Where does the time go, after we've sailed through and soiled it and looked around to only just catch its tail end darting around a corner. Maybe it is stored in a deep, soft hamper with the dirty laundry, caught in the lint in pockets and hems. All you have to do is dig it out to delay the getting dark of the day, which is coming later now after we sacrificed yet another hour to who knows where. Or maybe the time runs and hides under beds and dressers and nightstands where rings and paperclips and socks tend to congregate and gossip about our wasteful and forgetful ways. Perhaps it is just me, pitting time against me and the world. Time might actually be benevolent, whispering assurances from the cracks in my mattress and never discussing my habits after I leave the room. It's just me, then, who views it as the enemy. I invented its ill-wishing motives and crafty ways. Maybe it just goes along and I become out of breath and irritable trying to catch it.
I spend my life, slack-jawed, in front of computers and faces blank as blinking as screens. I surround myself with clocks, timekeepers set to eight different realities so I don't have to choose. I am perpetually late and sometimes early, but I never know whether whether it is 6:15 or 6:20 or merely 6, and that suits me fine.
This is the age of 160-character statements and diatribes on live-feed, and articles in newspapers withering from disuse and disinterest. Maybe it's better this way, when the Charlie Sheens can vent and the Pulitzer-prize winners can vent, and neither one can hear the other like they are shouting over a brick barricade, and soon the lauded and talented writer will stand alone speaking to a wall, while Charlie Sheen decorates his side like it's Berlin with the help of his followers, the world.
"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." Let's hit it with sledgehammers and shatter the grafitti-stained concrete like its glass or sugar lace and dance on the rubble without getting hurt. Maybe the words manufactured in loud, bellowing presses can be consumed with as much vigor as those spirited away through cyber space, the ones which sit, quivering and bright, on my screen and wait to engage me. Maybe writing can once more be a profession and not a hobby, and people will again move to Paris and write like Hemingway and that woman, the one nobody respected. We can all sip bitter coffee and spew out words that don't sound like we're pleasuring ourselves, and words that don't sound like we're writing them after a bottle wine or coming out of sleep, but words which prove that the coffee tastes like bathwater but there is a long and tall expanse of balconied buildings stretching out ahead of me and the sun is still sitting where it should and somebody is making dinner beneath my feet and above my head and I am content to write these words for their own sake, because I want to and because I hope other people want me to, too.
There's really no other explanation, except that the rhy
I spend my life, slack-jawed, in front of computers and faces blank as blinking as screens. I surround myself with clocks, timekeepers set to eight different realities so I don't have to choose. I am perpetually late and sometimes early, but I never know whether whether it is 6:15 or 6:20 or merely 6, and that suits me fine.
This is the age of 160-character statements and diatribes on live-feed, and articles in newspapers withering from disuse and disinterest. Maybe it's better this way, when the Charlie Sheens can vent and the Pulitzer-prize winners can vent, and neither one can hear the other like they are shouting over a brick barricade, and soon the lauded and talented writer will stand alone speaking to a wall, while Charlie Sheen decorates his side like it's Berlin with the help of his followers, the world.
"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." Let's hit it with sledgehammers and shatter the grafitti-stained concrete like its glass or sugar lace and dance on the rubble without getting hurt. Maybe the words manufactured in loud, bellowing presses can be consumed with as much vigor as those spirited away through cyber space, the ones which sit, quivering and bright, on my screen and wait to engage me. Maybe writing can once more be a profession and not a hobby, and people will again move to Paris and write like Hemingway and that woman, the one nobody respected. We can all sip bitter coffee and spew out words that don't sound like we're pleasuring ourselves, and words that don't sound like we're writing them after a bottle wine or coming out of sleep, but words which prove that the coffee tastes like bathwater but there is a long and tall expanse of balconied buildings stretching out ahead of me and the sun is still sitting where it should and somebody is making dinner beneath my feet and above my head and I am content to write these words for their own sake, because I want to and because I hope other people want me to, too.
There's really no other explanation, except that the rhy
