He was ecstatic with the joy of circumventing himself, or was that circumcising? What’s the difference anyway, it’s the rounding out, rounding about, severing through and lopping off, the cutting free as it were, the relief of one little less stump to worry about.
I cried often as a child, often to myself, often to the voices that comforted me and coaxed me to live one more day longer. Now I’ve gotten so used to living that the idea of death terrifies. I’m too comfortable in living, in my tidy thoughts as erratic and dismembered as they are. I’m not getting any younger and the more my youth escapes me, the more I wish to reboot the system and start over, knowing full well that it’s too late, all too late, I’m doomed on this path and there is no hope of ever living out my writing, or leading a writer’s life: peace, solitude and a little royalty check every month to cover the expense of a little house by the sea. Yeah, none of that for you boyo. You should never have gone to Bronx High School of Science to escape all those clowns who are now doctors and lawyers, never dropped out of high school because you couldn’t bear to live and all those clowns became stock brokers and scientists, never gone off to Albany (because John Jay was a good move although you fucked up there too, you got into a program that was excellent for the likes of you, that whole parallel and lateral thinking, that interdisciplinary shit you’re so keen on) and stayed for fucking five years investing in a doctoral program that was so mired in politics and pretension that by the end of it, by the time you busted your ass through the doctoral exams you couldn’t even write anymore, what good was that?
I feel a tremendous need to struggle out of this skin, rip the meat off the bones and exchange them for something else. I’ve grown fat, I am no longer lithe (I was always fat as a child, but then sprouted up and through rooftops in my teenage years; although I was no stunner then, you could see my cheekbones and the outlines of my abs), I am lethargic, suffering the beginnings of a mid-life crisis when I used to tell people I would not live past twenty.
I want a tattoo of my wife’s angelic face on my shoulder to comfort me when all the voices have left me, as they have been, one by one, over the years, leaving back alone in the darkness where they first found me, naked and churning, shivering, crawling, raking, waiting to breathe.
Mother, father please explain to me this blood in my veins, why it runs hot and cold, why I burn bridges and freeze out corners of my heart. Explain why I want to run away, not run backwards in time, but sideways and straight out of it, I want to keep my head together in death, even if that means living another life. Explain to me why there isn’t anything more than this and why this sack of meat lives so hard and true and clear like it’s all never supposed to end. Explain to me why when the world stops, I lose track of time and there’s so little time left even when there’s all the time in world? Explain to me when exactly I went mad because I cannot possibly be well like this. This is not the way I was supposed to leave the world, this is not supposed to be the life I would give my wife, my child. This is not supposed to be how things turned out in the end, especially when the end is nowhere near in sight.
Twist and twist it all around, trying to make the old sound new again. Reverb off the common sense and make the senses work to make sense of it. Everything old is new again only if you knock it out of shape.