Vox Populi
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Jose Padua: These Years of Thinking Dangerously
Every day my daughter worries when what she thinks
are weird thoughts enter her head; I worry when what
I know are weird thoughts don’t enter mine. When
the beautiful confusion of dreams becomes a stranger
to my waking hours I start to panic. All the wrong
objects collide in my mind, the corners of my brain
that should be speaking turn silent, and all the solemn
points of contemplation and vision are filled with noise
and corruption. I tell my daughter that everything that isn’t
at least a little peculiar is also boring, that any thought
that doesn’t also make us worry probably isn’t worth thinking
about. Then I add this: stay away from people who are happy
all the time, chances are they’re on the wrong medication.
The people who are truly interesting are as interesting
in a fast car as they are in a bare room with just a pitcher
of water and two plastic cups—just keep drinking and stay out
of the car. The secret life of people like us is a history of crazy
moments that wake us, the serene stillness that follows them,
and the sometimes slow, sometimes quick work afterwards
that leads to wisdom. When my daughter gets out of the car
in the morning to go to school she always asks, “Will I do
anything weird? Will I say anything weird?” and I always say
“No.” But the day will come when I can say, “Yes, you will
do something weird, and the wiser ones among us will appreciate it
and remember it,” and we go home and pour our coffee,
hers decaffeinated, into stained porcelain cups, add a lot of cream
and a lot of sugar as we warm ourselves from the inside out,
all caught up in the joy and comfort of our perilous thoughts.
Copyright 2024 Jose Padua
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Lovely. In all ways.
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This poem is lovely, and added to my class reading list. This because my class theme is “Conformity Sucks” with a sub theme of “Utopias Suck,” and this poem is along the same lines, embracing the weird (apropos, more or less), or absurd. As I tell them in class; “Imagine a world bereft of conflict. Boring, bourgeois, woefully predictable, like sanitized and neutered nature bereft of the sublime.”
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Thanks, Matthew! So glad you’re able to introduce your student’s to Jose’s poetry, which I love.
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I second everyone — you’re all that good! As is Jose’s poem! The tenderness at then end — ahhhh.
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Yes, the VP poets are THAT GOOD!!!!
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I think weird is the desired mode–something to aspire to like Nirvana. Like being able to jump in at the right time and play an improvised solo on an unfamiliar instrument.
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And I should add, I LOVE the photo at the end. (Lineman’s wife–what can I say?)
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Weirdness as nirvana… hmmm. I like it.
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Weirdness and the peculiar get bad press. But not all weirdness is the same. Good for Padua to remind us of this so brilliantly. His poem helps me see peculiar as a doorway to understanding, but even more, to creative insight, and the truth in poetry like his. In a world where inhaling, to quote Sean Sexton, is the imperiling condition, Padua’s poem helps us draw an engendering breath.
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Thanks, Jim. I’ve always thought of weirdness as a good thing. Artists are weird, so are poets and activists. I’m surprised to see the term flung at Trump and his followers as a criticism. I would call them racist, sexist and homophobic, not weird.
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“Periolos thoughts,” and the imperiling condition of drawing breath in this realm. What a pickle we’re in, and what a poem!
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Thanks, Sean. I love Jose’s poems.
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