After noon

It is a platitude that the great force of human creativity is a means of dealing with the relentless, bladelike grief of being alive. I'm not so sure about this, as it might just be part of the story we like to tell about the Agony of the Artist, a lie that we tell ourselves about what it is to be authentically human, that it is to be angry and in pain, so that we need not torture ourselves more than we are already tortured. But still it seems to me that there is such an exhausting amount of energy involved in this grief, and I am not a poet. I do not know the pebbled, cobbled, dirt, asphalt, grassy paths of music and I am wide-eyed and often frightened in the face of those who do. I cannot draw.

So I am sitting, marooned in the tumult, and I cannot sharpen it as They do, distil it into nib or note. Instead like the others marooned I grasp at the things which The Others have made, tearing pieces from their pieces and clutching them to myself as though I might slipstitch them together, throw them in the air over and over until they came down arranged into something I might have made.

From Shaler's Fish

draining the land into raw salt and a poverty of sand and judgement
and I am balanced on one foot, assuming that the next step is groundward
but wherever the ground is, blood.