Black Friday 2015

How this empire will lie when

in a century or so

it laughs its last choking joke

and flies farther than angels ken.

The waves of both maria,

maria vestra, not mine,

bring sad legs to these templa,

shrines of strange gods with pretty shine.

Their tired missionaries

take the gospel of self to

other shores. After one, two

years, they take off, leaving us to ourselves.

In this particular mound

of brown and black, I wander

lone, and not one spoken sound,

one whiff of skin, is tender

strange, without being familiar.

How does one live the life

of self in a community of selves?

It is a severed life

in the land which these people delved,

in temples like these—convenient lives.

I realize in writing this

I am angry. I want in.

There is tension

in being intentional

against other good news.

(And you, reader, see 

my fingers in their

natural state.)

How does one be in but

not of this religious

swimming pool of all worlds?

Day before Thanksgiving, 2015

I am listening to The xx and Daughter. Daughter is a emo-folk-rock band, emphasis on “emo.” The xx is super minimalistic. Solo guitar intro most of the time. Singing in the lower register. Bass is intermittent. Not minimalistic in the sense of, say, Philip Glass: repetitive and relatively simple thematically; rather, a “stripped-down” minimalistic. Bare-bones. Minimum. The xx could easily be a perfunctory band, but what do you do when you get enthralled in a world of crepuscular understated-ness, and find that it’s beautiful, in a way? What do you do?

There are no bird’s nests outside,
not that I could see, and I see
for miles. The world is ready for
death again, as it has been ready
for floods and ages. In its little
microcosm of the grand story
of the quiet execution on
the bald hill, which was not
even a mountain, the ground
drinks up the promise of life,
and is dead for another
eternity. But not yet. And that is why

I guess the point of my writing this is that I am bored. Not just the everyday “Oh-I-am-so-bored-whatdoIdowithmylife” bored. It is boredom at a fundamental level. It isn’t like general boredom, which shows itself at the surface, but knows that there really is something to be done. This boredom, i.e. mine, stems from the palpable fact that there is nothing to do, and hence, everything to be done, if that makes sense. I suspect it doesn’t. How do you learn how to be at leisure?