Monday, April 27, 2009

A Dirge for Happy People


How can the days go on being beautiful when we are not or do not feel ourselves to be?  But they are there, wasted on us.  There are others though, and we forget, for whom the days are memorable.  Unseeing eyes, our ears stopped up with dirt.  What endless road is this that we shall never travel?  Trudge on, trudge on.  Selah.  

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrif
y.

(from "Abaude" by Phillip Larkin)

4 comments:

  1. I've had two beautiful days in a row, euphoric almost, a new lease on life...etc. I almost can't enjoy it because I'm trying to constantly figure out a way to hold on to this...not let it slip away...

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  2. I'm feeling more Larkin-esque
    just drank a Fosters

    The last 160 bucks I had got stolen from my car last night -- with my drivers license.

    fucking days.

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  3. I write these things in a vacuum and think everyone is feeling what I feel, but here we see the poles. But it all goes, doesn't it, the euphoria, the money. Criminal, all of it.

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  4. yes it all goes. and even though you write in a vacuum most days I have the feeling you have some sort of psychic powers and have seen into my soul and written about what I was feeling (because I am the center of the universe after all) And the euphoric high...fading fast, just a tiny smidge left behind to remind me of how I could be living if I could figure out how to bring it back.

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