"Neither Logic Nor Sermons Convince"

“Neither Logic Nor Sermons Convince”
                                               (Whitman)
I have made no converts these years though I’ve had extended
even sustained converse-action which I love as much as  playing
piano or climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro  
 
Still and all: no conversions, catalytic, metric, digital to analogue
or vice versa, political, religious, philosophical, no convert to my
way of talking, thinking, seeing.
 
People have a mind-set of their own  even after my stalwart

efforts to juggle & tweak if not recalibrate their tea- party,

libertarian,  conservative, liberal, independent, radical,

traditional assumptions, controlling metaphors &

rat-a-tattoos marching to different drummers: it

makes no never minding; might as well
throw rice at a rhino
 
I’ve never been enabled to transform any one into anything contrary

to their bias and  belief systems unless I had a grade-gun to  their

heads & then it’s a matter of compliance  rather than conversion.

so as to take the credit  and run, cerebral  homeostat intact, noetic
configuration same as it always was.
 
What changes a mind? .
Can’t change my own
to be or not to be: it’s
beyond me. A waste.
 
Nevertheless I think and talk as if I  could if not shoul
 –no, not should— a terrible notion to change someone’s
minding as if I could help them feel good, make them a
better person, a wholesome human being or what’s
a college for?  Brain wash?
 
Conversion.  Converse Action.  Wouldn’t I like to talk 
sense into  them tea party-ers,  tip Ann Coulter off her
teeter-totter? Bottle up Bill  O’Reilly and ship him to
Wasilla,  Chris Matthews &  Rachel Maddow:  

lend them my pink Cadillac & let  them go riding
on the freeway  of love.
 
I could make a real difference  if people would just
talk to me  for a long long  time, I think it’s  going to 
take a long long time,  & we could question 
everything  make the whirl a  better pace.
    
(O my God’s in the Hands of Angry  Sinners: 
if I thought logic would  convince, I’d be logical rather 
than pathological or pedagogical. )