vacant lot, rainfalling in the streets.

too early for sleep, man walks across the apartment lot (i pass him on my way to the mail slot to drop and pick up, once again, as tommorrow) he ducks his head to keep the rain from falling in his face and i watch, transfixed, the light of the streetpole bounce from his eyes, watery reflection: this man has been crying. i build in my mind hypnotic scenes in which he has been desolated, his life and dreams fallen apart, his world shaken, crumbles to the earth and he is once again, as all things better dead: nothing. it occurs to me it is probably a woman. men seldom cry except over women.

i reflect on the strange power a woman can hold over a man. the sort of power a man can never hold over a woman. the power to make you alive, make you capable of any of these things which are marveled at and called miracles by the holy-crowds, and the power to take it all away. i wonder if that isn't, in some strange way the root of so many thousands of cases annaully of wife battering: how helpless a woman can make a man feel. how empty without her.

i spoke to my cousin about the concept of lonliness. he was telling me about a case of perfect love, perfect for each other, perfect-ness, and so on. i told him that it is loneliness to believe that you need someone else in order to ever be complete or fulfilled. that a connection may be found only with a single person and that is the limitation on all things, that one may not love all things and poeple with all the daring of compassion, but only with the force that is secondary to that which you are capable of loving that single other.

lonliness is a death all it's own.

when i get to the mail slot there is a woman there counting her junkmail. i see the time floating by in her mind, like she is waiting for something or someone to come and save her. like she is waiting for time to pass. tommorrow, she seems to think, tommorrow it will be better. i know it won't. her emptiness is internal. she is losing herself in the war of attrition that is life.

i can almost hear the friction of her heartbeat and the wearing down of her joints. the people around me are so tired. so tired.

where is the life we were so promised and envisioning in our fanciful youths?

there is a strange deflation taking place everywhere and it's source cannot be found.

i walked the block to the corner store, wher ei pick up a couple of packs of cigarettes, again, as yesterday and feel suddenly like laying down in the road. like feeling the rain splatter across my body, whichout reserve. like pulling the clothing from my flesh and leaving it in mudpiles beneath treebranches that save us all the standard falling of water from skies and laying on the blacktop to feel the rain drizzling, hammering, whatever from it takes against my chest, my arms, legs, toes. in this, i am alive as ever and clawing my way through time, wriggling my toes in the air and rain, and death itself, is only a breath i'll take some other day than this.

2003-10-09 | 5:42 p.m.
0 comments so far