October 11, 2010

• Night People

  Your formalism is your despair, the way I saw you, and it was already over.  Life never had a chance, not when you are a complaint in the universe; a seed-sower of mutiny and death.  The truth is always ready to invade our lives, if only we let it.

  You were always looking at me, but never while you were upright.  But if I’m slanted from the start, meeting each other just starts us moving in opposite directions.  Sometimes the only thing you want is to be understood, if only for a moment.  The world is awfully complicated.

  Did they sign you up for this?  Are you allowed to not participate in culture?  No, you must.  You walk up to someone reading at a library and start talking to them, they will be confused, affronted.  The world teaches us what must happen, who we must be, before we have time to speak.  The morbid bell chimes from a distant star; when our time is up, what will we have chosen?  Anything?

  But that’s how the world works, and we can sing our sad songs in protest as we walk along back alleyways, but will anyone end up alive?  Will not all our friends, others who could be alive if only we just believed that passing look in our eyes for just one moment, wind up in the same cemetery?  Perhaps not even that.  Just as in life, they bury us worlds apart.

  For that is life for someone who is just walking along.  You see people on the street, just like Chesterton said to do, and you wonder what could be.  Life seems to be a long moment of wishing, until maybe, just maybe, there is a sudden snap in the chord, and a smile is in front of you, and a hello, and you get to say something back, and off you gallavant into the wonderful world of conversation with someone who knows what life is all about, and the world is not such a dreadful place after all.

  • 12:45 am
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