It’s sunday and I didn’t get any sleep last night.
I had to have a second cup of tea in the afternoon.
It’s made me jumpy.
Anxious in the quiet and the stillness, in the occasional rushing of one car down an empty street.
And for some reason, right now, I’m thinking about when the Marsalis brothers played Mozart at carnegie hall.
Everyone went for the novelty, and then were surprised when they conducted an orchestra like the best of them.
And then, in the middle of the whole thing, one of them sat down in front of a piano.
The whole orchestra stopped.
And he played.
Something of his own, something improvised, something Mozart would’ve loved.
The crowd was silent. I mean they always are. It’s Mozart. It’s Carnegie Hall.
But they were silent in their hearts. In the depths of their chest they were still.
Receiving something.
The echoed tones reached out.
“I am here.” It said.
“Here I am. I exist.”
“Can you hear me out there?”
And then, the abboration ceased. Mozart returned.
The audience all wondered why it happened.
If it happened.
They all sat in their seats that night wondering, “Am I here?”.
A piano answered them.
“Here I am.”
“I am here.”
On sunday I trim my beard, water the indoor plants, start to drink a little earlier.
I test the windows and doors to make sure they’re firm, make sure they’re strong.
There’s a whole week on its way, with yes’ and no’s and maybe’s (the maybe is the worst).
I have to prepare for that.
Like a deluge, like a monsoon, the week comes in waves and if you don’t prepare you’re sucked out to sea.
The phone will ring, it will be someone upset, someone happy, someone ambivalent, some one needy, not necessarily in that order.
And then there will be the people that don’t call at all.
Those people who hover in the dark recesses of you life. You can see them faintly; a leviathan slowly turning in the fog. They are the worst ones.
They could smash onto your beaches and wipe you out or, what’s worse, they could never come at all. And leave you waiting for that fateful day.
Writer’s block-
in the silence
my pen clicks on and off.
There’s a stack of magazines at my feet full of people’s accomplishments.
I can’t bear to look at them. They keep arriving in the mail and collecting under my desk.
I don’t know what to do with them.
I read of the worlds of others and there’s this shadow that grows longer and longer across me.
It’s hard to live in that,
to do anything in that.
I don’t want to shut out the world, but the more I know of the world, the more I realize that I’m not in it.
In the corner of the back bedroom of my apartment I live a life of complete fantasy. Everything in theory. Nothing realized.
I’m doing it even now, trying to create a myth around these few lines.
What’s the beginning, the middle, the end?
Well there never is one, is there?
Nothing stops, nothing ceases, it all rolls forward and eventually rolls over us all.
And maybe the people in the magazines around my feet have realized this.
If there’s no beginning or end, and it’s all an abyss of possibilty and failure, none of it meaning a thing.
Why not go?
Math problems
in his heart
have now been multiplied.
