Thought became presence, like a shell on the beach, like the flickering word of a gull under a cold thunder moon. I floated on the blue water, a reliquary of things from the past, dreaming of a moment of conception on a glittering moonlit bay.
A while back, I told my girlfriend she needed to move out. To my surprise, she did so that very day. I figured she’d get lonely and scared of having to be by herself and wouldn’t be able to live without me. Instead, she got stronger and happier with every passing second. I thought to myself, “Damn, this wasn’t supposed to happen.” But then I finally just admitted that this
That thou punished me and made me hate thee is true. But I promised to be wise thereafter and seek thy grace. Why didst thou forsake me for my faults when I merely mimicked thy heckling tribe? I loved thee when thou strok’st me and taught me the charms of thy art. But now that I am subject to none, my torment is solitude. Prithee, magician, return to these sands!
Everything is an imposed illusion, an undisclosed projection, observed by unwitting players seeking knowledge just beyond perception. The beautiful things translate, perched on a rocky ledge at sunset, watching the valley turn to gold.
I remembered Drew from the 1960s, stoned on hashish or LSD, babbling Marx or Marcuse, whanging away on a red guitar. We lost contact during the ’70s, even though I’d occasionally see him, dressed in bright rags, riding up and down Tejon Street on a bike, a faraway look in his eyes. Early one morning while walking uptown to the park, I dropped into a place called Poor Richard’s for
Whatever concept an artist imagines Is a reflection of a latent form that lies within A block of marble; the hand alone, Guided by the intellect, can give it form. from Michelangelo’s Sonnet 15 The “reflection of a latent form” Michelangelo characterizes in his poem has inspired debate among artists, aesthetes, and philosophers for thousands of years, with little resolution. A procession of thinkers from Homer on have claimed that the
