12-24-1986

When I was a boy, I had an idea.
It was just an idea; it wasn't a plan.
I ran to the precipice, then I ran back,
I looked over the edge into darkness...and ran.

Moment by moment and for year after year,
I have entertained thoughts of all I might have done
with a moment's less hesitation that day,
another year to endure, or nowhere to run.

The monsters of childhood will never quite fade,
nor the lessons that battling them did impart;
I am reminded by scars that I still bear
on my body, in my mind, and deep in my heart.

Fear turned to anger, and anger to hatred,
and the slight, ugly sting of a selfish regret:
how much easier to sleep might it have been,
had I let myself settle that outstanding debt

as he himself taught me, might even have praised
had he raised me with even a little less fear.
Had I loved him a bit less in that moment,
I would surely have shed something more than a tear.

But a tear is what I shed in that moment
of freedom, when I knew I was no longer scared.
Without word or deed I had already won.
I left him alone, because I no longer cared. 

And I left a warning, as plain as could be.
It was only a warning, it wasn't a plan.
A bullet, stood upright, nearby where he slept;
a reminder the monster was only a man.

You cannot own what I own:
such singular joys,
you ignorant boys.
They are mine, and mine alone

You cannot know what I know:
the mind, formed like pearls,
presumptuous girls,
needs stimulation to grow.

You cannot see what I see:
your eyes will turn blind
and doubts cloud your mind,
if you watch the world with me.

You cannot love what I love:
this summit of space,
this depth of disgrace,
the world, below and above.

У меня есть жена

Four years - the first full term, if you will.  You run on a platform of all the things you're going to do; care for everyone, keep a budget, trim the fat, uphold the common good, educate your young, honor your elders, defend what is yours, and promote the values that bind you together.  You compromise on all of them here and there, not because you lose your way or falter in your commitments, but because you have to compromise sometimes in order to achieve most of those goals.  At the very least, you have to prioritize a bit, and in the end you always have to cut some programs that really mattered to someone.

But if you keep every promise you possibly can (even those that were ill-advised or over-stated), and always act within everyone's best interests, hopefully you'll be asked to stick around for another term.

I don't know anything about politics, but marriage sure as hell works that way.

The Truth Hurts

A schism due to indecision;
regret and then recidivism
beget a past split through a prism
scattered by abrupt division,
tinged with it's revisionism.
What fool would such a path envision?
Truth is a bludgeon in love's fission,
but disregard is an incision.

The Medium Moderate / Insincere Filth

Forty years ago, I can imagine Bourbon St. in New Orleans was a wholly different experience; the locals who are old enough to remember and the tourists here on business who once came in their youth lament the change, but you'd hardly notice them anymore.  The whole of the French Quarter and much of the surrounding area revolves around the service industry, as does the neighboring business district across Canal St. that is home to the less historic but ultimately swankier hotels, the Morial Convention Center, and the Sugar Bowl; in a post-Katrina town many of those service people are imports, with only a passing sense of the history of the town and the people, and even those born and raised in the Big Easy are too young to remember it as it was.

Much like the Las Vegas Strip, Bourbon St. is a relatively safe parody of what was once a genuine reputation for sin, indulgence, and vice.  Bachelor parties, organized tours, conventioneers, and retirees are slowly chasing down and overtaking drunken students and dedicated hedonists as the primary clientele, and once you get past the ready availability of liquor and strippers, you realize that the food sucks now, everything is overpriced, and worse than being filthy, it's insincerely so.  The public order laws, police presence, and company policies have been engineered to provide what is ultimately a sort of pervert's Disney experience.

All of this competes of course with the priorities of a much larger, richer city that wants to recapture or protect their history and help their own people; if you stray from Bourbon St. into the rest of the Quarter and on into the Marigny, you can still see some semblance of the old New Orleans of legend...but even that may not be there for much longer.  The one adult themed store that caters to the traditional leather and S&M community is being drowned out by a trio of whitewashed chain stores that sell bland "intimacy enhancers" designed for vanilla couples, and for every storefront steeped in local culture and indigenous practices, there are five convenience store that sell cheap copies imported from China, from voodoo dolls to plastic versions of the sculptures, glass works, taxidermy, and other oddities.  There are a few very good restaurants remaining, but many of them are sadly attached to a celebrity chef who is never actually present, or to someone that has insisted that New Orleans somehow needed fusion foods based only loosely on what was already one of the richest and most diverse culinary traditions in the world.

But the heart of it is still there in the people who remain true to the experience; brass bands wandering in front of Pirate's Alley, the smell of roux and bread, and a pervasive idea that even the most desperate of souls can revel alongside the local gentry and the tourists.  The merchandise and services may be overpriced in places, but the soul of being in New Orleans is still entirely free of charge.

Other than the toll it takes on your sleep and sobriety, of course.

She is a Diamond

Untameable adámas is oft a condradiction:
the hardness of her surface and the softness of her glow,
her value in adornment and inherent rarity,
the way she flashes brilliant when she's held and turned just so.

What makes such a thing beautiful is her imperfections,
a blueprint of her forming that observant eyes might see;
inclusions give character, and her color hues the light,
as if each and every flaw has been tailored thus to be.

She hides it in the rough, but when purposely directed
her nature is to radiate what she herself demands.
To care for her is labor, and to know her is an art.
She shines the most when polished, by patient and caring hands.

She Who Dances In The Glade

A girl might dream of dancing light,

that in the forest flits and twirls madly;

a random, airy thing of faerie fire

and silken wing, this daring sprite

who sheds robes and concerns gladly

to revel there in unrestrained desire.

A man might wander through that wood,

discarding care, forsaking human toil

of plow, and trowel, and stone-sharpened blade

to run and howl where two legs stood

before, and search the sky and soil

for scent of she who dances in the glade.

And should their revelries conspire

to bring them to the perfect place and time,

each might know the other’s nature on sight

and curse their human skin a liar.

A beast may out of man thus climb,

and a girl dream she is a dancing light.