by M. Blake

I’m going with blues riffs, poetry lines, fictional characters, my own moment-to-moment inspiration (or lack of), anything but that concern in your face, your daily worry over your future, that I can’t use, your being absorbed in the trivial, what you wear, how you look, your frustration at being a “nobody,” it only makes me laugh. Don’t you see how many moments have escaped you?  As you chatter on about your prospective plans, your ideas for raising yourself up, your sudden inspirations on how to fire your rockets so that you can take off out of this “rut” you’re in. You’re convinced you have it in you and you’re determined to make me see that potential, too.

And believe me, I don’t want to doubt you. It’s just that we’ve been over this territory before, and all I can do is move my head to that inner music and give you a sympathetic smile in reply. I doubt that I can show you I’ve given up on that line of thinking. I’m “crazy” and I know it; I’ve stopped trying to make sense in the eyes of others. It doesn’t work. It’s a losing proposition. If you impart anything to another, it will just happen and find a way through without your big push.

You’re pushing all the time, that’s the problem. Push, push, push. It’s like daily exercise for you. You don’t feel satisfied unless you’re “striving” for something in real “go-getter” fashion, but I wonder if you really do know what you’re looking for. You always seem busy, but confused at the same time. There is something absurd in that picture, and I can’t help but laugh – though I feel for you at the same time.           

My only answer for you is not something based in the corporeal; it isn’t something I can show you in my hand, or give you a specific set of instructions to. Yet you might catch a glimpse of it in that spark in my eyes, or that sudden grin meant to grab you and shake the tenseness and ambition away for the moment. Leave the long-term policies for the time being; it’s all there for you in a song, a poem, in the heroes that still inhabit your mind (and that you have perhaps forgotten about), the people you admired at one time before you focused on your designs only. Go inside to your true foundation, to what you have already gathered, but buried. It’s in there, for we were all young once; and I think you’ll find something to sustain you, and not leave you “forsaken,” exasperated and uneasy out here on the roadside, clawing at bogus visions.

<<>>