Obscure sorrows ...

“You were born on a moving train.

And even though it feels like you're standing still,

time is sweeping past you, right where you sit.

But once in a while you look up,

and actually feel the inertia,

and watch as the present turns into a memory

—as if some future you is already looking back on it.




One day you’ll remember this moment,

and it’ll mean something very different.

Maybe you’ll cringe and laugh,

or brim with pride, aching to return.

or notice some detail hidden in the scene,

a future landmark making its first appearance

or discreetly taking its final bow.




So you try to sense it ahead of time, looking for clues,

as if you’re walking through the memory while it’s still happening,

feeling for all the world like a time traveler.




The world around you is secretly strange:

some details are charming and dated,

others precious and irretrievable,

but all fade into the quaint texture of the day.




You try to read the faces around you,

each fretting about the day’s concerns,

not yet realizing that this world is already out of their hands.

That it doesn’t have to be this way, it just sort of happened,

and everything will soon be completely different.




Because you really are a time traveler,

leaping into the future in little tentative steps.

Just a kid stuck in a strange land without a map,

With nothing to do but soak in the moment

and take one last look before moving on.




But another part of you is already an old man,

looking back on things.

Waiting at the door for his granddaughter,

who’s trying to make her way home for a visit.


You are two people still separated by an ocean of time,

Part of you bursting to talk about what you saw,

Part of you longing to tell you what it means.”

Deep inside ...

It is very curious this state of pseudo drunkness that keeps my mind spaced out and this feeling that I have for a moment touched the untouchable ...

Living through today ...

 “...You find a way, somehow to get through the most horrible things, things you think would kill you. You find a way and you move through the days, one by one, in shock, in despair, but you move. The days pass, one after the other, and you go along with them - occasionally stunned, and not entirely relieved, to find that you are still alive.”
 
Michelle Richmond

 

 

 

 

Unspent Time ...

“Life has a way of going in circles. Ideally, it would be a straight path forward––we'd always know where we were going, we'd always be able to move on and leave everything else behind. There would be nothing but the present and the future. Instead, we always find ourselves where we started. When we try to move ahead, we end up taking a step back. We carry everything with us, the weight exhausting us until we want to collapse and give up.
We forget things we try to remember. We remember things we'd rather forget. The most frightening thing about memory is that it leaves no choice. It has mastered an incomprehensible art of forgetting. It erases, it smudges, it fills in blank spaces with details that don't exist.
But however we remember it––or choose to remember it––the past is the foundation that holds our lives in place. Without its support, we'd have nothing for guidance. We spend so much time focused on what lies ahead, when what has fallen behind is just as important. What defines us isn't where we're going, but where we've been. Although there are places and people we will never see again, and although we move on and let them go, they remain a part of who we are.
There are things that will never change, things we will carry along with us always. But as we venture into the murky future, we must find our strength by learning to leave things behind.”

Brigid Gorry-Hines

 

 

From "Soliloquy of the Solipsist” ...

“I?
I walk alone;
The midnight street
Spins itself from under my feet;
My eyes shut
These dreaming houses all snuff out;
Through a whim of mine
Over gables the moon's celestial onion
Hangs high.

I
Make houses shrink
And trees diminish
By going far; my look's leash
Dangles the puppet-people
Who, unaware how they dwindle,
Laugh, kiss, get drunk,
Nor guess that if I choose to blink
They die.

I
When in good humour,
Give grass its green
Blazon sky blue, and endow the sun
With gold;
Yet, in my wintriest moods, I hold
Absolute power
To boycott colour and forbid any flower
To be.

I
Know you appear
Vivid at my side,
Denying you sprang out of my head,
Claiming you feel
Love fiery enough to prove flesh real,
Though it's quite clear
All your beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear,
From me.

Sylvia Plath

The shadow of the wind ...

“Name me no names for my disease,
With uninforming breath;
I tell you I am none of these,
But homesick unto death —Homesick for hills that I had known,
For brooks that I had crossed,
...Before I met this flesh and bone
And followed and was lost… .And though they break my heart at last,
Yet name no name of ills.
Say only, "Here is where he passed,
Seeking again those hills.”
Witter Bynner

War against the ordinary ...

“In order to rise from its own ashes a phoenix first must burn.”

Octavia E. Butler