is there anything of value that can be taken from my actions friday evening; the ones i can remember that is . . .

well, i do have these stories . . . bits and pieces of strangely cushioned reflections that i’ve cross-referenced with the friend who witnessed my behavior that evening

i remember taking a guy-wire to the face as i ran, right across the jaw,
puffed my lip up all to hell, my upper gum was black and blue the next morning

i don’t remember arriving at, nor departing, the bar
but i remember being there,
working hard to maintain some semblance of coherence,

outside in the night
i ran up to strangers and asked them if they were an atheist or an agnostic

today i’ll tell you that i wanted to make them smile, to entertain them and prove to that portion of psyche which i want to find in every human that there is still someone out here who still cares,

today i’ll tell you that i wanted to scare the shit out of them

in the bar i tried to be lucid,

mostly because i’d run into two characters i’ve known for closer to ten years than not,
good folks,
townspeople i keep running into again and again
in those odd moments where two lives intersect
and i’m sorry if i ignored you man,
but you know i’ve always thought that she was beautiful

and it seems like i can only see her once a year

out in the night i was stopping cars
accosting the drivers
spreading the gospel

as i seem to see it

i really wish i could remember what i said

but wait a second-

i sat down here to construct some piece of elegant tragedy
(i already titled it Artistic Integrity III)

and this was supposed to be another meditation on the damnable condition of the relationship between alcohol and the temperament that demands to call itself artistic, even in those moments when -

-for example lying in bed (although i woke up on the floor) for the better part of a day, cut tongue refusing to stay clear of the split lip and bleeding gum -

- all you feel is stupid.

today all i want is for someone to tell me, definitively, why the archetype of the artist has become what it has become . . .

i can’t get over the idea that if i understood that - that - that damned chicken v. egg style conundrum that i’m only hinting at here because i refuse to waste any further time (besides the time currently being wasted [dammit, it’s different this time] bullshit, it’s the same old question, just a new spin) enunciating it.

if i could only understand that, i might know what to do next,
yet in truth, i’m the only one who can answer that question for myself
and you see how well it’s going so far

friday night i ran into a party
no idea who those people were
and i got thrown right back out

{that last bit, the particular tale in the above paragraph, comes mostly second hand, and i really don’t know if i want to use it as a metaphor, but that’s just restating the question}

This entry was posted on Monday, May 15th, 2006 at 10:27 pm and is filed under indiscriminate, philosophy, poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.