Manhattan Offender

April Poetry Series: First We Take Manhattan

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within
I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.

My mantrap, er, um, mantra

Bouncing back from bad news is rough, but over time surely the spate of bad news of late should end the flow and begin the ebb.  Back in May a friend introduced me to a prose piece by Leonard Cohen that sort of sums up my goal.  It is far from ambitious and yet challenging at the same time.  When a piece of bad news hits though, it's the reference to which I return.

What is a saint?
A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility.  It is impossible to say what that possibility is.  I think it has something to do with the energy of love.
Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence.  A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago.  I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order.
It is a kind of balance that is his glory.
He rides the drifts like an escaped ski.  His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock.  Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. 
Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape.  His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world.  He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart.  It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.

- Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers (1966)

We now return you to your regularly scheduled MO retardation.