Poim: The Rape of the Plains
@interludedocs
Silence is Life
PUBLICATION IN THE AGE OF NEGATION pt.3
Compassion and Contempt…
https://artillerymag.com/compassion-and-contempt/
Lucky Man
As we walked out one night,
my love and I,
I caught a glimpse
of an old bachelor friend
through the window of a restaurant.
He was sitting at the counter,
reading a newspaper over his solitary meal.
He would be going home alone,
getting into bed alone and waking up alone,
rather than returning to a shared bed
with a beautiful woman.
And I felt a sharp pang of envy.
For in his aloneness his life seemed fuller, richer,
and less lonely than mine
in its incomplete state of togetherness.
My love also noticed him and turned to me.
“Isn’t that your friend?” she said,
“poor guy.”
A Richer Victory
All Down the Line
A Richer Victory
Doghouse Epiphany
The object of this restlessness that puzzles you
is solitude: a loneliness for loneliness,
a wistfulness for restlessness,
a straining back to what comes naturally –
the way things used to be
when I had only me.
I miss myself madly.
I long to be romantically involved
with myself again, like old times:
dependent only upon independence,
demanding only temptation.
Kill Off Your Expectations, Settle In
Hour after hour, day after day, year after year, decade after decade, consumed by this precious illusion of service to the pen: priceless time that might have been used to benefit others, from which I might even have derived pleasure. And what have I received in return for this self-serving – if that – satisfaction of having actualized myself? Poverty and solitude have been the chief rewards. And what, actually, am I actualizing? Do I have anything to say that is worth saying at all or that hasn’t been said better before, that might justify this massive investment of time and energy, this insistence on keeping going, this unflagging commitment to a lost cause, as if it were a sacred act and not a sickness born of vanity? What would happen if I didn’t do it? Nothing. Nobody would notice. It wouldn’t make any difference to anybody… other than myself. And I would probably be a lot better off without it. As a compensatory last resort there’s always the myth of posthumous glory. But to receive that one has to die first. How inconvenient. I must put that on my to-do list. It would completely validate the work, of course. The only problem is that I haven’t done the work. I must also put that on my to-do list.