XI

I’m ready for another pitfall. Exactly when and what’s going to happen, I don’t know; but I think there’s a possibility for one, and when it comes I want to expect it, so I’m not distraught.

By this point, by 22 years on this desolate planet, you would assume I would have a clear grasp on reality and morality and suggestibility and frugality and maturity and potentiality. Maybe it’s only a plot to implant these ideas in our minds so that we get used to the idea of thinking this way, and would then, by this time, have these thoughts and plans already laid out in motion. Maybe it’s all just some underground conspiracy to intrude on the lives of the youth and declare our obsoletism and inability early on. Or corrupt us and manipulate society so that each rising generation becomes stupider and stupider. I use ‘stupider’ as a key example of a word that should not exist, yet my spell check doesn’t pick up. Yet it picks up ‘obsoletism’. Could be because I just made it up. It’s my instinctive grammar. Eat me. And I also don’t believe in sentence fragments when I’m writing in a speech-like manner.

Poetry only serves as a frail substitute to human connection. I think one night of passion and reading an Anne Sexton poem go hand in hand; either or. I’ve been reading a lot of Anne Sexton lately, and her words seem to paint me a bright orange. Or Sylvia. Or C.K. Roethke probably takes the cake at the moment. I wish the empty gin bottles on my bookshelf would magically refill themselves. I could use a stiff one.



Younglings, the small fish keep heading into the current.
What’s become of care? This lake breathes like a rose.
Beguile me, change. What have I fallen from?
I drink my tears in a place where all light comes.
I’m in love with the dead! My whole forehead’s a noise!
On a dark day I walk straight toward the rain.
Who else sweats light from a stone?
By singing we defend;
The husk lives on, ardent as a seed;
My back creaks with the dawn.

Is my body speaking? I breathe what I am:
The first and last of all things.
Near the graves of the great dead,
Even the stones speak.
-Roethke


I keep listening to OOMPH!. They are wonderful