Life...

Life is beautiful.

In Spite of Ourselves

The sun set in a yellow glob, the color of my suns when I scribbled them as a child, waxy red, orange, a conglomeration of texture and hues. The dark rushed in along with the winter chill. I sat at my desk and wondered what she was doing, a world away.

I awoke that morning with someone else: a thin, tattooed brunette who liked to crinkle her nose, sleep with her head on my chest, play fight and rode horses for a living. She was intelligent, recommended books that I had never read and could discuss those I had. She liked sex and was good at it. Yet there was something missing. That integral part of something. The fire the caught in your stomach, that defied gravity and had the simultaneous power to set afloat and crush.

I fell asleep thinking of Her while holding someone else. The One that slipped away, both from my own neglect and idiocy. Life is full of such 'hers'. We are a species of dreamers and romanticizers. I could blame it on Hollywood but that seems too convenient. The trait is universal, a shared blessing and curse. The ability to imagine. Imagination breeds dissent, breeds greed, breeds yearning, breeds the exceptional. Love is visceral imagination.

And like imagination, it largely goes unaccomplished and pending.

Always expanding.

--Currently listening to John Prine's In Spite of Ourselves

An Awakening?

I have lived a stationary life. While brief, intermittent geographical hop-scotches have occurred the majority of my life I have remained within a two hundred mile radius of the small town I grew up in.

Yet throughout this stasis I have had a continual yearning to wander. At times it is a dull ache, easy to suppress, while at others, piercing hot in its intensity. And I know now that this feeling will never leave me. It is as much a part of who I am as my stubbornness or my laugh.

Since my childhood I have had the strange notion that I will not live a long life. I remember having anxiety attacks - "spazz attacks" - as we called them, where I woke up at night in inconsolable fits - unable to control my actions but aware of everything. Only later did I recall the dreams that preceded these episodes. Huge, all-encompassing tasks at hand and only a brief amount of time in which to complete it all. It was the confrontation of infinity with brief, wondrous mortality.

The sun and moon rise. Seasons arrive and flee. Sand falls.

Time is short for all of us.

This notion used to terrify me and sent me straight into the arms of organized religion. I found little solace in such a sterile, formalized, self-denying view of the world.

I am certain of very little except that I am me and that I have but one life.

It's a strange world we find ourselves in.

I met her on the streets of Dublin.

splash

the illusion is that you are simply
reading this poem.
the reality is that this is
more than a
poem.
this is a beggar’s knife.
this is a tulip.
this is a soldier marching
through Madrid.
this is you on your
death bed.
this is Li Po laughing
underground.
this is not a god-damned
poem.
this is a horse asleep.
a butterfly in
your brain.
this is the devil’s
circus.
you are not reading this
on a page.
the page is reading
you.
feel it?
it’s like a cobra. it’s a hungry eagle circling the room.

this is not a poem. poems are dull,
they make you sleep.

these words force you
to a new
madness.

you have been blessed, you have been pushed into a
blinding area of
light.

the elephant dreams
with you
now.
the curve of space
bends and
laughs.

you can die now.
you can die now as
people were meant to
die:
great,
victorious,
hearing the music,
being the music,
roaring,
roaring,
roaring.

Charles Bukowski

Landslide

As I drove to work this morning Fleetwood Mac's hit Landslide came on the radio. Stevie Nick's acknowledgment, "I'm getting older too," resonated in the truck cabin, the melancholy way she accepeted it, like a love that is over.

"I'm getting older too." It's the mantra of the schizophrenic age in which I find myself; over a quarter century old, caught between twin impulses. - to settle down, find stability and start a family, or flee, run, seek out the new and mysterious.

I sat at my desk and twin monitors stared back. Reports, quotes, orders, specs, configurations, skus blinked by. Each voice on the phone anxious, convinced their deal was of the utmost importance. I was struck with the absurdity of it all. Of the neatly lined hushed rows of souls transfixed by computers, locked to the phones. Could anything be as inconsequential?

It's not that I'm unhappy. It's the lack of anything significant - the feeling that days tick by and no movement is made, no hills conquered, no love burning.

I've had brief encounters with love and lust over the past two years. A fluttering of feelings quickly scorched to ash. Vagueness. I experienced a hint of something real that fizzled with inaction, miscommunication, and stupidity. It ended with her boarding a red-eye flight to Australia, someone else's kiss on her lips, while I sat at home and smoked another bowl while Townes Van Zandt played in my head.

I don't know if I'm propelled by the desire to flee what it is that I've created or simply to accept Fate's invitation for something new.

Life is plagued/blessed by dualism everywhere - so why not both?