5-6-13

Who am I, sir? Who am I, and which way is home, and what is this loneliness that springs perpetual? No more crowds, just for a little while, pray sir, just for a little while. So many faces. "There will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet." Shall there be time to remove the paint and plaster though? Where am I, sir? Beneath the pasteboard, where am I? Where do I begin to look?

Have I a soul, sir? Can it be lifted? Can I be made good? Can you show me how to break? Can you teach me how to break? Oh, break me. Make me a better thing.

I grow lost amid the crowds and the crowds are lost on me. I can't see them. I am insulated. How can I love if I cannot see? I must learn to walk unbuffered. Oh, but how, how, how? Ever since childhood, this fixation on masks. World! How can I see you? World! Take me! On the side of the angels, but not one of them. World! Show me virtue. Teach me goodness. Teach me sympathy. Begone stoicism. World..........

I am so lost.

05-02-13

And have you walked, my friend, and have you walked?

And have you stooped, stopped short by brackish air?

And have you crouched, my friend, and couching stalked

The mud besludged and stagnant lakish lair? 

And what, my friend, yes what did you find there?

A water baby, was it? Some fallen fay,

Slime-skinned, or furred, as one hirsute with bile,

A rigor-mortised toad-child mid-decay

With claws for feet beneath the phlegmy pile.

And did you squirm, my friend, and did you smile?

Oh worry not, I shan't look on you ill

For letting wonder outpace your disgust;

The curious will get their ghastly fill,

And naught's so rank as awe can't overcrust.

And awe is love, my friend, and love we must.

April 10th 2013

I am enslugged, and sapped, and shorn 

Of all the haring thoughts of dawn.

I'd Samson's strength of mind at eight;

By eight again, mere empty pate.

Oh dread Delilah Nine-to-Five,

Don't take my life to keep me 'live!

2-1-2013

Occasionally one must say to heck with Chesterton. Chesterton is a grand philosopher for pulling the fair-to-middling life up into the angelic ether; there is none better for taking a hobbit and fashioning a hero; but, for those who deem ho-hummity as an unattainable paradise, Chestertonian precepts are unavailing. It is no use telling the man in the gutter to make a game of his goose-flesh. Sometimes it is better to imagine oneself away from one's present circumstances; sometimes it is better to live in groundless fantasies than in the world as it is; sometimes a studious disregard for the moment is necessary to keep one remotely functional. I am tired to excess. I shall sleep and awake elsewhere than Michigan in February. 

1-31-2013

One aught not despair. One aught to regard all inconveniences as adventures. One aught be merry and confident and ecstatically grateful for what was and what is and what has yet to be. I know life is a grand and gratuitous blessing. I know it. And yet, forgive me world, today I despair of you. Today I break and beg things to be all other than they are. Too much pain.

The car radiator has gone into hibernation and looks to require $700 to be coaxed back into life. If I pay the price of warmth, I lose the Santiago. If I pay the price of the Santiago, I lose my fingers to frostbite. Twice daily. The pain of cold in the fingers is almost beyond bearing. It is the pain of cells turning to scimitars, cutting nerves open from the inside. My face suffuses with involuntary salt-waters and I cry out imprecations at the winter and the tortures of the cold. The pain prevents me from properly gripping the wheel. It prevents me, likewise, from properly concentrating on the road. I risk so many mishaps on its account, and yet I am so reluctant to surrender the Santiago. The Santiago has been my North Star for almost a year now; it has been the lone fixed point by which I have navigated my ramshackle raft over circumstance's rollicking waters.

Flying the North Star

Oh life! Where is port? Where is a safe place to anchor? Where is a home? Where is anything other than the hingeless oscillations of the tide and eternally landless horizons? I know I am in a thankless frame of mind right now; I know that to be given experience of any sort is worthy of praise unending; I know that even torment is a marvel. Yet it is hard to confront, at last, one's homelessness, one's solitariness, one's directionlessness. One can be homeless, and alone, and without direction for a lifetime without ever confronting these maladies, and one can get along pretty decently in one's oblivion. I was oblivious, after a fashion, for oh so lamentably many seasons. Yet the pasteboard mask has ruptured, the white whale has been punctured and I am forced to face truths once hid. It is for the best, ultimately, I know it is. I shall learn to captain the waters that presently leave me seasick, and, as I learn, the ship shall become my home, and the sea my companion, and the trajectory of billowing Fate my direction. Only until such a time I grasp the gunnel in fits of self-pity and shake bitter fists at the winter.

1-30-2013

Rain. A winter tonic, a respite from the ice. I sit in the coffee shop and watch the glossed black night beyond the window. It's pleasant. Exceedingly. Swingy jazz issues from overhead speakers; a lady with horse-wild hair and debonair knits sits with her beau in the corner; everything emanates easy-come ambiance. At any moment I half expect a P.I.--sandstone trench; East Coast accent--to idle in and start interrogating the barristas. I want to protract this fiction longer than the open-hours will allow. I want to stop the clock and rummage around in make-believe corners. Slow down, glassed sands, slow down! Pause long enough for a lass to build some castles on you!

The rain grants refuge from the winter, but has rendered me an exile from my four walls. It has seeped in under the door and soddened the carpet, which the in-laws have since wrested from the floorboards and wontoned over upon itself, an obstreperous watchguard of fans stationed all about lest the fibers think about returning to their supine state. The place smells of damp and has no seating provisions, the chairs all being displaced to accommodate the newly yogic floor-mattings. I wish I didn't have to leave this table, this trumpet drawling, this cup of tartly steaming tea. I wish gadfly time was not so persistently biting at my ankles. Where's the veil as would protect from that gnat? Where's the break in the glass? 

1-29-2013

Swiftly now! Write like the arboreal bellows on a wild Northern sea! Write like the gallop of blood through lovers' veins! Write like the feet of Gene Kelly! Fly fingers! Fly! Outpace the night!

There is no time! The clock has got me shackled to a deadline, manacled to a midnight minute from which I cannot be unloosed. Life is so diffuse and the days so compressed. How may a mere time-dweller reconcile the two? I know not. I know not! I rack my brain, the seat of man's moments, but the seconds remain unstretched. 12.29. Tick tock. Tick tock. The sandman's hand infiltrates the hourglass and collects the last grain. I must pay the debt of that handful of dust and turn myself over to sleep.