I have always been a wallflower with confidence, silly as that may sound. The confidence came from reading more, knowing more, working harder, etc. The wallflower stuff came from my basic insecurities. I don't want people looking at me. I love a stage. Dichotomies, I know. It boils down to not wanting to win but desiring to place.
Winning takes too much effort.
But I've always placed. I was always in the upper 90th percentile.
The hardest part of coming back from the accident is placing. I am old, so it sucks not to have confidence.
Ili is young and pretty, and now when we go out, all the boys and girls are flirting with her. Where's mine?
"Does anyone ever ask you if you're her father?"
"Ah, I just kiss her big on the lips and tell them I'm her uncle. We're very close."
But I got into the pool and moved my hands about to exercise my shoulder. I tread water and dog paddled and pretend-swam in the shallow end. It seems to be working.
I did three push ups in a row without a break.
I'm trying. But as Dylan said, "You can always come back, but you can't come back all the way."
And he has the Nobel.
ReplyDeleteI went to the bookshelf - and took out three books of poems blindly
Rimbaud's "Illuminations" was one, "Strike/Slip "by Don McKay (brought to me by a friend I met online at a poetry site visiting me on Cape from Vancouver - she brought me three good Canadian books of poetry) and The "McSweeney's Book of Poets Picking Poets" which I believe I picked up at a yard sale and not sure Ive ever really read much of. So let's go there.
Page 16
The Devils
Charles Simic
You were a "victim of semiromantic anarchism
In its most "irrational form."
I was "ill at ease in an ambiguous world
Deserted by Providence." We drank gin
And made love in the afternoon. The neighbors'
TV's were tuned to soap operas.
The unhappy couples spoke little.
There were interminable pauses.
Soft organ music. Someone coughing.
"It's like Strindberg's Dream Play," you said.
"What is?" I asked and got no reply.
I was watching a spider on the ceiling.
It was the kind S. Veronica ate in her martydom.
"That woman subsisted on spiders only,"
I told the janitor when he came to fix the faucet.
He wore dirty overalls and a derby hat.
Once he had been an intimate of a notorious state institution.
"I'm no longer Jesus," he informed us happily.
He believed only in devils now.
"This building is full of them," he confided.
One could see their horns and tails.
If one caught them in their baths.
"He's got Dark Angles on his brain," you said.
"Who does?" I asked and got no reply.
The spider had the beginnings of a web
Over our heads. The world was quiet
Except when one of us took a sip of gin.
A random pick. I think though - I've lived parts of this.
i love when that happens. in Poem world.
Sweet dreams.