My greatest days & my most communicable triumphs are not usually available in the same description. I won’t get persnickety like I did with the color question. But I should give a minor explanation in order to qualify that the interior world (as you well know) is massive & vast, & always comes into play when you refer to the wonders of existence. Probably, my greatest moment could have been spent in a dream, but I am not an escapist. I will therefore say that my greatest moments have been ones in which I have built or felt a bridge between my exterior & interior worlds. Ones in which the alienation was fought, conquered, or while it slept. Probably it involves things like laughing with friends while drunk (sometimes just on laughter) in a perfect balance & feeling a genuine spirit of collaboration in humor, laughter, conversation. It could involve being with someone & making love, but this would tend to happen in a quiet coincidental way which was just as possible (if not more possible) quietly one night after work with your wife of 15 years as it would in the playboy mansion or while on a rendezvous with some impressive conquest in some exotic location while taking sexual revenge on God & all mankind. It involves the fleeting sense of mastery of existence & usually sharing it or some connection with someone, or at least putting it across to the outside world & improvising in a beautiful way. It has to do with the fleeting sense of being meant to be alive. I admit sometimes it happens even inexplicably while alone: I’d like to think it is a moment where the true, or better me was allowed to breathe, take wing. But if this is accurate, he/she has also evaporated & been forgotten a hundred times.
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I want to get lost in my walls & lights, my pictures. Yesterday as I lay falling to sleep I looked into the suburban street represented in the painting on the wall of the guest room. The dapple light & leaves all around struck me for the first time as I lay on my side. I thought of walking into the place. Soon afterward I realized that this street was the residence of death & saw phantoms floating in the colors. Among the subtle pastels & yellows there were menacing ghosts that took life if one was not already dead. It was odd to imagine the place so quiet & even feeling of a light breeze, to be a bait to semi conscious dreamers who found their death there while lolling on a swing or walking toward a lawn chair to have a nap.
I am tasting my lips. After a certain time, once the cinnamon has grown wet & the tea cold, there seems to be nothing left but my mouth & teeth. I love the smell of cinnamon & the dry powder floating on the surface. I hate the cake of hours. I am always wanting to be fresh, to turn the pillows, to undo the buttons, or to do them up. I want a spiritual wardrobe change every few hours. I want, I want, I want. I would like to have fresh cinnamon poured over my life at regular intervals.
There is something beautiful left over from when you were born.
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I can feel the summer on my skin. A jubilant physicality stretching past all that has weighed me down as my calves & tendons worked an easy stride. I walked a mile listening to music & literally laughed outloud as I passed all the landmarks of so many other walks. I grinned & danced as I treaded along those familiar paths, remembering telephone conversations I had had on particular payphones. Untouchable now - we had laid on the track & looked at the sky near the bleachers, smelling the familiar earthiness & hearing it's tiny particles scraping a crumbling beneath our shoulders & hair as we held each other. My feet made that sound beneath me as I tramped past such memories. The smell of chlorine & the sound of the pool’s loud whirring genorator reminded me of when I floated in the olympic pool, alone, naked, hearing the sloshing of water in my ears & watching the stars as I floated across, exposed, not caring. Or when as a gang of us we had climbed the fence & made a game of it all, jumping off the high diving board head first & plunging noisily into the midnight coolness. I heard the lyrics passing through my mind like ghosts singing to me. "Michael's bones lay where he fell" & I thought, or wondered really, if I will ever feel this way again when I am not alone. Will I ever laugh this way, strolling arm in arm with anyone but myself & the ghosts which seem so well conquered by laughter & easy kissing summer.
Thousands of tiny umbrella mushrooms had popped up in the moist soil of the yard overnight, infiltrating the lawn in their delicate clusters. I thought of the corpses of animals & the skeletal wingspans of birds rotting. Ducks & swans & birds which flew in from the sea to die in some field, their corpses being photographed while crumbling into the dust.
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