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samsilva54
, March 06, 2013
(view all comments by samsilva54)
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
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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
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Frankie Metro and Lindsey Thomas suffer through Hakim Bellamy and stir up shit in Albuquerque
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Three Poems by Rudolfo Carrillo
Three Poems by Belinda Subraman
Three rhythm:s by Felino A. Soriano
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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
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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
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Reviews
Interviews
Stories
Poetry
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Music
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Bookstore
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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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