thursday, november 8
-
there are experiences that bring you
to an unusually direct and unvarnished consideration
of your actual stature in life;
between one thing and another
my 37th year has been thick with themi was thinking: what exactly do i amount to,
here in middle adulthood, after some years
of whatever this has been?of the ideas of the self i've tried on
and then hung up to fade on the walls of my mind
few seem to have much bearing now
i'm sure not a historian, poet, or teacher
hell, i'm not even all that well-readon the facts, what i am
is a declining bottom-rung technocrat, a little too
self-taught and far too scattered to have attained much,
past a surface fluency with the technical arrangements
of a recently-dead past -
i drew pictures for a little while,
but i didn't have the discipline to make anything of it
i used to take photos, but now that just feels
like pissing into the ocean
i never did learn the guitar
even my cooking is frankly bad most of the timeit's strange to see all the ways you thought you knew
how to write something on the world
as hollow, as dull and rusted tools,
as tricks of the light -
of course you can't write anything on the world
not really, not for longer than a beat and
on the scale of an ordinary life
it's all so much dragging a stick through the sand
in between the wavesthe world writes itself on you, mostly
if some greater power comes within your grasp
it's like as not you'll do monstrous things,
at least judging by the powerfulfor inconsequence
maybe i ought to be thankful.