game on

It's going to be hard going back to life after a week away from it. Or I don't know, maybe I'll wake up tomorrow morning and slide right back into it. But for now, I'm afraid. What if all this beauty I concocted inside myself crumbles as soon as I reenter my daily life? What if I'm not as filled up as I've felt myself the past seven days? What if the winter doesn't live up to his songs? What if the big world and the open road contract again and become nothing but ads and beers and office gossip? I don't know that my wild self won't collapse. And I know it won't. But for now, I'm afraid that it will.

walt whitman's 49th beard

I think I'll just be a perpetual dreamer. No matter what my friends say and how people look at me askance and wonder what it is I'm thinking anyway. I've known those people and loved them, the ones I've read in thick volumes of poetry that have stood across the years, the men that radiate themselves without pretention. I've known them and stood in awe and made pleasantries without admitting what it was I was like. I can't pull my hand back. It wouldn't be worth it. Because I couldn't tell myself later that I tried.

on seven

Another year come and gone; and it's impossible to reclaim that feeling. I can't help myself, and in ways and ways I don't want to either. I remember running out the front door on High Street still putting my shoes on thinking finally. Finally. What we have given the world, the world has returned. It's fanatical thinking, I know, akin to the thoughts an Evangelist might have at the dawn of the Second Coming. Maybe I thought all my sins would now be absolved and my deepest heart could be revealed. And the former never happened but the latter broke me to tears on the floor of the ladies room in Blind Tiger, just past noon or so the day after. I think I mark that day not so much for what happened, but for the vacuum inside myself. I had never felt so vulnerable, and when nothing came to fill me, I was bereft. Beside myself. Outside myself or beyond. I think it's that utter emptiness I remember each year. It's so personal, it's not real, it's not the thing, it's the consequence. The string of signifiers, the wordlessness. The horror.