The Family Doesn't Need a Poet

"And I Fly": Geof Huth's Photograph of Don Huth's Film of Geoff Huth  (1 January 1965 and 24 March 2012)
1. Presqu'après-mid-nuit

The image is of me, age four, on the first day of the year 1965. I am in diapers because my parents made all of into personifications of a newborn year, complete with diapers. Before this point in the film, I was crabby, unhappy to have been awoken at midnight for the entertainment of my parents. Eventually, though, I acclimated to the new year. I took off.

The film itself was one of many converted to a digital format and projected on a screen throughout the evening of my father's 75th birthday party, celebrated in his current place of residence: Hendersonville, Tennessee. I retired to one of my many former homes, but one of the most significant of them, to celebrate three quarters of a century of my father's life, with one of my two brothers, all of my sisters, my children, my neiphews, and assorted other friends and family, in the Bluegrass Yacht & Country Club.

But I had arrived two days before, so the story is a little longer than that.


2. Auto-da-biogra-fé

On the flight to Nashville, where we all once lived and the center around which my father and siblings all revolve, I continued my reading of The Journals of Spalding Gray, which was a nearly constant harrowing account of the life of this actor, writer, and (most famously) monologist. On my return flights, I read the read of the book, completing it during the twenty-minute descent into Albany. That book, thus, infests my already fading memories of last weekend in Tennessee, its darkness suffuses my thoughts still. Once you know the end of the story is dark, you cannot have any hope, and I began Gray's book knowing the outcome. Still, details matter, and most darkness can deepen, so I still felt the hard wrench of the vortex sucking away the light, still felt the tourniquet tighten.

I've been reading autobiography recently, captured by the thought that a life well told, a life revealed, might provide insights into the human condition, might even seem more relevant to a poet than poetry would. I read the shortest of these autobiographies, Philip Schultz' My Dyslexia, first, finding it imperfect yet remarkably moving and surprising. The last point is the hardest to understand, for how could I find the story of someone I didn't know, had never heard of before, surprising? We learn about people quickly, Schultz presented himself quickly, and then he revealed his past, and the boy he was seemed an impossible source for the man he became. This poet's continuing struggle with dyslexia shocked me because it was so painfully human but also because the thought of being wounded by dyslexia seems so incapacitating to me. If it were possible to slip into dyslexia, that might be the worst fate I could imagine, for myself.

Today, I began reading Joan Didion's Blue Nights today, while washing my clothes in a laundromat nearby. The book is the story of the death of her daughter Quintana, a fairly horrifying followup to her book, The Year of Magical Thinking, which records the death of her husband and the severe illness of her daughter that led later to her death. Among all of this dying in her life, Didion struggles through her own serious medical problems. I've always loved Didion, whose prose is poetic, whose details are exact, whose humanity (her sadness, her strength, her frailty, her compassion, her resilience) is always evident. Her books of essays, Slouching towards Bethlehem and The White Album, remain favorite books of mine. And she's a native Californian transplanted to New York, as I am, even if her route here was much more direct than mine. She also married a man who was Catholic to baptize their daughter himself rather than wait too long to protect her from Limbo. At least in original intent, I was Catholic myself, and I'll never replace the penumbra of that faith system for another. I'll carry the scent of frankincense in my nostrils and the clinking of the thurible with me until I die.

Didion's chapters are short. She tells her story quickly, and although she has revealed the end of the story and the broad contours of the story that took her to that death I know none of the details yet. She understands le plaisir du texte. She knows to keep some secrets from me, at least for now. At this point, the story has a gentle cyanosis to it. The blue is seeping in slowly, just as the blue reveals itself slowly in the skin when the body grasps for oxygen but cannot draw any in.

The tourniquet tightens.

Gray tells a different story, still in fragments and flashes, but one decidedly linear and daily, one from a man so focused on himself, a man laid so bare and flawed that we cannot come to love him, but we want to come to save him. Everyone is broken by life, by family, by circumstance, but some are so broken that they barely function, even if they succeed in their life. Gray was, himself, death-loving, death-fearing, faithless, polymorphously perverse, egocentric, indecisive, fretful, and unfocused most of his life. He hurt terribly the three most important loves of his life, and he seemed generally uninterested in improving his behavior, in helping to repair these broken partners of his, even though he bore the responsibility for the breaking. His life was a swirling mess, and he let the suction spin him in circles as it pulled him down. Life as a trainwreck presented as a recurring diurnal nightmare of his own creation.

Almost his entire life was, except for that beautiful and extended moment when he had a family (most of whom, ironically, he had wanted to abort). Finally, this crazed self-centered man was something better than himself. That interlude reminded me of the idyllic picnic sequence in the film Bonnie and Clyde, a short respite before the return to the trip of death. And that final trip was amazingly harrowing. Gray became erratic and psychotic. His writing became obsessively repetitive (reminding me of Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno). He recorded conversations and screeds rather than write words down. He presented examples of what Didion's identifies as Karl Menninger's concept of the apparent inadequacy of the precipitating event.

Note that whatever is precipitated need not even be mentioned. As with the word for "bear" in ancient Germanic Europe, it is a concept too terrible to be associated with it its actual name.

In a couple of weeks, I will read the second volume of Susan Sontag's journals, again (I assume) edited by her son. The first volume proved what a towering intellect she was, and what a shuddering mass of human inability to function. I haven't even read that book yet, and still I feel its effects.

I feel the weight of human inadequacy and failure, the dead weight of despair and the occasional lift of success, in these stories. I accept how melancholy can be regenerative, how there is some beauty in sadness, if we can just control it, accept what it teaches us, and build something out of it.

These stories are trapped in my body. Like blood. Circulating through me.


3. Thirstday

My Father with His Fire (22 March 2012)
I arrived in Nashville the day before my father's 75th birthday and two days before his birthday. My youngest sister, whom I'm the closest to of my five siblings, picked me up at the airport and took me to her McMansion of a home. Her daughter's bedroom is the size of the place I live. Her rumpus room is about five or six times the size of where I live. She says they don't use it very much. Beneath its 20-foot peaked 20-foot ceiling rest eight recliners, a wet bar, a large TV, and a bathroom about the size of my bathroom. While I was there, I was reminded how my family, which stayed behind in Tennessee, evolved in a different direction than I did. They became much more materialistic. (Most live in McMansions.) I became only more the intellectual. (My excess focuses on books and the experiencing of art.) I like my sister enough not to tease her too much.

She went off on errands, so I borrowed a car to make the longish trek to my father's house, made a little difficult by the fact that the area around Davidson County, Tennessee, had expanded exponentially in the thirty years since I'd left. I could drive for miles without recognizing anything at all, except for the greater number of redcedars, hackberries, and box elders. I couldn't see any osage oranges on the drive.

I found my father at home, the house he shared with my brother's family, and which was being remodeled, expanded actually, because it's difficult to have a big enough house. My father's apartment in the house remained unchanged, but the livingroom and master bedroom of the main part of the house was growing. And my almost 75-year-old father was preparing to do yardwork. In a house with three men 50 and below, I thought it a little ridiculous that my father, at his age even if capable of the work, was the only one ever doing yardwork, so I helped him carry the refuse from the construction down to a bit of exposed bedrock where he could burn it all: boards, boxes, logs, branches.

My father and I are not close, and haven't been for most, if not all, of my life, but in this case we were able to work together, to focus on a job, to avoid discussions of politics and of my baldness and the fact that he cannot admit he is exactly as bald as I am. It was enjoyable enough, though the fire was hot enough to cause burns four feet from it. But rain came in the afternoon, a regular occurrence in Tennessee, especially in the summer, so we retreated indoors, where we examined family photographs I had scanned and I asked him questions about his life for a little chronology I was finishing.

For dinner, we went out with a second cousin I had never met, and we discussed beverages (why I'm the only person who drinks scotch, I'll never understand), politics (where I was the liberal and my father the arch-conservative explaining that the US has the best healthcare in the world, as long as you could afford it, as if not affording it was not an issue). That reminded me too much of the father I knew. As did one other thing: He complained about the length of the epithalamium I read at my daughter's wedding, intimating that I shouldn't read a poem at his party. I told him not to worry, that I would not be speaking at his 75th-birthday party the next day.

This exchange reminded me of when I was in college, and he told me, "The Family Doesn't Need a Poet." Fortunately, I never considered myself the family poet, but I did wonder, eventually, if the family needed a union president (since my father hates unions), a consultant who told people how to organize their homes, a teacher (since he considers teachers little more than union members), a nurse anesthetist, or a pizza delivery man. I'm certain he never told them the family didn't need such people either.


4. Eine-Kleine-Blaue-Nacht

I finished Didion's Blue Nights today. A slim book, it's an easy read. At least one of the chapters was under two pages long, and Didion's writing was weakening a little. The book wandered, though maybe not as much as this essay, and many of her paragraphs were a single sentence, even a single line long. She left out details about her daughter that I'd expected her to tell us, possibly because they were too painful to recall or maybe because she'd covered the illness in The Year of Magical Thinking. Regardless the reason, the book was lacking. It opened strongly but it declined with time, just as Didion herself is declining personally.

After an opening focus on her daughter and the travails and horrors of parenthood (What if my child dies?), she began to focus on her sharp physical decline. She is not the 75-year-old my father is. This story was interesting enough to hear, but it pushed us off the track, pushed us to another realm. Still, the person of Joan Didion is both herself alone and the mother of Quintana, so she is the intersection of the book, and part of her story made me think of parents and parenting, something I've been considering recently, something that my trip to Tennessee made me consider.

First, a thought: To be a parent is to be a failure. I believe I've been a good father, that my wife has been a good mother, that we raised our children well, but what do I know? I was going to talk to my daughter about this very subject this week, but after five days and three reminders for her to call me I don't think that's going to happen, which has to make me reconsider my parentness. Still, I think I can conclude I was better at parenting than my parents, maybe because I was the eldest of six children (and they were nothing of the sort), and maybe because I always have seen myself as a caregiver. I was never born to be a poet, of that I'm sure, but I may have been born to be a parent. My children certainly did well in school, were generally well adjusted, and never were in any trouble, and never were any trouble to us. I know of no other parents who can say that of all their children.

But the real issue with being a parent is the facing of death. The small issue here, one that rarely passes through my mind, is that my children are my replacements on earth. I will desist from living, and they will remain, maybe even with children of their own, to continue. We die as people but not as genetic code. We pass that one. Facing one's own death, however, is easy. Facing the death of one's child is hard, and it begins at their birth. From that moment, you worry about keeping them living, at least most of us do. I always remember this: that my mother let me play outside alone, unwatched, in a concrete world with metal steps, even when I was two years old. Because of this Katy Burton pushed me down the stairs during her birthday party, which I was trying to crash at age two and a half. The tumble down those stairs broke my nose, so I can breathe only somewhat through my nose fifty years later.

Think of this, though, something that Didion's book made me consider: a reason that infants sometimes die near birth, an explanation proffered, is that they "failed to thrive." I thought of that for a moment today and then realized that that is the parent's other worry, a worry as pressing as death. Even after infanthood, our children must thrive. They cannot merely live or survive; they must make something out of this world, and it is our job to make it so.

No wonder to be a parent is to be a failure. How many of us are capable of even ensuring that we ourselves thrive?


5. Somnamanuensis

My Youngest Nephew Wearing Someone Else's Eyeglasses
On my father's birthday, I worked most of the day on the chronology of my father's life, finishing it only after it had made it to 44 pages of length. The delay was caused by fact-checking, even though I made sure not to check every fact, and by the fact that my father was feeding me, remotely (via email), additional facts, details on some of the long trips we took when we were young. These were huge trips, which sometimes required us to miss school and which took us, usually, to many countries at a time. The trips lasted from a month to two and a half months, and the longest took us from Bolivia to California to Washington, D.C., to Ghana. No matter what the drawbacks were of my childhood, I have had experiences very few people have ever been privileged to have. I know that.

There was one chaotic family outing on this day, which was the 23rd of March and thus my father's 75th birthday. The entire family, except for my children (who were still flying to Nashville), met at a truly terrible Chinese buffet in Hendersonville, and we ate in a little corner at about six tables. The attendees included all my blood nieces and nephews, all my siblings (except for the youngest), my father, two in-laws, my second cousin, and his mother, my first cousin once removed (so my mother's cousin). The food was worse than terrible, the space was crowded and sticky, and there was virtually no real conversation. I spoke mostly to my neiphews, which was fine with me.

What I couldn't understand, however, was that this is where my father and siblings (and associated children) meet for dinner almost every Friday night when my father is in town. I can't imagine anyone ever returning to this restaurant. Anyway, when my youngest sister asked me when I might return to Tennessee, I said, "Probably the early 2020s," and I wasn't kidding.

Afterwards, the family moved to my middle sister's home for drinks and talking, and there I had the chance to see my own beautiful children, whom I do not see enough, all three of them, even my son-in-law. This part of the visit back to Tennessee, one of my scores of homes spread across the world, was the best one. For a few minutes, I had a good time with a couple of my siblings besides my youngest sister. We were laughing, especially my brother and me, about the dangerous lives we lived as children and adolescents, and those memories were good, even though they started with the story of his knife wound on the head on the Barbados campus of the University of the British West Indies.

Back at my youngest sister's house, her son, my youngest nephew,wanted to sleep with me (he doesn't like going to sleep, being three and all), so my sister asked if he could sleep with me. He is an adorable child, strikingly verbal for three years old, so he's fun to talk to. After preparing for bed, he said he wanted to watch TV. He had some video in mind, but I said I'd tell him stories instead. So I told him a Gate Wilder Squid story, one of the series of stories I told my own children at bedtimes, ones I invented at bedtime. To adults, they can be seen as horrifying metaphysical stories about the possibility that there is nothingness except for our imagining there is something. But children like them. I've no idea why. Gate Wilder Squid is a cat. Maybe that is all it is. After telling him the one about how Gate Wilder Squid was born and then went back and forth into a parallel world until he wasn't sure if he'd ever returned home, he wanted another. So I told him the story about Gate Wilder searching for asparagus root, hearing a noise in a tree, climbing the tree, finding a button, and then pushing the button causing everything on the planet to disappear into the earth. At that point he decided he could fall asleep.

I haven't slept in bed with anyone in over half a year, so it was good to have someone close, someone I could hear breathing, even if it was a little boy who would twitch and kick the covers from time to time, waking me up, Somehow, he was able to do this without ever touching me, so I would fall right back to sleep. I was calmed just by his presence. This one little beautiful and extended moment with my nephew, one which consisted almost entirely of our sleeping, seems to me the Bonnie and Clyde picnic sequence of this trip.

If I have to die anyway, allow me a tiny bit of respite on the way.


6. Gray-Day

Spalding Gray has inhabited me for a week.

I am sure I never would have liked the man. He was immature, hurtful, self-centered. I've made one of these lists already, so I need not continue it.

But I also saw in him reflections of myself, and anti-reflections. No way am I the sexual being he is. I am a bit more particular sexually than he is. But I worry that my attempts at art, even say this one I am writing at this moment, are self-centered, because all autobiography is, and thus without extended value. Even if I am not like Gray in that way, even if my focus on the self is no greater than usual, people may see it otherwise. I am relatively open about my life, so I write about it to explain the world.

It may seem that the world is small and encompasses only me, but I believe that autobiography offers others insight as well, and offers other insights.

Still, I identified with Gray. He was always questioning what he was doing, never certain he could do anything well. He focused on the idea of art being life, and life being art. So his journals were simply source material for the monologs that made him famous. He became famous for telling his life, and all that saves me from his fate is that I don't have as much to confess as he does. (I pity the women he loved who had to listen to his life being told in public, a life that often affected them negatively, and I wonder if I should pity any women I have loved as well.) This blog, of course, is just the most obvious example of how I've made my life my art. We are one. It is all of a piece.

That's what I always say: It's all of a piece. All of existence is just one thing. Every tiny thing we ever experience still fits within it. In its proper place.

Gray was an actor, so he also talks of the body as art, as the work, as the venue in which art occurs. And that resonates with me because I am interested in what I call full-body poetics, in a poetry that is about the tongue speaking, the body moving, about performing the poem with one's full self: intellectual, physical, emotional.


7. Gesamt-once-worst

My Grandmother's Piano in My Sister's House

I visited the last of my siblings' houses, the home of my first but younger sister, on Saturday, on the day of the party. We toured the place, met her finches, including two that cost $100 a piece (apparently, because they are such poor parents that they never tend to their eggs). My daughter and son-in-law rode in their go-kart, and we ate food that my youngest sister brought to the house because my eldest sister has no interest in food. While we were at her house, she complained, seriously, about the fact that her husband wanted to eat dinner every night.

listen to ‘Time to Go’ on Audioboo
While at this new McMansion, I didn't talk much. I'm not comfortable around my siblings. But I found the piano room, which has within it the old grand piano of my grandmother's, which was willed to my sister. This is the piano that I played for my entire childhood and adulthood. Not often because I wasn't often in Millbrae, California, but I played it whenever I was there. It's not a very good piano. In fact, we discovered upon our grandmother's death that it used to be a player piano, and was refurbished in a regular piano. And it's clear that my sister hasn't had it tuned recently. (She's "careful" with money.) But it still played, so I played it.

Before I started playing it, I decided to record what I played, so I set up the recorder and played for five minutes. As I played, I expected someone to enter the room and say something, thus ruining the recording, but that didn't happened. I realized later that I don't recall ever being interrupted while playing, and I'm sure no-one ever stayed to hear me play. This might sound like a sad story from childhood, but it isn't at all. I am not a musical person, am totally musically illiterate, cannot read music, have no vocabulary for talking about music, have been incapable of understanding even simple musical concepts, and have never been trained to play any musical instrument. So why would anyone ever listen to what I play or comment on it?

But I like making music, so I have for years, and now that I have this recording I can hear what I play, and I discovered something unexpected: This piece I liked for some reason, even though I can hear the missteps in it, and felt them while I was playing it. I think the last minute and a half is the best, so that's a reason to listen to the end. But I was surprised that liked the piece. I've listened to is scores of time. It is not one of those few pieces of music I listen to obsessively. I am listening to it right now. I don't claim it is any good, but it entertains me.



8. Party-Colored

My Father with Most of His Children
That night, a Saturday, we had a party for my father. The food was passable, but the service was awful. The meal was a buffet, so the staff should have been removing plates from the table, rather than allowing them to accumulate. The grounds were beautiful, and I did speak to a number of people I rarely see. We had six tables, so each child was at a separate table, as was my father. We had a copy of a printed photobook of my father's life for people to sign. (My daughter and son-in-law designed it.) We had a looping set of family movies and family photos going on for the whole time. (My son-in-law put that together.) We had copies of the chronology of my father's life for people to read. (I wrote and designed that.) We had flags of most nations and states my father has lived in on the table. (That was the work of my middle sister, who arranged this event.) And we had items from the countries my father had lived in. (That was the joint work of all my sisters.) It was a reasonably good night.

Then my brother went to the podium, ostensibly to introduce my father. Instead, he repeated, six times that "This is a poetry-free zone!" He even mentioned that these kind of bad poems don't even rhyme. Ah, to be a poet in a family that doesn't need a poet. Apparently, the family has been making fun of my poem to my daughter, one that wasn't too long, but neither was it short, and one that I wrote to be easy to comprehend, one that had a simple message. I really couldn't see this joking as a necessary or an act of familial generosity, but I let it take place without comment. Then my middle niece went up to the podium and made up a little poem, one that didn't rhyme. Good for her.



My father ended this public speaking portion of this event with a brief talk about the individual births of his children and about his memory. It was a strange little talk, completely inequitable in the time taken for each child. I, as the first, probably received the most mention, but was not named. My brother's mention was so short that about a quarter of it was mentioning that my father thought that son needed no introduction because of the "poetry-free zone" comment. The video quality is bad in all ways, but it captures the weirdness of the night. No-one spoke about my father. I would have except that I'd promised him not to after his crack about poetry. I've no idea what I would have said.



9. xxx

My Eggy Eggy Heart
The next day, most of the family met at the home of my youngest sister, and we had a huge brunch. My sister's husband and I made omelets, my sister make hash browns and remarkably good bacon, my son-in-law made bloody marys, and there was plenty of fruit. Almost all the food was eaten. My father was the first to leave because he was starting his road trip to spring training in Florida. My children left before my with my first sister. I had a mid-afternoon flight, so I was the last to live. My youngest sister and her children came with me into the airport, and the children wanted to go to the gate with me. I hugged them goodbye, heading towards my first flight of the day and preparing to finish reading the journals of Spalding Gray.

Note that no-one in this story has a name. No-one I know has a name.


10. Poëmical

My trip to Tennessee included the reading of The Journals of Spalding Gray, and as I was reading the book I realized that I could fashion a poem, somehow, out of the lines I was underlining within it. My original thought was to write an essay about Tennessee and this poem based on Gray's words the day after I returned. Instead, it took me six days to write the poem. I thought I'd finished it yesterday, but decided to add words from Joan Didion, among others, today.

This reads as a dark poem to me, one of fragments and refracted light, and it is a long poem. My family would not appreciate it. Although it's made almost entirely out of appropriated material, it seems to hold together, and I revised the words I stole whenever it suited my purposes. Sources for these words include Spalding Gray (who is responsible for nearly half of the words, I estimate) and writers mentioned or quoted in his journals (Wallace Stevens and Shakespeare), and Joan Didion (and the poets she quotes or refers to in her book (Keats, Stevens again, Eliot, Neruda, and Karl Shapiro). Note that she quotes from Auden, but that I saw nothing to take from there. I also stole lines from myself.

In the end, I like this poem, even if I wonder if it's a bit unwieldy.



Uncabined (Nocturnal Ideation)
I see the sweet blue veinsand how it startswith the sweet blueveinsthat seem not to stop
I am tired of remembering.
we will all pass intonothing
writing this in thedarkthough I can justbarely see the page I do notwant to be illuminated
it could be that poetry is just the vehicle I've usedfor coming into consciousness
(Language is notenough.)
Still I make a prettything.Still I make a prettything.
this artlifemy lifeart
she smelled likelemonslemons in her hairour lady of theleaves
frustrated because Icould not tell poetry from lifefrustrated to linkbodies to words andfrustratedto link my body to myown words
what a pleasure it isto stop time with a word
I want to speak my own words my artwants to bend around to meet mylife
with something likeferocityI turn toward theland I lovedto surrender to the essentialwithin itand to reveal that in myself which I love
vernantyet I die
I saw death in thislife.
Maybe tonight.
What if I can neveragain locate the words that work?
if the walls wereolderone would think
if the land were stonier one would think
art is only anextension of lifea graceful and poeticextension of self
I'll take art and tryto stop the clock.
do I want to be in a poemmore than I want to be in life?more joy out of thepoem than out of life?
I am the poemand the desire tofinish the ultimately unfinishablebefore the end
There are no privateacts left.
It is as though I amrehearsing suicide. I keep killing myselfin small ways.
The wonders of theworld are myriad, but they do not live in my heart.
so multitudinous thatthey seem
I am collapsingso I'm trying to blowmyself back uponly then can I startworrying about the evil clown coming at me with agiant hatpin
mansuetude of the siftedselfgiven over tobleeding and bleating
memory fadesmemory adjustsmemory conforms
Maybe tonight.
we are such stuff
as dreams are made on and our little lives
are rounded with a sleep
the sheep call usto bed
our little fire oflifegoes out
Wherefore artlifethou, me? Oh?
might jump out thewindow in my sleep and wake up on the way down
between the blossom-and the fruit-
gives and grieves up into the
pale moon faceglowing alabaster back at mein an innocent stateof grace
garland on the lawn
avocado, gold,mustard, brown, burnt orange
Metaphor is a way of revealing the truth by avoiding it.
the process ofintegrated ritualwas really theapotheosis of it
desire is to liveeach day in the face of death
Life, it is a fixedand imperfect text.
Maybe tonight.
a vital affair, not oneof the heart (as webegin)but an affair of the entirebeing (as we end) a fundamental affair of that fundamentalpart of life
death
pass intonothingness; but still will keep a flowery band tobind us to the earth
fleeing into thebougainvillea around the bungalow,screamingfleeing screamingaroundthe bungalow and intothe bougainvilleafleeing around thebougainvilleaand screaming intothe bungalow
I am torn between being a poet and being of the world
it is a vicioustirednessseemingly irrevocable
weary of the fine ash
which falls on cities in autumn
discoloring our hearts
a fixed and imperfecttext
lifeartlifeartlifeart
there's a part of meso in love with death that I feel I havealready died and am looking back at the living
just give up on humanlove and put it all into poetry
how outrageously sad and lonely mere orgasm is
Suicide is power overdeath.
I am controlled bythe fact and controlledbecause I see everything as animageeverything as theimageand I cannot seebeyond that image
I always invent myown world.
I become a cryto something a littlenearer until at last I cry out to a living place, aliving thingand by crying out confess openly allthose bitter secretions ofexperience
bitterest
Death is the motherof beauty.
I will get so good atartifice that I will no longerlead an authenticlife
What am I doing insearch of the miraculous?
I know what it is Iam now experiencing.
Maybe tonight.
yes, I am nothing visiting something (thislife)and returning tonothing
Step in this waterand you will be connected to all the oceans of the world.
in dreams a house is often your body
they oppress theheart
it's not me thinking about it(it's thinking me)
my frailty hasreached the point I can no longer tella true story
my art, lifemy life, art
the colors of thebushes
turning in the color of the hemlocks
and I remembered the colors of theturning in twilightas they swept overthe hemlocks
or against the leaves in the loud fireoutside the window ofmy house
That which I havegreatly feared has come upon me.
a fixed and imperfect text
that is our onlyjob
medicine as an imperfectart
in a rhythm and letting thatrhythm tell what it was I wassaying
information is avirus, one we must pass on
telling the story over and over so manytimes I become the storyitself
Maybe tonight.
A one-story man.
such too is thegrandeur of the dooms        an endless fountainof immortal drink
I may realize it, maymanifest it by unmanifesting myself
art of my lifelife of my art
I hurt myself so otherswon't feel a need to hurt me.
the only positive actwould be to leave a record, to leave achronicle of feelings, acts,reflections, something outside ofme, something that might be usefulin the unexpected future
We don't know whatphor is. We know only that itis meta.

isn't writing just anact of the ego? or isn't ita way for me to disappearinto a poem and cease to exist?
the right wordthe apt thoughtthe connectionthe rhythmthe music itself
I feel this overwhelmingcompassion for these poor abused children.
Memories are what oneno longer wants to remember
Maybe tonight.
I art life.I ♥life.My hard life.
let us be weary ofwhat kills
and of what doesn't want to die
I can't stand thefloor. I can't stand thebathroom. I can't stand thelight in the bathroom. I can't stand my facein the mirror.I can't stand amirror without my face.I can't stand my feeton the floor.I can't stand theocean I can't see.I can't standstanding with my feet on the floor.
I don't know whatreality this represents.
a fixed and imperfecttext
the inhuman dearth and o'er-darkenedways        made for oursearching
What is lost isalready in the earth.
and the woods withthe deer and the deer and thedeer and the deer and thedarkness and the darkness andthe deer and the darkness andthe darknessand the darkness andthe darknessand the deer and thedarknessand the deer and thedeerand the darkness andthe deerand the deer and thedarknessand the deer rightthere
chaos & cruelty
medicinean imperfect text
There are no privateacts left.
Act 1, Scene 18,937A small room with aview of the outside
waiting for Act 2
as if memories weresolace
Maybe tonight.
blue heart beating asit blew in the wind

ecr. l'inf.