Language, bane and blessing, I have savored your wares,
saccharine, strychnine, Balm of Gilead,
and other flavors so removed from moderate
only the jaded, bored, and desperate dare to sample.
In your world are many waters:
Oceans with rhyme and meter and measured tides,
currents and undertows and reefs
from grim to Paradise green;
vast lakes formed from the pressure of political ice
where storms churn and the sturdiest craft can be sunk
and one bright Beat phrase may float the only survivors.
Language, you have had your worshippers,
martyrs, sycophants making sacrificial offerings of verse
and sweat and tears and blood;
your essential flaws dispose of most with a historic shrug
and they disappear
sink without a bubble
beneath the surface of your inadequacy.
Occasionally a desperate note in a jade-green bottle bobs to the
surface,
to be found and revered by some mad shaman
in an ivy-covered ivory tower.
Its meaning is misconstrued at best.
My home has been here, rafting the seas of verse, hiking the arid trails
of fact,
seeking El Dorado across the trackless wastes of a thousand ideologies
and praying nonstop to all the gods in your pantheon of synonyms for
goodness.
I get lost and waste valuable time hacking my way through hybrid kudzu
drafts.
Sometimes the trails are tortuous, littered with doggerel and dangling
participles
and snarls of hopelessly mixed metaphors.
I am getting weary of your scapes and climes; the range of your
possibilities
appears of late to be just another obstacle.
I grow weary of the substance of this world; itc very elements confound
me with their
complexity, their substance too solid for emotion, too weak for
comfort... the clay feet of my paradigm.
What peace, to leave this world of language! To just turn oblique to
every phrase, and hang
suspended between the molecules of thought,
in a wordless dimension, fixed, bright;
bearing mute testimony only to the light of being,
without artifact or clue
or telltale jade-green bottle.
***
This old bit of doggerel is offered to those of you who have asked me repeatedly why I don't try to write seriously any more. I think it's self-explanatory. It was written while I was in serious therapy and struggling with some of the ego issues surrounding nurturing alleged talent.
I found a lot of this junk cluttering up a perfectly good notebook recently. Amazing how much time I used to waste on this sort of magic trick. Fortunately I'm much better now...
Realizin she hasn't evolved to a wordless dimension yet but workin on it,
MD
'just another onionhead and damn proud of it'