Soon I am leaving. Soon
The tinkle of keys, computer's hum, a plane
That bullets through the air, the anxious murmur
Of a talk show broadcast from God knows where
-- What sullen city clogged with smog-choked air -- a dog's yap
Will all fade like the colors on a bleaching t-shirt
Lying down there, somewhere on a dresser, or the fuzzy flicker
Of memory like a badly tuned TV.

These images flicker before the brain, but I suspect
The motor roared before the hum of consciousness began
And will again, after; reality is not,
Like paint dissolving in dull turpentine, such solemn blue
Or freezing red, burning black
To shudder into silver beads, and cloud, and stretch out in threads
Like a tortured patient on the wrack;

But like the shadow of a lightning streak, or
The after-image of an outstretched palm, the webbing
Finger fades, the voices die for me like a low call
Disappearing round the corner, and forever out of sight
Into the reeling calm. Image after image, silence after silence
After voice, all these things fade, replaced forever by another, fresher instinct
While the good past rots.

I search for a timeless out-of-time, where images take root and grow
And bear ripe fruit that always has that melancholy sweetness, tickles tongues,
Pervades the teeth. I fly forever in between the silky clouds at night
While the dark earth gapes like a yawn, the stars are dazzling teeth,
And the moon, like a larynx, sings. I would fashion a garden of forever, scrapped together
From bits of shaggy carpet, wicker threading from a basket, broken bricks
And pages ripped from soggy books. Assorted arms and limbs, a red-veined leaf,
A purple artery on lucid arms, and yellowed teeth: these would be
My roots, spiraling into a forest of purple trees, memories
Tinged in the blue of a setting sky, forever in the golden fall of sun;

But while I sit and write, forever fades. The voices
Echo round and round in a canon of goodbyes, the sea falls
And blasts, a solitary gull wings round, tumbles towards the earth, catches her flight
And a fish, and baffles towards the sky. All my roots are rotten, rotting
While I search for that perfect memory, for a captured light
Whose writing never fades. It is not immoral to miss your life, to flee
The shadows of a rocking globe, to see
Sunset horizons like a rainbow hued archipelago of dappled clouds...
But the ocean of time is devouring misty islands: when the singing fades, it fades
And is gone, and my weak pitched voice cannot imitate it, no, can never imitate it,
Never bring it back.

I'm on fire; for some reason (maybe it's caffeine) I'm incredibly excited about the prospect of reading Heidigger, Kant, Derrida, Barthes...give me any philosopher (no matter how sophistic or sophisticated) and I'll read him. Well, actually, what I'm excited about is the possibility of reading some nice summaries, concise introductions to very complicated, challenging ideas. I always tackle the works directly, but maybe what I need to do is enter in on the shallow end (so to speak).

I had a hot chocolate, late into the night. I don't normally drink caffeine, so maybe that's why I'm all buzzed. I should be sleeping tonight, because tomorrow we're going to Taos, my mom and I. To be fair, at 3:30 in the afternoon...but I don't want to go to bed late, wake up early, and be all groggy the next day; although, it might be nice to talk a long nap during the four hours' ride down there.

I'm beginning to feel happier in Denver. Tonight I saw Ben and we had a long conversation about all sorts of philosophical things (quasi-philosophical...I'm sure we hit on a lot of errors and shallow distinctions) that was really invigorating. I was afraid to go out, for some reason; afraid to drive, to see old people, to reignite old friendships only to see them extinguished again the moment my plane touches down in P-Town this Saturday. But I suppose...you have to take things as you go. You have to be where you are when you are. That is, if you wanna go out on a date with someone, you go out on the date, that one date, regardless of whether you're going to have a long relationship or whether you're fleeing to Cuba the next morning. Carpe diem, as Horace says; grab things while you can, while you have the life surging through your veins, set yourself on fire!

It's a shame I'll have to leave Denver now for Taos...no time to put this newfound energy into practice. But I will have a chance to walk around Taos, to experience everything fully and intensely. I just want to down all of life. I want to drain the cup to the very dregs and suck on the bitter lees and chew up the seeds just for a taste of that sweet, sweet sappling hidden deep down. And I want to write, I want to analyze endlessly. How wonderful it is to be young and have the whole world at your fingertips, to feel everywhere a sense of ardorous promise. Yet I must sleep.

Insomnia

Insomnia is a gift, until the next day; until you wake up sputtering and groaning, cursing the sun, cursing your life, your sleep-failing hormones. By that point you've picked up some mediocre book, you're flipping through the pages, awkward and bored out of your mind by a slew of unneccessary words, while, exhausted, you wait for exhaustion.

You wake up at three in the afternoon, and the day is wasted. Your plans have lain out in the sun too long and are now wilting, drooping, parched-out dry, stretching out on the couch like a deflated weather-balloon. You feel groggy, can't go back to sleep, and the clock ticks. Tick, tick, tick; the emptiness of space, the void of time, all things resolving into their accustomed and permanent positions; the fuzzy-beige walls, the wavering light through the window casting a candid, hot, unwelcome streak across your chest. Too groggy to move, but much too up to rest.

But you while away the night hours (while you wait) with intellectual collossi, monuments rising from the gritty dirt of assumption to the towering heights of solecism, solipsism, with fits of conniption thrown in, liberally, for jest. Meanwhile you're shut indoors, crushed by the night like a little piece of fudge glopped in between two dark masses of pudding collididing under a thick glass dome. You're hungry, but you can't eat anything because you've recently brushed; you're tired, but images of the world, inverted in a whirl of panic, dance in front your closed eyelids. Doubts, like the phantasmal outlines of rug-draped furnishings in pale moonlight, trip up your wandering mind; and no matter how many times you reassure yourself, their vague corners and shadowy outlines are always there, palpable as the sharp ends of a cheap-fold out bed through loose-knitting cloth, jabbing your ribs.

On Not Talking to Anybody About Anything

The other night, I came to a startling conclusion: I don't know what I'm talking about, and neither do you. Clearly, we must either learn how to speak more effectively, or abolish language altogether. Let's start by simplifying our diction to a series of expressive grunts. Consider the advantages: instead of arguing with each other, couples can express their feelings with "angry grunt" (which sounds very similar to, and is often followed by, "horny" grunt). When something makes absolutely no sense, there's always "inexplicable" grunt, which is followed by "feed me" grunt and "vodka" grunt, respectively.

How our lives will improve! We can cease all this metaphysical chatter (which nobody seems to understand anyway) and get right down to the bare essentials of life: food, shelter, and hot, hot mammas. People from foreign countries will understand each other without ever having to set foot in the class-room. No one will complain about bad grammar and syntax -- and best of all, the potential benefits for poetry and opera are enormous.

The opera's pretty much grunting and whistling already, and if we can just get rid of the encumbrance of language, the sopranos will be free to sing as expressively as they'd like while the audience will be freed from the burden of trying to understand them. We'll need operas, of course, that are rich in sentiment and emotion and light on the intellect...I'd suggest Wagner. Now for poetry: poets will be freed from the obligation to think up witticisms and clever turns of phrase and be able to get to the heart of their craft --expressionistic force; plus, all grunts rhyme, so we'll be able to return to those much lamented classical forms.

As for the sciences and wissenschaft -- well nobody listens to the literati anyway, so we might as well be grunting; and for all the advantages of science, when we weigh on the one hand the benefits of our vast knowledge of the universe, and on the other all the happiness which would be ours if we simply did away with language, which way do you think the scale will tip?

I've seen the future, and it's language free: no more arguments about religion, no more reading assignments, and no more awkward attempts at conversation on the subway. Woohoo!

Sent to the New York Times:

Dear Editor,

The Republicans sure know how to party; they've all pulled themselves up by the boot-straps, but none of them mentioned that the boots in question were golden buskins. If the Republican party were truly attempting parsimony, perhaps they would cut out the evenings at expensive (and exclusive) restaurants, the fancy (and politically safe) entertainment, and the cocktails (whose organizers will, I'm sure, fret deciding which is the more economical -- roquefort or brie -- both imported, of course; and as for the crackers, well, ritzes, for all the party's ritzy glitz, would certainly be unacceptable).

No; the Republican convention, like the nation they run, is about making money and the attendees are no doubt among the world's largest moneymakers. Attending the convention is as much a matter of showing support as it is of keeping face, and the whole thing is not unlike the gathering of primped aristocrats at Versailles in the days of yore (though it's somewhat disconcerting to think of George W. Bush as Louis XIV's successor). Make no mistake about it, the only frugality on the part of the ruling party is towards spending on education, culture, and the poor.

Sincerely,
Alex Leibowitz.

A little boy is walking down a road on the edge of the forest when he hears the beautiful trill of a nightingale; he is so enticed that he runs after it into the woods. He follows the bird to the edge of a clearing; it lands on a golden bough and begins to glitter all about as if its plumage were on fire with rubies, emeralds, diamonds. A beautiful woman steps in after the bird and calls it by name - Autumn, sired of Lark and the Falcon, the Great One; she is the witch of the South, Belinda, the darling of the Summer.

Belinda reaches out to stroke the bird - but it lunges at her wrist with its beak. The shrill song falls off, a deathly quiet descends upon the grove, and with the flowing blood of Belinda come the frosts and cold of Winter, the dark lady, who enters wreathed about in a long veil of blackness, glittering with stars.

She is Winter, wrapped in the Night, which moves and shivers about her as if a living being. She strokes it, whispers to it, and begins wrapping it around the trees -- so long a scarf, there is no end of it, going out fold by fold like the web from a spider.

Last of all, she stoops above the wounded muse, speaks in her ear a word or two of her harsh and eastern tongue, then swaddles her and carries her off. Belinda’s skin, once as bright and smooth, as fair as a forest of greening elms, looks worn and bark-like behind the blackness. But her face remains unhidden, pale and perfect, and it has the preserved look of the recently dead.

As they disappear into the forest, a single flower, a daisy, falls from the wilting garland in Summer’s long, golden tresses, which are beginning to grey with age and frost. It falls on the one spot of earth miraculously untouched by the frosts and the dark cloak of night, beneath the golden bough.

The boy, more curious than ever, but also filled with the unfathomable dread of all he has seen, gathers up the courage to steal in after the flower. He plucks it up from the ground and brings it up to his nose; ah! the smell is the sweet perfume of Belinda, the scent of long and lazy days when every flower imaginable blooms and the air is busy with bees plucking the nectar pores of the honey-blossoms. Oh that sweet, unimaginable scent! And what good for the boy, for it replaces all the horror with a kind of caress of loveliness and the incomparable sweetness of being.

Above him the bird Autumn is unsettled from her perch, for her talons have caught in the fabric of the night; she wobbles and stumbles over the branch, unsettling its foliage, which clinks abundantly, then tumbles, and then, spreading her long and ocher wings, wings off with much effort and stress, for she is dragging up with her the whole quilt of darkness. All about the forest the leaves shudder with the burden’s departure, the trees groan in the concord of their bondage…and then they are free. Autumn takes wing with the Night, and the child of sorrows is delivered into joy!

From then on and ever that boy was called Spring, and he could be seen always dancing in the desert, a garland of fresh-cut flowers in his hair.