"The poor ye will have with you always, but you will not always have me." - Jesus Christ, Matthew 26:11

Ten minutes ago, I was pulling into the parking lot of a grocery store in my affluent community of Temecula, California.  People are bronzed and fit, well-heeled and rolling in nice wheels.

I get out of the car and see a woman of seventy, dignified, well-assembled.  She's driving a modest, but late-model sedan, about to load about ten bags of groceries into her car.

She is crying.  She has a handkerchief up to her nose.

I try to look away in good suburban fashion, but she waves at me, so I approach her.  "I'm so sorry to do this to you," she begins, and I assume I'm going to be called upon to assist her with the groceries, or maybe she needs a jump.  Clearly something is troubling her.

"We have so much in this country, and I just cannot stand it."

Now I think she's unhinged.  Alzheimers, perhaps.  "What's wrong?" I ask her, and she just points.  We see a woman of about eighty-five, shabbily dressed, head covered with a throw to protect her from the heat, hobbling along, pushing a shopping cart filled with survival tools.

My new friend's hand shakes as she points, and the tears are really streaming now.  Soon, so are my own.  She continues to diatribe, understandably, and I feel awkward, but I give her a hug.

"I'm sorry.  I'm so sorry," she says.

I'm not.  It's a good thing to know that fellow-feeling is alive and well, that people are heartbroken by the conditions we find all around us as a nation.

I gross $565 a month, and only live where I do by good fortune.  Today I was supposed to attend a seminar, but had to cancel because I lacked the gas money requisite to get to where I was supposed to be; where I wanted to be.

My paycheck didn't arrive on time; hasn't arrived yet, and it's five days late.  I'm one of the little people whose job is peripheral to anything of real importance in a society still mad with "success," defined largely in economic terms and achieve by exhibiting the kinds of social grace than put you in positions where you can increase your worth in precisely that sense.  Adolescent behavior, in other words.

I can't help but think - this is a Kantian point - I can't help but think that I didn't have gas money precisely so that I would arrive at that store at precisely the moment when the woman in tears would beckon to me, a stranger, so that I could witness afresh, for myself, up close and personal, the anguish that elderly people are sometimes feeling over what is not going on in this country.  She had no obvious way of knowing that I'm a writer and a philosopher, and yet I was the one who was there in her moment of need, seemingly only by chance.

But now the world can know.

Words are the shopping cart I push in my own poverty.

Larry Fike
Larry Fike is the author of "Piker," a book about overcoming child abuse by familial reconciliation.

Waxen (Poem)

People

           (us)

Like flaxen textiles
         
          move like jets,

Mentally,

          until Earth unsettles

Our fingers.

Whereupon

          we create units, additional units

To protect us

          Whether they be carry ons, wagon trains, laptops or automobiles---

As long as they are

          Well-designed,

Utterly impractical.

          It's the twenty-first century.

A hell of a lot that does mean.

          Clap.

Larry Fike

WCW (Poem)

never believed I'd one day become an old fart who seriously cared about things like

     Weather

and

     Poetry.

But:

     Here 'tis.

I wish I had met William Carlos Williams in Paterson, New Jersey,

     Because that's a different kind of hell, where he was a physician,

And now is famous for eating plums his wife had put in the refrigerator

     The night before he had come in late, after house calls.

And somewhere in his mind there was a little Larry Fike,

     Similar but different from the Little Larry Fike in my own,

Who toddles and turns corners and looks for, "Daddy."

     Boney-nosed, he saw placements on pages

As the essence of poetry and,

                                                                                        Being a physician,

Carved.  Healed.

     Placement is                          everything.

Wouldn't it be, if you were a medical doctor, one

     Who handled peoples' organs, pulses in your fingertips as you cut

tried to make things better.

How could you not care about where things actually go.

Lawrence Udell Fike, Jr., Temecula, California, July 31, 2011, 7:02 a.m.

Wrist Sizes

Mine's seven-point-seven-five inches.  My brother's is much larger.  What does that tell you about relative p--s sizes, and does it matter.

Does it really matter.

How are your relatives?  Your friends?

My girlfriend has very tiny, tiny, tiny wrists.  I hold them at night, sometimes.

What does that tell you about her?

I learned from God (The Internet) that I am Below Average.

Her?  Probably way below.

We could take other measurements.

And know nothing . . . new.

Unless you measure success by what G-d gave you!

Do you?

That's the sad part.  The happy part?  Hands.  Hand in hand, friends.

Larry Fike

Congratulations, Samuel Beckett, You Have A Disciple

"What time is it?"

"It's twelve-fifty."

"What time is it?"

"It's ten-to-one."

"I thought you said it was twelve-fifty."

"I lied.  It's ten-to-one."

"Now I'm confused.  Is it twelve-fifty, or is it ten-to-one?"

"Ten to one, it's twelve-fifty."

"That's six."

"No, that's a clock, not math."

"Why can't you answer me simply?"

"Okay.  Let me try.  Ten-to-one, it's now twelve-fifty."

"I thought you said it was ten-to-one."

"I lied."

"So what time is it?"

"What's it to you?"

"Well, ten-to-one, whatever I ask you, you're going to say it's some time other than the time it actually is."

"It's no time.  But ten to one, that's what time it was when you originally asked me."

"You're confusing."

"You're confused."

"Stop it and tell me what time it is."

"No time."

"Why do you speak in riddles?"

"Ten to one, I don't."

"But now you do."

"There is no now."

"You just made my point."

"I give up."

"How can you give up now?"

"Now?  When you've just said that ten-to-one there is no time?"

"Well that's what time it was when you asked."

"But now it's later than it was then."

"I don't have time for this."

"Why?  Because there is no time?  What time is it."

"One-oh-two."

"One-oh-two what?"

"One or two moments ago you asked me what time it was."

"What time was it?"

"Ten-to-one."

"But now it's not."

"No, now it's not.  Now's no time."

"How can it be 'No Time'?"

"That can't be."

"Then I guess that it isn't."

"You're right.  It isn't."

"So how can you talk about what isn't, if it isn't?"

"I can't."

"So where are we now?"

"Nowhere."

"Let's go somewhere."

"We can't."

"Why not?"

"We don't have the time."

"Sure we do.  We have lots of time."

"Where did you find it?"

"Nowhere."

"So now you're telling me that there's nowhere to find the time."

"I certainly am."

"But here it is."

"No.  It's not."

"You're so confusing."

"No.  I'm not."

"You're not?"

"No.  I amn't."

"That's not grammatical."

"No, it isn't."

"Are you serious?"

"I can't be.  There's nobody here."

"You don't have a body?"

"No body can answer that question."

"What about your soul?"

"There's no me with a soul to speak to you."

"Then why are you speaking?"

"It isn't me speaking.  It's you."

"Oh, so you're a solipsist."

"Shh."

"Huh?  What's that sound I hear?"

"Nothing.  I have to go."

"Why?"

"No reason."

"So there's no reason, either?  Is that what you are saying?"

"Not as far as I can see."

"How can you see if you aren't?"

"I can't.  There is no me."

"So who am I talking to?"

"Yourself."

"Why are you doing this to me?"

"I'm not."

"Then who is?"

"Apparently you are."

"There is no me."

"Now nothing is beginning to understand nothing.  Let's toast to that realization."

"We can't."

"Why not?"

"Because we don't exist."

"Congratulations."

Lawrence Udell Fike, Jr.http://www.larryfike.com/PIKER-by-Larry-Fike.html

Up Rivers

He walks in and sits his leathery black feet upon Big Buddha Pad,
Which he had manufactured in a Small Village where the children would otherwise perish,
And his shoulders evince the fact that he has swung from tree to tree
To improve not his masculine physique, but only his unrivaled physique
That swayed, gently, as need called,
From branch to branch,

While his piercing eye gave no attention to the other parts of his anatomy
Which hung, just so as to indicate the significance of their presence,
And eyes pierced calmly over a scene he could not have examined witnessing.

But there it was; there he was.
He swam across branches, watched dreams rush up rivers,

and, interims,

Blinked, walked men become small nuts.

I forgot.  It does not really matter, I suppose.  But I might still mention it again:

"But there it was; there he was.
He swsam across branches, watched dreams rushes up rivers.

Once Upon the Glasses

I see a little pony girl.

She's laughing.

Ha Ha!

But i'm serious now, and she's humping me,

Like a big whale!

(Oh, c'mon, that's funny.)

She settles down (life is life)

It's okay.

And then dis baby-doll of mine,

She begins to speak!


It's not here.  It's not there.  It's nuthin.

A meatloaf!  Maybe.

I got better things...

Larry Fike