All melancholy moping aside, all neurotic navelgazing for naught forgotten for now, all mooning lunacies unwaxed, unwaned, unlit: when it came to the wheres and whyfors of my own affairs, I never seemed to care.  I traipsed through thoroughfares unawares, thick and thin, heedless of what all blaring nonsense meant, head hung and haunted by my own boohooholic bandstanding.  Sometimes I peeled back the seal of a bandage stuck over some bit of my colourful and craggy past and through the ragged edges of the damage unhealed as proscenium – through the mouth of the wound – I would be transfixed briefly, agape aglare in the surge of memory blazing upon me like a nextdoor sun.  Then I’d quickly replace the bandage, charged like a battery with the impulse to do something, anything, to vindicate the past.  But those little windows kept multiplying.  And I kept the shutters drawn.  Most of the time. 

   And I started to think that humans come out of the womb squaling, cold, afraid.  That our entire nervous system is like an exploratory toe extended into water of a questionable temperature into which the rest (whatever that might be) may follow if the temperature is deemed suitable after all.  It is just too bad that this world, into which we are poking an exploratory head, is so prone to ripping that head clean off, or perhaps merely pummelling it, or baffling it one way or another.  It is just too bad that this nervous system can be damaged so severely, so quickly turned into an instrument of torture rather than one of intricate subtle measurement.  Too bad that the water at times seems entirely unsuitable.  Corrosive.  That the rest should not follow.  But then maybe it is perfect.  Perfectly attuned to measure what needs to be measured by an organic lifeform on a planet of this nature.  Maybe we’re just still squalling; still reacting; still terrified of having been born, as ourselves or as a species.  Maybe we look at ourselves, then look at the world around us, this planet and all its life, the observable universe, and though we can see the causal chain that brought us here as a species, we see nothing else like us.  We see a place that is intended for not-us.  A place in which even the Earth itself is a beacon shining a quintillion times brighter than the sun, abeam in its coat of life resplendent -- a diamond in the rough -- and we a microcosm of that seeming singularity, animals alone amongst animals, a beating tender heart drifting in a place bristling with knives.

   Please do not be afraid.  The very worst that could happen is a life filled with pain and sorrow followed by death.  It is not so bad in the vast scheme of imaginable tortures.  Please do not be afraid of death.  The aforementioned scream of the newborn baby is the beginning of life, and it is an explosion.  And we all know how explosions end.  I myself have heard the oohs and aahs when the fireworks lit the night sky.  An explosion is potential becoming reality, and under these conditions very wonderful things can happen.  But the clock is ticking – if you believe in clocks.  Please do not be afraid of time.  Even if you want time to be a line, under that paradigm every single moment is still touching every other moment, though separated by whatever span of contiguous increments, so maybe we’re halfway there.  Maybe people wouldn’t be so afraid of growing old if every day of their lives they were a different age from some particular day of their lives, one day waking up old, weathered, another a child, another middle aged.  Also do not be afraid of growing old.  I can’t even be polite with this one; it’s so important.  A consciousness subjectively experiencing its circumstances on a linear time line is in a position to accrue wisdom (that is, Worldly Finesse) through experience.  This wisdom, or lack of same, can be etched onto the body through the years, observable to any who’d care to look closely.  To yearn after a physical state or set of circumstances back through the years is to deny experience.  Is to refuse to learn.  To wish to unlearn.

   I am afraid that if the water seemed cold, but the person jumped in anyway, they’d either adapt or slip into hypothermic shock and drown.  I am afraid that adapting means stasis, and drowning means loss, and that not diving means nothing at all.  Consumed by fear I gnaw my nails to niblets over nonsense, terrified that I might miss something integral to what constitutes a full and complete human understanding.  I am embarrassed to have a body and wish that I could keep it concealed at all times.

   We’re coming close to the end now.  Gravity is rumbling in the night like a storm on our doorstep.  In the darkness it almost seems to add a purpleness to the black of the shadows, a bruise left by its clutch.  We are lethargic and exhausted, our fires burning low, bellowing to invert into blue bluttercloth flapping in the limegreen wind of some dreamscape.  All we know turned the ninety degrees that made the waking world’s two-dimensional nature seem to disappear in the three dimensions of sleep.  Like a coin spinning on a table, glinting, presenting its rotating broadsides in wide wingbuzzing blurs of metallic sheen and in between diminishing momentarily to the barest glimmering line.  Then gone.

   The part where he shot the florist juxtaposed with the part where he first kissed the girl.  Then the girl walking up the stairs towards his apartment and him closing the door with his back to her - fumbling with the keys, locking the door – her watching him, smiling, holding a brown paper sack filled with groceries.  Then he turns around and she’s not there.  There is a her-shaped hole on the street corner with the sodden newspapers on it, and the taxi cabs honking past it, and the lamppost that looks like someone used it as a bludgeoning device in a savage beating then replaced it on the corner with the

MMMARRRRRRMP MMMMMARMMP, VROOOOOOM VRRRRRRRRRRRRRROOOOOOM

& the bustling wino,

the souldeadened prostitute,

the pristine businessman

and she’s gone too from the other side of the table as he sits across from the empty chair, not even a coffee mug (filled with steaming victual fluid or otherwise) there to mark the emptiness.  But not gone from the hallway yet as he turns and almost bumps into her, stopping, sweating from a recent shower, smiling.  She sees

something that resembles a verdant expanse of meadow between mountaintops, with all the signs of peaceful life resplendent in the intersecting villages

enough to make her smile and for a beam of sunlight to appear.

He’s carrying quarters in a plastic bucket.  He’s wearing a leather apron.

She’s scaring the porters, telling them, “Fuck it.”  She’s swearing the weather hates you.

   And you’re somewhere, down and out, peacetime warwise, wondering where the hell all the really good places to eat sandwiches went, when, from across the street, blaring like a firehorn, comes Ronald Peabody, the local newsvendor, wondering what happened to all of the deliveries he made up along The Cobbled Route, where all the rustly pages stinking of ink went, and you’re telling him, “No.”  You’re holding your palm out towards him, warding him away.  Your gray scarf slips down your neck, exposing the flaccid, mottled, wattley neck of an old man.  Your eyes are filled with bitterness as you spit some rebuke towards the rednosed mess of a newsvendor.  What do you know about newspapers, anyway?

   “What do you know about kerosene?  Two bar’rls of it.”  His face, reeking of gin, protruding, intent.  “Went missing from the fucking docks two days ago.”

   And you tell him, “No wonder this town has such a shithole reputation, with loudmouth drunks like you beautifying the landscape.”

   He has some piece of trash flapping in the wind against his grimy suit, a twisted piece of newspaper, apparently, and he swats at it, sending it on a trajectory away from him briefly, until the wind catches it again and it warps around his screaming face, the shape of his scream becoming visible as the newspaper forms tightly to the contours of it, muffling his wails.

   You stood bemused as he fumbled with it, stepping backwards into a mass of hobovomit and slipping out into the street, landing sharply on one hip and commencing to thrash about on the grimy pavement as though bereft of all sense.

   And there’s not much to it now.  You come home and you make the tea.  You sit at the desk.  You read the books.  You write the long entries in one battered, leatherbound volume or another, your gnarled hand cramping in the candlelight until you pry the pen out of it and massage the sharpness of the pain into a dull ache.  Maybe eat some halfspoiled beef or whatever it was, and wash it down with a dirty bottle of cheap beer .  You often don’t even remove your clothes, just lay down on the blankets and furs and slip into a light doze where translucent light fills the room and you spend the whole night just remembering that people are doing things to you and sort of what they are doing.  Then you forget both.

So I put the beans in the refrigerator for later. I fluffed up the pillows when I went in to look at the bed. The usual stuff happened to the whiskey bottle. I always thought about drawing a picture of you when you were asleep. Haven't thought of that in a while. What you look like to me now is probably not the way you'll look the next time I see you. But it's okay. That's the kind of thing that's easy for me to imagine.

Still all a-tremble because the cold is never far.

Lovely is the throatmeat when the pale fangs take a slice.

Lovely is the sunshine and lovely is the ice.

‘Cause

“We got ourselves a bleeder!!” the raspvoice was heard to say.

It’s yellowgold to umber, bathed in the light of day,

because I made myself defenceless in the deep dark fields of hay.

The seed may stray and the beasts may roam

to yonder hearth and home;

the fox might lay in the bones all day of chickens, goats and sheep;

but since the boards came down and the posts left ground,

my fears can finally sleep.

Because I made myself defenceless as a sort of final straw,

my flesh and field can only yield beneath all teeth and claws.

Boundless colours shift and dance since I tore down manmade laws,

and the blades of grass do drift and prance as the wind blows clear the fog.

We had it from the wisemen that the greens of our neighbour’s lawns

were emeralder than the eyes that peered and squinted ‘gainst the dawn.

As the grass strays through the fields so green – so yellow, red and gold,

as the flowers bloom and the bells toll doom,

as the warmth gives way to cold,

you’ll hear me say as the ravens play,

“There’s no way for me to sense this.

With a palms-up stance and a world wide glance,

I have made myself defenceless.”

I know I couldn’t have made it this far without you.  Any time I’ve been on the verge of disaster you’ve gestured or spoken a word not to make my problems disappear, but to show me how to solve them.  I came here full of my high hopes that buoyed me up into the clouds, and sunblind I exalted in my accomplishments.  But as the easing hand of gravity began to press me down it was you who taught a floating man to fly.  Then the darkness.  So many times I shut my eyes in terror against the darkness, unknowing which came first:  the shadows all around me, or my keeping out of the light.  But again under your instruction I learned that my heart burning like a sun will light all the paths and heights before me.  The most terrifying thing in the world is to think that we are not loved, that love is a lie, that there is a place or a thing somewhere, somehow that is made of terror and that banishes love.  I see now so clearly that there of course could be no terror without love, no love without terror first to be loved.  And even warm with that fire in my breast, even for moments, tears slid down my cheeks and sizzled in the blaze as I felt the weight of life on my shoulders.  Atlas’ burden seemed a paltry marble next to this sacred duty of breathing, banding us all together in our fear and pride to make a paradise out of slow and crumbling wasteland energies.  But how great an accomplishment it is to know that children can be born, and that they can laugh easy in a place carved out for them already, their own trials already made easier by those who have gone before.  No dark without light, no warmth without chill, no life without death.  Even the most magnificent of cities founder, as stars burn out in the sky.  The weight is again passed around, the pressure on, the sinews flexed.  I love the EARTH to death, from womb to grave, sun cresting all horizons as leaves and hands lift to its shining face.  But in the flux, I need only one thing more, beyond blade and bandage.

I need you to watch over me.