Crossing The Street

Crossing The Street

A creature wrapped up in mists,
you are vaguely shaped
but your heart swells and stirs me
as you speak of crows
and other things of shiny note.

As if I had something to say,
as if we met
in the crossing of the street,
and then I bowed
in the old style, doffed my hat.

There are strange new creases
above my brow
where my hat rides in the cool
of evening,
where I press my hand as I begin.

March 31, 2010 8:31 AM
1st verse modified and
one word added to 2nd verse
May 7, 2012 7:18 PM

"Every fact of science was once damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and 'progress,' everything on earth that is man-made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of someones refusal to bow to Authority. We would own no more, know no more, and be no more than the first apelike hominids if it were not for the rebellious, the recalcitrant, and the intransigent. As Oscar Wilde truly said, 'Disobedience was man’s Original Virtue.'" - Robert Anton Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson (born Robert Edward Wilson, January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007), known to friends as "Bob", was an American author and polymath who became at various times a novelist, philosopher, psychologist, essayist, editor, playwright, poet, futurist, civil libertarian and self-described agnostic mystic. Recognized as an episkopos, pope, and saint of Discordianism, Wilson helped publicize the group through his writings and interviews. Wilson described his work as an "attempt to break down conditioned associations, to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models or maps, and no one model elevated to the truth". His goal being "to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone but agnosticism about everything".

I delighted in his Illuminatus trilogy and his Schrodinger's Cat trilogy. After that I wandered off, not that attuned to his brand of generalized agnosticism...