From a Deathbed, Hopefully

I watched a slow tide creep over my childhood neighborhood; every third license plate hung pristine on freshly waxed SUVs, and, not surprisingly, but often the stern bust of Honest Abe regretfully informed me: Illinois.  My parents’ house now resists the buffets of the encroaching college culture, and where neighbors’ gardens flourished beneath clipped greens and pared and pruned bushes and pines, now only mudfields and mudflats swallow the sunlight and spit out dandelions.  Ratty old vinyl couches collect the rain and roaches with equal indifference; newly arrived twenty year-olds abscond with said furniture with a peculiar lack of discern or concern.  All the same to me.

I never really believed in me.  I believed in the idea of me, and I followed a blueprint rough sketch ceaselessly.  I never could stop thinking; I couldn’t shut my mouth and listen, to watch, to hear, to feel.  I couldn’t breathe through all of my screaming.  The universe is not out to get me.  I pay my debts as a thank you for the loan; I expect nothing, for I give out of love.  Pure, unbridled love.  I built a wall to keep the world out, and ended up keeping myself in.  I couldn’t grasp the idea of being lost as knowing exactly where you are, and I couldn’t feet fine for want of feeling even better.

When I was twenty, I lived in Madison.  Now that is a place where college life rises to your neck, and every wave washes over your head in terrifying confusion and momentary flashes of lucidity.  A carousel, really, with jockeys scrambling like children for the fastest Quarter Horse.  They’re all moving the same speed in a steady circle.  Reserve an outside track for me, please, and I’ll drown the whining engine with bluegrass played to the Arabians grazing the Kentucky bluegrass; from bassinet to a casket, and in between, a warm four-post deathbed, peacefully, hopefully.

(04/38/2001) When I speak, forgive me–my conscience falls asleep, but when I listen, I lay my pride prone and prayerful at the speaker’s feet.  Like a blade on a whetstone, I watched a pacifist turn to paladin on my parched and paling skin.  Forgive me again, for all these abstractions.