Notes on His Own Existence

I

It’s another docile Friday
To do with
Or be done with;
It’s another calendar date,
And language is killing you,
Slowly,
Expertly.
It’s another tepid moment,
Another excuse
For not truly being.
To hell with all the Fridays,
To hell with me.

Did I steal someone else’s life
(A worthier and better life)
To enter this world?
Was my birth some unforgivable crime?

A murmur,
A whisper,
A howl;
Sometimes it comes to that.
You end up,
Rigid and frozen,
Peruvian mummy
Bolt upright in an Andean cave.

II

Human nature:
The nature of waiting.
Understand it,
Can you?
the infinite and the infinitesimal,
The long and the short.

Always feel like an uncouth yokel,
Invited to a royal banquet,
Not sure which knife to use.

III

I suppose I will have to spend a lifetime or two
Just learning to tell the truth,
Learning to listen.

Each day I set out
From the left-off,
The fearful source,
Desperate to return,
To something pure.

These missions I set myself
I hardly understand-
But they drive me anyway
With unbearable urgency,
Drive me to distraction.

Like a one-armed pianist
Determined to play
A perfect symphony.

IV

Lutheran or Catholic?
I love the bare
And the sumptuous
With equal annoyance.

I was raised in a church
Of unanswerables,
Ordained a whisky priest
To the world.

Defrock me if necessary,
But leave me,please,
A few bright trinkets
For my personal rites.

V

I am the skeleton
At the Feast of Fools,
The peasant
With St Vitus’s Dance.

Births,deaths,marriages
Pass through me;
My caravan journeys on
To the Mountains of the Moon.

VI

Some believe in fate,
Some do not,
But events keep coming,
Anyway.

Death is preaching its sermon
Through my eyes
And my busy fists
Grasp handfuls of nothing
Every day,
Every day.

Do you weep for the man you once were,
The man you might have been
Or the man you will never be?

VII

Indo-European
On this peninsula of words,
I erect shrines
To anthropomorphic deities.

Black acids of culture
Break me down,
Raven’s nigredo,
Swirling with code.

Truth:snowfall of light;
Peacock’s tail at summer’s end;
This chaos I fight through,
Humming favourite tunes.



VIII

Debatable Friday,
Wishbone of contention,
The only place where I can presently be.

My own life’s archaeologist,
I root for evidence
And mark my territory with scholarly papers.

Another day
In which to refine my poetics,
To devise new strategies
For self-creation,
Falling slowly
Into the abyss.

I love the traps too much,
-Beguiled,
Ready to be caught,
To see what will happen,-
The delicate traps,
Exquisitely engineered.

Now Sinbad the Sailor is weighing anchor.
Robinson Crusoe is building a fire.
Sherlock Holmes puts his deerstalker on.