Hi, All.

This should be on an about page, but I wanted it to get top-billing. For a long time there have been no memoir-style updates on my site. The reason is I was presenting myself as an artist/poet/photographer, and I didn’t want my site to look like a blog. I even dislike the word, ‘blog’. It is undignified and aesthetically unpleasing. It sounds like a creature form a nineteen-fifties B movie sci-fi flick.

Anyway, I was trying to market myself as a soon-to-be professional, and I had planned to do drawings and photos for printing (which I would still like to do), so I wanted the site to look clean, simple, and focused on visual art. Another reason I was marketing my work in website format–with no daily updates and only links to what was featured–was that my girlfriend was saying she wanted to see a professional site. And another reason still, was a good friend was saying to be professional, ‘get the personal stuff off the site.’ Some of the most successful people have marketed themselves that way, but their sites are boring, even when designed beautifully, because they are like sign-posts in the desert, where no one goes for long. Why? They are lonely, and the interactive blog environment is the answer to that, and it is the website of today, where people congregate. So that is why I am returning to a blog-style format.

Here’s the thing. A long time ago I had an epiphany; ‘Don’t change yourself into something, be more of what you are, or get better at it.’ I am not only a photographer. I am not only a poet. I m not only a teacher (well, I don’t do that any more). I am not only a spoken-word performer and a comic. I am all these things and that is what I am. And the charm in a person comes in the amalgam of what she or he is, not in dissecting his or her parts. Besides, it’s more fun and less pretentious to present yourself as a whole person, and on the blogosphere, ease is the means of the day, so I have everything all here in one place. I think that if anyone wants to take a professional interest in me or my work, he can click one link or another and focus on what he wants.

Furthermore, in the spirit of being whole, I will have daily updates of my life in Korea, because, let’s face it, this is my ‘journey to the moon’, and the defining event of my life, thus far.

Peace, Love, Joy, & Imagination,

Carl

I Don’t

I Don’t…
… mind, listening to a ‘grown’ man cry

… tell him to “man-up”

… relish the strength of a man
surreptitiously trained
out of fear

… respect the ignorance of a man
beaten by society into stupidity

… defend his ‘need’
to be unfeeling

… like that women
often take advantage
of a man’s DNA-driven focus
or of his love,
expecting princely treatment
yet display themselves
to the better bidder, simultaneously…
then often leave for him–
only to return when they see
how shallow and stupid,
animal,
immoral,
primitive,
and dishonorable this is…
all the while asking for
equality

I Don’t

… like that in this country
most everyone perpetuates
the naiveté
of women
including the women,
themselves–
nor that this is all
to serve the stupidity
of most of the men
(or, their ignorance)–
and their sense of entitlement,
which makes
kingdom-less princesses
out of most of the women

I Don’t

… defend a woman who tortures
a man,
regardless of her reasons
in fear:
of abandonment,
in experience of insufficient support
or even in the pain of the loss of love

I Don’t
lack any compassion
for stupid men and women, and

I Don’t
like using the word ‘stupid,’
but the outcome
of society is largely
ubiquitous stupidity
and men and women perpetuate
it,
so I name it what it is

And

I Don’t
like that stupidity rules most human life–
tradition,
xenophobia,
animalistic-practicality,
nationalism,
honor-less-greed
and man-made female-naiveté–
or that it all trumps love

I Don’t
… like that a people can live amidst
space-age technology
and still emote like cavemen

I Don’t
… like that tens of thousands of men
suffered the horrors of war,
so people around me–now
and forever–can live in luxury,
nor that they seek to deny it
and forget it,
because the nations that paid for
that freedom benefit

I Don’t
… like that my blood:
my dear uncle;
a lover, a brother, a son, a beloved and an artist, a poet, a musician…
saw his friends killed, here
and went mad for a time, himself
… that he sweat through dreams
of that hell
for the rest of his life–-
so horrid, that he couldn’t visit me, here
or the man that was an orphan boy
whom my soldier-uncle raised
on Geohjae Island–
when the nightmare was real,
and bad dreams were a respite from the real horror of battle–
and I don’t like that I am disrespected
by the children of those my uncle saved,
because I share his nationality

I Don’t
… like that my and other nations
preach peace and democracy
but do not teach it
so after the horrors
tribalism prevails

I Don’t
… like that my nation killed 3,000
Jeju-ans, because
they looked communist

I Don’t
… like that my nation
torched sixty Japanese cities
and dropped the rage of the sun
on two more of them
for the horrors Japan committed–
and to frighten the world–
nor that the Koreans think
the Japanese didn’t pay

I Don’t
like that we dropped
chemical weapons
on the Vietnamese,
and that the Koreans helped,
because we paid them–
yet they rail about the cruelty
of the Japanese

I Don’t
… like that I and my friends
and family
paid for these and other wars,
which aren’t only for freedom,
nor that we have to stay here,
but I know
there wouldn’t be ‘a here’
if we didn’t,
and I wish you appreciated it

I Don’t
,,, like that the rest of my life
is painted one color
because of happenstance–
And I don’t mind crying

 © Copyright 2015 – 2025 Carl Atteniese II /
All rights reserved

____________________________________

A Note About This Poem to Feminists:
If you find offense in that I generalize about women, I applaud your sentiments that are aligned in issues of equality. However, I would not agree with you if you were to say that I should negate my experience as an expatriate resident in a Confucian country, where the roles of women were maddeningly codified and thus quite in line with what I have conveyed in this writing.

Now, I have often struggled with how to describe my subjects without offending, but simultaneously struggled to impart a message to a definite group exhibiting definite behaviors that are deleterious to the human soul–as I penned words about my experience and pain of living in here, I often bent to remove the label of that country (but herein re-introduced it by suggestion) to avoid having to deal with the ignorant charge of “racism” (I despise having to use of that stupid word!). Had I not inferred the name of the country here, I might have prevented this moment, because you would not feel I am labeling the behavior of all women, but that of those in a group.

Alas, the truth is, some women in all cultures do what I have described in this poem, and I am not obligated to make that statement of gendered behavior neutral, because it is poetry, not sociological dissertation that I write. In addition, were no women in the experience of others, found to act as I have described, then I would still have the right to describe those women as “women” and be justified as a poet in doing it. Finally, it would not, as my writing now does not, make me sexist. It only makes me human, describing human experiences. I am not sexist; I am honest, forgiving, and descriptive.