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The poetry of Sam Silva volume 3
by
Sam Silva
samsilva54
, March 06, 2013
this review of this book by Ken Saving at THE RECUSANT Kevin Saving on Sam Silva The Poetry of Sam Silva Volume 3 - Selected Chapbooks 2008-2009 with Cover Art by Rachel Davis (2009) available via 'Amazon' Comprising 43 poems from the prolific, North Carolina-based poet, Sam Silva, this collection encompasses work from five previous chapbooks: Along This Indoor Stream, Shoes on Spring Ice, The Woman with the Veil, What the Ego Thinks of Paradise and Word Returning to its Corruption. Silva was a columnist on the Spring Lakes News for a decade, has published well over 350 poems in a variety of journals and ezines (including the Recusant) and has been nominated for the Pushcart Award on seven separate occasions. An intriguing stylist who sometimes seems to hybridize elements of e.e.cummings (without the 'typos') and early Eliot, Silva can sing the seasons or, more wistfully, adumbrate the seemingly ineluctable inertia to which modernity appears to be prone: I, who am a member of the spiritually dead, a moral mouse!, drowsing breezy from a morning nap, listening to computer music. (from 'The Wind within a Half-Crushed Straw'). He is capable of raw physicality: ...pissing a pool from the unrepentant urge to leak recycled water from the frigidaire ('Briefly Curse the Modern World') and of crystallizing awkward, elemental truths: Nature is so huge and beautiful and cruel. ('With Virtue's Sins'). Sometimes, however, his profuse - even 'word-salad' - effects can leave the reader floundering in search of a shaping verb to add coherence to the glistening parts (as witnessed by 'A Not So Different Story'): Still a chill in spring's ugly menace ...murder and will in the raw green shoot ...or that naked ache that lasts beyond winter whose old men watch the young gods crucified. A crazy grace which has lived too long! That pocked withered face of the luckiest fool to enter this world with a lonely song where clowns are cheered in the circus city and a wilderness voice gives passion to pity headless and grieving with broken soul. Oh fathomless word! Oh fire made from coal. Sometimes (as in 'The Economy of New York') he catches it just right: Spring is half-assed, full of remnant frost and of Winter's frozen berries. Towards April a sick March creeps. Eliot's influence appears advantageously in 'Ah, Spirit Things': Then towards the sea as the vision grays on the creaky bend of its rotten days watches as winter presumes to undress that shivering form which exhales the soul. Silva frequently - and attractively - employs intermittent rhyme, or idiosyncratic internal rhyme. He also enjoys eye-catching, oxymoronic titles. He is, in my own view, overly fond of concluding his poems with ellipses (...), which represent the literary equivalent of pop music's modish 'fade-outs' and which represent a retreat from the summation of a fully quenching closure. Like most writers, Silva is at his best when he has something trenchant to say. Too often, for this reviewer, he resorts to repetitive variations on a theme of navel-gazing. Although he is by-no-means alone in this respect, one can easily come away with the sense of a mind engrossed in picking at the scabs of its own experience: [...] I read even less these days ...all of my books have failed me ...all that I've written ...all that I've read. [...] but every inch of me back in Ithaca in the bannered house I never left. (from 'The Word Returning to its Corruption'). The 'Rachel poems' (particularly 'The Light Preceding Autumn', 'Rachel Conceives A Painting', 'The Art in my Lover's Eyes' and 'Going North this time for Summer') seem to me to show Silva at his best, directly addressing his lover: entranced but not entrenched, noticing the nuances. And in 'A Dim Light Needs Forgiveness' Silva gradually ratchets-up his sense of moral outrage at his country's (and its Vassal-state's) foreign policy: She likes my book ...this woman with the veil. Perhaps our airplanes will enlighten her as well. They come to liberate with Jesus and the nail! They come to set the world alight in fires of liberation burning in the night. I sense her dimly like her music ...this woman whom our prayers will send to hell. The over-riding impression taken from this volume is of a talent overly-comfortable within its own abundance; definitely one which would benefit from the hand of a firm, sympathetic editor. But (as the conclusion of 'Veterans Day' demonstrates), at least the talent is there: [...] sing[ing] its closure [...] full of pesticides and fragrance till the evening sun goes down... I have learned to swim through days like this through an ocean of grief that leaves a kiss from a sad smile underneath a frown. Kevin Saving © 2010
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Eating and Drinking
by
Sam Silva
samsilva54
, March 06, 2013
this is a review published a year or two ago by mary jo malo at Unlikely 2.0 Unlikely 2.0 Perchannce to Dream: Eating & Drinking by Sam Silva Mary Jo Malo Reviews the Book The cover of Eating & Drinking by Sam Silva immediately captured my attention. For me it seems a depiction of the elementals: the blue sky as Air; purifying flames as Fire; a weightless stone as Earth floating in a glass of Water, the universal transforming solvent. The alchemist's vessel/ philosopher's stone/ human being is itself the fifth element which contains the other four. Life, its own wisdom, cannot be separated. Sam Silva's life might be a rough gem, but he cuts beautiful poems from his misfortune. He knows a secret: our lives seem of little consequence; paltry and kicked aside; worthless pebbles; yet they are as beautiful in their commonality as they are unbearable in their lightness. The magnetic lodestone of magic and navigation attracts those who endlessly perfect one another in love. This is transmutation. Like sacred vessels or holy grails, we provide one another with food and drink to satisfy. So like many of us, Silva despairs as to why we won't let this happen. "If the flesh has come into being for the sake of the spirit, this is a mystery. But if the spirit has come into being for the sake of the body, this is a wonder of wonders. How has such a great wealth settled in such poverty?" (Gospel of Thomas, 29) In the brief opening chapters, key prose and poetry introduce "Sef" and "The Fat Man" who chronicle for us the pivotal events of Silva's youth and its demise. His adolescence was a series of traumatic epiphanies, the onset of paranoid schizophrenia. Equally tragic and ironic was the way that a priest's promise of Heaven, an end to his Hell, caused him to ponder a premature leave of this world. Kisses From The Heart And Sleeve The thing I feared the most, sweet bird!, shy elf!, was not the bloody wisdom of the host in longing to kill me with kisses from the heart and sleeve. I understand those falling towers of the absurd, and much more than those intentions of the spirit-thing, the "holy ghost," I am stunned by the stupid anger that I find now in my heart and self, that I might throw away the world …and leave. Here at these gates we enter his heartrending coming of age story, a unique torment, as a young man's body so hungry and vital is suddenly racked with a special torture, that of dreaming awake. For The Boarders A polished wooden world where dimly passed the youth through that psychotic door where lies becomes the truth, and love, a wounded bird that fell through frosty English Autumns outside on the Commons where the school grounds meet the moor in the mind's forbidden Hell. Sexual predators, bigots, the violent and abusers of all types frequented his real time nightmare "homes." There was also his "rape" by the pharmaceutical industry: The Story Of Accidental Rape Sef was sick from that psychotic conflagration brought on by the ineptitude of a local psychiatrist, compounded and enhanced by the Pharmaceutical Industry and its wonderfully encouraging propaganda. As consequence his medication was changed, and a psychotic episode induced, that in no way reflected the contemporary knowledge of said literature...His behavior was criminal, and bordered on being worse, so that he came quite close to being incarcerated. There is often a wry humor alongside his angst filled experience of mental institutions and halfway houses. Sef is "on leave" from that perverse squalor of the halfway house [...] they roll over the countryside, he and a hippie couple in long standing friendship, cracking jokes on the upswing of his journey away from sick oblivion... Brenda lights a joint, but Sef says...no! You know...with my medication... (Serious Business) The Psychos In Charge is a prose piece which expresses a pathos for military rejects. You know, those discharged from the military with 'Vietnam Syndrome' but no defined medical conditions: recurring, revolving-door victims of the medical system who get caught out in the real world botching suicide attempts and committing thrill-seeking crimes. And here's a less pathological crazy soldier bullshit story and if you get curious starts with all his scatological bad-talk...gets all of his geography and politics confused...tells you things about training terrorists for Kaddaffi..Just fifth beer talk!, and you don't have to be a Marine to be unimpressed. [...]I felt entirely too sick myself at the time to really sympathize with his (a fellow musician) problem, was more concerned with smaller things, like getting a handle on my hallucinations. I was not even certain that I wanted to stay alive anymore[...]after the winter of 83[...]I was beginning to think that I might fool a few people into thinking that I was almost human[...]Chuck shows up at my apartment[...]with a very young and very sleazy looking girl, and the two of them offer me a joint...and I declined the opportunity to disengage entirely with reality[...] First loves and the young woman who carelessly sent him away just as his illness was becoming too apparent: The Rape (School Won't Start Again Next Fall) [...]What happened to me, had nothing to do with my oddly sweet high school days, but with that rupture, both humiliating and permanent, that fell to me like a guillotine and severed spiritual skull from distended corpse. That the "word" would descend on such sleeping, easy children of a make believe forest! That I was the only child and fool, to be sent to such "madness" in the ruin of voices and viscerality. "Maria! "my last voice in island paradise...you who stuck me on a bus and waltzed away disgusted...I was fucked like a fool and thrown to the rats of this continental blizzard! And in the irony that follows all things were the path of your voice...the victim of your providence...but that I somehow was caught in the pincers of its material dictums as if you were the victim...and I the accused. We were neither!...I wept for you seven lonely years...somehow! And your broach with me was in no way meant as malice... No Maria...your world was alight with all the fires of a practical joy! YOU are not guilty of malice! You will be deeply moved by his descriptions of the world's imperfections, torturously revealed through a myriad of voices, waking dreams, and nightmares. He indirectly reveals the lying voices inside his head, while overtly reminding us how the other liars, deceivers and hypocrites, the ones outside his mind, speak and act in the real world of men, women and children, particularly the starved and warred upon. The Problem With A Square Idea Each brute assumption defends its own stupidity with definitions of the "real" that scrub and churn the bottom line ... the cross becomes the swastika, for every janitor, in kind, and love, the burning gumption whose existential chemistry is merely what we see and feel as products of the social stain. Violence is it own bad faith; its affirmation of an urn defining every false messiah to haunt those cheap impoverished limits within the paranoia, yes, of an angry aching brain. In the esoteric arts Water corresponds to Winter; Spring to Air; Summer to Fire; and Autumn to Earth. The seasons are predominant metaphors in this book. Silva also repeatedly uses the word Hell, but Heaven is mentioned substantially less. And if I had his manuscript in front of me and performed a word search for 'heaven", 'hell', "autumn" and "winter" vs. "spring" and "summer", the disparity would be glaring. This seems an unusual alliance until one remembers that the world 'hell' originated in Northern European mythologies. It's not too much of a stretch for Silva to describe parts of his life as an icy hell filled with devils. As if unreal, spring or summer are used sparingly, but generously to describe sacred moments in the arms of his beloved. Lyrical, ecstatic and sweet, Silva's style balances the page with other reflections of his mind. They overflow with gentle and sad expressions for a multitude of disappointments, with himself and society. His spirituality is a gnostic's comprehension, good and evil, the authenticity of both. Endlessly and necessarily he sorts these out and expresses a daily morality with a clarity the "mentally healthy" rarely achieve. He shows us our seasons and realizes there are no reasons for history's bloody lies. We choose our loyalties and treasons, and this often portrays true madness. Wherein lies our empathy? Unlikely 2.0 The story of a love is not important�"what is important is that one is capable of love. It's perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity. �"Helen Hayes Politics & Culture Reviews Interviews Stories Poetry Serials Music Movies Visual Art Books Bookstore Merchandise Mission Statement / Submission Guidelines Blog Links Old Site Donate Recent Articles: Why, yes, we are at the AWP, where we're releasing Gods of a Ransacked Century by Marc Vincenz! Love Has Been Liquidated: Volume 2: the continuation of John Bryan's choose-your-own-adventure role-playing prose poem Five Drawings by Emily Elizabeth Hochman Four Drawings by Sean Gall Four Dragons, mathematically produced animated visual art by Paul Brown Lucid Possession, an ever-changing electronic stage performance by Toni Dove Discotrope: The Secret Nightlife of Solar Cells (an audiovisual performance) Art Game, Interactive Fiction by Pippin Barr An Interview with David Leonard by Alex Takacs Planet Beethoven, a Short Film by Genco Gülan Frankie Metro and Lindsey Thomas suffer through Hakim Bellamy and stir up shit in Albuquerque Phil Rockstroh considers the existential diseases behind mass shootings Three Poems by Rudolfo Carrillo Three Poems by Belinda Subraman Three rhythm:s by Felino A. Soriano Two Poems by John Grey Two Poems by Brenton Booth Exiting on Map Screen: Poetry by Tasha Klein Alien Classified: Poetry-esque by Larry Goodell Three Poems by Zoë Etkin The Spear: Fiction by George Sparling Flipper Hands McCreary: Fiction by Michael Frissore Who's for Jesus: Fiction by Sarah Sarai The Right to Bare Teeth: Fiction by Michael Alix Tale of the Hashish Eater, Scamro (a modern retelling) by Omar Azam The Prophet of Whimsey: Fiction-esque by Joseph Robert Sargent Angel tests his First Amendment rights against the Transportation Security Administration Maude Barlow returns her Queen Elizabeth Medal of Honor Keep Fighting / Keep Evolving by Mickey Z. The Problem with Polynormativity by Andrea Zanin Join our mailing list! Print this article Perchance to Dream: Eating & Drinking by Sam Silva Mary Jo Malo Reviews the Book Part 2 In our recognition of all unholy alliances Green Ooze (with regard to that most notable of the political murders in Guatemala) I know a nightmare and I weep for you sleepy city in the South, rooted in your own Catholic flowers and poverty amid the vegetation. We all weep for you ...for your enlightenment however lonely and obtuse about the rain-forests falling to abuse ...we weep for each environmental niche at noble salad lunches. Our congressmen! Their tears profuse with laughter like a carnival ...over champagne marinates, weep over truffles and steamed goose ...you are the crown of sorrow over splitting headaches and their days made of fifty-dollar plates and more ...the book we read ...we try to finish before we fall asleep! and weep trying not to be disturbed by little family feuds and feasts and all their permutation ...knowing that a priest and a noble man could once again like a common criminal, down there, like all the poor and god forsaken peasants among the many other factotums of the myth of God that murmurs tired phrases about a man and how he ought to be a brother...oh that you should know! Down there ...till we're bored enough to sleep, we weep and worship little relics pure enough to keep and if we cheat ...we chew the dreary meat and give the dog his bone. And we will bleed green ooze and will weep and weep until the nightmare is our own... In our disgust for deeply seated bigotry Democracy In The South The crows have taken a vacation in the shadows where the mental image ducked. Among the trailers and the swamps, where land is dredged, the bottled beer is sucked, dark highways proceed in their deliverance of the virgin spirit to the dry and anguished deed confessing to the cop in a baptism of blood and wood, until the charge is finally dropped ...and evil is made good or good enough to stop aspiring to justice, when progress is the overwhelming issue in the law. The computers just get brighter!, the malls become the place to shop. And once again "truth" is never spoken ...merely understood "Equality is nice, but" the crow shall hunt the mouse! lucky to live as mice by virtue of the mercy of a claw. In our hope for a genuine prosperity doctrine, not the fundamentalist abomination . . . Riches "People get what they deserve" ...that Karma of the cosmic pie! "But only in California and only if pie is what 'they' eat while others labor at their feet at the peak of this statistic's curve, and a lot of pie not just a bit" And "if only others loved the Lord and had the faith of a mustard seed they could pray themselves a home and car and get off welfare ...yes! indeed! "and pickup call girls bound for Hell and screw them in that car's back seat and keep them useful with a lie that only the pure in Jesus tell and 'satisfy their every need.'" And when God's kingdom comes to Earth, falls from the sky and crashes there, and Africa is filthy rich, the Chinese, smug, in all of their wealth, and all that God's children can afford are peanuts in the packaged care of dark skinned people when they bleed ...why even I, will stand amazed!, at the unsung justice in this curve and think "Why Jesus, God, be praised! …'they' really do," "People, however full of shit really get what they deserve." Silva was an army brat who spent time in England, Puerto Rico, and many other countries. His politics are partially influenced by first hand knowledge of mentally ruined veterans. He tells of special missions and soldier towns. Love Between Commercial Breaks begins with "It is amazing how the phantom of film has transferred that dense human grip that people would normally keep in the most savage, desperate, and cold-blooded acts of life." In The Whores he tells the story of three American soldiers doing reconnaissance and surveillance near Maguey, Columbia where the US enlisted the aid of Vincente, a Panamanian, because they didn't trust the locals. Vincente wanted to join the US army and eventually gain citizenship, but the mission wasn't going well. The helicopter gunships would turn up nothing; some of the choppers were shot down; and there were rumors that American servicemen had been clipped or captured . The local 'militias' were more successful; however, their methods were an increasing 'embarrassment' to our State Department. . . . and in our disdain for soiled loyalties What's Left To Do [...] no one cares for freedom, nor love, nor faith, nor purity except, and in as much, they pay green for green with spiteful sneer whose game of spite is its own bliss, the price of such an empire that calls itself "Democracy," and lewd rewards in Heaven for the soldier in every distant war. Continued... Unlikely 2.0 It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish. �"Mother Teresa Politics & Culture Reviews Interviews Stories Poetry Serials Music Movies Visual Art Books Bookstore Merchandise Mission Statement / Submission Guidelines Blog Links Old Site Donate Recent Articles: Why, yes, we are at the AWP, where we're releasing Gods of a Ransacked Century by Marc Vincenz! Love Has Been Liquidated: Volume 2: the continuation of John Bryan's choose-your-own-adventure role-playing prose poem Five Drawings by Emily Elizabeth Hochman Four Drawings by Sean Gall Four Dragons, mathematically produced animated visual art by Paul Brown Lucid Possession, an ever-changing electronic stage performance by Toni Dove Discotrope: The Secret Nightlife of Solar Cells (an audiovisual performance) Art Game, Interactive Fiction by Pippin Barr An Interview with David Leonard by Alex Takacs Planet Beethoven, a Short Film by Genco Gülan Frankie Metro and Lindsey Thomas suffer through Hakim Bellamy and stir up shit in Albuquerque Phil Rockstroh considers the existential diseases behind mass shootings Three Poems by Rudolfo Carrillo Three Poems by Belinda Subraman Three rhythm:s by Felino A. Soriano Two Poems by John Grey Two Poems by Brenton Booth Exiting on Map Screen: Poetry by Tasha Klein Alien Classified: Poetry-esque by Larry Goodell Three Poems by Zoë Etkin The Spear: Fiction by George Sparling Flipper Hands McCreary: Fiction by Michael Frissore Who's for Jesus: Fiction by Sarah Sarai The Right to Bare Teeth: Fiction by Michael Alix Tale of the Hashish Eater, Scamro (a modern retelling) by Omar Azam The Prophet of Whimsey: Fiction-esque by Joseph Robert Sargent Angel tests his First Amendment rights against the Transportation Security Administration Maude Barlow returns her Queen Elizabeth Medal of Honor Keep Fighting / Keep Evolving by Mickey Z. The Problem with Polynormativity by Andrea Zanin Join our mailing list! Print this article Perchance to Dream: Eating & Drinking by Sam Silva Mary Jo Malo Reviews the Book Part 3 When I began reading Eating & Drinking I assumed it would be a difficult challenge to review the work of a poet whose beliefs seemed so very different from mine. As a "convert" to atheism, by way of existentialism, simply glancing at his religious verbiage was off-putting. My apprehension crumbled page by page. Sam Silva's poems aren't the least traditionally religious. His fears, desires, and disappointments, though subjectively experienced, have a collective resonance with anyone who longs for peace and social justice, genuine tenets of most religions and philosophies. His mirror reflects the madness found in all of us who care about the world and who feel nearly as hopeless. This poetry is clearly Christian existentialism. When I read each solitary expression of despair and contemplate the man with whom he most identifies, I'm thoroughly convinced of my analysis. Whether or not Jesus was heir to the throne of David, I believe that he was essentially the first Jewish existentialist, at least a Gnostic and tender warrior on a vision quest in the cave. To understand this perspective you'd have to tease apart each and every tradition associated with him to find him. In the turbulent Roman province of Palestine, cultural diversity and politics inspired contemporaries and the immediate generations to claim him as their own. Some traditions say the Zadokites claim he fought with them at Masada. I've concluded that he was a mishandled phenomenon, a man of many voices whose compassion confounded the powerful and comforted the weak. Perhaps we'll never have a clear answer, but Sam Silva is certain he was human. Big Brother The devil said "its fuck or be fucked" and the devil was, like Cain, my brother, a beater, a brawler and not a lover of any scam "where some wise guy god, with a silvery rod pushed its cheap little trick of the book 'I AM' through the orifice of its own thin brain and the 'whole word sucked' itself insane with a honey lick of his words like 'hell.'" My brother knew that my shit was dead! What he didn't know was that it was the only thing I had that he could kill.' Morning And The City Gates [...] Philosophies!, whose passions fill up the void and silence of religion...like a neighbor whose sobriety and earthly sense, whose jokes and common recompense, salt the food, the thought, the meat of all such things as darker hours might somehow have wasted ...on the gods. My own mother's schizophrenic torment went unrelieved by the typical psychiatric prescriptions of the 1950's on through the 1980's. I realized from just the very few years I spent with my mother that she was dreaming awake, or more accurately, having nightmares with her eyes open. And when my adult relatives failed to protect me from her confusion, I felt so betrayed and angry. Knowledge helped me to accept her condition and her habitual abandonment of me, and I took to heart the teachings of the gentle shepherd. But well-intentioned foster parents moralized about her. "She's so selfish and self-centered. She seems well enough when she takes her medication." Who could understand her suffering and her agony in making even the simplest decision? My mother would pace the floor for hours trying to decide between this or that. One night my sister and I sat with her in a small diner all afternoon until closing time that evening. We were eventually forced out into the darkness where my mother led us home via a strange new route. Years later during one of our 'visits' she said she was afraid to pass the church next door to the diner, because she was afraid a devil might jump out and grab her. Thus the detour. Where Every Act Is Treason I did not even dare a hateful wicked thought much less the courage of despair, nor fight for gentle sweetness to be slaughtered in the night of all things given and unfought. It was not death I feared, nor even pain alone, but doing what was wrong and doing what was right, the two the same! the Devil's money for why I lived till I was dead, and death alone might save my every inch from Hell. Give it to his legions to buy their salt and bread. teach them more than how to fight; teach them how to kill. Sam Silva is a prolific writer. It is the surfeit of his comprehension and the exigency of his condition that cause him to leave no paltry stone unturned nor facet unreflected. Despite the recurrence of a core vocabulary, each poem is deftly nuanced. In its entirety Eating & Drinking is a vast mirror and a single poem a piece of his mosaic. Sam Silva's poetry is the improbable integration of his life. Brush Light In The Abstract Van Gogh was savaged by his urge to love. The dry poems of the age turn their face away that every page might, failing all else, be discreet. And you have the vision of your labor like a wild, but tended, garden, seeded wildly and gently grown. So that as the fruits of wisdom I have learned each lovely flavor, and gazing at such paintings on the wall, this furtive autumn, I have learned to have a notion, gentle tear, and fathomed ocean, I have learned to have a vision of my own. Magic Among Animals The gift of a dark storm. ...that every predator would shy away to his dry cave and lick the liquor of the rain in that more drowsy aspect of the carnal form. This beast!, that we imagine in our pain ...he is like every man. He has a burning vicious hunger and a tiny brain. And day is much like night, and night, like day. And love is more than what we do, though it is likewise, the only thing we can .... The Wonderful Perfect Lie [...] I found a way to live within the womb and never die with all the rapture held and coddled in my sweet clichés of starry nights assuming that the mist beyond the tomb is merely like a freezer where eternally forgotten corpses lie numb with all of the coma of their dreamless light. Silva also knows moments of peace and love, an immanence wherein existence doesn't explain or justify. His is pure joy while he watches his wife, Rachel Davis, paint. She Takes The Love The World Has Thrown Away [...] She is trimming the briars of Summer and Fall or moving the snow on the Winter drive. My hand is pale from the indoor hours. My brain and its wires entomb their tall discordant frame whose belly is a bouncing ball along the song its thin name choirs... ...she is balancing the books the same!, making the meal of the household keep. I have no clue!, no!, none at all! what chemistry has called the love and labor of her endless fires especially for such clueless shame as wanders off to sleep, early in the day, enthralled by all the weak and lacking circumstances that came like some bleak star to be a burden and curse that unlucky angels found bundled in a heap. The More Words Seem to Fail The disease of the dark. The ruin of constraint and tired. Indifference spread so smooth like buttery words some stupid saint, some dull naif thinks lovely thoughts about people like me who have little want save a walk in the park and the sex of paint on a canvass loved like the dimming hours. A dark disease that longs to be free not at all like itself but just like the birds around this dry leaf that feeds the flowers that beautiful people so full of passion know for a poem and mistake for eternity. "For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine; and you say, 'He has a demon!' The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, 'Behold, a gluttonous man and a drunkard, a friend of tax-gatherers and sinners!'" (Gospel of Luke). Silva knows well the myth of the son of man who came eating and drinking. For him, Jesus was simply a man, perhaps with confused thoughts but who certainly loved people. They called him a sinner, one who consorted with temple harlots and the women of wealthy families. He could have chosen to remain, and there are traditions which maintain that he did, such as the Masada legends. John the Baptist, who prepared a highway in the desert for his royal cousin ate locusts & wild honey, and dressed with a leather girdle. They called him crazy. Nearly devastated by his own suffering, another millionth prophet discouraged by social injustice and religious hypocrisy, Sam Silva comes eating and drinking. While he is among us, let's listen to him, a son and brother of man. Learning From The Desert Of The City [...] At the age of twenty three I began to pray ... I began but never finished. Ever since; I have put more faith in whiskey and its smiles than in that magic love that burns among the heavens at the end of every day and the end of every life that lost is way. The man, the other drunkard, other loose jawed winter-phantom preaching like the lazy to the lazy said "eat ye! drink ye! in this carnal kitchen now become divine by virtue of the risen, once slain, but now arrived, as if from Hell, in a little black Sedan..." And those, a little dryer thought "not just a drunkard, but also likewise crazy." "It was an evil thing, they brought, this lack of holy stuff." I will admit. So, in my greater passion, by Jesus, I forgo the bread thinking that I ought to drink until such holy regurgitation might decorate the holy bowl or holy sink. Tired of my wit? that's what I mean, I just can't get enough...glory! Glory turns the pink wine red, the meat, back into bones and dust ...and what's left? An empty bottle and a wink. Bob Marley wrote in his song, Crisis, that "some people think life is a dream so they making matters worse." At worst, this is a deconstructionist solution; at best, it is a sad warning." The concept of Maya, that life is illusion could prove a justification for suffering; but it also might enable a dearth of compassion and apathy which lead to withdrawal. "Every day and every hour people die . . . but those who look on them will never understand that their day will also come, and they continue to behave as if they were immortal." (the Mahabharata). Silva doesn't care about samsara or resurrection. He takes his inspiration from his teacher, another in a long line of suffering saints. We can only know the human kind and that's sufficiently mystical. This alone drives us to possibilities for love. He knows the man Jesus simply because such a man is human. That is why he was a phenomenon. On any given day, in any given moment, heaven can become hell. The peace Sam Silva longs for is a silent dreamless sleep. His words are painted with a rare humility, one which probably shudders at my comparisons with the Son of Man, but that's just how I see. He is not given to delusions of grandeur. Here is his own opinion of himself: The Artist's Other Still Life [...] such a sweet spirit plagued only a moment by tired and spiteful anger by the fear and ache of my own dense meat [...] I was neither mean nor harsh but merely the cooler season's wind with its dust the wind cursed ...a bowl full of dust, painted and filled for the eye. I wonder if there was ever love or substance, though, in this bony bowl? Wonder I must in reckoning with death [...] And so to Hamlet now and his famous soliloquy. I believe that Sam Silva knows this struggle all too well. How many at our cross roads desire the dreamless sleep of death, but change our minds because of the possible eternity of heavens and hells? In that moment of decision how many stay; because despite the great sorrows we bear, we can't hurt our loved ones? How many remain and try to make a heaven out of hell for at least one other human being? Sam Silva is a living sacrifice for all the lives he touches with his poetry. Like so many, he could justifiably leave, but he doesn't. My life has been enriched because he stays to eat and drink with us.
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