I Have a Million Ears on a String

I have a million ears on a string.
I cut them from my many lovers.
I have a thousand and three.
I put them on my bookshelf
And at night I hear them sing.
The sound of an ear has many waters
Like a stream running over a dry river bed.
Come into my soul and feel me shiver.
I have a soul, I have a soul.
Come into my soul, it is not empty,
And us three will live together
With a thousand and three.
The ghosts who are not there.
It is only us, you and me and he,
Us three.

My relics on the bookshelf.
The forty lashes a thousand and three.
In the night please come to me.
I am alone except for he.
There are no thousand and three.
Come to me in the night for I am alone.
A little warm blood to remember you by.
In a cup on a saucer warmed on the hearth,
And mixed with sake.
A little whiskey in Earl Grey tea;
A cure for rheumatism.

I always remember the thousand and three.
I know all of their names,
But I did not love them;
I love only he.
But my love for him is bitter;
I dare not call it love.
But come to me and I will promise
To love thee with a real love.
It will only be you and me,
And he. I can not shed the he.

Will you risk the dragon and try to set me free?
The dragon, the dragon,
And good Saint George died
A thousand years ago.
Nobody believes in dragons, in their roaring fire.
I do not believe in dragons, I know them.
I know he. But there is nobody alive
who will set me free. So come to me at least,
So it can be you and me and he.
And I promise to forget about
The thousand and three.

A poem by Julian Moore.

This one is called "The Harlot" but that is a common title and you can write a million poems about the harlot so I should not monopolize it for this poem, so I titled the post after the first line "I Have a Million Ears on a String". I just wrote it and did no editing so do not look at it as a finished product. I am not a good poet, I just write down my thoughts. I never studied rules of verse or wore a corset. But it is good to write down things that come from the soul. I am listening to Bizet's Carmen as I am writing this, so that is serving for s bit of inspiration.

The Parable of the Onion

I find The Brother's Karamozov to be greatest novel written by a fallen man that I have ever read. The Novel is a fallen art form. The cry of Adam after the fall, trying to make sense of his misery after he lost the gifts of God. The tragedy of Don Quixote is that he loses the faith in the end after he is defeated and dies a broken man. But the Brother's Karamazov is a Novel of Hope. Dr. White sees in it an act of hope and a sign of the future conversion of Russia in fulfillment of the Fatima prophecies. Alyosha is the fictional character I adore and relate to the most. Who most touches me. People say he is boring. I see that as a sign they are bad people. I often think about Dostoyevsky and hope he is in heaven. He was buried in a Russian Orthodox Monastery. Thinking of EENS, we would assume he is damned, but we can always hope for a deathbed conversion to Catholicism. I would hope Dostoyevsky is in heaven more so than nearly any other man who died apparently outside the visible structures of the Church.

The two most important parables in the novel are "The Grand Inquisitor" and "The Parable of the Onion". I will be silent on the first and focus on the second. There is a wicked soul in hell who only ever performed one good act in her entire life. One day she saw a beggar at her door and she gave her an onion. So after she was damned her guardian angel told the good God about the onion and the good God told her to take that onion and offer it to the damned soul and if he could draw her out of hell using that onion she could be saved. So the angel offers the onion to the damsel and starts to draw her out and she is getting near out of hell. The other souls see her and cry out. "save us! Let us hold on to thy skirts so that we too can get out and be saved!" But the damsel was wicked. She did not want to help out the other poor souls. She wanted to be saved alone. And she had no faith. She thought that if the other souls grabbed on to her the onion would break. So she started kicking the other poor souls and crying out "It is my onion, not yours. Mine!" And as she cried out "Mine!" the onion broke and the damsel fell back into hell, deeper than she was before and remained there forever. Because she no compassion on her fellow souls in hell.

I feel that I have been through hell and I hope to be drawn out. I want to hold onto my onion until the sweet sweet end. I will try not to kick the other poor souls who cling on to me but instead to help them come aboard and maybe some of us will be drawn up to heaven and have peace in the bosom of Abraham forever and ever.

P.S. I saw someone from the hospital today. I will not share his name because it should remain private. He was Jewish. He looked old and feeble in the hospital and he was old and feeble today with a nurse walking with him.

Kate (or is it Katie?)

When I was young and sleeping I thought the most beautiful girl I had ever seen was a girl from South Africa named Katie. She had turquoise eyes and went from man to man to man, claiming them as her own. By now she must have a thousand pelts. She may be dead now, or she may have converted. First she slept with my roommate Jason. Then she went with my other roommate Goeff and became the love of his life. Certainly the most beautiful girl he had ever been with as she probably was for most of her lovers. She once told me that Geoff was like "a big oak tree". But she must have found a redwood because she left him after a short while. I never forgot Katie, though I wish I remembered her last name.

But then there was Kate. She was mine. I had a crush on her. I met her in psychology class. She would go around campus on roller-skates and went to raves and took ecstasy and talked about how great fun it was. After class one day she invited me to go look at the snails. It had rained and we went to the garden on campus and looked at all the snails crawling from the plants to the stone steps. They were beautiful but I noticed mostly Kate. One day after class she invited me to her boyfriend's house for perhaps the most boring few hours of my life. She was with her boyfriend, they were smoking weed without me and people were playing the Tony Hawk video game. When I had my turn I didn't know how to play and got zero points in my session. Somehow I got home. Kate drove me.

But the story is years later. Kate still remembered me as she remembers all of the boys in her life. She was in a theater group and my roommate Goeff was making a documentary about the play they were performing. The Serpent by Jean-Claude van Itallie. Kate was surprised that I had started smoking cigarettes. She smoked also. I guess I was supposed to be innocent. We had a party for the cast and our roommates and we drunk and at the end of the party Jason was complaining because Kate and another actress would not leave the apartment but also would not have sex with him.

She told me about the play which was a mock of the Garden of Eden and the Kennedy Assassination. Avante-garde I guess it was. She told me at one point all of the girls on stage would be dancing with apples and they would go to the crowd and give the apples to a member of the crowd and we were supposed to eat the apples and she asked if she could give the apple to me. We attended the performance. She danced like Salome and she handed me the apple and I bit and then all of the girl who were dancing pointed at us and laughed and laughed and laughed and not knowing what to do, I continued eating the apple. I don't remember what I did with the core. Was there a garbage can? After that night I never saw her again. Kate, not Katie. Katie was more beautiful, but Kate was mine.

I wonder how many times I sold my soul to the devil? One does not really know until the last judgment. Perhaps a million times.