Hatred

I wish that I had a dart of steep venom, something pure,
A small thing pulsing with agony,
The whole of hell in the core of a bullet
That I could thwap into your heel;
Then a pin-prick might cost you a holocaust of sorrows,
Then your body, the whole of your corpulent body,
Rolling hills of gelatinous mush mounding one on another
Like a pile of compost or a heap of shit,
Like corps of corpses steeped hill-high on funeral pyres,
Might catch and flame, roar to the sky
Like a field of raging sparks;
With a wand I would fill you with pain limitless, too much
To brood, writhe, wheeze, and cut the soggy roasting
Into briny bits, and stomp them through the globe.

P.

The wind is coming down in broad sheets, and the pages of rain
Slap against me; the whole world seems to be
Rifling through the book of seasons,
But it can't find what it's seeking
So it thunders and storms. Acharnos,
What excuse can you have to dawdle in this weather?
I have my sheep, my ranging herds, huddled like a balled up clump
Of yarn under yonder cliff, but where's your farm?

A.

Peleon, pull the ragged cusps of your cloak
Closer in to the bristling edges of your neck
And try to smooth the hairs with warmth. This is a time for wolves
And I wouldn't be wandering out so late
Or so lucklessly but for my Ludia. Do you know the tale?

P.

No, but here; let's duck under this tree, see
The long boughs drip with their bounty of rain, but the grasses beneath
Have less than their fair share, just like the farmer who comes before dawn
Gets the brunt of the work to the darkness, but the drunkard
Who wanders in late leaves as early, when his work's barely done; so this indolent grass
Is ripe and richer than the spreading of fur, better for a sit
Than soft sapplings. But with the same congenial air that these leaves,
When the rain leaves off, shaking in the after tremors
Of the earth's soft sigh like a breeze, will disrobe themselves of their thirsted drink
And drip it to the earth that's spare below, so I'll share with you
Honeycakes, a tug of wine, and some of the mealy apples
I've been gathering all morning, the fallen from the trees;
All I ask in return is the news.

Random "Poetry"

When an acrid moon rose
Over the birthing fields
Of gathered piss and compelled many words
To ramble, harvesting of weeds,
While in the long, disgusting lots
Of spilt beer and politics
The wind licked her bloated lips
And rotten apples cored,
The buildings stood
Silently as sentinels
In cool revolt against the sky.

Alencia Speaks!

Dawn, by Alencia Lysander

When I unveiled my entire body to her,
Stripping off the folds of gleaming
Priestly white to reveal the rich and saffron
Hues of golden skin beneath, glowing in multi-layered
Brilliance of rippling muscles
And the scent of lake-fed, cusping herbs

Her blood, you can bet, was boiling
The way your water bubbles when you stir the tea,
Mixing in the crocus and the argent berries, funnelling
The ruby dust of crushed hyacinth so
That the aroma wings up
In the Elysian mists of soup
Like some delicate bird, your drink:

I quenched my blood in the savor of her hot lips: delicate one,
You whose beauty is the wave of ivy wrapping round tree
Of blue pealing souls, dividing from one another ardently to the sky
From their roots, and your limbs are the routes
Of empire, and I have traveled everywhere from the capital to the heart
Like an errant begging for kisses and benediction, and I have kneeled
At your temple; so you transformed my juice into wine,
My veins into masmatic gold, and I feel a new breath rising
Deep from the earth:

There will come the unity of my soul with my brother soul
Across the wide wastes of the ocean that he worships like the setting dawn, and then
We will fly free as the bluebird into the first arch of spring
Through the gleaming horizon that fades in the parallax vertigo of the present
Time; then we will see, all things
Will be renewed, and every voice will blaze up like a living flame, or he'd say
Like the perspiring wicks of the dusk, and I'd say dawn: my prophecy.

Eucharist

The tuning fork, the present guide, the letter
And the question why, stretched like the divining rod
Under a boiling sky
To try for the deep riches of furrowing streams:

Or tell of Moses in the desert, when he struck the rock
Once and the hard resounding of metal,
Twice and the outpour of numinous
Streams, three times and the wrath of my God was upon him
Smoothing the sky into trembling clouds:
Shot bolts from the quiver, and struck him down
Not far from the river of Jordan, but stark across
From the promised land.

Who am I?
I promised it for Abraham like Jason -- the golden fleece --
With milk-whites of honey, and with the dripping of grapes, for juice;
But my nation trod on the husks, culled all their sweetness in wines,
And lay their naked rinds in the gold sun to dry;
Then some of them, mining out silver, ignored me in chalices
Of intricate work: here was Dionysus on the ridge, chaised
Acanthus running round the pillared bust, and fields of gleaming grass
That shivered in the cooling winds when freshly dark
Black ooze came down the cups. And others came to banquets,
And many came on maidens -- their honey skin was spoiled
By the thickly milk:

Here, Israel, is my providence! Here are your provinces of milk
And honey: a festival of hedonistic pleasures, carnivals of sin; and yet have there been
Always the sages who knew me, always long into the burning night,
The dripping of wax, the turning of parchments in stacks by the black
Of their white, ink-stained beards; some, muttering into cornered retreats,
Would raise their hollowed eyes to the moon, and with their infernal cries
Of antique wisdom and effectual lore would score
The plates of youth clean dry, curdle and mold
Until they were old, and then lying pious,
Flesh burdened with wrinkles
As much of the pumiced page as of age,
Mournfully, they would die.

No, Israel:
The world is filled with pedants and beggars and whores, bores each after each
Their particular monstrance, and a great remonstrance is in store
When the flesh becomes spirit again, when the meat becomes bread,
And my breath moves from general beings
To the mountains and streams that have moved them,
Each to their ends.

"Me iamque iam haec tempora fecit."

Sublimated in the rich metal of his desires
Like crystal, caked like the salt
Round the urinal stalls, and bathing in streams
Of the all pure elixir,
He rose to the voice of the living God.

His spirit ascended, the angels attended
Cool clouds in the breadth of the steaming dawn;
The sun blinked his eye and kernelled and cried
The diaphanous mist, and the gleaming was dun.

All hail to the fair sea, the tablets, the dragon,
Hail all that you pass in the meadows of midnight;
Sip darkness and bird-lime from cisterns and flagons:
The glutinous honey of raptured delights

Where the moon glows in the fragments of sunsets
And time, like chipping glass, stains the winds'
Far breath to the north while the cool south will let
The turbid pools of the stars touch the morn.

Very Like a Question Mark

It could never be the same, after
The sparrow ran into the clear glass
Pane -- it was then that the wooden frame
Bent, then that the window
Cracked, and he looked into the fragments
Of a world below gone black;

Sands melting into glass grind back to sands
And rinds, the chime of the breaking
Limes across the dawn, the setting sky,
While the little bird finds her apotheosis
High in the grubs and dirt; a sprig of grass
Has munched voracious on her hips, a mushroom
Pops between her nose, and all the world waits
For the gossamer fate of her toes: back in his mind

A hundred birds are falling like a thousand portals of glossy space
Are shutting, and the doors loom larger and larger, and the free of flight
Eludes captivity in air, and all songs sing
In shattered silence.

How singular the little creeping of light comes through the pane,
The vacuum sounds of traffic moving back and forth
-- And the long-green carpet of the earth
Is limned about with birds' feet poking out
Like little bits of linoleum.

A Scientific Poem

Masses of flesh creeping on wobbly bones
Across the dirt, colliding and consuming
And returning to the earth. When it bleeds
A red stain taints the ferric ground, and seeds
Of dissension among mattered aspects sing, but somewhere deep
Under the ripple of water and the broad caves, feet
Of cisterns and the distant calling waves, rivers
Striking together like the hum of parallel keys
On a piano, drenched with rain and windblown leaves,

Creeping from the cities' seaves. Black
Darkness of clouds and the thundering storm, a forlorn
Vision of the falling axe, the hammer on the ruddy
Backs of metal planes -- and the sickles taking grain:

And if I'd known these things were a threat to me
The waves would have clamoured and joined in pain
In revolt from the mountains like the distant strain
Of a rising trumpet, the hurricane blast
Of the titans' horn, and the breath,
My last.

The Death of the Author

"By the gods who dwell above, high o'er the plains of Ida
Riding across the world in their winged chariots, their crystal palaces
Of shining gold like the rose-light of dawn: there's Venus who has mercy,
And Cupid of the admirabile locks, Apollo with his halting bow, and Neptunus
Clementia, great pitier of things. If ever mortals, besieged
By the wailing walls of a great sea, or sundered in
The labyrinth of time have clapped their palms together, not in kind applause,
But out of hope for sympathy, and sent fleet-footed prayers to Zeus above,
And nor did their hopes deceive them -- from Kunthia on the virgin rock,
Ariadne on the dire straits, and passing by the wayward sea
Betied Ulysses in his reverent ecstasy
Of sirens (Muse, inspire me
To higher things!) -- then surely where the gods take pity
There is room for mortal hope, there is room for clemency to spare the proud
And save the meek!" Thus was Turnus' prayer, and just as, four months after May,
Boreas takes summons from the sweet West Wind, and while
Zephyrus reclines to the banquet, pageantry of rest, and sips the sweet nectar
The nymphs procure when, wrapping garlands round their holms, they tap
The inner spirit of the trunk, and gather in the bark sweet drops of breath,
Aquillo still takes up his glacial sword, and iced eclairs
Of thunder, girds the shoes that beat across the chasms and the cloak of snow
That fills them in, and decorates his brow not with the laurel of Phoebus Apollo,
But with the croceus-born mistletoe to hang in rich-hued red above his grinning scowl
(the kind you see often on angry skulls, long-dead, rotting
Somewhere far in the desert winds) then jumps on the world, seizes the globe
Like the head of a victim, pulls the bull by her white-haired scalp, and slits
The ruddy blood from the just now brown-stained throat, so anger --
Menin! Rage! -- consumes Aeneas like the brazen branches of a fire
Make the red and silver leaves wither into wrinkled crisps of blackened ash
When druids dance 'mong the elms on autumn's solstice day, brandishing
The ripped, torn limbs of the forest, flashing with fire and globules of flame
Spitting into the spinning air. His fingers wrinkle, tighten round his hilt,
He sees the prostrate belt, and his brows furrow like fields, his face
Tightens up like a dried plum, old orange, franged fruit, and the elixir
Of madness and wine imbibes his veins, breaks through to the meters of conscience:
Now all drunk with anger, now all iron and ashes of conquest --
And nor did the prayer go unheard:
"The time for prayers is past, passed like the sparrow
Passes the holm, where the ring-doves take their nests, before the fallow fields of fall
And the hungry hawk, when still all are marigolds blooming, and the lilies dip, aloft,
Their cisterns of beauty, and the sun shines clear on the golden earth. Then cities
Long at war might rest, their leaders' faces lose their studied
Gloom and a smile might break like a rainbow on lips that advancing armies
Clash with joy, while they hug like brothers who lay down their arms --
The farmers beat swords into plough-shares then, and the wolf hangs his head for the lamb
And lions benev'lent for mice, like some great creature that would take in his claws
All the little, lost things of this world, and whisper like breeze from the storm,
'There you are; you're okay: for you too are beloved...' Oh but I mourn
For faces pallid and lost, thousands of sinking faces, masked in the hollows
Of hell where the air is cool, where deep whispers echo, wail from the rocks,
Downcast like the mast of the sunken that pokes above the depths, while a ripped flag,
Black, Waves like the flicker of hope in their eyes. No, the time for May
And the fragile flowers of beauty is past; you killed Pallas, my beloved, my last
Kindness in a ruined world. Now that belt clings richly to your shoulder, Turnus,
And I see the gems you must have admired, crying each for the rubies of slain,
The sapphires like his eyes, and the marbled medallion a fragment of face:
No! You cavorted! No! You wrung it round with a pretty one, showed it to Juturna
And bathed in her pleasure, feeling cool the waters flowing around you, cleansing your hands,
Setting the record of deeds in the straits, and flowing out to the vast ocean where the waves
Wrap round the shore, rap the shore, tap the carving shore, like a hammer,
Into the inevitable and invisible countenance of my revenge. Blood flows back, Turnus,
Back into the rivers, back upwards of falls, and the whole world wrinkles into itself
Like a burning rose. There is no forgiveness for triumph, and there is no sorrow
For truth." And with that Aeneas grasps his sword, his long blade, silver to the sharpened tip,
And with a trembling hand like the tremors of earth his quaking arm
Raises it into the air, and plunges it down the way a man looking over a pit
Throws a rock, and waits, in celerity of being, for the flint-strike to fall.

Then the vengeful blade found the fountain of breath, plunging into his central, his heart,
The way when a poem is read, and the author speaks to the very seams
Of the reader's garments (new and green
Seem the washing and clashing of time).
So the sword stopped in its frame, to the hilt, connected with lame and perspiring Turnus, expiring,
The way a sharp lash binds together all flesh, digging deep captive arms to the bone,
Pushing down to the very marrow, the core, and then biting firm
Like a dog that drags a dead deer, and tastes the running blood. Then Turnus' soul gasped out
With Aeneas' trembling breath, and both fled to the shadows below.

Chairondas traveled to Opium, to the place of Cincinattus, scholar and sage of some renown, his house

In the tips of the peaks, on Opium's mountain, where the clouds

swirl by like skims of cream, and the skin of the sky

Is solid and different. The lights shift in the upper air, and the sun frowns in multicolored radiance of being. There

The swift chariot of Phoebus makes its rounds in gold-broad brilliance, there

The moon proceeds through the court of her stately grace like a nacreous pearl; while she watches

The fires of the Achaeans are all glittering below, hundreds of fires, thousands of fires, winking and twinkling like a piece of the milky way cut up with a scissors and sprinkled, sprinkled liberally on the outstretched darkling earth, looking up at their mother.

Oh how the nacreous mother mourns when the camps wink out! Mourns with the coming of dawn, to see her children flee by the bridle of swift Aurora -- with the flaming eyes! -- the steed snorts impatiently, paws the ground, gallops off and the charyots are rising, clamps like the clatter of swords and the shouts, death screams and triumphs, and brown soaked with blood! Mourn or rage triumphant, and all of this

None of the wise Cincinattus' concern. He belabors his days perusing

The histories of Persia, of the Orient, of the East. Paging through many a crumbling page

His fingers perch on the word, he opens another book and examines the word, he forms in his mind the image of the word like the slice of a peach floating in the soft and subtle cream, like the slice of dawn through the crack in his window and the steaming, burnt-out candle's ashen

Edge in the pearly sky (gone the nacreous moon) and his mind

Is like butter and not lacking fatigue.

So he dreams of peaches and orchards, and the white grapes he used to pick from his mother's
Garden, like pearls, like little gems of emerald and sapphire in his stretching hands the plums and the olives would fall.

Oh the glorious of globe: he awakes with a start; a knock on the door.

"I am in love with a woman of hair like the silver chaplet of a marbled angel, and I've chaised her in Europe and Asia, the East and the West, but she smiles with teeth like pearls, a rosy white by the sheen of her skin, and she does not care with her copper brows."

"Youth comes to love with age; let the simmer in your heart fire, let it flame, let it burn down forests and whole icy lands where the crystal palaces perch unevenly in the first dropping of snow, the first falling of wintery freezes, only to be shattered by the light of an august sun."

"The snows won't fall in August but the winds blow cold in autumn and I shiver for the chill. Throw another log on the fire."

He cuts a thick leg from the chair and the little corners of flame sizzle about it, the curls of smoke claw round the nails, the pegs (for from oak, for from knotted, proud-strong limbs of iron
Oak) are last to catch, and crackle with resentful steam. Cincinattus strokes his long beard, fine like a sheep's fur, and purses flaking lips, and gnarls a gnarled, oak-like face.

"What is the cure for love, Chairondas? There was a medicine in Asia, in the east. The sages," he flips Confucist lore, bound in leather and brass, "Say the trick was to burn together

A mixture of tea-leaves, powdered flint; the combustion

Explodes and the thick scent

Rises to the nostrils, impels it through the seeping brain. But not just any tea; the leaves
Gathered from orange trees at the end of the world, for there too the thirsty orange hungers their roots

To the depths of the earth; lyre strings mixed in liberally, of course, that goes without saying,
And a bit of powdered fluff from the first spring hare: that makes good tea."

"Sicilius," (for that his other name)

"I respect your ancient lore and books, but I think the words have been

Misprinted and some drama mixed in with the rest.

I read of a golden cup off the other side of Attica wherein was kept

(and here he draws a breath)

The elixir of Plato's philosophy, whose theft

Was sacred by the fingered rivers of Oenoe;

The Hero came long ago, and threw it into the stream, and whoever drinks deep of that

Drinks deep of love."

Now the old man, Silenus, confounded by the change, let the milk of the fading day

Pore over his brows and spill down his chin, and watched for the growing flames and the oyst-made
Sky, and took to uttering one of his prophetic

Cuts of wisdom, which he made like the greased hands of peasants

Potatos and stews for the slaves:

"Sweet in the first morning, and last with the dew
Lasting into the rivers of honey, the milk-dripping
argo of argus-eyed buds. Come in the flower,
When the long corollas hang
Down their sipping pendants of life."

Sing the pride of Kroisos, Muse, Son of Alyattes,
Vainglorious, which put upon him many pains
And destroyed a mighty kingdom, once greatly strong
In wealth, while it placed him on the pyre
For all great flames and licking bolts,
So that the gods' will was accomplished,
When they first came together in counsel:
Kroisos, king of men, and that sage of Execistos.

The Star

I wish I were at the crests of waves,
Looking out over the lapidary waters
Lapping, all facets of burnt ruby brilliance,
While the sun touches the western edge of the distant shore
And the gulls fly low, skimming the water for food.
I would hold myself against the tight winds, the slashing winds,
The winds that sear my shivering arms even as the golden sun
Can crisp the burning waters' edge; the furrowed sands
Would scatter at their might beneath my wrinkled toes
And my shadow project like a monolith, unwavering,
Longer with the falling sun and shorter, then diminishing, as cool night sets
Along the starry blight of timeless sky, eternal
In her distance, a cloak as soft
As all the bars of a prison wall. Is there no star out there,
In tutelary grace, who watches the ever revolving, ingrown fields of space
Alone, utterly alone, but casting a motionless, reluctant gaze
Unknowing and unknown on all the hidden parks?

Nebilungs

Murdered, falling down into the brown earth, whimpering
And dead; mothered in the cruel winds of October
When the pale leaves cristled hard as ice and white
As snow fall above her ruby lids, her still-glowing
Embers of skin, still-beating heart. Dead:
Weep, meadows, you willows bend your leaves, strain
Until your roots crack from the earth, until you tilt
And fall. Fall! Autumn everywhere! : You've murdered
The beautiful summer, you've murdered the still-flying wings
Of the spring, you've pierced the corolla of a perfect blue flower
And stabbed it 'til the sapping veins could purple-nectar flow.
Oh for the beas now, the yellow ones on golden days
Springing resiliently from green stems of eternity, and the
Ever stretching sky. Oh for the little wandering
Creatures, the ants in the basins and courts of the earth!
Oh for the houses and the grass cracking sidewalks,
The scuff-kneed blacklings and resplendified beggars
Holding their dirt-bent, corroding cardboard signs and cups: my reveries!

Teachers of poetry, that is, sophists
Have dried them all up, stuck
A Straw into my skin, into bones, and suck
The red marrow, the blood-flowing marrow, and gnaw
On my good tasting bones. The strains of violins seeping
A little from ochred wood won't drown them out, and my breath
Is so exhausted and puckered my lips that I can't blow a horn,
A gigantic brass horn to draw out my cry so the wind
Could gather up the stirring ruby leaves and stir the embers
Into a consuming, turbulent flame, into a holocaust, and the world
Would be purified in the ringing breeze.

Metamorphosis

Night of the mind after a metaphor, in the darkness
Of words seeking after their
Flesh, of the body as real as embraceable
Forms I sing. But oh this change! How many times
Were the words you read rewritten, how many times was it necessary
To raze my thoughts and then re-raise them, lazar-like,
From the sluggish dead? How many fields
Stitched together by broken limbs and quivering fingers
Must I have crossed in the moonlight, aloft
And lonely from the city's neon edge?
Before I can find my beginning (I left
When I began to climb to attain my second self --
I found him fleeing after a shadow like the shadows
All the while tumbling from the precipice of twilight
Into the depths of the night) I mourn for the loss of myself,
The revision of time, the recreation in my recreation:
How long will the low lying cliffs hold my path through the stumbling fields
Before the whole face of the mountains is changed?

My Generation

One by one I watched them jump
Off the edges of cliffs
With zeal at the going
And never return.

And oh! how these dressed up!
-- It was quite an event. The youths were there
Screaming there drowning voices
Like the gurgle of a whirlpool; the old men
Got pushed to the back, stamped into the dirt, but didn't care:
There time was come. In the crowd
A short weasel of a man, wearing an iron crown
Through his temples and thorns in his eyes
Sold voluminous bottles of liquer. It's best, he said,
If you drink up immediately before rising
Into the engulfing void. The liquor
Slides down your tongue, making it writhe
Like a burning snake, then your eyes cloud, your throat
Waters and sees
New things in your heart: precipitating down your throat
(Again, no need for muscles, the slow moving jaunt
Of the body escalator) and escalating, it hits your stomach, where
It diffuses from the core of your body to all of your heart, your lungs,
Your brain, broad back, down to your buttocks, your feet, your fingers,
Hair, toenails, nose, and eyes, until
Poised again on the tip of your tongue, through veins and arteries
Silently flowing, the whole of your being will scream
And you jump. Jump! Hurl yourself into the abyss, and do it loudly, with a screech,
A cry of wild volupty!

So I see the abyss was yawning. So I see
The wild clouds were riding the straits of the sky like the cliff
Was perched on the darkened gulf, a broad pillar
Of sucking madness. The greedy monster like a god
Engulfed them all, like a wink, like the blink
Of their own eyes, the fantastic vision
Of their mouth, and the empty screams echoing from below like the brink
Of their voice.

Antiquity

A cleaven pot, brown, rising
In purple fragments from the earth
(Grey gristled, where the patterns
Swirl and dog in argus eyes) inside
A few shattered fragments of papyri,
Translated from the Greek, thus:

Lover, the swift borne of your hair
As the rising wind...pluck[ing] a harp
[...] and all the gods, Venus, Apollo:
Round folds of silk and the voluptuous
Texture of skies, he coiled, desiring.

When the lightning cleaves the pot into fragments,
And the nuanced mirage of the clouds wraps around
The ancient temples, twin pillars of Herakles,
The silvered marble of another time...these pots
Speak destinies, I find them each
In fragments, little cutting pieces of agate and jade
In consistence and cost, sharp enough to pluck blood
From the thirsty wound and drive deep
Into the pale skin of a shallow maiden. Parthenos, Athena
I was hunting you, your great pleated folds
Of blond hair falling like the dawn, ripping the sky
To pieces, little pieces swirling with the ravaging passage
Of time and the thunder-bolt lightning,
And the moss and the streams and the rocks.
I was singing eternal
After your shadow.

Do you hear the wind these days? All of them
Are greedy for difference and gain, and no one
Leaves touched in the gentle light of an adoring cove
In the overgrown gardens of time
That unsearchable, quaesiting marble, bending in towards herself
In voluptuous folds, all the scarlet of form and the gold
Of her hair:
Athena I could kiss your lips, your unworshipped lips
While the storm and the ravage of time is consuming the world,
Sweeping the continents into the seas.

Shades

Human beauty was entrusted into my care
He said yes I wrapped myself around him
Like ivy sucking the first sweet sap from trees
I plucked myself into conflagrations of berries but
A sad wind. The sky falls in small drops, very small
When you're lonely and the air is whirling inferno around you,
Very small when the earth turns slowly into shadows
And whirling darkness: if you clasp a shadow
It flees, like the efforts of an adamantine pincer
On the thin and steel-clacked air. Suddenly he was a shadow
Falling across my arms and dampening my dreams like an arid torrent,
A volcanic eruption of water from deep springs above (and
The little vines running into ravines, thick moss-gatherers,
Vines sucking teats of the mountain, juicing
Hard rock). Hello my voice
Quivered in the shadows, patiently, delicately exploring
The far reaches and the arid domains, all the way
To the valleys of hills and the hesitant sunset. Darkness.

(Flash) Photography

So really the rosy forests, really
The standing blue and a picture of
You on the rocks, you by the resinous
Outcropping, cut-picked, piquing
Photographed rocks, weaving together
A dreamland veracity, the blowing
Wind and the lithe photography, ripped
On the white-scored edges, lipped
Grey, faded with dots of withering
Black (oh I could come to you
In the night, in your arms I would take
A million pictures, a million
More, and then a thousand, a hundred
Thousand still-shot pictures of your face):

The golden hues, fading in the so-dark
Edges, and then a dazzling array of
Shadows, gliding, dwelling under by the crannies, nooks,
Brooks of bristling like the shady leaves, even
Singing where the blurs, a kind of exalted
Singing glowing, and the microscopic
Burrs and crops: and where I stop, I lop
A clear-cut stream of dulcimer to the dulcet dark.

Elegy for a Love Toy

I saw you with the beautiful brown hair, russet streaked a scarlet dawn
Of faded gold, unsure and unaware, the rolling folds
Of your fading jeans were dragging on a walk: how
I longed to talk, to spew in bold strokes those words like an autumn twilight: "I love you"
Would we have whispered on casual Venised streets, while a tower
Pokes in the distance through the twin framing hills of below, wrapped
In round stone and the distant rap
Of the beating drums (some errant bum)? Even birds would hum in our sunset quiet
And the air would smell of buttered cakes and the old men taste their kegs
Of cafe'd ale (he's watching the legs of beautiful Meg, the American
Girl in the streets with the dazzling ring, wrung round the next of her pinky,
Gleaming a delicate flash while her bust
Excites another gleam, a heated flush of desire
In an otherwise cracked, worn and wearing marbled...) but we'd taste lips:
Yours soft, round, pale but browned
With a sip of cocoa, merging with your browning, day-drenched skin, my hand
Harvesting tips of golden grain through your darkening hair, other
One wrapped round ecstasy of chiseled space, and in the darkness moonlight streams
Like only cream that skims the void of a remembered face.

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.

A poet / teacher on mediocre poetry:

"As for the presence of so much failed or mediocre or formulaic work piling up around the ostensible "real thing"--that also seems to me a normal and healthy process. In a great pyramid, most of the stones are inside--not polished, not perfect. Some, very few, are the visible, sharp-edged outside stones by which we feel we know the pyramid to be a pyramid. In poetry, some of us are laying the inside stones. Some of us those shiny outer edges. The aim is to build the glorious thing. And if you look back at any period in the history of poetry in this language there are really so very few poets whose work endures--rarely more than two or three in a generation--and yet all that "poorer" work was always being written, all around them, perhaps in some crucial way actually permitting them to do their work. How often one finds the stated "major influence" on some magnificent poet to be some "minor" poet whose work simply doesn't make any real sense as an influence on the "great" one. Who knows what we all give each other--it's such a mysterious process. And yet, somehow, letting everyone add their share, century after century, it gets done."

I've spent most of the evening talking online, and I also watched "Ladykillers", the British version, which is far superior to the new one with Tom Hanks. Mr. Hanks is, of course, an excellent actor and his character is larger and more memorable than the original's -- but what is lost in translation is a subtlety that I think is unique to British film; Americans are no good with dry wit -- everything of ours is so dramatic, so sugary-sweet and inevitably cheap. While the British version is filmed in black and white, it's the American version that delights in the grossest caricatures, the most obvious contrasts, and these extend even into the picture: it's easier to see what's happening onscreen in the new version, but the "black and white" of the original has a nuanced nonchalance, it has shades of grey.

I made the mistake of reading the Kid's blog. He's still with his new boyfriend, was arrested for driving without a license while smoking pot, quit his job. Seems like he's still too hard on himself, still has panic attacks, and lacks all sense of direction. But for all that he's surviving -- Thornton was right, he didn't need me. What especially hurts when I read his entries are his kind references to his new boy:

Im in love again, Im going to be moving out and Moving In with a boy for the first time ever. Life is good. Mike is amazing, Hes unlike anyone Ive known thus far, Treats me very well. Is A romantic guy like me too, so its great.

I have to say, if only for the much needed feeling of intellectual superiority, sic. And that's how it makes me feel. "Mike is amazing. He's unlike anyone I've known thus far; treats me very well. Is a romantic guy like me too, so it's great" -- it stings me; it's a stab at my heart. It's my fault for reading it, I know...but when he was with me, I was the beloved, I was special, and it was I who was "unlike anyone [he'd] known thus far". It really hurts me to think that he could just move on to someone else, some random guy that he met on a whim from the Internet, and already he's thinking of moving in with him and his given himself up to him completely.

I don't know if I envy him -- I think what I wish that the Kid knew was how much I really did cared about him and identified with him. I mean, I did love the time we spent together and I do miss him, but I had to decide that he wasn't for me. And I feel like I'm the one who's suffering for that decision, which isn't fair -- I broke up with him because I thought that it would be good for me. But here I am.

Just because we decide upon the best course in life, or any course at all, doesn't mean that it will be without pain. What is left of the Kid is a multifaceted memory: hugging him on a park bench while he cried; walking through the mall holding his hand and expostulating my wild theories as he scanned for potential gay-bashers; suffering panic attacks in the middle of the night while he lay in bed waiting for me to crawl into his arms, waking up the next morning and wanting any kind of stimulation, wanting out of that suffocating little room where he smoked twice an hour and chatted on AOL; hating to be with him but running after his bus to prolong our partings; feeling the pangs of regret when I hurt him, the wild exhiliration when we made up; seeing the broad green of the park near his house from the window of Bus 33, watching the lights of a titty bar wink at me from across the highway on the night I broke up with him, while I waited in the fading light for another bus, a final bus that would not, would not come. Today I was walking through that park again and I was haunted by the thought that I would see him with his boyfriend; I felt the most palpable agony at each unrevealed face and distance-hidden stranger, as if it were the shock of him watching.

Unless I send this to him, he'll probably never read it. My life will continue; I'll continue to write my turgid prose, and for other men. Still -- why I am left with these memories, this loneliness, while he has already moved past me and I am to him nothing more than a vague recollection, a dreamy face among the time-blurred crowd of ex-lovers who must now bow before the living idol of his new love?

I still have all my interests to shield me from this world and to filter out the stream of life; but I wish that I could push beyond them to connect with more people, and beyond anything else I have a keen desire to be loved with pure, unadulterated passion and to so love in turn. This desire is my downfall, and perhaps my redemption; I find its living embodiment in the character of Aschenbach, the hero of Mann's "Death in Venice". Mann has succeeded in painting, for the intellectual and self-consecrated artist, his private remorse. Where are you, my Tadziu?

Mon âme vers ton front où rêve, ô calme sœur,
Un automne jonché de taches de rousseur,
Et vers le ciel errant de ton œil angélique
Monte, comme dans un jardin mélancolique,
Fidèle, un blanc jet d'eau soupire vers l'Azur !
- Vers l'Azur attendri d'Octobre pâle et pur
Qui mire aux grands bassins sa langeur infinie
Et laisse, sur l'eau morte où la fauve agonie
Des feuilles erre au vent et creuse un froid sillon,
Se traîner le soleil jaune d'un long rayon.

"Mon âme", the poetic soul, but truly poetic, and also the loved one, the expression that denotes the very core of one's being; it is the center of the human that climbs, up, up, and out of itself, like the rising waters of a fountain, or bent as the great weight of the moon bends water, "vers ton front oü rêve, ô calme soeur", where the contrast is immediate between the calm serenity of sorority and fervent masculine rising; here is a calm that lapses into sleep, the sleep of "un automne jonché de taches de rousseur", which can only be indentified with the hypnotic crimson folds of the lover's dress, a shimmering of phantom light that finally gives way to the white flicker of "le ciel errant de ton oeil angélique"; infinite, a sky, and yet immediately limited, immediately the globe that holds it, like the unescapable earth, the unescapable winter that autumn portends; the paradox continued in the angel who errs; the fallen angel and the sky captured in the globe of the smallest proportions, but nonetheless the soul climbs towards this vague infinity of being; bounded because it is being, but insofar as it is, being infinite.

The "jardin mélancolique" must bear out these contradictions, and reminds us of the original garden of Eden and the first sin. So the fallen angel of infinitely orbed and delimited oneness inhabits the garden, in one of those grandly contradictory gestures, God's hand reaching out from the infinite to create the mortal creature, who is not yet mortal but bounded by the inevitable facillty of his sin. Here, in the center of the poem, the soul rises, but finally that rising is only a sigh, a sigh towards heaven. "Soupire" holds the great weight of sadness, borne out by the white dashes of clouds in the blue sky, borne out in the irony of the faithful fountain that continues its duties, according to the laws of nature, when by those same laws, seemingly, man must fall, and cannot find the positive force he seeks even in the loved one, who errs, and whose dress is crimson, that deceiving Eve of the red apple -- the poetic rising of the soul must lapse into the purely sexual rush of the blood into upward erection.

This tender sadness is the tender October, the beautiful month, the month easily imagined for Keat's sonnet, and still the sky is a burning blue; but it is pale, fragile, and this whiteness now reminds us of the imminent snow.

Here the poem turns.

Because this sadness, this human grasping at the infinite, this is pure -- this is the purity of the soul moving, this is the motion, and the sadness is captured in all of the images but static, and overcome in this headlong rush, embodying grief but beyond it. This is a "langeur" but a "langeur infinie", rolling along on limp L's, gurgling into the R, but stretching even into the limpid clearness of the I like the sky.

We must judge the poem by its aim, and it is this aim, transcending the dead water and the savage wildness of the agony of "feuilles", an agony of both the falling leaves and of dying poetry, the double death of the white, unfilled page and the page that is already filled and is lifeless in the limp hand that produced it, it is this aim that, while it might blow with the cold october winds, portending winter, portending the ultimate death, portending the cold furrows of nothingness, still, in digging this furrow, still, in rising, drags along with it "le soleil jaune d'un long rayon" -- this arrow-streak of beauty, of light, of life, fills the gaps of emptiness, fills the scarlet blotch of sin embodied in Eden's fall, leaps above its source, and, in leaping, transcends its very self and overcomes the white death of the empty page, even as it springs from it and must fall back into that emptiness; poetry is a kind of arc, a jump through the nothing, an echo in the vast reaches, the void of eternity.

I've been semi-sick for the past couple days; I don't know what it is -- could be pollen, could be an actual cold -- but I've had a slight sore throat and all my muscles are really sore. I feel a little bit better today.

For the Fourth of July I went to Vancouver, Washington with my friend (and I use the term loosely) Gael, two lesbians, an extremely effeminate youth, Redface (whom Gael is apparently involved with, despite the fact that he already has a boyfriend), and a tall, dark, handsome fellow, Petra. We drove from Portland into the suburbs, and I was struck by the sheer green beauty of the landscape. This was the earth, city-obscured, the earth of fields and hills, sprouting trees and mossy locks, the life-bound, boundless, fertile globe along which we move, in flying metal. It reminded me of the suburbs where I grew up, and I felt a little homesick. The city is different from the suburbs, however close they are to each other, and I missed the hills, the neat, two-story houses, the manicured lawns, always overshadowed by the reminiscence of a more ancient landscape, domesticated but untamed, and vast. I miss now the shopping centers, domed by the long globe of the sky, where teenagers and their middle-aged, comfortable mothers and fathers came to buy groceries or rent a movie or browse, ignorant and self-content, through the clean aisles of mass-produced but ultimately innocuous books, whispering each, "This is life; what I say is different but finally kind; wars, religious turmoil, turpitude, angst are all things to be considered from the privacy of a soft armchair, and discussed politely at genteel dinner-parties; or you can brood, if you like, in your SUV, over the hum of NPR." It is the quiet, secluded, privileged life of the rich middle-class, mostly caucasians, yuppies all, but I miss it. I don't live in the center of the city in all its gargantuan hugeness, where people pour around thousand foot skyscrapers like ants around sand-castles, but Portland, in its gritty, poor, matter-of-fact realness, is tiring in its own right.

The festival was typical of its kind. Thousands of people (46,000, in fact) swarming on a common green, trampling the grass, laying down blankets, holding each other, kissing, laughing, buzzing with conversation, eating grapes, watermelon, pizza, purchased confections (and there were the concession stands, people-swarmed and swarming), massing into porto-potties set in rows like a parody of neighborhood blocks; these were dirty teenagers with fat faces and baggy pants, goateed, chin pointed men, their tall and slim, maquillaged women, clutched about the shoulders -- their lonely and broad counterpoints, soiled, stretched garments bulging with skin, clutching skirts and purses. Crowds like these remind me of the living dead, the masses of flesh eating, "rancid humanity", that eerie, prophetic painting of America in the throes of a modern apocalypse.

The fireworks began shortly after the band stopped, a sort of rolicking, insipid jazz that I think no one enjoyed. We saw them through a curtain of trees, unfolding their petals of light, soaring never high enough, but always obscured by the swaying foliage. The music, projected from the now empty bandstand, crackled, fuzzed, and halted, started up again. A country song played, "If tomorrow I lost everything I've worked for in my life / Except my twenty children and my trailer-lovely wife / And this godly country..." or something like that. I booed, a chorus of one. "What is this," I asked Chea (one of the lesbians), "the fourth of July?"

When the fireworks stopped, the paralyzed masses rose up in a turmoil, fleeing in every direction, riding bikes, boarding cars, buses, walking, whispering, chattering, and spilled over the highways like a flood. The grassy fields, I imagine, lapsed again into emptiness, into serene and midnight silence, into a post-diluvian tranquility that held with the singing of crickets at least until dawn.

I'm sitting at my computer listening to Bach; the harpsichord triples in minors, the violin purrs a story that's filled with despair, but balanced the one against the other, there's the feeling that I often get from Bach -- that life is sad but valuable, lonely but worthwhile in spite of, or perhaps because of, that loneliness.

I remember what Thornton said to me still, when I broke up with Jon and was in utter agony and whined and whined to him: he said that he didn't have time to talk to me because I was melancholy, that he didn't have time for people who have negative attitudes. That really struck me to the core. Of course it was mean and shallow of him to say that, and of course I hurt his friend, so I could expect no sympathy, but it reminds me of the things J.D. used to tell me -- and they're both of them older men, although Thornton is about 20 years JD's senior.

Is it really possible to control your happiness? Can you just decide to dawn or brighten up, like a light-bulb, at the flick of a switch? Sometimes, I'll admit, I treasure my melancholy, even though I rarely enjoy it -- because that's the life that I know, and it's hard to imagine anything else. I try to change my perspective, I try to be more social with people; lately I've been greeting people on the Trimet bus system, striking up conversations, and bidding good-day to random people I see on the street -- but sometimes I'm just sad, and more, I'm lonely. I feel like people expect me to be happy or go away, and that just doesn't seem fair. There's a certain morality in happiness, tenuous and tricky, but I think we expect our peers to be happy; we do, like Thornton, instinctively shy away from the whiners, the self-pitiers, and I'm not sure if that's merited or if it's a crime.

I still miss Jon. I don't miss anything about him particularly; he smoked pot all the time, he never had anything interesting to talk about -- but at the same time he was sweet and he was a boyfriend. He was interested in me. Or I felt he was interested in me; but to meet someone and be "together" with them but a week after...although to be fair, he dumped me. Still, it reminds me of Hamlet's quip to Horatio, 'the funeral meats did but coldly furnish forth the wedding tables'. Now he has a new boyfriend, and I'm alone. I feel like I deserve it; as if this is my punishment for breaking up with him -- and at the same time, I don't understand why I'm the one who has to suffer. Brannian tells me that's the way life works. There's no reason in it, no intricate meaning, no "karma" -- it just is. Shit happens. Still, when I broke up with him (at his birthday party no less), I remember feeling awful; I remember crying to the sky for a lightning bolt, for some kind of a punishment; I felt so guilty -- and I couldn't believe that I could do something so awful without suffering for it. But suffer I did, and I still am. Yet it was right. Ultimately, it was the right thing to do.

I finished Virgil's fifth eclogue today, the commentaries, and started on the sixth. I need to begin reviewing my Greek for classes next year, too; but I always shy away from it -- it's harder to use the Greek dictionary. There's also this business of mistakes: I have no way of knowing that I'm not making tons of mistakes as I parse through Virgil and Lysias...but I suppose even if I got one thing wrong and one thing right in every sentence, the true knowledge would augment and the false examples, in insolation, would eventually correct themselves when set against the larger store of evidence. Learning a language is a bit like excavating -- the more you unearth, the better a feel you get for the thing you're investigating; a single block of stone or a fragment of a pot isn't going to get you anywhere, but everything together tells a story, assembles into a coherent whole. Alex the archaeologist! Ha!

I went to a jazz festival tonight. It was five dollars to get in. I was a bit grudging to pay the five dollars -- I don't know why; I'm such a cheapskate. It was for a good cause, too: feeding the hungry. Still, all these philanthropic ideals -- I can't help but feel skeptical. I mean, feeding the hungry isn't going to solve things; it isn't going to somehow make life meaningful. There will only be more hunger; they beggars will reproduce, population will increase...from a biological standpoint, providing resources to the hungry doesn't seem like it will help things. And sometimes, sadly, I'm very much a biologist.

There were Christians outside of the fair trying to convert people. I was in a very bad mood; maybe it was because I'd just been reading the (highly inaccurate) War for God at a bookstore, but I just became so infuriated. I pushed my way through them and when one of them asked, "Have you heard the Gospel?" I said, "No, but I know when it was written," and walked on. I wanted to say, "I probably know the Gospel better than you do," or ask a million questions or start arguing. But Thornton said something else, "You aren't going to convert them and they aren't going to convert you." How these ghosts haunt me!

Ben is dating someone now, too. Well, I'm still single. If I'm single forever (which is a far way to predict from twenty) then I suppose I'd better get used to it; and take some small consolation in the fact that there are many other single people and the idea that there's much besides to do. Like memorize poems. Or dance. Tonight, outside, with a crowd of adults, some alone, or married, some young, others well into their sixties, I danced to accordion jazz. The Wilamette River flowed on by us, customers at restaurants ate their dinners, and a youth, poet and scholar, for once forgot his choler and moved to the inane beats of the herd. Maybe happiness is a choice after all.

My sanity is collapsing. My thoughts are like boiling water, my mind is like a raging, turbid sea, and words, words come pouring out, words like raining, drizzling hailstones, chunking houses, grounding the plains in fickle ice. The air crackles, incessant static, and all vision is the snow and fuzz of bad reception. Feeling shudders through me, through a beating heart, through air-brushed skin, through hair and cool and itch; the same dull smell, the same clear taste. I feel like I'm floating in an immense space of clearness. The ever pervasive sense is the sense of time passing, time slipping away like minute grains, and everything is calamity.

Devices break -- TV's, DVD players, computers, the world is all one big heap of broken things. Metal upon corroding metal, foil on crinkled foil, broken, brittle pieces crushing the edges of even smaller and more brittle points. A glaring light runs through everything, or the sapping static electric of light, and even the edges of pure forms are dull, brittle, corroded, and bleeding with rust.

My love comes to me from the desert; a harsh desert, a desert of nothings, a desert of throbbing bodies and the scraping away and tearing of skin and the licking, nursing of wounds, and my love comes to me in the desert, from the desert, bearing a book, a cross, a sign, and while the winds blow, he says, "Take the way of peace, the path of the righteous; be happy and drink from the well hallowed wells where all is clear water, where leaves drift about scarlet in the night, where life is a burning of sacred light." And what do I do in the pure blue sky of his eyes? I spit to the winds, I would leave myself cold, I wrap myself in darkness and ashes and dust. My own personality overwhelms him, settles down on him like a thick, suffocating cloak of smoke, and I can't escape this haze, this horrible haze that clouds over everything, makes the rocks blacker, and shrouds the azure sky and makes everything dark.

When darkness falls I wish I could swim a million miles. I wish it were only myself trapped in the cold darkness of the rushing seas, jagged rock islands poking out of the water by my side, far right and left, but myself, storm tossed and freezing, blown by harsh winds and scattered by rains while always the cool stars above, always the quivering libidinous earth-bound mass below, struggling until my over-taut, grinded grunting muscles give way and I collapse, and the cool waters close over my head, invade my brain and still my breathing throat, my gaping gorge. I am heading for my special isle; swimming through the mass of sea back to my country, back to my home-land. There it's always warm and dark, there the breaths come in hot, soft whispers, there there is darkness to cover me, darkness to blanket me, and everywhere just the cool, warm, soft, pliable, wax-like curving edges to curve me into infinity and cover me with nothing. Finally in the dark and eternal night of unconsciousness, of non-consciousness, I slip into all being and all being resolves itself through me; the nothingness has become all and the all nothing.

Until that moment of pulchritude and consummation, there's only the world of colluding and colliding experiences. The fallen world. The world that still believes the consummation of all matter is God. All matter -- the mass of rolling atoms; atoms pushing in the wind, atoms striking in the void, everything, everything separated but just little specks, tiny little dots of infinite mass, separated by vast distances, the distances as vast as the distances between myself and all others, between me and my boyfriend, the widening gap that I can never feel through.

When I'm with him, when I'm lying with him, lying next to him, I wonder -- can I ever please him? Can I ever consummate his desires? I look at myself, the livid piece of meat that I am; I find no peace in his arms, because I'm always quivering, always rotting, always suffocating under the tenderness of his embrace. I think: is this my final chance for love? Is this my final chance for peace? My desires, my wretched ambitions to write, my desire for the consummations and unifications of poetry, and my labors, all of my labors are interrupted by the stretching of days, the stretching of arms, embraces, and the cold fervor of one heart beating next to another. As if I want to be myself, I want to burst out of myself, but I'm afraid if I am myself I'll lose him. So I conceal myself, I go into a deep shell, I go into hiding because the truth is, it's more important to me to keep him, more important to me to stay bound together in his knot -- just never to be lonely and most of all to be loved. So I have no real schedule and I'm quivering to him live like an uncooked piece of meat. I'm an incoherent jumbled mass of words that don't resolve themselves, words that fit like puzzle pieces with the wrong ends, desires that don't quite combine, contradictory desires, contradictory thoughts; how can I offer this tattered, broken, quivering thing, searching everywhere for unity in books, everywhere for unity in poems, everywhere for unity in art, to someone else, a fragmented decaying dropping collapsing colliding overheaping overfilled overstuffed overmade and united bundle of junk into collusion? I can't mix myself when I'm overflowing out of myself. I want only to escape from my life; I want peace.

But peace is far away; but peace is the crackling of fires; but peace is the darkness of death. When I go to the place of death I'll go to a land where all wrongs are righted; where no longer can I hurt anyone I care about, or break to pieces and shatter the objects and ornaments I most hold dear and love. Every walking, every journey, every moment is a subordinate moment -- subordinate to this great darkness that will bear no subordination. I'm ordained to die, and confused with every waking moment, yet so desperately clinging to this quivering, clinking, roaring, collapsing, rising and falling, degrading sea of shadows and darkness, feasts and flesh.

Love is a great light, love is a great heat, love is something to be treasured with the kiss of red like ripe fruit lips, and something that is so rare and so precious it is a little green-glistening gem, a ruby, a good ripe diamond, or the sweetness of bursting in and through the mouth, a grape. Love drenches through the body and soaks the soul like wine; love make everything inebriation, love pines away always a fire against shadows, always like a throbbing sun against the night. Here is quandary: I who have aligned myself most close with death, I who take good kisses from this dark but comely sister, how am I to love? How am I to join my breast with life's hot breast, feel the heat emanating always from his chest and every limb without some plaguing guilt? I wish I could sail far, far down the Nile into the heated pyramidal rising spaces of Egypt, and then be done in the mounds of sand covering every ground, and bury myself with the wind. But life calls me like the hot sun burning the edges of the pyramids, like the broken Sphinx's nose, well seen, and glowering eyes will not recall me from their gaze. Life is the making of choices, the pouring of decisions like the spilling of ink, and every drop of ink must be salvaged, recombined on the page to make something more than music, less than noise. A seeker of silences am I; I join quiet whispers together into sounds, not wondrous but soft and sweet, cooing like death, but always to be joined to unity of life is a throb and a pain, a continual raping and a birth. Jon, this is my love for you; my love is the birth, the dawning of warm blood rushing to my cock spreading like a light over my body, a light I can't dimiss or even flinging myself against the broad and bursting chambers of my heart resist, and the cist of compulsion bursts, emotion washes over me, and I am bathing in a sea.

Someday when the sun is burning down on my skin and the soft waves coo on the edges of my consciousness and my mind is pliable and soft and melted wax, and my lips have the honey-sweet breath of the dew, their due, I'll think of you and your warm body pressed against mine now; I'll think how I was meant to be a crackling mass, a burnt and gooey, roasted sweet, something to melt and sag and collapse. For only by burning, crackling, flaming and puckering in the heat of life can we yield to death; and only then does time collapse to rinds and lees of burnt, ashes of coffee, remnants and weeds and desert sand. Scatter me to the winds; burn me like my poems, my love, and scatter me to the winds. Blow harsh and cold and cool and leave the endless stretching, blue, and moon-reflected sky so calm.

The sound of bubbling madness; the insanity of a throated pitch; spears heading for enemies' hearts. Meanwhile loud rustling of wind and the quick clash of arms, the thrust of bodies head-long into flight, and far off flowers; a cool hyacinth shudders, curls, and falls by raging streams. The foam flecks the speckled rocks, a butterfly perches on the wetted blossom, licks, takes off. Now leaves rustle, and shrubs weighed down with pregnant berries. Menalcan is playing the pipe, puts down the pans, and with a rugged knife he cuts a fawn from tender bark. The sun is setting near the hills, mixing with the falls in brilliant streams of red and orange and gold, so that the chills are water running down like precious gems, like all silk hems of finely-woven sheens. In the decorated chambers, maidens dance with maidens to the music of the lute that rushes through the rafters and the floors, where hoardes of decorated men all gleaming in their iron mail clink clashing cups and laugh and sup on venison from recent fallen stags, who lay there quivering while the chinking arrow sank into their heavy hide, procuring flowing sighs of fresh and eager blood, while their flesh-stripped bones were left to rot, and the remnants were nourishment for all thick moss.

Virgil, Eclogue II, englished:

For Alexis, beautiful, pastor Corydon was on fire,
-- The darling of their master -- and nor did he get what he'd hoped.
Only in the densest branches, all of shady tips,
He usually came. There these foundless things, alone
Among the hills and forests spewed he forth with studied zeal:
"O crudely Alexis, care you nothing for my songs?
Pity us not at all? For death do you finally think me?
Even now the shadows, and coolness capture flocks,
Now thorny bushes hide even their emerald lizards,
And Thestylis in the rabid (for her reapers) heat
Crushes thyme on dinner with other fragrant herbs.
But with me and raucous (while I lust your steps
Beneath the ardent sun) cicadas resonate the trees.
Amaryllida was not enough for me to bear, bitter rage
And proudly prude? And neither Menalcan,
However black he was, and you as white?
O beautiful boy, exceedingly shouldst never trust to color
White privet blossoms fall, black hyacinths are gathered.
Hateful to you am I, nor do you ask who I am, Alexis,
How rich in flocks, abundant how in snowy milk.
Thousands of my lambs err in Siculian hills;
Milk does not lack for me, neither in the spring or fall, and fresh.
I sing those things as he, habitually, (if ever didst call fields)
Amphion Dircaeus in Actian Aracynthus.
I'm not even so ugly: recently I saw myself on the beach,
When placid by the winds stood seas. Before Daphnin I should not,
In your opinion, quake, if reflections never lie.
Oh! If only it were pleasing for you, with me in found fields,
To live in humble houses, and hunt deer,
And drive their mothers' young with greened mallow!
Along with me in the forests you'll imitate Pan on the pipes
(For Pan first joined together with wax very many reeds
And founded syrinx, Pan who cares for flocks, and of the flocks, their masters),
Nor repent yourself for wearing off by flute your lips:
What would Amyntas fail to do to learn the same?
I have a pan compact of seven different pipes,
Which, as a gift, Damoetas gave me once,
And dying said: "These are your master now";
Damoetas said, while jealous Amyntas watched.
Besides, I have two, unknown in the tucked-away valley,
Fawns, sparse even now with whitened spots,
Who twice a day will dry the teats of sheep; and these I keep for you.
Long since Thestylis begged to lead those off from me,
And will do yet, since you think shit our gifts.
Come hence, beautiful boy, oh! For you lilies in full,
Behold the nymphs bring baskets; for you the shining Nais,
Plucking violets pale and poppies' tips,
Narcissus and flower joins of sweetly odored anise;
Then with wild cinnamon and mixing other suavely herbs
With gentle, little yellow she weaves hyacinth and violet.
I myself will gather white of tender the downy apple
And chestnuts, which my Amaryllis once loved;
I will certainly add waxy plums (for there is also honor in this fruit)
And you, oh laurels, pluck, and you, approximate myrtle,
So placed since you mix sweetly odors.
You are a rustic, Corydon; nor does Alexis care for your gifts,
Nor, if for them most certain, would Iollas concede.
Oh, oh, what did I want for miserable me? With flowers the Austrum
-- Foolish! -- to fight, to cast off wild boars with flowing fountains?
Where do you flee, ah! demented? They live also, gods, in the forests,
And Dardan Paris. Pallas who founded cities
Herself is tenant; to us the trees are more placid than all.
The savage lioness hunts the wolf, the wolf himself the sheep,
And flowering willows sate the lascivious goat,
And Corydon you, o Alexus: whatever floats your boat.
Look, the bulls take up again on yoke the hanging plough,
And the sun doubles rising shadows as it falls;
Nontheless, love burns me: for what bounds hold back love?
Ah, Corydon, Corydon, what dementia has seized you!
Half-shorn your leafy vines grow on the elm:
Might you not something more worthy, of which use needs,
With pliant branch and supple thrush prepare to weave?
You will find -- if this one forebears -- another Alexis."

Virgil, Eclogue 1

M. Tityrus, reclining 'neath the shade of a spreading beech
With tenuous oat you meditate the sylvan Muse;
We flee the edges of our country and leave the dulcet fields;
We are fleeing our homeland -- you, Tityrus, light in the shadows
Instruct the woods to resonate your lovely Amaryllis.
T. O Melibeoeus, a god granted us this peace
For ever will he be a god to me, and ever will a lamb,
Tender from our flocks, his altar stain.
He, as you see, allows my cows to wander, and myself
To play those things I wish on rugged pipe.
M. I do not even envy, more admire; everywhere, wherever I go
The entire country quakes. What's more, I prod my flock
Forward for ills; and her, Tityrus, I lead with aches:
For here among the dense hazels, just now twins,
The hope of a flock, ah! -- she left them on the naked rock.
Often this evil to us -- if not for a wandering mind --
I recall had predicted an oak, heavenly struck.
But nevertheless this god, who he is, give, Tityrus, to us.
T. That city which they call Rome, Meliboeus, I once believed
-- foolish I! -- alike to this our own, to which we are often accustomed,
Pastors all, to dispatch tender kids from our flock.
So dogs are like to cats, so mothers their young
Thought I -- to confound great things with small, this was my fault;
Truly Rome raises her head as much above cities
As cypresses will turn their nose up at the fragile guelder-rose.
M. And what was, for you, the so great cause of seeing Rome?
T. Liberty, who late though she was, respected a laggard;
After the beard fell from the razor more whitely,
She paid respect all the same and, long overdue, she came
After Amaryllis had us, and Galatea left us.
For this I will admit: as long as Galatea held me
Neither hope of liberty was nor care for savings.
How ever many victims you wish came out from my holdings,
However much rich cheese was pressed for our ungrateful town,
Not ever weighed down with copper would my palm come home.
M. Amaryllis, I had wondered why, grieving, you would call the gods,
For whom you left his apples to hang on the tree;
Tityrus had left. The pines themselves, Tityrus,
Even the fountains, yes verily these trees would call your name.
T. What could I do? Neither could I loose my yoke
Otherwise nor elsewhere come to know such present gods.
There I saw him in the resplendence of his youth, Meliboeus,
To whom our altars fume each year for twice six days.
There he gave this answer first to my request:
"Pasture your oxen as before, my sons, and raise your bulls."
M. Fortunate old man, so the fields will remain yours
And however much you need, whatever you want of bedrock
And all this chalky pasture overgrown with slimy thrush;
Nor will unaccustomed fodder tempt those laden with birth,
Neither will the ills of neighboring flocks infect them.
Happy elder, here among well known streams
And sacred fountains you will capture the coolness of shade;
Here for you, as always, from the neighboring limits
Hedges that feed with salictian flower the Hyblean bees
Will often coax you to sleep with soft whispers;
There below the high cliff the hedge-trimmer cries to the heavens,
Nor meanwhile will the shrill wood-pigeons, your delight,
Nor the turtle-dove cease to moan on airy elms.
T Therefore first will winged deer graze in the clouds
And channels abandon fresh fish on the beach,
First overwandering both of their boundaries either the exiled
Parthian will drink from the Arar or the German from Tiger,
Before the god's face is forgotten from our heart.
M. As for us, others, from hence, will reach thirsty Africa,
And some will call Scythia and the rapid clay's Oaxen home,
or dwell in Britannia, deeply divided from all the globe.
How will I ever again, long from now, seeing the pauperish edge
Of my homeland, and the sod gathered roof of my hut
After so many years admire my kingdom, my crop?
A good for nothing soldier will keep these sweat-grown fields,
A hawk will tend this turf. Behold how civil war incites
Civillians' cares: for this we sowed the fields!
Plant, Meliboeus, your pears, now place your vines in line.
Come, oh mine, once happy flock of sheep, let's go.
Nor will I, after this, couched away in a green-grown cave
Watch you hang far away on the thorny rocks; no,
I will sing no songs; nor where I lead, my flock
Will you pluck the flowering clover or feed on weeping willows.
T. Nonetheless here, with me, you could stay this night
Above the ripening green: for us there are succulent pears,
Chestnuts soft, an extravagance of pressured cheese;
But look, far off the highest city tops already fume
And greater shadows glide down from the hills.

I started "Being and Time" this evening. Utterly senseless -- it makes me want to cry. I thought I knew something, that I could understand things if I read them, that I was moderately educated -- there was barely a sentence that made real sense to me and I can only claim a single section honestly interested me. And yet -- Heidigger is trying to figure out what *being* *is*. I *am* -- this concerns *me* -- I should be fascinated. But I can't help but think -- it's unanswerable, it's too obscure, it's...

I've been trying to figure out what being is my whole life. I mean, what existence means, and what it means to me, and whether it means (that is to say, communicates?) at all. But...did he solve the problem? Did he give a definition for being? More words to throw around at parties, I suppose -- impress people: "I'm reading Heidigger" -- "Will you fuck me?" The utter frustration of it! To think that you can apprehend and not know what you're apprehending -- perhaps it challenges me. It definitely challenges me. It challenges me like very few things I've ever encountered; like, in fact, nothing I've ever encountered. There's always a basis for any other question, always some point to claw at, to grasp, but nothing for the question of being except being itself. I'll keep you posted. Part of me wants to put it down and never take it back up ever again. And then there will be a major work of philosophy that influenced everybody in the 20th century that I don't understand. Whatever my carreer, I am a foreigner in my own time, to my own people, well read in ancient sources but ultimately outside of the loop.

This brings me to another question that I often ask: is there anything to be gained by all this study? Beyong pleasure? Is pleasure itself reason enough? Should it bother me that I don't understand how trees work, what a tree essentially is? When a moment passes I don't know what that passing is. I am, but I don't comprehend myself. The utter exhaustion of it. And whatever I write, whatever I think, is an unformed and unthought thought, misunderstand and misapprehended, lost to all comprehension like a quick flash of light in the dark, a raging spark that burns and sputters out, or some thing -- a meaningless nothing. It distances me further from religion, from poetry, from any validation -- how can I validate anything when I understand none of it? How can I, confronted with this nothing, affirm "O youth perspicuous in bloom" when these are images in my mind, but the source, the I, is beyond me? And yet it is comforting to think I enter the illusory world of knowledge, like a dream, like a mist, and through the comparison of one thing to another, I begin to understand this nothing by dividing it, splitting it into smaller infinities, smaller nothings, and rearranging each in a pattern of nothing, and affirming, "be". So I know that bloom is the growth of a flower, a flower the growth of the spring, and spring the growth of life, which is the opposite of fall and winter, death and nothing, being that springs from the absence of being. Youth too, is life, and perspicuous is a clear and firm affirmation, one of absolute existence, and I mean an eternal existence in bloom, in becoming which is not yet nothing but the apex of a movement away from it. My experiences collaborate with each other to give me no ultimate knowing but a prediction of what knowing this being might be.

Again and again it's the same thing -- I want to write something but I have nothing to write. Every time I sit down to write something the only things that I want to write are old and pretentious -- I started writing something in the vein of the Bible and it's interesting, but perfectly awful. It cripples me. I tried to begin, "Kevin was in trouble. He had three thousand dollars in gambling debts due by the end of the month..." but I couldn't finish it. How do gambling debts work? I haven't the slightest clue. Every time I sit down to write something, I feel like everybody is glaring at me. It's the awful comments I get from posting on this site, partly, and partly it's just the immense pressure of the past. That's cliche, but I just hate modern literature. Everything is trying to be...interesting; writers trying so hard to be interesting. I just want to follow a formula.

Another thing that I don't want to do when I write is research. I hate the idea of having to summarize facts and places and other people's ideas in my writing. I just want it to come from me -- I want to be able to produce the world and never be questioned on a single detail. That's why I couldn't start writing about Kevin -- because someone was bound to complain that it was unrealistic -- I hate realism! Realism has ruined literature. But so has fantasy; fantasy narratives are awful -- it's pure escapism. And what's wrong with that? Everything is about the quest to save the world, the brink of destruction, descriptions of fights and battles in the most ludicrous and cliche style to no purpose. Writing has to be redeemed. There has to be some quality about the words that make them worth it, otherwise I can't help but feel like I've been wasting my time. Like I'm just dying.

That's how I've felt, sometimes, about brushing my teeth, washing my face, showering. All these little, annoying things that aren't worth the time it takes to do them; but that's life. I don't like to think that I'm disintegrating. But at the same time, I don't really like being here. I said that last time I wrote, and I'm sorry if that is naive, pretentious, and etc. but...I feel impotent. I feel like I want to do something but I can't. Everything is a struggle. I lay awake nights worrying; I keep the fan on to provide white noise, just so I can go to sleep without hearing other people talking in the hall, keeping me up; ear-plugs in my ears, but still I keep turning familiar concerns over and over again in my mind and I just can't sleep.

Where am I going to find a job this summer? I haven't started looking. Why haven't I started looking? Because I have papers to write. But surely I could call places -- it just feels useless, and I give up before I've even started. And writing these papers, when I begin, I often feel like I have nothing to say. I'm afraid that I don't have anything to say, and that's why I spend so much time trying to write something, anything, because I desperately want to have something worthwhile to say. I know that I'm a good writer, in that I have some facility in constructing sentences and some appreciation for the play of language, so all I need is something, anything to write about.

I really hate all you people who read my journal, because you do nothing but mock me. If you don't have something nice to say, you should keep your big dumb mouths shut. There was that one girl who complimented me, said that I was well read, and that was nice. You know, folks, it isn't a competition. You don't have to prove that you're smarter than me and I don't have to prove that I'm smarter than you. Who cares who's read the most books, who can write the best, who is the most logical, who is the most poetic? All of these things are barriers to our expression of ourselves. I try and I try to please you, but this is getting me nowhere. It would be better to just attempt to please myself.

But how do I please myself? And if I please myself, am I done? The only thing that resolves the constant conflict of life is, of course, death, because the human mind is so unstable that it will always find some new anxiety to land upon as long as we are alive. Perhaps it's a survival strategy -- this has just been my experience; I've never been content for any long period of time. Of course, there have been times, right when I meet a new group of people or after some calamitous or amazing experience, when the whole world seems wider, when I'm constantly discovering new things. But eventually I return to my rut, and my anxieties, and always the pettiest things, so that, looking back, I can't even remember what I was so worried about before.

I spent the early part of this semester trying desperately to find a boyfriend, and now I don't even want sex. I thought that perhaps a man was the thing that was missing from my life, but I don't anymore. I mean, it's just too simple. Or maybe I've given up. It leaves me in a difficult position, because -- you're supposed to have someone to love, but I don't know if I care anymore.

I remember once I criticized a poem someone wrote about self immolation and he told me that I was immature and that I needed to work at soup kitchens. This is the kind of crap that bothers me about people -- why does everybody else have suggestions for me about how I should live my life? Why can't you people all just live your own lives? It's not that I don't care about you, but I generate enough negativity myself, and I don't need yours as well.

I was thinking about how life degenerates into conflict today; about King Lear, in fact, as an expression of people pitted in struggle, one against another. That's tragedy, when community collapses, and when things go to dog eat dog. I hate corporate executives, I hate people who pretend to be nice to you only to get what they want. I especially hate it when what they want from you is your body -- something so close to who you actually are, and yet so far. I'm not under the foolish assumption that my body is anything to want. I'm a very bad lay, I'll admit, when I don't like the person I'm sleeping with, and that's the case only too often.

I was considering becoming a hedonist, and doing only those things which gave me pleasure. But i don't really know what gives me pleasure. For instance, I don't take much pleasure in the company of others, but it's something that I need every once in awhile to avoid going crazy. If I spend too much time alone, in my room, I feel as if the entire world is passing me by. The only time I really feel at peace is during the night, when everything is dark, when you can't feel the world turning (because the stars are always obscured) and when everybody else is sleeping. Then I have time to think -- and if I don't stay awake and worry, I have time to sleep and dream.

I love to dream; there's something so soothing and peaceful about a good dream. Bad dreams are always terrible, of course, and if you don't dream, I think that's the worst of all, because the night passes in a flash in that case, and you have no extension of time in which to enjoy the sensation of being asleep. I hate it especially when you awake at 6 am and have to get up at, say, 8 o'clock, and you have this pleasant sleepiness hanging on your eyelids and you coax yourself back to sleep only to wake up, an instant later, to the feelings of dead exhaustion and an alarm clock. That click of the alarm clock sounding, which has tormented me ever since middle school, is the worst sound in the world. The mind fastens upon it, it is instantly recognizable, and it begins the whole day, along with the drudgery of brushing one's teeth, washing the face, staring sleepy-eyed into mirror, wondering how attractive one really is, showering (which is moderately pleasant if you've slept well, but not stimulating enough to cure insomnia's hangover), getting something to eat, and then rushing headlong into all the petty calamities, all the stresses, all the idle moments of another day wasted.

I used to feel that if I was reading, I was doing something useful, but lately I feel so little inspired or diverted by the things I read, and so slow to comprehend any particular passage, that I just seem to have wasted more time. One is never satisfied with a book; its either too long or too short, and it passes right over my head. If it's poetry, then the play of language darts in front of me, scampers off, but I can never quite grasp -- what's actually being said. Novels are too long, they degenerate into merely their plot. Analysis I never understand, although it fills my head with strange ideas. History is repetitive and disconcerting, biography is a dooms-day prediction, the news is the fulfillment of the prophecy, and what else is there to read? Gossip, jokes, humor. Every social interaction, you might notice, involves laughter. Or at least most of them. Whenever I hear people talking in the halls or at a distance, they're always laughing. Why is that?