Wow!  it was more than a year ago on Explosion Day that Housing Doom explored some weird impact that Rhonda Byrne’s "The Secret" was having on a group of stressed-out  AZ Realtors.  Well, yesterday a fresh spring dandelion called Prosperity Radio abused YouTube’s notification system to send a couple of e-mails right past Doom Admin’s ordinarily rock solid anti-spam system.  Gonna be a long day at YouTube tech support …

This is classic Americana.  The New Thought Movement came out of Emerson, the early days of the Unitarian Church and a whole lot of other stuff generally rooted in that 19th Transcendentalist wave that hit Concord MA and caused a whole lot of pretty good literature you probably had inflicted on you in High School if you’re old enough to be pre-Politically Correct.  Your Grandad would have known it as The Power of Positive Thinking.  More recently, important parts of New Thought ended up under the aegis of Emotional Intelligence (aka "EQ").  I suspect that at the root of this phenomenon is an important issue in the theory of aesthetics that says something critical about ontology.

Ah New Year’s Eve and heavy snow in the Maritimes. This fragment goes out to all the high-priced bureaucrats (you know who you are ) who will be waiting by the loading dock far into the evening today.

                  First Hymn

…

Buying is the biggest burden,
    Licences the heaviest care;
And the paperwork must finish
    By the close of fiscal year.

Each year’s order — bulging pallets –
    Yields its secrets to our search;
And the smallest cord or cable,
    Counted! ere the End of March.

…

                                Postlude

Her avatar’s hand cradles the dark
triple-bank-shot metonym
which somehow goes unbadly

with this high dusty space. "Oh say,
can you sew?" dance the tutu-clad mice
scampering

in the linoleum dust
as all the while North Ender ghosts
unpretentiously haunt the hallway.

My voice coach (every poet needs
one) asks me to sense buzz
on my lips, lift cheeks,

front a projector,
just like the ones back at
9 Grove Street,

only now waves wash south
across Chebucto
from studio 8A.

Remember where you were
that time you phoned me
at the lab? A chocolate

scientist sits there now,
listening to fats, and once
I asked a mellonist

to send him some exotic
acid, but she declined, being
busy. I’m not dismayed, for success

could have placed an irresistibly high price
on the head of every harbour porpoise
still swimming in this world.

12/6 2007

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