The Unurban Café Scrawl
All I have are epiphanies and shotgun shells oozing from my swollen pockets. All I take are walks in frozen colds where the ice like salvation falls on my balded skull but I am neither frigid or saved. I still in the crevices of thought with shields and passions and notebook scrawls. I still at the speed of perception with the windows to the soul and looking outward onto the vista that is and still contemplating otherwise.
Who are we to do these things and who are we when we settle for the puddle when we could have made the storm? I read the same tomes as the next and stare at my empty palms in a reverent silence. I know what I am supposed to do. I know that it’s the words that halt the explosions from bombs when they stare at me with vacant receptive faces and I am both the truth and the reconciliation. I know what I am supposed to say when the tripod is in place and the tape begins to roll. I know where I am supposed to be headed when it is 8 am and an opening in the traffic appears. However, ontology is a big word and these books seem to propel me in the other direction.
Everytime I look out into the world for works I am refracted back into my own being. Maybe I am self absorbed as the portraits on the wall would leave me to believe. Why cannot I paint the sunset? Why do I sit in the closet of the mansion with a candle and a bone? Whither the theory and the action and the praxis and the kujichakalia and the promenades and the princes descended into urban grottos and its hard out there or so I have been taught. As have we all. And I still head first into the pit and maybe there is something to being too damn stubborn to learn.
I just checked out when I shouldn’t have and how cliché to be a servant to the sound of a wailing guitar, the confessions of the damned, the smell of caffeine and honey…the temptation to tell more than needs to be said. A smile made sour by time like fresh milk left out in the world for a moment too long. The taste of a cold French fry. A word out of place and the gaze of the institution all before breakfast and tea.
How dare we pretend as if we didn’t know that we held the keys all along? Where do we go from here? Into the shadows to pray to the flickering on the walls or back into the womb for more percolation? What will be so different when we reemerge? Will it then be any easier to love ourselves?
Even in death we will remember. Oblivion resides just on the other side of time.
I sip in fury and scribble in frenzy. I cannot quit and my fingers shake at the keys waiting for a logic of their own.
Flowers dangle from the ceilings on green and purple strings. Abstract paintings and a toothless skull. Artificial illumination.
The group members laugh even as they share the pain of life. In their being in itself for itself is at least a step in the right direction.
Because thinking is overrated and love is sometime too far away to even matter. |