snooze button

Teenagers walking in the park, to and from the bars, to get high and drunk and cop a feel.

I walked into those tired places once, was frightened by what I saw: trolls smashing their heads through wooden tabletops, many a fair maiden picking splinters from her forehead... and I dodged a flying mug of cider (it turned to vinegar inside her). I wrote like a tired hand; fingers trickling cobwebs onto a screen, wiping it clean absent-mindedly with two contemptuous clicks of a mouse. She flies into the moon, but I stay behind always; I'm the rock of the community, I am the oddity of the coffeeshop. Long days melt into easy comfort, with one or two mugs of honey-brown to keep us fast and loose. And ah, so what--the system isn't fair and never will be, but no we won't be sucked into that merry-go-round of blame, shame and guilt; 'why' is not our question; it is the 'what' and 'how' that breaks us with its relentless answer-lust. And if conventional wisdom begins to lie, we must stab at it, as at a traitor.

Fibrillation and defenestration and the constipation, the malevolence the incontinence, the tribal stipulations, the venomous conspiracies, the electoral pespicacity... and true wretchedness is when a middle-aged hedonist wakes from his dream and, face-to-face with delusion, cuts out his heart in disappointment, and then expects pity or even a paper towel to wipe up the blood.

And I love her whimsy and wonder, her touch and breath, the woman who lifts me up; she takes my hand and we float into a sky painted blue with serenity, quilted together by the sunrise and the sunset.

But the sad truth, I won't even dare to publish. This is a meeting to discuss the future. This is our business--who will take it over when we're gone?

I don't know.

I can't be in ten places at once; not like I used to.

I worry about this little secret of ours, and my links and my fonts, Helvetica, Garamond, Distant Galaxy. The time I tried to open up an ocean.