Reluctance

Sleepy, and tired, and contentedly unadmired.
I'd rather not take the dead, shallow leap back,
Back to routine, the sweat-inducing sun,
Or the cold concrete floor on which I rest my head.
I want to be here, left alone, free, silent,
Sweet Dr. Pepper lingering mouthwise,
And oh the worthless yawns, oh the sleepy eyes,
And the mystics who clutter this coffee table,
And sore muscles intertwined with happiness.
This is newness, this is bliss,
But the higher I keeps calling,
And I must follow, diligent,
Or a shadow casts its frown
On everything,
Everything.

On Swimming

Purity is clothed in the warm fibers
Of your stunning sigh, your smile,
Your dangerous, death-killing laughter.
I am a stowaway on too poor a ship,
Daydreaming, lost, and delusional,
All that I might feel the sweet vibrations
Of you, the surging, flawless waters,
Beneath my prostrate adoration,
Rocking, swaying, motherlike, love-filled.

One day I'll make my way to you,
When my legs have my will
For a companion, when my fear
Is swallowed, finally overcome,
And you will baptize me, and add
Colors to my laughter, and the fish
Will dance our joy into the underwater world.

Rilke

We are not poor. We are just without riches,
we who have no will, no world:
marked with the marks of the latest anxiety,
disfigured, stripped of leaves.

Pride

According to the Population Reference Bureau, there are 106.5 billion people on earth who have ever lived. Lots.

And you want to be number one. Oh, just in your own little clique; no more, no less.

Sorry, coach. The clamorous climb up the self-centered power struggle knows no equivalent. All power probably is a desire for attention anyways. Ambition to the dregs, and the flask is infinitely deep. And don't forget: there's no real, solid, bedrock criteria. It's all just an emotional pull, a neurochemical flux, no different -- no different! -- than a child's struggle for attention. The prideful are the true junkies, and the drugs they suck have no fashion sense.

So be content with being nothing.

No, really, be content with being nothing.

An Injured Neruda Poetry Book

Neruda has been splashed
My heart within me gashed
Kool-Aide is the culprit
To which I swing my pulpit
With tears and rage and -- grins
'Cause that's poetic once again
(Stop it, Pablo, that's too much,
"I'm never through -- get in touch")

Verily Verily

Verily verily,
If you squeeze life
And it breaks,
'Twas all a dream,
Yourself included.

2:57 AM

The clock mocking with a yellow blinking colon dividing the 2 and 5, which in its own blocked out way looks like an electronic heartbeat crucified on the upper half of a digital cross. Television fuming phosphorescence, beaming whitish black and mesmerizing. The stove to my left breathing the only other light, spotlighting a row of common condiments. Air conditioner whirring the same pedestrian whir. And I can't sleep because I'm thinking, or because my thoughts are thinking me.

This or that, or that or this, and on and on, and the audience is snoring. Still the same routine. These days you don't seek only one spouse, but a second: your career, and that's a woman you simply can't get drunk and shack up with until you twist her arm into marriage. She's a fickle, careless, tireless, implacable, unappeasable, bitchy little thing, and once you ambivalently choose, she's with you forever, and if you screw her over she'll leave you and your spirits dropped at the door to become drinking buddies with regret and his dark-browed, death-soaked brother, depression.

C'mon, sir, what will it be: counseling, or counseling psychology, or general psychology, or clinical psychology, or psychiatry, or neuroscience, or theology, or journalism, or technical writing? The average soul-dead chap has it easy enough. He wants what will get him laid, what will support a family, what will keep him in decent standing with his friends. He isn't interested in virtually everything. There's no such thing as the torment of a decision. He isn't capable of running from himself simply because his self isn't carved out enough so as for him to be capable of running from it.

But I'm capable of running from myself. I know what I'm supposed to be doing, even if I can't tack down a career. Worry about tomorrow is an extension of running from the calling of today and grasping for artificial life, a life built on controlling the infinite array of occurrences within it, a life of breaking when the incalculable comes a-knockin', a life where I refuse to exhale. Everything must be abandoned, resigned up to God as a metaphysical burnt offering, and the smoke that rises to the heavens is a symbol for my relearning to breathe.

So I quit. Worry not for tomorrow, for tomorrow will take care of itself. Goodbye worries about the GRE, about sycophantically making the professorial check-off list for graduate school, about which career and where, getting published and saving the world. Goodbye, so long, adieu, fuck off, and all God's children said amen.

I am going to read and write and live and love and smoke my pipe and play my guitar and laugh until my face is distorted with smile lines, sanctified to God as best as I can, and that's that. And if anyone doesn't like it, there's always room on my pile of forgetting. I light it nightly as a celebration for a day spent living, and watch as the flames, dancing to dissipation, burn away the darkness, warming me until my morning comes and the trek of life wanders on.