the introspecter

The days swarm by with little change but the temperature and the weather, fresh budding spring leavening the gray with slivers of green, hints of the greater green to come. Blue skies have broken out, with song birds in the pine trees and dogs sprawled out in the yard. Memories crowd and swirl like ashes after they abandon any last ember of light or heat. I am still loitering in the periphery, life flowing in festive and funerary ribbons right through me. I am posting again, these cartoons in the margins, these captions for the things left unsaid.

The break from posting wasn't so much a break from writing, though that itself was an attractive facet of the hiatus. It was more a brief respite from these habits of seeding my own isolation, the Russian roulette of recording these moments when every sense of tomorrow was dissolving, watching as I generate a precipice out of gray days and bad chemistry. It was about avoiding that shudder that ran through me while I watched the sickness overtake me, words clattering to the curb like reject brass. The heat of despair glowing in the dullness of my eyes, awaiting some untold measure of violence to curse the world with the gift of balance.

For awhile the weight of my consistent and overwhelming failures was a constant and bedeviling distraction. The combination of my depression and my misplaced obsessions made a particular poison of all the calamity I had tethered to my tracks, reason returning again and again to this path of the sinking ship, and the captaincy of dissolution. All of this plus the particular sort of prose-poem journalism I have been using in the attempt to capture the living truth of the moment, mingling the feel and the real made for seriously bad juju. And as we all know about juju, the bad kind is simply about the worst kind of juju there is.

Still, though I am posting again, I am in no way well. I am not cured of the blue murder streak that runs through my blood, or of the casual oblivion that lurks in the hollows of my heart. I am still as broken, as sad, as buried as ever. But instead of lingering upon every slip of longing, I am trying a little harder to play it as it lays. Less hope strangely makes a lot of kinds of living easier. Hope is another country, calling from across the sea. The world we are left to work with is something we can engage, figure out something steady from all these seething possibilities. So I try to find comfort in doing what I can, even if all I have left I can fathom is the fall.

This is the return to that same old neighborhood. That glimmer of twilight, that brooding touch of dawn. My habitual babbling now posted at a daily rate, a free lunch of dust and feathers. All the usual suspects, from the empty roads to the moonlit devil dancing on the line. Raccoons and raconteurs, filthy needs and bleeding reasons, all our cartoon pals on hand and raring to go. Angels and ministers of grace, you know what to do. Spill that breath and haul that ballast. That inverse wisdom is upon me yet again, shining like the longing of a sheathed blade. Waiting until the cards demand some wager, and the wind, when willing, will turn on its heals and flee, laughing madly into the night.