skate or die

how horrible the world is today.  how weird, surreal, unpredictable.  each day is a fresh shitshow of unfathomable proportions.  i don't want to escape this world.  but i want to leave. 

even so, i've rediscovered skateboarding, not by my own folly by skating - i've always been uncoordinated oaf, i'd kill myself - but by watching skating videos on youtube. 

i don't know what got me on to the kick.  i've long loved the art of skateboarding.  young punks in my day often were skaters too.  often skating segued into making music.  often it was the other way around.

but when i was a wee lad constantly falling on my ass at pools, ramps & the street i thought that skating is an art like any other creative discipline. 

i think i'm right too.  i shared a video with a few friends, including my brother from another mother, & fellow lover of skateboarding, jonathan hayes, of a neo-hippie originally from NZ, richie jackson, who sports a mustache that dali would envy & dresses like he just took the stage of the fillmore circa 1967.  hayes responded in kind by mailing me a copy of the august issue of thrasher magazine. 

what astonishes me is the pure aesthetic bliss of jackson's street skating.  skating is a discipline of totality.  like jackson who takes the whole urban & surban landscape & structures into the art.

it occured to me, not for the first time, that poetry is like skateboarding.  language is the board.  how we use it to create art in our environments is totality in the regard of the writer.

of course, i'm a poet so i admit to a conceit that any art or discipline i admire can be made an analogue to poetry.  but i'm not the first to think so. 

my beloved thom gunn published his poem 'skateboard' in his book the man with night sweats [1992;fsg].  gunn was a slow reviser to his poems.  often he published them long after initial composition.  i suspect 'skateboard' was written in the early to mid 1980s. 

gunn is witness to the artist 'Tow Head' skating a San Francisco street. 

                          Emblem.  Emblem of fashion.
                          Wearing dirty white
                          in dishevelment as delicate
                          as the falling draperies
                          on a dandyish
                          Renaissance saint.

curious too how gunn emphasize the dress of the skater because the skater's physic is in total with his art.  skateboarding is a physical practice, as it is an internal discipline.

'Tow Head' is a dandy much like gunn was an anti-dandy in his own physic.  the poet as skateboarder as artist. 

                         Tow Head on Skateboard
                         perfecting himself:
                         emblem extraordinary
                         of the ordinary.

perhaps i too see myself in these lines.  beauty is how you find it even as you construct it.  the gift of language is like the wood, metal & polyurethane of the skateboard.  both most work in its own gravity & must fight against the customs of the tribe.  fortunately for both skateboarding & poetry that tribe is exploded to include many peoples & genders [binary & non-binary].  both have still a way to go.  but like gunn writes, for those who undertake the discipline of art [skateboarding, poetry, painting, music etc etc] shall 'perfect[...]: emblem extraordinary / of the ordinary.'   

& let me amend the title of this little piece in honor of the great poet wh auden who said in his poem 'september 1, 1939', written after the nazis invaded poland which was the beginning of an earlier version of the end of the world, 'we must love each other or die.'  auden thought that is a false sentiment.  not because of the lack of love in the world, especially at the start of one of the most brutal horrors world civilization would suffer but because we die anyway.  auden revised the line, sometimes printed, 'we must love each other and die'.  we must do the former even when we have no choice in the matter to die. 

skate & die