Give Me A Pen

Sunday comes on like a disheveled bear, teeth & jaw fomenting in the brisk climate. I try to read my own palm, oblivious to the rules of grammar. Self-conscious old men whose every thought seems colored with angst from an invisible source sit over their tables serving judgement to a pitible host. 

A minute passes. I put the bitchy distraction out of mind and my thoughts turn to poetry...political comics...journalism...the last uncaptured serial-killer of popular notice. We're each of us lonely as fishermen, trying to write scripture for the cumulative trials of random and predictable ephemera. The girlfriends and wives and would-bes abscond in cars with men who are not us. Grandma folds her arms and points with her chin at your birthday cake. Her eyes are a mule's. She's human in a way that cannot be parodied or imitated. 

Poor old Allen: to identify with his deplorable thoughts and hate people like that -- women most of all -- shuttling the grotesque from town to town and year to year. (His heart finally demanded absolute attention when the detectives returned to ask the familiar questions.) He left an unsigned-note in his bedside table. 'Philosophy is angst turned against itself.' Guy wanted to be a poet but couldn't find a beginning or end to his wrath. 

For my money I'll look for the work that repays itself. No need for knives, hooks, handguns, explosives, etc. Give me a pen and some memory or scent of a woman and I'll figure it out between newspapers and hallucinogenic mornings, the sound of the divine and their rules, gradually, becoming familiar. 



**** 

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