How To Live

I've been sent this previously unpublished poem by Mateo del Olmo.  He'll probably be insulted when I call it a bad poem, but so be it.  

How To Live

Sleep refreshes

Food nourishes

Dreams confuse but reconstruct the mind



Meditation sorts things out

Kissing makes Goddesses of women and fools of men

Sex is a demon, but who can despise it?



In a dream a problem is never solved

but it is

Poetry confuses the intellect but then doesn't



Spices alert the palate

A man's beard grows to remind him he is alive

Music soothes or excites



Salt is a metaphor for what isn't insipid

Melancholy heightens the appreciation of beauty like Keats's

"sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud"



Sunlight cheers and invigorates

There are those who claim it has a fragrance but it doesn't

Exercise rejuvenates and will not confuse the palate



Surrealism turned out to be a false path

It did not teach men to live

It confused the confusion of the dream with the reconstruction of the fragrance of sunlight



It did not even try to teach women how to live

The alcohol of surrealism is not the spice of melancholy

or even a slow-growing beard



Meditations actually are useful "in an emergency" though you wouldn't think it

The confusion of beards with weeping clouds does not occur in dreams

Spices have fragrance, but we do not know what it is for