Burn, Baby, Burn (Continued)
At my core, nestled somewhere between atrium and alveoli is the fact that I am drawn to putting ink on the page. Put it into the ether and feel the billion reasons well up not to, the thousand fears. If creating is at your core, the validity of what you create is inextricable from the validity of you as a possible waste of space. Rather you step into traffic. Write and you have more enemies than you could ever imagine. Many within, many without. There is, I once sensed, an unwritten expectation for a writer to write about just a little more than what he truly knows. One side screams it is the attempt needed in vital reading. Another sits back and snarls that there is a term for such a thing - lying. Decisions and defensive positions. Rare is the artist who moonlights as a pacifist.
Who knows what sides of the many fences we are on? We think we know, so do others. There are so many fences, and so many voices to say we are full of it. With me they step from the shadows when I am sick and alone, because I am not yet old. Call it a dress rehearsal. Call it Truth - 1, Lies - 0. When you have made enemies of your failures, the way I have, you learn to double up as soon as you hit the ground. Get married. Join the Marines or a monastic corps. Make sure something of the world has your back.
Sometimes they just laugh. They know that will rattle you for now. In the coffeeshop yesterday it chose a student vessel laughing loudly, implying nothing more than his youth at 7:16 a.m., proof he has already beaten his hangover. Come to my aid was the music, an Indian tongue, as rich and complex as our modern routines are sterile. In my ears a 90-year old woman looks down and moving her hips forward and back seventy years. For a moment the laughter is drowned by a sense of respect. A trill sets me on the tip of this mad century question: What is this? Nusrat’s grateful mistress. Nameless child whose mother calls a miracle. This is no detached idol worship of the exotic, but a sharing of wisdom of the both ends of age. I become immediately convinced that spontaneous immortality is a staggering side-effect of cosmic entropy and backbreaking love. The laughter stops, leaves. The music remains. Strong means staying power.
Now it is I who laugh out loud, returning to the pounding in my head, the night, the patio stars lulling me to stillness. The universe is still melting, the fears still cat-calling from behind Jupiter. I will get sick again, and I will get old forever. Perhaps I just aged over the hump. At once only one thing steps forward: that we will all die must keep us moving despite, no, because of the fears. Let them test our resolve and force us to consider our role before the end.
For some its creation, objet d’art of saving grace.
Who knows what sides of the many fences we are on? We think we know, so do others. There are so many fences, and so many voices to say we are full of it. With me they step from the shadows when I am sick and alone, because I am not yet old. Call it a dress rehearsal. Call it Truth - 1, Lies - 0. When you have made enemies of your failures, the way I have, you learn to double up as soon as you hit the ground. Get married. Join the Marines or a monastic corps. Make sure something of the world has your back.
Sometimes they just laugh. They know that will rattle you for now. In the coffeeshop yesterday it chose a student vessel laughing loudly, implying nothing more than his youth at 7:16 a.m., proof he has already beaten his hangover. Come to my aid was the music, an Indian tongue, as rich and complex as our modern routines are sterile. In my ears a 90-year old woman looks down and moving her hips forward and back seventy years. For a moment the laughter is drowned by a sense of respect. A trill sets me on the tip of this mad century question: What is this? Nusrat’s grateful mistress. Nameless child whose mother calls a miracle. This is no detached idol worship of the exotic, but a sharing of wisdom of the both ends of age. I become immediately convinced that spontaneous immortality is a staggering side-effect of cosmic entropy and backbreaking love. The laughter stops, leaves. The music remains. Strong means staying power.
Now it is I who laugh out loud, returning to the pounding in my head, the night, the patio stars lulling me to stillness. The universe is still melting, the fears still cat-calling from behind Jupiter. I will get sick again, and I will get old forever. Perhaps I just aged over the hump. At once only one thing steps forward: that we will all die must keep us moving despite, no, because of the fears. Let them test our resolve and force us to consider our role before the end.
For some its creation, objet d’art of saving grace.