Fresh Air From The Age
“I see a harbor filled with masts and sails, wearied by the sea wind that wearies me.”Archive for June, 2007
Love
Feeling as I do today, as tired as i do today, as exerted, involved, sober, unseen, downtrodden, and as whole as i feel today, ive come to write. I wanted to title this “disease” or “famine” or “hate” and i’d speak about the failings of humankind. I have this heartburn and it didnt help this vicious circle that ive come to know. But yet again, the girl, that girl, has taken a sad song and made it better. She, somehow, even through the most minute conversation, can give me footing on an unseen cliff side. I do hope i can still be able to call and have again a familiar voice in a flurry of jungle noise on any given night full of decadence, loneliness, animosity, jealousy, music, love, sound and fury. This is my tale, and I am the idiot.
Time And Soul
“I understood too well that great lovers were all men of leisure, I fucked better as a bum than as a puncher of time clocks.”
Here I sit, victim to a rainy day,
feeling like a water balloon in a puddle-
only slightly drifting; not floating, not still.
Jobless, seeking not a trade, but a greater form of inspiration, I’ve read the few that have made me feel whole, here, and awake. It is a feeling of communion, of society. Indoors, the constant pitter patter of rain at my windows keeps me company. Like listening to somebody else’s quandaries, i’m only barely conscious of this rainy day.
Outdoors, I surge through flooded Florida streets in a Jeep. The puddles jet out from underneath my tires and create two angelic arcs on either side of the Jeep. For a second, i’m flying. For an instant, the raindrops stop sliding off my windshield, suspended in the sky, and I see everything. I see the people in their cars, rushing to their appointments, or going to meet friends for coffee, conversation, some sort of conviviality. Too much time is spent wallowing.
Tonight
Tonight I planned to lay myself to waste. I had a half bottle of wine and less than half a pack of cigarettes. I was in a mood that I had been in before. This mood always left me miserable, alone, and reading or writing something.
Tonight I read Kurt Vonnegut’s “2BR02B”. Miserable tale about life and death: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/21279/21279-h/21279-h.htm
While I was reading it the girl introduced herself to the night. She’s always been the one to deter these moods, these nights of waste.
I realized then that she, along with so many other reasons, like the beaches, or the breezes, or the tropics, make me feel alive; and along with feeling alive comes an unexpected energy. This energy’s shown here, as a poem, or a paragraph. It’s the writing that saves me– that makes me grimace, too.
This girl, these words, make me see an otherwise ignored reality in which people laugh, and are joyous. A reality that can be so easy to ignore, a reality in which I thrive.
So I know I can thrive, I know I can be alive. Now and always. This is important.
I’ve never let anyone know about this place I made here. I just made it so I can write for myself. Tonight I’ll let this girl know about it. Just because she’s pulled me out from under so many times. She’s made me know I can live. The tropics always let me know this, too. Along with some familiar faces and random moments with my parents. It’s all I have.
Right now, watching Leaving Las Vegas, a movie where Nicholas Cage plays a man who’s trying to drink himself to death, knowing this girl is awake, knowing there’s palm trees in my backyard, I couldn’t be happier to be here.
Fresh Air From The Age 