Friday, November 18, 2011

That This Is This


The puzzle of texture, pattern, and repetition. The idiot wonder prompted by even the most prosaic mosaic or randomly occurring stain. Prompts, responses, and resolute silences from the interior continent. Sounds of no clear origin. Desires of no clear etc.

Desires. Desire.

The incomprehensibility of all transmission, whether of blood, belief, truth, or information.

The magic of a phonograph record, compact disc, or photograph.

The process of ruin and deterioration. Erosion, the real deal and the metaphor.

The slow dazzle of contentment.

The planet's tantrums and stoic productions.

The involuntary heresies of the hobbled heart.

The helpless disgrace of despair.

The missing things, the absence of, etc.

The tragedy of memory and forgetting.

The fact that even a telescope can't really find tomorrow, that even a microscope can't make sense of yesterday.

The blood-muddling transformations, defeats, and ecstasies possible in a single moment.

The strange human resistance to the merely practical.

The drab compromises and uneasy pacts.

The irresistible persuasion of percussion.

The takeaway prerogative of fate.

The way that water moves, travels, falls, settles, or sits still.

Some agreed upon sense in the second hand, that we pretend to recognize or understand time.

That we choose to believe this is all real.

That we choose to believe.

That some of us don't recognize that before we can know something we have to believe it.

That we reach out.

That we hold out hope.

That we pull away.

That we fall.

That we get back up.

That we go on.

That by tomorrow any one of us might be gone forever, and in a hundred years the sound of our laughter, the touch of our hands, and the stories we paid for with our lives will be forgotten by every breathing thing still living.

That this is where we are: Here.

That this is who we are: Who?

That this is what we want: What?

That this is what we have: Now.

E...T...C.

6 comments:

  1. "That by tomorrow every single one of us might be gone forever . . ."

    There's something about this party you're not telling me.

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  2. A new and smooth tune every line. I wish I could be there Sunday. Bless you and the straight-out flat-footed joy you bring to the people close to you. I'm envious. Mick G

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  3. Thanks, Mick. You fellas really are some of the most outstanding Austin exports, and I say it all the time to all sorts of people, but there really isn't a better or more diverse and interesting clan.

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  4. "The slow dazzle of contentment."

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  5. "The blood-muddling transformations, defeats, and ecstasies possible in a single moment."

    ReplyDelete