Jack Pelham

Suppose I should be so driven against a man
That I decided not to acknowledge his good deeds
And his good qualities
And his accomplishments—

That knowing them,
I pretended as if they were not so now,
And never had been—

And suppose I should rail against him
For every sin I can perceive in him—
Or imagine—

And suppose I should decide not
To wish him well about anything—
And not even in repentance from his sins
And the reformation of his heart.

And suppose finally that I should be so driven
As to wish him tortured or dead
And blotted out from history itself
So as to punish him with the ignorance of
All the generations hence.

When you count this up
All together,
and weigh out its sum total—

Doesn’t this describe the hatred of some?

I think it’s interesting that one part of this
Consists of denying even
The truth about a man
When the truth doesn’t lend itself to
One’s ill will against him.

And this makes me wonder, then,
At how no honest person
Could be hateful like this.

I’d love to live in an historic house
From a time when beauty in architecture
Seems to have mattered more
Than it does today.

These memories are but the shadows
Of what happened in my younger years—
The rough outlines of how it was—
Laid across the imperfect lawn of my mind
And stretched the more out of proportion
The later it gets in my day.

Let us stand back and watch in amazement
As the underthinker defines “overthinking”.

A dent guy can see dents you can’t see
Because he’s not looking for the dents themselves
But for how lights and shadows from other things
Pass over the dents as he passes by.

Even simple-minded people—
Who believe that things are generally
Supposed to be simple—
Will adopt beliefs that,
Whether true or not,
Require a great deal of intricate work
To explain well to an audience of
Honest, rational, and responsible people.

Given how much a person can learn by experience in his lifetime,
Wouldn’t it really be something if some genius were to invent a way
By which that learning could be transmitted to the young?

He who thinks that believing is not a work
Has not worked at thinking about belief.

When man worships at the Shrine of Convenience
He becomes perfectly comfortable
In not knowing the nature
Of his god.

Let us all give thanks
For the Internet and email and text messages and TV and radio—
Those unassailable domains of the marketers,
Who, being the heirs apparent of all humanity,
Have brought our race finally to this glorious maturity,
Born again by way of the ever-gushing font of ads—
That life-giving stream, as from Eden itself—
Without which no one could ever know
What to think of himself
Or what he needs
Or how to find
His own way
To market!