Rhode Island Read

Reader, your E. will, in very few days, depart for Providence, RI in the hope that the city will, at least for him, be true to its name.

What fortune awaits him? This weblog will chronicle his comings, goings and doings. E. will have opportunity to rub elbows with the Ivy League set, but this for him will prove daunting, because he cannot help but feel that, after so many year in Tucson, he has become some wild and hairy savage from the hinterlands.

Whatever befalls him, he will hope that the great sorrow which visited him in Tucson will not chase him across the plains.

Stay tuned; the next chapter of the history of E-tiolation will soon have its first words written.

Melotonin Nights

We had our dreams once, cosy and promising.

Now these dreams are as blood in my eyes -- blood in the eyes as certain reptiles sometimes get. Or one who has been choked too long sometimes gets.

They come back and I ask them to leave, but this is oh so obviously only an invitation to stay. . .

Everything that Rises Must Converge

And so, Goodbye.

Goodbye to febrile frustration. I will soak in saline different from that which has washed my cheeks for many months.

Goodbye to dreams of ease in the timeless heat. I will blaze my way through bracing winds and wet woollen skies.

Goodbye to dank shame and the rot it breeds. I will seek my cure by the sea where dreams draw new life in leisure, in the drowsy succor of mulled wine and delicate fish flesh, in waves that beat stones into sand into stones again. . .

. . .And we, my love, will be just as enduring.

For Lack of Genuine Feeling . . .

. . . I run and all those things -- you know those things which have been dogging my heels -- now get their due and I think, something is beginning to dissolve, to separate, the base have reached unprecedented depths of baseness while the virtuous are even more firm, perhaps desperate, in their determination.

How much longer can absurdity reign? We will mark our time, my dear, by the tight white skin drawn 'cross our fists; in furrowed brows the chancre will plant its corruption.

Fortune Cookie Wisdom

Ends have no ends: the end of the tether simply marks the beginning of your drowning.

Vase

The shattered vase has been glued back together, the flowers replaced, filled again with water. The water, however, enjoys a greater puissance: it pushes against the seams and threatens to return the vase to the shards it now discernibly consists of. . .

Do you know the moral of this tale?

I am, Reader, a superfluous man, a criminal, scourged by Experience, bearing the stripes of Memory, pilloried and scorned.

(Incidentally, the vase, once shattered, though it may have dated to dynasties long since lost to the dust, loses its value.)

Sadly

you will remain for me
an effigy
some old god of the sea
bringing weather
bringing storms
and stillborn
infants killed by never being
never seeing
the light from your thighs
no "he has your eyes"
not you
not me

not ever