What Do You Want To Do With The Rest Of Your Life?
Do you want to accept & perfect the role
into which those with the most power in relation to you
are casting you?
Do you want to find a group with conditioning similar to yours
& thrive as a member of it?
Do you want to remain free to apprehend & comprehend
every sort of phenomenon & impression?
Are you confident that you can handle all that complexity
plus the onslaughts of every sort of
aggressive group, individual, molecule?
Do you believe you’ll be able to learn fast enough
& develop the necessary skills fast enough?
Do you suppose that you can find common purpose & method
now with this one, now with that one
sufficiently, & often enough?
Are you willing to understand your vulnerability all the time?
Can you defend yourself from the attacks
of those who can’t bear your not agreeing
that their partial understanding is complete
& superior to all others?
How do you want to live?
What do you want to achieve?
What do you want to do with the rest of your life?
Eric Chaet, The Turnaround Artist, born Chicago, USA, 1945, raised on rough South Side, pre-computer factory, office, & warehouse jobs. Some teaching, some independent self-taught technical consulting. 1974, Old Buzzard of No-Man’s Land, poems, Toronto, Canada. 1977, Solid and Sound, vinyl LP of songs, Lee’s Summit, Missouri, USA. Mid-80s to mid-90s, silkscreened, hitchhiked, & stapled 1500 cloth posters to utility poles along American highways. 1990, How To Change the World Forever For Better, brief prose philosophy, Greenleaf, Wisconsin, USA; 2nd edition, 1994. 2001, People I Met Hitchhiking On USA Highways, mostly narrative prose, De Pere, Wisconsin, USA. Lives in Wisconsin, industrialized dairy farms & cows, remnant cheese & paper factories & factory hands & outlaw mammals & birds, post-construction boom, reactionary politics & obsolete machinery, a smattering of professionals & millionaires. Poems published, over 50 years in many USA states, plus Brazil, Cuba, Ireland, Scotland, England, Spain, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Nepal, India, China, Singapore, Korea, & Taiwan, often in translation.
You can contact him at the Leave a Reply box on each page of his website, 100 Peculiarly Useful So-Called Poems, <http://www.ericchaet.
wordpress.com>.
Find Chaet’s book, People I Met Hitchhiking USA Highways, and read a review written here. See also, There’s still a little breath in the old American Revolution, On Job Creation, and Stalin.
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