Life Crisis

A poetry/prose creative mashup

At a certain point I’m overcomplicating things even for myself. Not everything in life is a philosophical treatise mixed with a math problem embedded in a Soviet spy novel heaped onto a bone pile of a medieval court mystery. I’ve been doing this whole being human thing a whole lot longer than most ppl that I’ve ever known or been close with or even I myself ever thought I could or would have. Have you ever stood in a crowded room in a raucous house party and thought to yourself “Fuck! I’ve been alive longer than anyone else in here.”

Try five times since just last Tuesday.

I’m tired.

At the end of the day, I’ve already probably expressed myself too much already. It’s hard sometimes to be your own best friend.

Is the situation serving me? No. Is it helpful? No. Can I walk away from it? Somewhat. Can I do it without unraveling other relationships, other situations with other ppl or other aspects of myself? No. No. Not at all.

We are already so entangled in each other’s lives and enmeshed in each other’s tendrils. Look up at the sky and laugh back at God..

No aspect of being human can ever stand independent of the basic fact of being a social species. From its breaking dawn in days of broiling heat on the prairies of the East African savannah to the bone chill of late autumn last year in East River Park out by the water, the entire throbbing mass of humanity is hurled into the abyss like a shaking subway car is throttled out onto the elevated lines overhead and arcs it’s way straight into the bloody belly of mid-town Manhattan. Your bones felt weary as the wind rattled the last leaves out of the trees and your skeleton sagged like a prewar apartment building long fallen into disrepair.

I’m tired

Your heart still throbs just like a harp string--

Oh Lord im tired.

Being human still hurts--

Im tired.

The breaking waves against the battered beaches--

Oh God I’m tired.

I never again will get a chance to be young--

I’m tired.

In the pearly dawns and youthful promise lie the aching howl of wind and gaping maw of open graves in darkest night and deadest winter.

No other animal looks quite the same way at its young.

In their fetal heartbeat is the same febrile tremor

and resounding echo that beats against frail skin and bends the mind into contortions just as painful as the body and spreads a milky glaze over the iris as a dark cloud passes against a pale moon rising.

We curl up against ourselves like flowers curled into petals of rot.

Who are you?

That same resilient resounding echo--

Oh Lord I’m tired .

We pick each other up in our lives and drop each other off along our way like shuffling commuters into the gaping maw of the subway’s roar, clattering our way from birth to death the same way the clanging din of the F train makes its way from Rockefeller Center to Broadway-Lafayette at rush hour straight through the throbbing heart of New York City.

So we head into the evening darkness and towards Brooklyn and emerge onto further shores and pick up a newspaper and begin homeward--

death as a bride stands elevated and is anointed at the alter and illuminated as a thousand candles’ glow in the bright eyes of hungry ghosts--

We cast ourselves headlong into the third rail like roiling seafoam.

Part 2 Excerpt from a Personal Correspondence. I,e, a love letter to Anonymous.

I do, however, miss you and at times your absence brings me sorrow still. I’m sure that you must be at least as familiar as I am about the struggles of finding a mind and a heart that is intellectually, spiritually and creatively of a similarly well-matched manner and equilibrium. A quick wit, a coy and cunning sense of humor, an artist’s stormy complex temperament, a soul always striving towards transcendence, looking for the source code of the Creator in every fleeting moment of joy or second when you unexpectedly stumble across some otherworldly vision of nature in a state of rare primordial grace and rapturous sublime beauty. It was just such a preternatural moment when first you appeared before me, and at a very prescient time in my life at that. I stood at the pinnacle of my youth and beauty, triumphant, strong-willed, and self-assured but still silently longing in my heart for companionship. You walked towards me like a shimmering azure oasis in human format, a fresh sight for weary eyes after wandering in vain for what seemed like an eternity--sifting thru barren sand dunes searching for any semblance of the extraordinary in a desert devoid of all that lends meaning to experience--- absent of all color, melody, sweetness or fragrance. The vibrance of our lively conversations at long last quelled my deep spiritual hunger and slaked my desperate intellectual thirst. Enamored by your sweet demeanor and your mind’s intensity and held captive by your brown eyes’ honey-colored gaze, some essential part of me likely stands there in your shadow still. Two rare minds alike as ours are about as difficult to find as fine-cut diamonds in a gutter. But I had once upon a time found another one alike in you. You understood my deepest self’s desire to apprehend the ineffable and to dwell transfixed within the numinous. Once in every cycle of samsara at most maybe, are we fated find one so well-suited. Should we let the fact that at one point it fell sour dissuade us from cherishing the memories of the days when our love’s fruit was still ripe, overflowing with sweetness, satiating and abundant ??

It’s a lonely mind that holds onto all its own most lofty thoughts, that has no other kindred spirit to allow them to flow forth and take on form thru means of like-minded discourse. I still long to share the complex and ponderous geometry of my oddly and eccentrically patterned psychological landscape with another individual but still I stand alone and quiet, huddled within the safe confines of the secret gardens of my psyche. Year go by where no one appears who may even be capable to leap its barriers, much less be interested in doing so. Love is a senseless leap over logic’s walls, after all--and many have returned from its endeavors most grievously injured. Some have even lost themselves to its pursuit entirely, I know that you and I both still nurse our wounds. And so I’ve been stuck here alone in my own head for quite a while now, talking to myself and stalking my mind’s own perimeters.