We Live in Tangled Spirals

And so at last I am old. I enter the shallows knowing the depths to come are no big deal. Erudition remakes me yet again, but this time in an image nobody wants. Desire is always yoked to memory because memory is all a body is, in the end. Crickets are a recurring dream of summer while fireflies are promises we make in one life but keep in another. The prodigal who elects not to go home, who eats his fate without choking or spitting - can I meet him now? At 5 a.m. the house is quiet enough for prayer, but I do not pray, only lie to myself about prayer. What is recursive is always escalating - we live in the tangled spirals of what we'll never know. Greek coffee boils under the watchful eyes of cats. One privately mourns their father's passing, signaling in a faint but ongoing way (which is what "father" means after all) their longing to live monastically. The many fallacies that organize our shared being are like cousins you never meet but then meet only to realize you've never not known them. Have another beer! In Ireland I was less Irish than I would be ever again and never was I freer but that's not how you go home now, is it? I will miss sex by outdoor fires, long drives with coffee, and the happy confusion instigated by photographs. Always be seducing and always be willing to be seduced, says the Man without Shoes, who will seduce no woman ever again. At the foot of a mountain, one looks up. Below the sky one studies with the Teacher who explains the sky is everywhere, we are in it and also, there is no sky. Oh my tired heart, oh my weakening voice. In January I pull the quilt tighter and try to remember how it all began. You?