Monday, November 30, 2009

Surviving November
“I shove joy like a knife / into my own heart, over and over”
-Tony Hoagland


Let us acknowledge our inconsolable fact:
there is excruciating pain in the truth that we are human.
I can’t understand, however,
how there are so many, legions of lovers
who are making the fun scene
and the bliss scene
and dropping it like it’s hot
and smiling constantly
and laughing.

Do they not feel the weight?
or do they, upon shouldering it call some emotional Hercules
to hold it when as they shrug it off?
I want the secret to that normalcy, since that is what normal
seems to be, or at what I hope it is.
Can money buy happiness? Tell me, Warren Buffett.
Tell me, Rupert Murdoch. Have I got it all wrong?
Is this why Hemingway bit that steel barrel?
Did Faulkner drink all that hooch to calm the sizzling fire in his brain?
I can see why he would, anyway.

There is one answer I do know.
Rebellion. To hunch against ourselves and weep for it,
to bray out like donkeys being led cruelly,
or better yet burn the mule as an offering
to a God that may or may not be there, but in the act of burning
this throbbing life pulses slower and mute.

That is our love, the love of saying no
to ourselves, storing up our own defiance for winter
building it up, throwing it out
and saving it again.