I have a paper due tomorrow and a viva voce. They call it an oral examination but I shall call it a viva voce because I have been accused, not unfairly, of displaying belated signs of delinquency and juvenency. I have a perverse desire to go to class and tell the teacher that I didn't write the paper because of lingering over the caput mortuum of last Spring. The bile inside me isn't worth writing about. Instead, I've copied the poet's verse.


The Scholars

Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love's despair
To flatter beauty's ignorant ear.

All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?


And I shan't leave this open-ended. I will tell you what I think. I think it's all futile, all, as Auster calls it, "magnificently useless."

Playing my part well

The snow is mounting outside. I have readings to read, paintings that lie unfinished from last August want my indifferent strokes to cross them out. I have emptied a cardigan full of chocolates.
A song makes my flesh tingle with desire again.
I wish I cared.
I developed a condescension for everyone and everything when I realized I knew. I was ten when I found I could separate myself from my body. It scared me and I only did it consciously when I was sad.
Brilliance is so deafening. At 16 when my parents would introduce me to people who were identified as intelligent I could smell rot. Lost limbs,organs,lives for this brilliance. I let them break my heart. It amused me.
My condescension lets none peek into the self that has been nurtured so lovingly by the un-self without.
Poem-penning, Barthes-spouting, communal loneliness evoked camaraderie makes me act with the same flourish as does a lover who saves me for the wedding night.

I do wish I cared.