If I let you love me
I will let you down
And when our love is done
A part of us will drown
If I let you love me
I’ll start to love you too
We’ll tear at one another
Cuz that’s what lovers do
If I let you love me
I’m taking on your weight
And someone will get hurt
And hurt will turn to hate
I won’t let you love me
Cuz I care for you too much
Attachment is no match
For the malady of touch
by Richard W. Bray
Anybody sitting here?
Good Lord, I need a drink
Let me offer you some beer
You can tell me what you think
I’m in here every day
Drinking is my life
Wanna throw it all away
Since I lost my wife
She ran off to Beijing
With my business partner, Ted
She says he’s more exciting
And an animal in bed
So tell me, What’s your story?
It can’t be sad as mine
My father never liked me
And my mother dated swine
My people are afflicted
When it comes to crime
My sister was convicted
And my brother’s doing time
I didn’t catch your name
Would you like another shot?
They tell me I’m insane
I’ve mortgaged all I got
I’ve always been unhappy
You look like you work out
I’m doing pretty crappy
With psoriasis and gout
Didn’t mean to bend your ear
It’s just what I do
I’ve never seen you here
So tell me about you
by Richard W. Bray
—Throw down the mattock and dance while you can.
W.H. Auden
Life pushes “Play”
We get a dance
We can shimmy
We will slip
We don’t get a
Second chance
It’s a one-way trip
I took a road
It got me here
A stack of choices
Make a man
Don’t make no sense
To shed no tears
Here is who I am
My life’s been good
And it’s been bad
But it’s the only
One I get
It would be stupid
And so sad
To waste it with regret
by Richard W. Bray
escaping
pain and pity
i lit out
for the city
and ran
away from home
sometimes a body
gotta roam
I just wanted to be free
Thought I had to make a mark
But this city ain’t for me
Flying home in the dark
enchanted
by the light
i didn’t foresee
an endless night
had enough of
snow and ice
going back where
folks are nice
Won’t you please deliver me
From all the jackals and the sharks
Lord knows this city ain’t for me
Flying home in the dark
by Richard W. Bray
Strangers sharing all their troubles
Actors living inside bubbles
Lucky, privileged, pampered babies
Make me foam like I got rabies
I got a list inside my head
Of all the people I want dead
I focus focus all my spite
On other people day and night
And I could torture all the swine
Who don’t decide when they’re in line
Chatting up the checkout gal
Like she’s their oldest living pal
I got a list inside my head
Of all the people I want dead
I push my anger far and wide
Cuz I don’t wanna look inside
I ruminate with all my might
On every slander, every slight
The lineup is a mile long
Of all the folks who done me wrong
I got a list inside my head
Of all the people I want dead
I try and try and try and try
To swallow hate until they die
by Richard W. Bray
You can send a man to war
Make him watch his buddies die
Don’t even say what they died for
You can even make him cry
You can cut all his rations
Down to the nitty-gritty
But the last thing a man wants
Is pity
You can send his job away
Cut his salary in half
You can abuse him every day
You can have yourself a laugh
You can take away his home
And brutalize his city
But the last thing a man wants
Is pity
Take the country that he loves
And starve it half to death
You can give his heart a shove
You can steal his dying breath
You can trample on his pride
And make his whole world shitty
But the last thing a man wants
Is pity
by Richard W. Bray
so many times
so many ways
i hurt you
for what I am
and who
i want to be
i devour
i disrupt and
i endure
my hunger
slashes you
it nibbles me
a thousand times
i can say
i’m sorry
but that’s
a stupid song
i sing for me
by Richard W. Bray
We have what it takes to set you free
Money and bullets and boots and blood
We’re everything that you want to be
The model of modern society
Wash away fossils in crimson flood
We have what it takes to set you free
Inside you is a another form of me
We’re putting our values out to stud
We’re everything that you want to be
We’re the glory of all humanity
So embrace your liberation, Bud
We have what it takes to set you free
Steaming hot piles of Democracy
Fashioning our dominion of mud
We’re everything that you want to be
Bombs build dreams like factories
Shimmering cities on a hill of crud
We have what it takes to set you free
We’re everything that you want to be
by Richard W. Bray
I met a man
Who laid some bricks
He knew about
A million tricks
The people loved
His fancy streets
But I prefer
The grey concrete
Don’t wanna hear about the things you did
Don’t bother me if you got stuff to share
Everything that I don’t like is stupid
Don’t waste my time. I really just don’t care
I met a man who
Who looked at stars
And tried to guess
Just what they are
But that didn’t do
A thing for me
Or take me where
I wanna be
Don’t wanna hear about the things you did
Don’t bother me if you got stuff to share
Everything that I don’t like is stupid
Don’t waste my time. I really just don’t care
A gal I knew
Was brave and free
Embraced life with
Vitality
Did not take much
Sense to see
She was not the
One for me
Don’t wanna hear about the things you did
Don’t bother me if you got stuff to share
Everything that I don’t like is stupid
Don’t waste my time. I really just don’t care
by Richard W. Bray
Alexander Pope
Many vices have corresponding virtues. Consider the following pairs of adjectives.
Confident/Cocky
Trusting/Gullible
Audacious/Impudent
Candid/Indiscreet
Gallant/Foolhardy
Deliberate/Dithering
In each of the above examples, there is a point where excess converts virtue into vice.
Consider the Wooden Paradox from basketball coach John Wooden: Be quick but don’t hurry. In other words, give maximum effort without losing control. Expedience is good; reckless haste is not. Thus we excel by straining a virtue to the edge of the border where it becomes its corresponding vice.
Controlling our appetites is a key to maximizing virtues without rendering them vices. As philosopher Phillipa Foot* notes, “Virtues belong to the will” (13).
For example, there is virtue in Hamlet’s impulse to redress his father’s murder; however, the mindless barbarism of Hamlet’s hunger for retribution obliterates a guiltless family—Ophelia, Polonius, and Laertes. Enraged recklessness is the vice which transforms Hamlet’s valor into senseless carnage.
To his credit, Hamlet is aware of such folly. That’s why he salutes Horatio’s staid and sober equanimity:
Give me that man
That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him
In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart,
As I do thee
It is not good enough simply to act upon justifiable impulses because, as Foot notes, “almost any desire can lead a man to act unjustly” (9). Like Hamlet’s ill-fated quest for justice, much death, loss, and destruction is perpetrated in the name of love, charity, temperance, and security. Alexander Pope warns us to be wary because
The same ambition can destroy or save,
And makes a patriot as it makes a knave.
It is difficult to discern the corresponding virtues for “moral failings such as pride, vanity, worldliness and avarice” which “harm both their possessor and others” (Foot 3). Pride is a fundamental flaw bred in the bone of humanity. Excessive self-satisfaction puffs us up; it distends the ego and smothers benevolence. But you don’t have to take my word for it:
Before destruction the heart of man is haughty (Proverbs 18:12)
Whether we credit our existence to God or evolution, there is no such thing as a self-made man.
Let’s imagine a man who comes into the world with a massive endowment of skill and will who also happens to be born at that right time and place to garner great fortune and esteem during his lifetime. Shouldn’t this man be immensely grateful for his fortuitous circumstances? Why does pride so often trump modesty in the solipsistic hearts of the fortunate?
Compassion and humility are the best antidotes to our capacious appetites and our rampant self-love.
*All Philippa Foot quotations from Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy
by Richard W. Bray
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