7 mayo 2008: Desire

"Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than to nurse unacted desires." - William Blake

A cold choice to make
Upon reaching the first air
Regards taking breath

Once tasted, that gulp
Becomes a constant desire
Involuntary

Some roads less traveled
Pass underneath, the earth moves
This way and that way

The rest also comes
Morning through the tired winter
The will of the One

Notes: You are born by cut or by canal and air gets in your lungs. No one knows how that decision is made, or who makes it, or how the desire to proceed, to live, arrives. No one remembers. Billions of decisions follow. We don't even think about them. Desires are decisions we imagine before we have opportunity. We are rich, we are poor. We are tall, we are short. We have an automobile accident or asthma. These are not haiku.

Post publication dialogue:
Gene: PeeGee,
babies take their first breath because we have a
reflex that causes us to gasp involuntarily for air
when sufficient carbon dioxide builds up in our
bloodstreams. When the placenta no longer delivers
oxygen to or removes carbon dioxide from the baby, it
involuntarily gasps for breath, filling its lungs with
air for the first time. (You want this to happen
outside the mother rather than inside, if you get my
gist.) The same reflex is also why you can't commit
suicide simply by holding your breath.

PG: Sounds awfully technical.

Shipmaster: PG, I know you probably didn't mean that to be funny, but I laughed harder at your comment than anything posted here in a long time. Maybe it was
imagining the perplexed look on Gene's face when he saw such a reply.

PG: I meant it to be funny. Funnyish. Gene's explanation of why we first breathe when we are born is true, I guess, but the poem, such as it is, wanted to see that action as a choice, a decision made by either the individual or by God. I guess Gene holds to the God theory. In which case, with humans having had no choice in the matter of that first breath or of the last breath, it would seem that every breath in between is also beyond choice, leaving us with the wonderful Eastern philosophy of living -- "It breathes me."

I'm not there.