Rain and Poetry

Sitting now in a serious rain storm in the mountains of Luang Prabang, The thunder and lightning seems to be carving new mountains and the rain is turning the streets to rivers.

I'm sitting here reading poems and thinking about the amazing chance we have here in all this mess of life, all the happiness and sadness, to see and to hear.

Here is a poem I am spending some time with from Philip Whalen, another vagabond American moving through Asia.

Hymnus Ad Patrem Sinensis

I praise those ancient Chinamen

Who left me a few words,

Usually a pointless joke or a silly question
A line of poetry 
drunkenly scrawled on the margin 
of a quick                        
splashed picture- bug, leaf,                        
caricature of Teacher            
on paper held together now by little more than ink            
& their own strength brushed momentarily over it
Their world & several others sinceGone to hell in a handbasket, 
they knew it- 
Cheered as it whizzed by- 
& conked out among the busted spring rain 
cherryblossom winejars
Happy to have saved us all.

Rain and Janis Joplin's Deepest Heart

Janis Joplin
Morrison Hotel Gallery

It is the rainy season here and I am sitting in the rain in the nostalgic early morning. - Thinking about a quiet saturday afternoon in the late summer. My father and I had just gone for a long walk in the forest and were rained out and made it back to his wood paneled ford station wagon. It smelled of woodworking and cigarettes.

He put on this tape by Janis Joplin and we listened to her speech a few times through while we sat in the dryness of the car with the rain drawing a curtain between us and the rest of the world. Just my Dad and me and Janis Joplin, she was totally hopped-up on some kind of crazy drugs and energy and sharing her heart.

Here is the poem that she shared on stage in the middle of a song. It might be titled 'You can destroy your now by worrying about tomorrow'.



I don't understand how come you're gone

I don't understand why half the world is still crying

when the other half of the world is still crying too, man
and it can't get it together.

I mean,
if you got a cat for one day
I mean, if you, say, say...
maybe you want a cat for 365 days, right?
You ain't got him for 365 days
you got him for one day, man.
Well I tell you that one day, better be your life.
Because, you know
you can say, oh man
you can cry about the other 364
but you're gonna lose that one day,
and that's all you've got.
You gotta call that love, man.


That's what it is, man.


If you got it today you don't want it tomorrow, man,
'cause you don't need it,
'cause as a matter of fact, as we discovered on the train, tomorrow never happens, man.
It's all the same fucking day, man.
  

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