There is no reprise to a good day. Don't try. Sunday was cloudy and gray. I left the house only once--to go to the diner for breakfast. Different day, different deal. The rest was spent inside, reading and working on photographs. I didn't even shower. I made a spaghetti dinner for my mother who came over in the early evening, but she had started a new diet, didn't eat much, and left early. After that, I drank too much whiskey at my desk. Listened much and long to strange music. My legs were swollen and tight when I rose to go to bed.
Monday comes thick and heavy and gray. My batteries are low. Give existence meaning, I tell myself, but I find the formula reversed. I look for quotations from Camus.
"A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession."
Confession is difficult when the people to whom you confess may be those who are complicit. It has become too easy to find me. I've used "Cafe Selavy" in too many places, too many times. I do not wish to become Diogenes walking naked in his own home town. And these are literal times. For me, too. I must find the titles to my "abandoned vehicles." I don't know if I can. My life's a jumble of messes that I'd just as soon walk away from and leave behind. Rather, I must put them in order. Existence gains the upper hand.
I don't know if I ever left you this poem or not. It is long but worth it (at least I think so -- you may want to re-write it :) )
ReplyDeleteIt was written by a guy who I only have talked to by phone and only posts poems online. I may have left it before but a good poem doesn't tire. I'm sure the line-breaks are fucked but that's okay for now.
The Weight of Being Eden
Ran into Ben Henry Howard,
In the black of the hotel cellar a few hours back.
He had only a short time to spare and spoke
Full of confidence and consequence,
With his dromedary bottom lip,
And that speck of know-it-all worn by cosmic gurus.
The moths swarmed the solitary condemned glow
Like constellations in motion; peering, swirling,
Eyeballs gazing back from the mirrored walls
Smeared with interstellar dust
Painted in pigments of love and lust.
He suggested I kill my imagination
And count my chickens before they hatch
And begin to scratch at their shells and beg for food.
To do this would unhook the clasp of mystery's cloak
And send it floating rumpled to the floor beneath the hat rack,
Until it climbs again to weave golden thread as it did before.
You can feel the Spice Islands' tradewinds
Warm your face before they pale upon the backs of whales
Across the shorn spring lambs skin
Of the bleating North Atlantic toward a battered bowing inn on the shore.
The torches light the drooping tropic night
That sags beneath the weight of its own perfume
And the weight of being Eden in each extreme.
It is always day where it snows.
Always white with perpetual light and fleshful of pumping blood,
Adieu, Adieu.
The last kiss before boarding a train
Lies frozen beneath the slow drifts
That creep motionless across artifice of day.
Look, there, another plump thigh
In purple garters warbling the songbird's goodbye to night,
Adieu, Adieu.
And I simply wait and hope the telephone rings
For a conversation about the evening's mundane trials
With the inevitable farewell, awkward and sterile
As it always is across the lines, across the miles. Â
And I simply wait and ventilate the balmy breath
That blows unseen between the wiry veins of all things.
See that wall there. It never whispers
Or cracks its toes or masks its intent
To become the universe in miniature.
Best as anyone knows it bears its load
And waits like a curious turtle in repose.
A thousand sermons dangle
Condemned sprung jacks in their boxes
They bounce and cackle from the tree's unsteady arms.
Each one naked knowledge,
A singular original sin to pluck and bite
And with delight begin another lapsarian lineage,
Rise, line of Cain, Rise, line of Eve
We are all fallen here,
Get up and breathe.
An empty urn black with tarnish
Greets the tongueless thirsty traveler
Beneath the neon's flinty flickers
And the maypole's sundered wreath.
We are the spring sprung children
Spinning, spin, spin
Spin with your nectar-ripe ribbons
So that we all may be born again and again.
My head is full of numbers
Manipulated and constantly recogitated in an endless algebra
To push aside the regret and all that is lost with it.
This time I hear the drums
Pound and drum beneath the Banyan tree
And between the fixed wooden wings
Of the samurai city's soaring gates.
All Hail a little sprig of jasmine, dazzling,
And placed in her hair, just behind the curve of the ear,
Or a wedge of lemon in the blue iris of her stare,
Come, Rise, Hail, Spin, Adieu- and again.
A deposed simple primeval emperor
Marches across the cold vast silver
Folds of the budding rose
As it sways in the infinite fileds
On an ordinary day,
And now it's best I be on my way.
May you confess and be glad of it.
So, is a dom a "dirty old man" or somebody into domination?
ReplyDelete@SeanQ6 - lol!
ReplyDeleteconfession...I always have to confess...I was trying to find a way not to confess...confession as art though puts a whole different spin on it...thanks!
L, Q reprinted this on his blog. You might take a look.
ReplyDeleteQ, No matter, I think the "O" stands for old.
R, It's the drink that does it:)
That would be "o" not "O"
ReplyDelete