CONTENDER
A CONTENDER
I coulda run a country my bro said the other day as I fell into self
loathing for choices made and not made But Stop! Cormac McCarthy
now 82 tells us: The probability of the actual is absolute And I have come
a tortured + circuitous route to agree Wholeheartedly
Hands up if you believe in crossroads You know the place where
old Robert Johnston sold his soul to the devil (..so he could play guitar..)
The place where for a split second or 2 you believe that the road is yours
to choose But find that the choice you have lassoed has become a noose
That road is yours for the taking! And once you do the mirage of the crossroads
fades Every grate Every iron door +every die rolls into place Once a thing
is set in motion all inert desires are slaughtered You will never find the saw your
brother placed inside the cake The one he passed through the grate on your 60th
birthday
But for now why not celebrate the vestiges of the child in the morphing 20
somethings all around you? All tatted up with more places to go than you
can shake your cane at What do they know of the grate? The steel door? Vestiges
of immortality still cling And when the last Monarch passes on it’s way to Mexico
they won’t even notice +may swat it to death Because today they feel groggy from
all of the beer+groping on the couches at The Dance Cave
While tomorrow is an endless mirage I am I can I will Yet there is a vast
difference between quitting + knowing when you’re beat But you must be old
with grizzly-thinning skin to have such gravitas As well to know that: Some
of the most miserable people around are the ones who finally got what they
always wanted
__
Choice is lost in the maze of generations and each act in that maze is itself an
enslavement for it voids every alternative and binds one ever more tightly into
the constraints that make a life.
He’d have latched it but those doors only latched from without.
(Cormac McCarthy Cities Of The Plain 1998)
Summer 2017
songanddancegirl 