Just morning

A sprite bird burgles the morning, every morning, catching the memories lain by night as if its every sense were contingent on obliterating them. I resent the birds, in halved moments. Mostly, I think of them as I would Tang: good in space; less than appealing when tasted.

When the memory- and the drink-sodden weight of my lids are by the heft of both hoisted-- I first curse those birds, and then know gratitude for their having the gall to be; and by being, be by me. Loons come to mind.

A mid-week morning hits me straight in the face. Then, without censuring itself, and mounds of teeth-grinding angst born, right there and then and all the time, loving her and hating unctuous familiarities, something drives something in me as deep as the need to define "something", and it is this, I with a grin guess:

If, Sweetheart, I ever saw a smile as bountiful as yours in how it directs the light to where it needs to be, I'd be more than a little surprised. Irascible qualms die in its cause; and if there is a half-hearted step between us, I assure you that it is mine, not yours; you have never been, never can, never will, anything but the very force of this world; and for you, only, with a hint of regret and some pride and more hope,

serviam.

a moment of existential distress in capetown

petulant wounds exasperate capetown's oxygenated attempt to seal them. Sunshine plashes everywhere. Even when the sky's overcast, the fulsomeness of the flora talks uninterruptedly of a bacchanal of photosynthesis. The liveliness doesn't oppress me but empties me. You have to be vacuously accepting of life when it'll by such bullying insistence preempt any possible decision to reject it. I end up resenting the knee-hack at my freedom to be unhappy (or happy). Five years from now I'd probably forget how to write my own name. People with regret say they want that, a place that makes you forget, but I don't. Each day I fight to remember it all. The splotchy profusion of vegetation crabs my vision, tries to crowd out my memories.

Nicolette rails against my continued interaction with Jessika. Our discussions revolve around issues from the past and her accurate, perky awareness that I still have feeling for Jessy, even if flora and sun and food and frequent sex collude to pervert the course of a love begun half a year ago.

"Pervert the course": I say the phrase with an acrid slime in my throat, convulsing momentarily the smoother functions of my bowels, triggering almost their spasmatic heft.

"Course." What course? Destiny? Where to commence, where to end, what lies in the middle? The plague of these questions is their insistence that time be marked by a calendar in our experience we're never privy to. We refer to it, this gross abstraction, as a means of economy, an economy almost alien to us in the dim glow of night's afterbirth, a fist of leavening grey thrown at the sky, some child's act (no doubt, let's us pray). Not even dawn cites the "time," only speaks of many dawns or a few when animal sniffed rarified air and for a while we loved beyond our instincts, when we sacrificed where it made no sense and didn't when it did. I assure myself that a story when told to its moral conclusion dismisses considerations of chronology effectively, resoundedly. The impression will be had; the time will not matter. So I console myself. The reality may be grimmer. The reality may lie in physics, particulate matter, a reliance on nostalgia upon which I can't count (the clock, though, never does fib). In any case, I think, to preserve any sense of outrage, I'll scowl at the sky, burrow into my chest with two clawing hands, rip it open, let the venal curse see the roiling maggots within and call it good