Too Many Jokes
Too many jokes I tell myself.
My brothers.
A handful of friends.
Over and over again, too many jokes.
Sometimes I feel like I’m stuck wandering. From one place to another. No place feels quite right. No place feels like home.
Nose to the ground, searching for traces of something. A memory,
Reality feels like a dewdrop on a leaf that shakes and drips. Blink for a moment and it’s gone. Disappeared. And you disappear with it.
There’s a memory filed away of a cold night drinking somewhere. The cold getting to me, and talking to friends until that feeling slipped away, forgotten.
Sometimes it occurs to me a person could do that his or her entire life. Just autopilot the whole fucking mess.
Wake up one day and finish it off.
You’d like to think you’re one soul in a brotherhood of man. But no one wants to get his fingers dirty pulling things from the muck. So it’s up to each of us to out-do the rest in all varieties of vanity.
I shave my head and slowly trim the colorful clothes from my wardrobe. Even when I splurge on a pair of colorful sneakers, I wind up rebuking myself.
Like whatever you like, but do nothing which is of no use.
The process is its own reward.
After it calms down, the person looks away. Tapping into that pure moment. It will always happen.
First some small talk, small feats to break the ice. Maybe too many jokes to make the person smile. And then a bit of conversation, only half-carried, trailing off into silence. And on that threshold, a gentle lapse into that state of honesty.
I will put some fives in my wallet.
And walk through the city. In solitude.
But if I find someone like me, hanging out, with that nowhere-to-go look and nothing-to-do attitude, I’ll pay them for a portrait.
Something carved away from the whole, floating out there in the periphery.
Shorn from your origins, belonging nowhere, and to no one. Like a bird taking wing.
Climbing high above metal valleys. Poured from molten sunshine.