Sketches – 41

I’m wearing this hat
For the rest of my life

What? Why?

Because the world is a meaningless
Nightmare of suffering.
And besides, my mom says
I’ve been looking old

You do not.
Besides, your mom is like
A fountain of
Inappropriate comments

I’m ancient.
This hat will cover my shame

Nietzche said
Shame was a sign of
Decadent servant morality

Yeah, well.
He was insane and
His sister was a Nazi

She also wore a hat.
Look, Wikipedia

You know I can’t see that
With this over my eyes…

My love,
You’re young.
You’re younger than young.
And your mom is …

What?

… wrong.
That’s the word.
Now please take the hat off.

I need at least three more
German philosophers
To weigh in first

Fine.
Kant says listening to your mom
Is not a categorical imperative,
Hegel says getting old is
Part of the phenomenology of the
Spirit of the world-soul,
And Schopenhauer says
Hegel was an idiot

Ugh.
It’s worth taking the hat off
So as to never hear you
Utter a sentence like that one
Ever again

Very wise

ephiphanicity

He saw her waiting on the bed
A sadness drawn across her eyes
And suddenly he felt a pang
A flash of something
Alien before

He hated she was miserable
A brief insight into her pain
To be with him
Whom she could
Barely stand

The world is crass and fathomless
And humans, selfish things
But he just
Couldn’t do it

Anymore

The Unspoken

The day is winding down,
And there is no one left at all;
A cloud has spread across the sky,
Like slipping on a shawl —
I do not stay for beauty here;
It’s cold and gray and bleak —
But this place listens to me when
    I do not speak.

I thought heard a voice,
As though a curtain, dark and long
Had been rolled back to show a scene
Of us, both young and strong —
But vainly do I look, and look,
For what I should not seek —
For this place brings to life the words
    I dare not speak.

The trees are restless, shivering,
The river’s flowing slow,
The leaves are gone, and it
Is time to go —

Wherever the unspoken goes,
I hope the queen of grace
Will grant to it an audience,
And let it show its face

And use it’s voice
Like angels, or the birds,
When finally it’s where
It knows

The words

Snapshot: On Finding An Abandoned Stall in the Desert (Revised)

There was a final time: the stall set out,
With jewelry and fabrics in a line —
The next day, and thereafter then, no more;
No more, and soon, no one with memory
To paint in images or words the scene
That once was daily, year on year on year.

The mundane, the quotidian: our lives,
Not big events, but habits of our days,
They soon lie empty on a sandy waste —
The firebird heads into the unknown,
High o’er the mountains, just past where we see,
To leave behind our stalls for someone else