questions

There are some days I ask myself,

"Why the hell do you write, M.W.? Why would you throw your thoughts out there forcefully into a gaping abyss and hope that it will somehow matter, whether it's now or in the long run? Why do you constantly insist on putting yourself in direct line of fire from the opposition?

Why do you spend endless, grueling, long hours sitting in front of a screen, tearing your brains out, trying to format your convoluted thoughts into something mildly coherent for all those crazy people out there to read?"

And then I answer myself:

Because you're crazy, too, and you give a shit.

And then I chastise myself for ever feeling the need to ask those questions.

I have

been happy for a long while.

And it has had nothing in the world to do with you.

Come to think of it, it hasn't had much to do with anybody at all.

Some Nights

Some nights, we find freedom in strange places.

At a strange house with strange people that we don't really mesh with. In a strange backyard

at a strange time of night with a dying fire and stale chips and spiked drinks.

Or maybe we feel free because of all that.

Because after a few hours and a few cups, strange people and strange places don't seem so strange anymore. And all that we would find hedonistic and despicable and uninteresting suddenly feels like art of a dark and mysterious form.

And then we're nothing but characters in a pencil-sketch, controlled by an artist.

And we're suddenly okay with that.

And even though we're walking around in a gritty, colorless world that has been smeared by the side of someone's hand, we feel like it's home.

Like there's no other place that could possibly be more comfortable than this odd, nondescript setting, where literature is more clear, and people are more beautiful, and a dying flame looks like a forest fire, and crass music starts to resonate with us when it would never have before.

And then you're more interesting, and I'm more interesting, and you're not really a stranger anymore because when the world is less strange, you're more transparent too. And I like the feeling of a not-really-stranger's hand in mine, though meaningless it may be.

But somehow, I don't want to believe that it was. Even though you'll wake up the next day, shaking off that pencil-sketch world like an artist shakes off a bad day of painting, and I'll wake up and rinse the embers off my fiery skin. And even though we'll go back to walking on either side of those railroad tracks,

somehow I'm still going to be left hoping that they're not perfectly parallel.

I am.

I am red-eyed, tight-lipped, searching, searching.

Born from the womb a silent mess.

Gales of wind and throngs of flames slashing through the treetops. The wildest storms that pitch burly men off shipsides and tear the shoeless from their mud-thatched homes. Hemingway and Keats and Poe and Aristotle and Huxeley and Plato. Tangled philosophies, morals erased and rewritten and erased and rewritten. Poets and storms and anger and love crumpled up and shoved into a

neat, clean skin.

Stretched and bound, like a new, leather journal. Wrinkleless, smooth.

Bottled and corked tightly, a crisp sauvignon. Corked so tightly, as a matter of fact, that it can't be drunk.

It's just as well.

There's too much strife in Pandora's box. Too much love and too much hate and too much music

and far, far too much poetry.

Of course, that's the most dangerous of them all.

So here I'll sit, corked and calm, tasting the color of the tornado in my gut.

Maybe one day, the plug will be pulled. My god, may the world be spared. But maybe it won't

and until that hypothetical, unknown day.......

I am waiting; you are waiting. For what? I don't know. Or maybe I do.

"I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern."

Me too, Mr. O'Hara.

Sunken Mornings

The world feels so large today. So unbearably large.

So large that it seems like no matter what I do, no matter who I meet, no matter how many ladders I try to construct or nights I spend in small rooms with loud music, sputtering on liquid Lethe,

I will never be able to bridge the oceans or sew together that horrible gap of vast nothingness between me and everything else.

Where are you? Will I ever find you in the 7 billion people out there?

What is destiny but coincidence?

Odysseus said "Men are haunted by the vastness of eternity." Is it bad that it is not eternity's vastness that haunts me but rather the vastness of what is now?

The vastness of human possibility, the vastness of all that we can't achieve, the vastness of everyone I will never meet, the vastness of the ground I will never cover, the things I will never do. I usually don't think this way. I usually soak in and rejoice in the large unknown. I usually celebrate it.

But today, I am scared of it.