleeves of his jacket, down the backs of his hairy hands, between his fingers, like frozen sweat, like the light at the beginning of the world, a brightness in which everything could be seen…
Without saying a word he started bleeding away inside.
…as his voice turned flesh and blood in the cartilage of his nose, mid sobs and thick snuffles…
Senor Tomas, who sat on his leather stool and sucked in his tears, with his back to the door…
…the fire followed on behind with a rush, like a shaggy dog wagging its tail of smoke at him.
…it’s dangerous to contradict what lunatics or lovers say…
Roads of white earth are like the bones of all roads that fall dead at night. …They remain unburied to give passage to souls in torment…
…fire is like water when it flows…
Fire is like water when it flows, no one can cut it off.
…smoke swirling like milk…
…his sigh dropped from the tip of his spurs like tears, almost like words.
…wrapped in their ponchos like mummies…
…the earth was a huge nipple…
The sun, blear-eyed, could hardly see.
Stones from agave slings hummed through the razor-sharp air in the sun-toasted silence of the ripened fields…
Through the tattered lip his incisors, like two enormous nose drips, thrust forward a ridge of cold laughter.
…gums nailed down with stumps…
Madmen and children speak the truth.
…spines…hidden like jaguars…
…sarespino bushes, which by day seem to keep their spines hidden, like jaguars, and bring them out as it grows dark to wound those who pass by.
…echo of the bells that toll for the dead down in the town until they make everyone dizzy, tilan-tilon, tilan-tilon…
The hands of those who snap the maize plant so the cob will finish ripening are like the hands that break the sound of bells in two, so the dead person will ripen.
…the running of the rats, real persons to judge from the noise they made, as though they were moving furniture, were the last things she heard.
…lighter sneezed sparks as the flint struck the steel.
…sparks that sailed…like little partridge eyes to set alight the gold-starched clothes of dry sun and dry moon, dry salt and dry star, of the maize-fields.
…flowers like doomed flags crawling with insects…
…darkness in the clear light of liquor, a luminous liquid which coats everything inside you black as you swallow it, dresses you in mourning inside.
…spurs speaking to the stallion in telegraphic, star-like language.
Death is the dark betrayal of the liquor of life.
Two thin burned legs inside a petticoat of ash, a head with no ears and a small lock of hair, also of ash, and a few curled fingernails, was all that could be lifted from the ground where Vaca Manuela Machojon had fallen.
The waters of the river would cheep at the edges of the pools, like little chicks.
…speaking as though he were killing lice with his teeth…
…her soul…pleading for relief…
…her soul bulging out of her aged, deep-set eyes, pleading mutely for relief…
…tidal waves of weeping that makes everything salty, because tears are salty, because man is made salty by weeping from the moment he is born…
…jasmine-colored teeth…
…a body that goes out of tune, my son, is no good anymore for this life…
…its blood of red citrus juice bathed the moon…
…the madman’s vision is like a mirror broken inside him and in the pieces he sees what he saw whole before.
…he turned his head with the eyes of a boiled crab…
Musus tried to control his horse, sitting up like a flea in the stirrups, buttocks-battered by the trot.
…hoofs echoed like pewter-pots…
…his eyes were fixed on a long serpent of trees which seemed to be crawling between the mountains with the sound of thunder.
Don Chalo…bellowed at him with his mouth open up to his eyes, and such force of lungs that the sound even poured out of his nose.
The sonorous blood clots of his laughter could not be heard, but it was joyful paint that splashed over his face…
…clotting blood of the red moon…
…the thick clotting blood of the red moon…
…dark forest which stank of horses…
…you could hear something like the boiling fizz of water produced by the stubborn flight of insects…
…flea-bitten nag which paid no heed to word or spur once it became stuck to the ground with the glue of weariness and the thin gum of darkness that was half a dream.
…his ears hummed as though he’d been dosed with quinine…
…silver-coin necklaces of clear water and mountains of leaves that woke at each disturbance, each gust of wind with the clamor of a swarm of locusts sandpapering the air.
…carpets of dry pine needles, rivulets which the shine of the moon turned into navigable rivers of white honey along bare hillsides surrounded by pine groves…
The stallion tossed its head as it felt the splash of large drops of white moon.
…sprinkle of limy light…
Pine cones like the bodies of tiny motionless birds, sacrificed birds petrified with terror on the ever convulsing branches.
…hands…like spiders….
The hands of the second lieutenant looked like scuffling spiders beneath the play of lights and shadows.
The light and shade had awoken the itching of the mange between his fingers.
Air and earth, as the riders advanced, seemed to be folded in dark and luminous pleats, blinking, and the stones and black spinebushes gave grasshopper leaps.
…the brightness that was coming at them now, gropingly, mid a beautiful darkness, seemed more like a star in the sky forgotten there since the beginning of the world.
…they could hear the tinkling of stones as they sang beneath the horses’ hoofs.
The rocks, faintly orange in color, were reflected in the film of moon and water that covered them like the surface of a mirror…
…meteors falling with their tendons bleeding light…
…the collapse of a vegetable being which no longer has the will to resist the onrush of the wind.
They literally merged their necks with the necks of their horses, to offer the least resistance, and because contact with living, sweating animals which smelled like sacks of salt afforded them the vague security of companionship in the midst of danger.
…that man whose pale blue eyes shown like crystals of fire…
…squirrels…chewed on cheerful thoughts…
…distant howling of coyotes in lunar syrup, squirrels gnawing with laughter as they chewed on cheerful thoughts…
The moon had fallen with its slow decaying light in a convex sky weepy with night dew.
Suffocating suphur fumes in which diseases seemed to float…
…whiplashing of the fierce wind…armed with razor leaves.
Black wasps smelling of hot cane liquor fleeing from honeycombs the color of excrement sown in the earth, half honeycomb, half ant’s nest.
Little streams of weeping, like brown sugar water, ran through the dust of the roads on his cheeks.
…it grows chill, like the fur of a dead animal, at night.
I picked you up and brought you back to life by blowing on you like a fire when all that’s left is a spark.
…fireflies played at little candles in the darkness. If only Goyo Yic could have seen just one of those small greenish lights, the color of hope, which lit up his pockmarked face, dry and expressionless as cow dung.
…sticks sounded like snapping guitar strings on the docile backs of the oxen…
To hear them speak was better than charity now, in his solitude, when to hear a voice in his house he had to talk to himself, and it’s not the same at all when you talk to yourself, it’s a human voice, sure, but it’s the voice of a madman.
…people…made from hillside earth…
People from the highlands smelling of wool, crags, and black poplars. People from the coast stinking of salt and sea sweat. People from the east, made of hillside earth, giving off an odor of tobacco, dry cheese, yucca paste and corn starch, and people from the north smelling of drizzle, mockingbird cages, and boiled water.
The blind man heard the sky palpitate like some feathered creature, and a strange itching troubled his groin and nipples, as if his sweat were eating away his courage as acid corrodes metal.
…time, which passes without us noticing: as we always have time, we don’t realize we’re always short of it, was how Culebro explained it to him.
…knees deadened from so much kneeling, hands dripping the white smallpox from the candles they held in bundles…
What color is weeping? he cried, stretched out on the ground, and in the same cry, with the very ache of his weeping, he replied, It’s the color of white rum!
White copal, which is the mysterious white brother to rubber, the black brother, the darkness that jumps.
…a woman who is truly loved cannot be seen…
A woman who is truly loved cannot be seen, she is the flower of the amate, seen only by the blind, the flower of blind men, men blinded by love, blinded by faith, blinded by life.
…let himself be bathed, one of those moonlit nights when everything looks just as it does by day, in the tree milk that flows down from the machete cuts in the bark of the moon, that light of copal the wizards cook in receptacles of dream and oblivion.
The woman made a sound of splintering teeth, grinding them, and of bones straining in their joints, stretching out, curling up, crushing her face with tears, which interlocked the sorrow of sinfulness to her placid smile of contentment.
[A New Year’s Message to our readers from the Editorial Board]
January 17, 2015 marks the first anniversary of the Billy Lee Pontificator. During the past year we published more than fifty posts on over thirty topics of interest to Billy Lee — like economics, history, humor, politics, religion, gay rights, literature, race, music, culture, technology, science and many others.
Billy Lee celebrates his blog’s one-year anniversary.
WordPress, our blog-site administrator, reported in year-end statistical summariesthat readers clicked on Billy Lee’s Pontifications 7,000 times.
Although some people might consider the number small compared to the tens-of-thousands of hits received each day by commercial web-sites, Billy Lee prefers to compare his numbers to what he might expect were his articles posted on the front of his refrigerator with little door-magnets.
It’s unlikely that more than a handful of visitors to his kitchen would take the time to read even a few of his posts during the year. Measured this way, it is clear to the Editorial Board that the Billy Lee Pontificator has been a spectacular success.
Billy Lee sometimes tells people he started his blog to entertain and inform readers. Not true. We know him. We work with him. He created his blog, because he needed a reservoir for his crazy ideas.
Billy intends to leave behind a public anthology of utter nonsense to his loved ones. He is convinced that the heart-palpitations he experiences every time he writes will kill him someday, probably prematurely. He doesn’t want to leave an empty legacy of a wasted life.
But let us face some harsh realities. Writing a blog is agonizing, thankless work. A famous person once said: no one who blogs is ever happy (or famous). Bloggers can sometimes suffer criticism, but more often than not, people ignore them. And it hurts.
The public seems not to care about bloggers and the useless self-indulgent crap they write. Blogsters who believe in what they do (and that includes Billy Lee) writhe beneath the stab-wounds of rejection every time they push the publish-button and sit glued to their computers to wait anxiously for their site-stats to dribble-in.
Most of the time the numbers confirm their worst fears — they really do suck at what they do. They bleed. They suffer. And everyone knows they self-inflict their own self-righteous agonies.
No one does it better than Billy Lee. Only when a blogger stops blogging, does the bleeding stop. Billy Lee has suffered and bled for twelve months now. Yes, he bleeds, but no, he’s never bled-out.
It seems that more and more blogsters are abandoning their sites and moving on to other meaningless projects. We hope Billy Lee never does. As boring and irrelevant as he is, we still want our paychecks! Stand up, Billy Lee. Keep on blogging!
Sincerest Regards,
The Editorial Board
P.S. One more thing. Some readers may have heard the news by now. Security guards arrested Billy Lee during his speech last night at the “New Year’s Eve Homage to Year One” Gala and Ball. The Board hosted the plaid T-shirt affair at the exclusive Rubber Chicken Dinner Club in Metamora.
Billy Lee has apologized.
Guess what?
We don’t care!
A transcript of his remarks is reproduced below.
Helloooo, everybody! Happy New Year!
(burps loudly, spills drink)
(audience applause)
I’m Billy Lee, the Pontificator, and I’m drunk as a skunk!
(Audience laughter, applause)
What’s my New Year’s Resolution for 2015? Who wants to know? Yeah? Oh yeah? You’re all a bunch of gnarly swamp rabbits…That’s what I think! I’ll pickle ur… Whoaaa! Easy big fella. Not you. Not you.
(Scattered laughter. Room quiets)
Ok, Ok… it’s an easy one, my comrades. Hold on. I’ll tell ya. I’ll tell ya.
(Stares wildly into the room)
I resolve… I resolve… in two-thousand one five… to be sexy all the time! Two – oh – one – five! I be sexy all de time. Yeah!
(hiccups, burps, takes a drink)
(gasps from audience, a few catcalls)
I resolve to be of good cheer, most of the year, and for god sakes don’t tell ’em I’m qu…
(stumbles, grabs podium)
Don’t tell ’em I’m qu…
(twirls a 360 and throws drink glass, shattering it)
Don’t tell ’em I’m qu…
(falls into microphone setting off loud reverb)
Don’t tell ’em I’m qu…
(sprawls onto stage floor, face down, butt in the air)
don’t tell ’em… don’t tell ’em…
(scattered screams, folks covering their ears, expressions of outrage in audience)
Note to our readers: Let’s just say, things escalated. Billy Lee decided to belt out a slurred and soggy rendition of Take Me to Church. He demanded that male volunteers come up on stage to kiss him on the lips.
Some in the audience rioted. People began throwing things, including chairs and salt shakers. Finally, marshals stormed in to escort BillyLee out of the building. He was hand-cuffed and dragged. He began bawling like a baby. Some say he mouthed the words, worship like a dog! worship like a dog! as the marshals threw him into the paddy-wagon.
An hour or so later, members of the Editorial Board — they shall remain unnamed — posted BillyLee’s bond, and all of us, together, asked that he submit his formal remarks — in writing — today. We demanded that he include an apology.
Billy Lee complied. We have attached his written “homage” (an e-mail) below. The Editorial Board.
January 1, 2015
To: the Billy Lee Pontificator Editorial Board
May I offer my profoundest apologies to anyone I offended last night by my outrageous behavior, inappropriate comments, and lewd singing? I am so sorry.
I am so ashamed.
I know it’s the tradition for people to drink small amounts of alcohol on New Year’s Eve, but last night I clearly exceeded the reasonable and customary limits of insobriety.
Under the influence of what some said was “excessive” consumption of liquor, it seems I offended both the gay community and those Christians in the audience who prefer to drive gays to suicide. For this, I am truly sorry. I said and sang stuff I didn’t mean.
My question to the board members is this: Can you forgive me? Or will you use my weakness as your excuse to torment, humiliate, scandalize, censor, and shun me?
Your silence seems to speak for itself. You forgive me. And you torment, humiliate, scandalize, censor, and shun me. Thank you so very much.
Let me reassure you. I am not myself gay, nor have I ever been. Do you believe me? Again, your silence speaks for itself.
You don’t believe me. I feel it.
And you shun me. I feel that, too. Ok, then. Now that it’s settled, can we move on?
And again, may I prodigiously apologize for playing the fool and making you hate me?
I am grateful for each of you: for each member of our illustrious Editorial Board and the over-weighted bureaucracy that supports you and makes up the backbone of the Pontificator team.
Thank you to the staff of sycophants, apple polishers, and suck-ups who inspire all of us to do our best work.
And thanks also to our black janitor and the two sluts who hang out in the parking-lot before work every morning. Thank you to everyone.
It is now my pleasure to present my homage to our first year and to discuss many of the articles I wrote that might have enriched all our lives had you taken the time to read them.
It’s no secret to me that you didn’t read my articles. Yet you call yourselves the “Editorial Board” !!! The only thing you edit is your paychecks. I’ve caught more than one of you erasing “ones” and “twos” and writing in “eights” and “nines”. It’s not right, people. Can’t you see that?
Well, enough apologies. I’m admonished and chastised. I get it. And no. I’m not dropping my pants, so you can spank me. It’s enough, already, Editorial Board! Let’s move on to my Homage to Year One!
I’ve included the following written transcript of the remarks I would have made last night had I not been drunk. And I made some changes to more accurately express my feelings after your reaction to last night’s sorry debacle and my role in it.
By the way, I’m thrilled to reveal the five most read Pontificator articles for 2014. Can you guess? They are… (May we have the envelope, please? Drum roll…)
Since you’re reading this report in your e-mail, Editorial Board, click on the links and read all five, right now!
The best article of 2014 (and far and away my favorite) is Bell’s Inequality. It packs a huge wallop for those who dig science. Not to totally pander to science freaks, but a close second is Conscious Life. Site stats say few people have read them. I know the Editorial Board didn’t read them.
Read them now!
Our best (worst) day of the year was May 3rd, when church leaders — alarmed by my famous Gay Love post — swarmed our site and eventually shut it down — for six weeks!
I never suffered emotionally in my life like I did during those weeks — they turned into months! Details of that unnerving fiasco are described and preserved in Writing Free.
Of course, I can’t expect any of you to read it. It’s 2,000 words. It has paragraphs!
Many people told me the post they liked best was Hearing Loss. It is a true account of real-life exchanges between me and my hill-billy wife, Beverly Mae. It is always good for giddy guffaws and lots of laughs. Next July, when you are all taking your six-week vacations, why not set one week aside to read it, Editorial Board?!
Another funny post, at least to me: Why Do Humans like Music? I belly-laugh every time I revisit it. It’s that good. You wouldn’t know!!!
I don’t know how many of you Board members know this, but The Billy Lee Pontificator got it’s start, believe it or not, from a desire to showcase an article I wrote titled, Horemheb, Exodus Pharaoh? I loved that essay. I loved the title. Wow. Horemheb, Exodus Pharaoh? Really? Everybody will read that one!
To my amazement, and through the tears of self-humiliation, I discovered — after I published it on my blog-site — Horemheb needed a re-write. Some family members may remember how much the re-writing of Horemheb dragged-on during its prolonged infancy on Facebook, before I blog-published it. It’s why we hired our Editorial Board team.
Maybe someday some of the Editorsmight want to read Horemheb to see if I missed something. If it’s not inconvenient or too much trouble, Editorial Board!!!
Anyway, sloppy execution of my article, Horemheb, led to the policy elucidated on our Billy Lee Process Page, best summarized as follows: re-write it ’till it’s right. People hate the policy, but I like it. In my bad heart, I know it’s right. And since my Editorial Board — yes, that’s you! — won’t spell check my stuff, I have no choice.
To sum-up: I can’t say I enjoyed my first year blogging, but I’m proud of the articles I wrote. I’m glad some people say they read them — even if my Editorial Board refuses. I regret the controversies, but it’s how we stay alive, stay engaged and grow. Does anyone agree?
I know almost nothing about the man, William (Will) Shakespeare. Over the centuries, scholars have questioned many of the details of his life including his birth, circumstances of his death, his sexuality, and his authorship of various works. It seems it might not be possible for any modern person to know anything they can fully trust about the man himself.
I’ve yet to take a college course on Shakespeare or perform in one of his plays. I have attended theatrical performances and watched movie enactments. Mostly, I’ve read his plays and his poetry, not much more. His work is suffused in unique hues, which easily identify his authorship. When reading Shakespeare, my interest is always in his unusual use of language, which appeals to me more than that of any other English-speaking writer or poet.
Shakespeare, whoever he was, had a gift for language which seems to have seduced nearly every person of letters I’ve ever met. He had a talent for drawing attention to the nuances of meaning through a peculiar juxtaposition of his singular syntax with unexpected context.
Shakespeare’s pen tugs and pulls on the corroded wires in our brains to make new schematics. His ink flushes out the rust and lubricates the synapses to enable fresh and completely radical transformations of our internal world. Best of all, his complex literary architecture provides a grand space where readers can safely explore many of the raw subtleties of life, love, power, sorrow, decline and death.
I love Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s language thrills me. I agree with Poet Laureate, Donald Hall, who once observed that Shakespeare’s writing is among the most densely strewn (with gems) of any literature in the world.
In this article are collected — from Shakespeare’s Sonnets — over one-hundred and fifty of his brightest jewels and most dazzling gemstones. I don’t much care about the size or carat of a crystal — or its clarity. Color and cut are what fascinate me. If the excerpt doesn’t sparkle, it isn’t on my list.
The scintillas in this sample are in order of their appearance in the Sonnets. They make up a kind of Reader’s Digest abridgement, which should enable readers to glean some of Shakespeare’s best lines without having to spend several hours reading all one-hundred and fifty-four chapters.
…making a famine where abundance lies, thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
When forty winters shall besiege thy brow, and dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field, thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now, will be a tatter’d weed, of small worth held.
Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee calls back the lovely April of her prime.
Die single, and thine image dies with thee.
…sap check’d with frost and lusty leaves quite gone, beauty o’ersnow’d and bareness everywhere: then, were not summer’s distillation left, a liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass…
…thou art much too fair to be death’s conquest and make worms thine heir.
Sweets with sweets war not…
Is it for fear to wet a widow’s eye that thou consumes thyself in single life?
Is it for fear to wet a widow’s eye that thou consumes thyself in single life?
The world will be thy widow and still weep…
But beauty’s waste hath in the world an end, and kept unused, the user so destroys it.
For thou art so possess’d with murderous hate that ‘gainst thyself thou stick’st not to conspire, seeking that beauteous roof to ruinate which to repair should be thy chief desire.
Make thee another self, for love of me.
…violet past prime, and sable curls all silver’d o’re with white…
…barren rage of death’s eternal cold…
Thy end is truth’s and beauty’s doom and date.
…wasteful Time debateth with Decay to change your day of youth to sullied night…
…my verse…is but as a tomb which hides your life and shows not half your parts.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines…
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws, and burn the long-lived phoenix in her blood…
Yet, do thy worst, old Time: despite thy wrong, my love shall in my verse ever live young.
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling, gilding the object whereupon it gazeth; a man in hue, all hues in his controlling, which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.
With sun and moon, with earth and sea’s rich gems…
…not so bright as those gold candles fix’d in heaven’s air…
For all that beauty that doth cover thee is but the seemly raiment of my heart…
For at a frown they in their glory die. The painful warrior famoused for fight, after a thousand victories once foil’d, is from the book of honor razed quite, and all the rest forgot for which he toil’d.
…thy soul’s thought, all naked… …puts apparel on my tatter’d loving.
…thy soul’s thought, all naked… …puts apparel on my tatter’d loving, to show me worthy of thy sweet respect…
And keep my drooping eyelids open wide, looking on darkness which the blind do see…
…like a jewel hung in ghastly night, makes black night beauteous and her old face new…
But day by night, and night by day, oppress’d? And each, though enemies to either’s reign, do in consent shake hands to torture me…
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings that then I scorn to change my state with kings.
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow, for precious friends hid in death’s dateless night, and weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe, and moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight…
Thou are the grave where buried love doth live…
Though thou repent, yet I have still the loss: the offender’s sorrow lends but weak relief to him that bears the strong offence’s cross. Ah! but those tears are pearl which thy love sheds, and they are rich and ransom all ill deeds.
…clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun…
Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud; clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun, and loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.
I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief, although thou steal thee all my poverty; and yet, love knows, it is a greater grief to bear love’s wrong than hate’s known injury.
Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows, kill me with spites; yet we must not be foes.
…thy beauty and thy straying youth, who lead thee in their riot even there where thou are forced to break a twofold truth; hers by thy beauty tempting her to thee; thine, by thy beauty being false to me.
If I lose thee, my loss is my love’s gain, and losing her, my friend hath found that loss; both find each other, and I lose both twain, and both for my sake lay on me this cross; but here’s the joy; my friend and I are one; sweet flattery! then she loves but me alone.
And darkly bright are bright in dark directed.
When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so!
All days are nights to see till I see thee, and nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.
For nimble thought can jump both sea and land.
These present-absent with swift motion slide.
A closet never pierced with crystal eyes…
Mine eye’s due is thy outward part, and my heart’s right thy inward love of heart.
Or heart in love with sighs himself doth smother…
…my jewels trifles are…
But thou, to whom my jewels trifles are, most worthy of comfort, now my greatest grief, thou, best of dearest and mine only care, art left the prey of every vulgar thief.
Against that time when thou shalt strangely pass and scarcely greet me with that sun, thine eye…
To leave poor me thou hast the strength of laws, since why to love I can allege no cause.
For that same groan doth put this in my mind; my grief lies onward and my joy behind.
So am I as the rich, whose blessed key can bring him to his sweet up-locked treasure, the which he will not every hour survey, for blunting the fine point of seldom pleasure?
The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem for that sweet odor which doth in it live.
They live unwoo’d and unrespected fade, die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so; of their sweet deaths are sweetest odors made…
So true a fool is love that in your will, though you do any thing, he thinks no ill.
I am to wait, though waiting so be hell; not blame your pleasure, be it ill or well.
…show me your image in some antique book…
O, that record could with a backward look, even of five hundred courses of the sun, show me your image in some antique book…
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, so do our minutes hasten to their end; each changing place with that which goes before, in sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth and delves the parallels in beauty’s brow, feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth, and nothing stands but for his scythe to mow…
O, no! thy love, though much, is not so great: it is my love that keeps mine eye awake…
Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye and all my soul and all my every part; and for this sin there is no remedy, it is so grounded in my heart.
But when my glass shows me myself indeed, beated and chopp’d with tann’d antiquity…
And all those beauties whereof now he’s king are vanishing or vanish’d out of sight, stealing away the treasure of his spring…
…against confounding ages cruel knife, that he should never cut from memory my sweet love’s beauty, though my lover’s life…
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain advantage on the kingdom of the shore…
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain advantage on the kingdom of the shore, and the firm soil win of the watery main, increasing store with loss and loss with store…
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate, that Time will come and take my love away.
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, but sad mortality o’ersways their power, how with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O, how shall summer’s honey breath hold out against the wreckful siege of battering days, when rocks impregnable are not so stout, nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays?
O, none, unless this miracle have might, that in black ink my love may still shine bright.
…right perfection wrongly disgraced…
Why should false painting imitate his cheek and steal dead seeing of his living hue?
They look into the beauty of thy mind, and that, in guess, they measure by thy deeds; then, churls, their thoughts, although their eyes were kind, to thy fair flower add the rank smell of weeds…
For slander’s mark was ever yet the fair; the ornament of beauty is suspect, a crow that flies in heaven’s sweetest air.
When I perhaps compounded am with clay, do not so much as my poor name rehearse, but let your love even with my life decay…
For I am shamed by that which I bring forth, and so should you, to love things nothing worth.
…when yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold…
…when yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold…
…as after sunset fadeth in the west, which by and by black night doth take away, Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
…the coward conquest of a wretch’s knife…
The worth of that is that which it contains, and that is this, and this with thee remains.
…for the peace of you I hold such strife as ‘twixt a miser and his wealth is found…
Why is my verse so barren of new pride, so far from variation or quick change? Why with the time do I not glance aside to new-found methods and to compounds strange?
Thou by thy dial’s shady stealth mayst know time’s thievish progress to eternity.
Thine eyes that taught the dumb on high to sing and heavy ignorance aloft to fly…
…being wreck’d, I am a worthless boat…
When all the breathers of this world are dead; you still shall live — such virtue hath my pen — where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.
…making their tomb the womb wherein they grew…
…upon thy side against myself I’ll fight, and prove thee virtuous…
Thy love is better than high birth to me…
Thy love is better than high birth to me, richer than wealth, prouder than garments’ cost, of more delight than hawks or horses be; and having thee, of all men’s pride I boast: wretched in this alone, that thou mayst take all this away and me most wretched make.
But what’s so blessed-fair that fears no blot? Thou mayst be false, and yet I know it not.
In many’s looks the false heart’s history is writ in moods and frowns and wrinkles strange…
How like Eve’s apple doth thy beauty grow…
They that have the power to hurt and will do none…
…who, moving others, are themselves as stone, unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow…
They are the lords and owners of their faces…
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
O, in what sweets dost thou thy sins enclose!
O, what a mansion have those vices got which for their habitation chose out thee, where beauty’s veil doth cover every blot…
The hardest knife ill-used doth lose his edge.
As on the finger of a throned queen the basest jewel will be well esteemed…
How many lambs might the stern wolf betray, if like a lamb he could his looks translate!
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase, bearing the wanton burden of the prime, like widow’d wombs after their lord’s decease…
…hope of orphans and unfather’d fruit…
…roses fearfully on thorns did stand…
…eternal love in love’s fresh case…
Give my love fame faster than Time wastes life…
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured…
So that eternal love in love’s fresh case weighs not the dust and injury of age, nor gives to necessary wrinkles place, but makes antiquity for aye his page…
…mine eye is in my mind…
My most true mind thus makes mine eye untrue.
Such cherubins as your sweet self resemble, creating every bad a perfect best…
If it be poison’d, ’tis the lesser sin that mine eye loves it and doth first begin.
But reckoning time, whose million’d accidents creep in ‘twixt vows and change decrees of kings, tan sacred beauty, blunt the sharp’st intents, divert strong minds to the course of altering things…
Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds…
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickle’s compass come: love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, but bears it out even to the edge of doom.
Bring me within the level of your frown, but shoot not at me with your waken’d hate…
…to prevent our maladies unseen, we sicken to shun sickness when we purge…
…drugs poison him that so fell sick of you.
What potions have I drunk of Siren tears, distill’d from limbecks foul as hell within…
O benefit of ill! Now I find true that better is by evil still made better; and ruin’d love, when it is built anew, grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater.
For if you were by my unkindness shaken as I by yours, you’ve pass’d a hell of time…
…how hard true sorrow hits…
‘Tis better to be vile than vile esteem’d…
For why should others’ false adulterate eyes give salutation to my sportive blood? Or on my frailties why are frailer spies, which in their wills count bad what I think good?
Unless this general evil they maintain, all men are bad, and in their badness reign.
Our dates are brief, and therefore we admire what thou dost foist upon us that is old…
To this I witness call the fools of time, which die for goodness, who have lived for crime.
…black beauty’s successive heir…
…fairing the foul with art’s false borrow’d face…
…none knows well to shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action…
…as a swallowed bait on purpose laid to make the taker mad…
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream. All this the world well knows; yet none knows well to shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
And in some perfumes is there more delight than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
Thou art as tyrannous, so as thou art, as those whose beauties proudly make them cruel…
…a torment thrice threefold thus to be cross’d.
The sea, all water, yet receives rain still…
…thus far for love my love-suit, sweet, fulfil.
Make but my name thy love, and love that still, and then thou lovest me, for my name is Will.
…to put fair truth upon so foul a face…
When my love swears that she is made of truth I do believe her, though I know she lies…
And wherefore say not I that I am old? O, love’s best habit is in seeming trust, and age in love loves not to have years told: therefore I lie with her and she with me, and in our faults by lies we flatter’d be.
…the manner of my pity-wanting pain…
As testy sick men, when their deaths be near, no news but health from their physicians know…
Only my plague thus far I count my gain, that she that makes me sin awards me pain.
…my female evil tempteth my better angel from my side…
Two loves I have of comfort and despair, which like two spirits do suggest me still: the better angel is a man right fair, the worser spirit a woman color’d ill. To win me soon to hell, my female evil tempteth my better angel from my side, and would corrupt my saint to be a devil, wooing his purity with her foul pride.
Yet this shall I ne’re know, but live in doubt, till my bad angel fire my good one out.
Those lips that Love’s own hand did make breathed forth the sound that said I hate.
I hate from hate away she threw, and saved my life, saying not you.
So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men, and Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.
For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright, who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
O, how can Love’s eye be true, that is so vex’d with watching and with tears?
The sun itself sees not till heaven clears.
…all my best doth worship thy defect, commanded by the motion of thine eyes…
But, love, hate on, for now I know thy mind; those that can see thou lovest, and I am blind.
Who taught thee how to love thee more the more I hear and see just cause of hate?
…the bath for my help lies where Cupid got new fire…
For all my vows are oaths but to misuse thee…
For I have sworn thee fair; more perjured I, to swear against the truth so foul a lie.
I, sick, withal, the help of bath desired … but found no cure: the bath for my help lies where Cupid got new fire — my mistress’ eyes.
