Eight twenty.
The house is silent. Yesterday I resolved that I wanted things more like in the nineties; so, I would act as if the millennium never happened, and it was all a mistake. The millennium brought with it the deaths of my parents and best friend. The first decade for me was an awful test, with treatment and a job I hated, and the lying media throughout the war on terror. It makes little sense to ask if I was a free agent during that time. More like a Melvillesque plot; though it wasn’t all bad. Everyone takes scars as they grow to maturity and beyond. I keep thinking of my dad’s death and how I dealt with it: the silly book by Charles Fort full of rains of fish and frogs, also like the film Magnolia. It was like my dad’s ghost went into the force of the new century. The year 1999 was a strange one, with a lot of power to rob life and give it. Once I wrote a poem of a humpback whale through a screen of kelp, and in her wake a school of gleaming seahorses like stuff from a mystic dream.
If God has no plan for some of us, then Nature surely has. “And striving to be man, the worm / Mounts through all the spires of form.”
robgradens 