scruta

My innocence, my freshness, my opening to the world is a vacant lot in the middle of a sprawling city of high-rises drowning the sky in concrete. Gnarled grasses worm their way around the cracked earth, cordoned off from the surroundings by high walls and chain link fences. A dirt path leads inside from the road, strewn with detritus collecting dust.

I walk by the lot often and see myself walking down into it, but never actually do. I always have some place to be. Still, the thought of being there never leaves my mind. It haunts me when I’m alone in elevators, deep in work at my desk or carousing over drinks in the dimly lit corners of the city. Though I never go there, I feel as if I visit the vacant lot every day.

I promise myself that it won’t be paved over, and no building will take its place.

I’ll chain myself to the bulldozers first.

You want to know why poets suffer? Why they perversely grasp the sword of Damocles and bring it down upon their heads?

The greatest poets strike at what is most universal, and there is nothing more universal than suffering.

The only sin I know is feeling sorry for yourself.

Do you want to know what loneliness is? It is an obsession. It is the thing that you know you should turn your eyes from, but you can’t look away. It is a naked woman prancing through the streets flooded with pedestrians, and you are the one driving a tractor trailer behind her, staring idly when you should be watching your mirrors and the road ahead.

Loneliness is that naked woman running through the streets too fast for you to catch her. The more you try the faster she goes, wearing you out, folding your concentration, diverting your attentions.

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Sometimes I think I’ve fallen in love with loneliness. I do not work to end the sight of her. The chase I make across the city late at night or in the brightness of the morning is the same. I love that amber sigh I feel when I meet her gaze, that shining promise in the distance.

This is the thing that you’d probably say if you were trying to unravel this Chinese mystery that you see before your foreign eyes, sitting in a land that heard the buddha speak long ago, that understood and forgot, but found his voice lined in its bones. Now you see China as this, a mystery that continually unravels. You think you’ll understand the core, a massive turban that you unravel in your hands, turning over and over, piling up before you that you find impossibly, perversely never diminishes in size. You tell yourself that there must be a core, or that even if there isn’t, that you must think there is.

I am of the opinion that hearts do not grow stronger; they thicken.

I laugh at anyone who says the age of kings is over.

What man doesn’t want to be a king? What woman doesn’t want to be a queen?

This is the basis of our age; the madness that binds us.

The vision that everyone should live like a king, that everyone can live like a king.

I believe that people have souls in spite of the snickers and cries from hard-headed materialists in the back of the room whose neurological pathways keep them from participating in this illusion that I call a soul, that I call my life-blood, that I call myself.

What would you reductionists not take from your own breath? You know, the one that gasps ineffectual innocence even as it breathes it in?

Look at you traveler. Look at your eyes in the mirror. See how the pupils are flashing black before you.

Could you reckon their meaning? Could you see into their nothingness dividing nothing into nothing? Darkness into darkness? Depth into depth?

Do you even want to?

I am possessed by my dreams, my passions.

If you would ask me how I am different from most people, I would say it is this.

But these others…these others… what is it then when they look at me like a madman?

How do they see me? A foaming, fidgeting madman? Babbling at street light shadows? Lost in dayglow rantings? Chasing the sounds of ringing strings? Hanging on the breath of just-spoken words? Consuming all thoughts of the future, of progeny, of safety for that demon burning inside of me?

Are they devoid of passion? Or are they afraid to let their passions consume them?

I don’t know. To me, they are madmen as well.