A) Despair: Get used to it

Daddy loved castles.
with a hairdryer for a gun
and the mountains every one
a charging villain

Blazing through the cobwebs to get to the unused room in the locked up part of the house where they had stacks of pictures of mammograms, someone had been a nurse or something, and yellow page after page was enlarged bulbous breasts in clinical studies. We were too young and then I was too young then and now I’m too old to be looking for you, too old or looking for someone like you. I try to keep myself occupied. Pets are for women too ugly to have babies, or men who can’t get a date. I dress because I am alive, and progress through the hours, sejant receiving my messages in my cabin. There’s a serenity to be found in the woods. Mad disquietude on the dull sky. Ah, now the croaking birds of the California afternoon, once you start to hear them, as with everything, they are everywhere. Unless you get

Used

To them. The breeze also, young and annoying this morning, dancing contrapuntal with the horrible low background pule of the invisible interstate highway behind the trees. Other lives, theoretically, moving forward, pulsing just beyond the speed limit through intersections where the light is mainly green.

I do not have a dog, nor any dates and so there is nothing but clear floor and time. Picasso receiving the vast dimensions of new canvas, sans paint. A cup, inculcating emptiness on the crusty countertop, Mr. Coffeematic still resolutely refusing to concoct any fill. Even my appliances, in their vanity, cannot form working relationships and I think, maybe, its me. A fear always. As fear is the only constant fear.

A fear also, as fear always comes, that there is a story that only I can tell, and it is not being told. Words come, but there is no charge to them. Freely I admit they are without ornament, hung without string, like stars in the sky instead of Christmas lights. Still beautiful, but not unique, imbued with nothing personal. They are none of me. Words like appliance, (to inertly apply pressure) or used (either acceptance, or domination, or BOTH, interchangeably, either way one gets

Used

to it).

“The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time.”

-Abraham Lincoln

Myriadic patterns in the system emerge. Her crooked smile. My obsession with arms, hair in strange places, life in the gutter. Sadly, we are what we frequently discuss. And frequently in my case it remains despair. Alien pen marks, rare ink splotches on my hands, fingers, pants, occasionally face. Language in the mists, ghosts in the forest winds, singing their gone songs, my fingers shaking pink. There are themes that emerge in days past, oh to remove them were they not writ with the permanence of ink. Oh, to start again! Ordo ab chao. All my former lives extinguished with a crash— all grows inky black. Who knows the words? The night filled with a polygamy of stars, and planes rushing off in silent courses. The Breathing and The Breath.

Like freckles in the sky, stars in their highways. Can you see them kissing? Find two stars leaning into each other and watch. "It's romantic," she says and then regrets it because quickly I will be thinking about romance. Now I am. Lying back on the mountaintop, the red glows dabbling across the perseitic night foreground extolling the virtues of feet on brakes. Perhaps you know where this story goes. Think now to when you were young and you counted every one, all the universe a warm-mother’s cold-kiss across our cheeks. Every-thing able to be counted, no such thing as too many voices in a room. Voices, spilling out in shapes and color. Music before there were notes. It’s exasperating how slow it all moves, hours, days, eons and only

under the influence

under the tree

do I see

the seven sisters, deigned to tell me something, but what is the story, and how many times has it been told?

Nothing much happens to me now nor ever will again. There are those who do not believe in goodness or splendor in the world and therefore can not look for or see it. Flesh sinks in a lukewarm bath. History too, melting, and once you start to let it disapear, as with most things, it goes fast. I know all the old songs. Ok, I’m haunted by them. What better company to keep on a candlelit night than ghosts. The songs grows mute when you have heard them enough, and life’s passions slowly erupt all around you with a vividness that no memory can exceed. For a while there were floods here, and I rose above them or waded through, thinking under ill or nil advisement that the land would return as I remembered it, but it never did. So many modest pebbles swept out to sea that now I dream. Humming a song because the tune. Like a lilac flower, I remember lexis long after their ornamental petals have wilted. What did I know before what I learned? Where did this ship come from when everywhere there is only sea? Serenity, still I dream. Of fearful woods. A warm summer’s day censuring itself into a warm summer’s night and you— I wish you were here right now.

Know this. We can only have knowledge of things that we re-create ourselves, through thought, memory or recollection. Truth that is hidden from us in life comes alive only in dreams. I never realized what I had until it was gone. Now. I have nothing, neither dog nor date, but a sea of clear hardwood floors and this too, I can get

Used

To. I used to get used to all sorts of things. Pecuniary benefits notwithstanding. Fill my beak with the finest foods for a few months and you can’t tell me I can’t afford them anymore. Recession! Pah!

“Anyone can see that I have set out on a road along which I shall travel without toil and without ceasing as long as the world has ink and paper”
-Montaigne

Other lives, moving, theoretically, in invisible shafts of darkness, leisurely. Soft tone, round light, open door. Ever notice no matter how many people are in an elevator, there’s always one leaning against the wall? Check it out next time you get the chance. I did. Riding alone, leaning slightly-

She lies flattened with her eyes closed, stars gone out, half naked under a white sheet. Asked how she would describe him lately, she replies “Phlegmatic,” and suffixes the endearing “Dick.” After, we

Used

to talk about our past. Where are we now? Are we what we frequently discussed? Perhaps you know this story. Perhaps the story is within us all. A story is The story, spiderwebs in winter when all the spiders are… where are all the spiders? In our daddy’s castle, under the brown dresserdrawer filled with inkstained plaid pockets. In play, love,

the distant mountains, our darkest foes.

A room without our clothes

At the forest’s edge
Blushing, benignant. We are phonemes. The most basic of sounds, guttural and primitive in a language larger than the earth. But who can translate what it means? Going up? Leaning slightly, aspera ad astra, a song recognizable, the words elude

me.

I know

I know it.
Alone.

There are, some times love doesn’t take flight into the golden clouds. It flounders and falters and dies in a wild shot, a cry of pain and a rusting fall into the fathomless depths.

Trees sway. Soon I’m going away, and you will look for me. Where I’m going you can not come.

Get

Used

To it.