It’s been too grievous a house. Too grievous an evening of not sitting, of marketing, my heavy clattering onto the earth-floor. When they brick my skull I don’t mention it. So they don’t when I hide to the washroom, and thickly, at the mirror, I realize: I don’t want to do this anymore. A whole childhood of promise, then four hours of promise, and then it's all offal. Rummaging your hands into the cold and wet animal, trying to predict your success. Poetry is a useless department; it never described this. Nor the secular neighbourhoods. Nor suffering under the secular tone of everybody. How long now have I been an opportunist alarmed at failure and so was talking wildly? Huddled in the back now I’m talking only to the driver, the volunteer attendant, as a cloud of gallerists schmooze in the hall. A sombre but vital lurch we take, shuffling into the night-storm after, leaving each other and yet were carried. At the bus depot I hear myself say anything. I hear it clatter off the corners of the sky of a garden. This is a garden. There are switch lights. Near the switch lights two men warm their hands and so were carried too.

inquiry

Wow! That's exactly how it seems when I'm the only patron in the Pub! :-)

But, then, there's the "be careful what you wish for thing"... as in what's worse: alone, or around others that don't seem to get you?

Probably the latter... *unless* one miraculous remembers their own underpinnings. No, not that silly genealogy stuff. Not the history of peoples stuff. Not racial groupings that don't even go as deep as skin, yet even those who hate racism keep talking about different colors of people/person, belying a belief that said pigment matters.

No no no!

The underpinnings are "behind the within". In fact, even that's misleading, as all words must be given their assumption they reference a genuine, "real" objective reality.

It's when aware turns back upon itself which is no self which is nothing and yet even less than nothing, even emptier than void.

It's... well, it neither is not isn't any*thing* (see?) that could follow the word "it's".

But the tapping into it is whoosh bang holy whizbang heaven YES!, even when seemingly collapsing back into "Where the fuck did it go?" so painfully instantaneously....

kavehorvanya

Ha, I'm glad it's relatable for you. I agree that it is quite apt even if I wrote it based off my experience being a volunteer attendant at an art gallery, or feeling underappreciated but mostly lonely after a poetry reading... I think ultimately it is better to reclaim that solitude as opposed to being around people who don't get you; it's why my poem ends as it does. I'll be honest I don't really what you mean by the race stuff, or why you're bringing it up. And I'm even more lost afterwards haha.

inquiry

> Ha, I'm glad it's relatable for you. I agree that it is
> quite apt even if I wrote it based off my experience
> being a volunteer attendant at an art gallery, or
> feeling underappreciated but mostly lonely after
> a poetry reading...

I like when that sort of thing seems more an "enlightened melancholy" than, say, a "permanent affliction".

> I think ultimately it is better to reclaim that solitude
> as opposed to being around people who don't get you;
> it's why my poem ends as it does.

I think I know what you mean, because I don't know how many times I've seemingly awoken as though from a drunkenness of having gone too far down a path of merely humoring others, where at some point the reality of it unnoticeably morphed from a light-hearted humoring to being over-invested in a role of a scene, which became seemingly hypnotically inescapable - never mind having degenerated into worse (e.g. depression, fear)...

... but then something thankfully "snaps me out of it", with genuine emergence from a sort of lethargic grogginess - complete with negative emotion "benefits".

I stumbled upon a technique/trigger for said "emergence", but I don't know how to describe it. I just know that exposure to certain thoughts and points of view over many decades culminated in knowing how to trigger "finding my way out" - which paradoxically is actually a finding "my" (the double quotes are important) way *in* courtesy of losing the notion/sense of a me/my to be experiencing that.... <looks around nervously because no one ever seems to know what I'm talking about along those lines>

> I'll be honest I don't really what you mean by the race
> stuff, or why you're bringing it up. And I'm even more
> lost afterwards haha.

One day it hit me that despite people yammering incessantly about racism the last several years, people are still talking about different colors of people/person as though the colors matter, which I believe is literally the crux of racism.

In other words, we don't speak of left-handed people in a way that suggests their left-handedness is at the core of or driving their be-ing/be-havior. But the very people most upset about racism seem to be the one's most likely to speak of "black people" or "a white guy", as though the skin color were a/the most salient feature underlying their be-ing/be-havior.

To me, *that* they felt it important to include the color in front of the word 'person' or 'people' implies they consider it not only *an* important factor in determining the person's/peoples' be-ing/be-havior, but *the* most important factor for being the only characteristic/adjective they used!

It's a shockingly obvious thing when you finally think about it and, well... at some point I finally did, and feel it important to share, because I think most people don't realize how subconsciously racist they are, and how their language belies it in so-called spades simply by their placing a color designation in front of words like 'person', 'guy', 'woman', and 'people'.

Said another way (as though spoken to someone doing that), if you don't consider skin color a determining another's be-ing/be-havior, than why are you using language that screams that you do?

Does that make sense?

BEFORE I DEPART (poem)