Storage

People pass through the world once. There are no do-overs. There is no time to spare. There is no room for exclusion, for that which is excluded is irretrievably lost. I have seen in my life people who consciously exclude, who actually make the decision to do so. I cannot understand it. How can anything or anyone in existence be determined to so completely lack value? How does it happen that people find their space, their compassion, their very freedom so very limited? And by what? Where is the boundary, how has it come to exist? It is as if life had somehow grown its own box. It is as if life were a hard drive with a certain nonnegotiable capacity for storage. One apparently reaches the limit. One apparently becomes numb. I don't understand it. I think each one of us is more like a sky. Or anyway, I wish we were.

Transition

I have never thrived very well on change. And since change is an essential ingredient in life--terutama jika anda menikah dengan seorang perempuam Indonesia--I have not done a whole lot of thriving. One is inclined to live according to what he has been taught and to what he has observed from the earliest times. Unwittingly, we mimic our fathers and our grandfathers, entering into their unfinished struggles, investing our own livelihood in foregone conclusions. To break the mold is to challenge a longstanding law scarcely divisible from ones own anatomy. Freedom arrives only through unconditional surrender--to this one must become absolutely captive.

Desperado--
this is new--
on the run
from who knows who--
and to think, this girl
with a kitten in her blouse
needed only to get to Eugene--
I figure we may as well start
with bigger things--
This is the secret
to the poem,
the lock of the key--
If travel is what you are wanting,
begin with more exotic lands