Profile on a Full Moon

It is a breezy, full moon night.  I leave the doors open and pour myself a whiskey.  I am rattled and shaken.  Shook.  I should go out tonight.  I've had no dinner, did not stop to get any or get anything to prepare.  I have only the whiskey if I stay in for the night.  The cat runs in and out on heavy feet that she makes boom upon the wooden floors.  Ghosts.  Fucking phantoms and specters that bode inauspicious without striking.  Chimera.  Phantasms.

The show and reception went well.  My images did not displease me.  There are never enough compliments to satiate the ego, of course.  But old dangers and arguments circulated, too, of which there are never too few.  Wraiths, shades, and figments.

Another whiskey on a very empty stomach, but I have no hunger for food tonight.  I dare not confess too much, though.  Fancy, impulse, whimsy, hankering.

You who are only bored. . . be pleased.  Speak little and smile more.  There is horribly little we can do.

*     *     *     *     *

It is not yet morning.  I have slept fitfully and little.  The house turned cold in the night.  I start the heater, make coffee, go to the computer.  I am exhausted and will go back to bed when the exhaustion overtakes the other, the thing that keeps me from bed, from sleep.  This full moon night is so dreadfully empty and spare.  Hollow.  I keep looking for a good sign, but eventually all signs lead to the same destination. I should have made pottery instead of photographs I think.  Nobody objects to a pot, really.  And why do we teach children to write?  One word tries to replace another, one sentence, one paragraph, one essay.  The more you write the more you must, always trying to reconstruct what came before, reshaping and explaining, reinventing, covering your tracks as best you can, and so the indictment grows.  Better to be a gourmand or wine toad or a fly fisherman or a stamp and coin collector.  Why do we teach children to read?  So we can fill their heads with ideology.  It is troubling, all of it.  It is problematic enough that we learn to speak.  

I will not go to the factory today.  I need to get parts of my own life in order.  I won't.  I will sit like a catatonic and think rather than do.  Painfully, I will do some task in a panic.  The day will be gone.  I should whittle.  Nobody whittles any more.  I could find a place to sit and watch as I whittle away the day.  Just shave and carve until there is nothing left of it at all.