It stares at me while I write.
Photographer?
Update!:
Thanks to this handsome rockstar we now have credit where credit is due.
This lovely photo is by Matt Wizniewski.
You guys have been so great giving me the names of these artists.
Let us not rest until the entire internet is credited!
The sun shames me as it rises.
I’ve been disappointing him lately.
Hiding.
Drinking grapefruit soda and watching old British detectives on TV.
They search for something,
I search for something.
They pick through bags of tea and old newspapers.
Me: Through leftovers. Empty vodka bottles.
Searching searching.
They always find their man on TV.
I’m looking for the culprit, too.
Beneath meaningless mail and newscasts.
Through orange peels and under lamps.
I’ll find who is to blame.
The villain who picked me up one place and put me down another,
no map, no spyglass.
Fending for myself.
I’ve fashioned wood into weapons, wrapped a cloth across my face.
While I war my way through this mess; beat back the mail, beat back the call from my mother or the old friend who’s “Doing so well and wants to get together”. Punching and kicking through hordes of those who expect things. Things that are small but to me are planet-sized. While I forge through it all, I will be constantly on the Villain’s trail.
When I find him I’ll ask him.
“Why did you do this to me?”
And he’ll laugh when he hears the word why and I’ll tremble.
“A night on 44th street. Three martinis and a new jacket that you wore. A spice mill across the east river made the city smell like pancakes. It was like a meteor knocking you out of orbit. It was all I needed. Like diverting trains, your life split from itself. Dumped you out here.”
“It’s a desert here.”
“It is.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Most don’t.”
He’ll ask me if I’d like to go back now.
I’ll say no.
One day I’ll feel it.
One day I’ll know what it is.
It will fill me up.
I’ll glow.
Things will be better.
Or at least feel that way.
I’ll peel it back.
Reveal the underneath of it all.
That thing that hides.
And then in a corner of the room it whispers.
Whispers that there’s nothing there.
There’s nothing to feel.
Nothing to fill you.
There’s darkness.
Nothing to peel back.
Underneath you is nothing.
The world is as it is.
The shine that you wish to shine from the leaves of the trees and the rain covered windows and the lakes and streams and and all of that.
It will never come.
But still you’ll walk the floor of the kitchen and the sidewalk with your dog expecting it to come.
One day it will come like a great wave rolling down the street.
You will open your arms and welcome it.
That’s what you’ll continue to think.
And you will be wrong.
It never comes.
This is the world.
And the whispering ceases.
And the sunlight dims a little bit.
My stomach twists.
I walk to the whispering corner and kick away the dust, the dog hair.
Nothing there.
Creaking boards.
I make a pot of coffee.
One day I’ll feel it.
Before the tumblers hit the lock and the door swings and a woman an a boy stumble in from the heat and mess of the outside.
In those moments.
What am I?
I figment of my own imagination.
A passing thought of something bigger.
A man, alone in an apartment.
Checking email.
Walking dogs.
Nursing a dying cat.
Looking for inner meaning in mindless television.
Jumping at a knock on the door.
Contemplating a glass of whiskey.
Contemplating my feet.
My hands.
The growing lines.
A mystery.
Every page that’s read, another is written.
Every word that’s said, less and less smitten.
It deepens.
All of it.
Fades into gray.
Consumed by clouds.
Gone.
The door closes again in the morning.
The house becomes empty.
The dog looks at me wanting to know what’s next.
If only she knew.
If only I did.
It deepens.
It’s towards the end of july and the gloom still hangs.
So we all wait.
Wait for what?
There’s a groaning garbage truck, a cluster of birds.
Waiting.
The chrysalis cracks and the wings dry and we fly away but when?
There’s a box of kittens given away. New lives begin.
But when?
The start is me.
That’s what you’ll say.
Raise the rod and deem it so.
I have begun.
But no.
That’s not how it works.
And how arrogant.
Clusters of stars exploding before our eyes and I say that I’m the center?
No.
Not at all.
Swept away, we all are.
Maybe we can paddle a bit left or a bit right but that’s all.
It goes where it goes, and it doesn’t even know we’re here.
All of the last, say, 17 previous posts were supposed to be published throughout the day today but my “queue” function decided to take friday night off.
FYI, the queue function is an orthodox jew.
Thus ends April PAD.
Good riddance.
The theory is this: Divine Boredom. To have all is to want nothing and vice versa. Nothing being something, you understand. The universe was at one time “one”. A single being. All was loneliness. Omnipotence is nothing if no one to oversee. Correct? And then the great “It” was split. Became two. Like heaven and hell or tropic and arctic. The two: four, the four: eight. And so on. Where does it stop? When the one, which is the many, has the experience of the without from within. A true sense of the self. The divine self. The self that can only self-know by becoming the outside force. You see?
My grandfather would tell me old stories when I was a child. Stories from before the Catholics came and changed us all. He told me that before the Catholics came the world was not this simple round thing that it is now. It was part of something greater and more mysterious. All that exsisted was contained in a great tree, he told me. Yggdrasil. A tree that contained heaven in it’s branches, hell in its roots, and we dwelt between the two in it’s mighty trunk. The God of us all back then was called Odin the Allfather, a mighty and wise God who had one eye that could see into eternity. He old me of how, for seven days, Odin surrendered his Godhood and hung by his ankles from the branches of Yggdrasil. It was in those seven days that he was given the Runes, the ancient symbols that would protect and guide him. We are like Odin, he said. Vision is sorrow’s gift.
The voice came again last night. I struggle to write before the words slip away. It said to me from out of a darkness… ‘I lay here. Safe. Nestled in a crate of fresh plumbs. How did I get here? Magic? A journey so impossible, but a bounty so rewarding. I can smell it even now, here by the sea. The fresh leaves, the acres of bark. So much for the taking. Soon the skin of my pupa will split, and I will be unleashed. You will be defenseless against me. The miles of trees will part as I journey down the coast; elm and beech, ash and poplar, the mighty American oak. They will fall like soldiers to the ground. I am the hand of the divine and I have reached your shores. I am god’s thresher.
