Melenchronic Thrombosis of the Pocket

As this year draws ever nearer to the end, and the encroaching winter seems to pity the inhabitants of the east coast by holding off her true power for yet another day, I find I am locked in a constant epic battle between wild lush optimism and isolating despair.

There’s something about fall that calls for self examination, and winter for self extermination. Perhaps it is the hibernation mentality.

I can feel the light meter of the world slowly being wound lower. The blacks and whites and colors are all creeping with grey. The shadows and light are seeping into one another and it becomes difficult to differentiate.

Why is it I become so dolorous, so melancholic this time of year, though perhaps, I never really came out of it in 2008. I spent the entire year holding my breath underwater, petrified of the inevitable moment my lungs gave up and I took the long scorching suck of seawater held only for me.

Yesterday at a Wal-Mart in New York, when an employee began to unlock the doors to their store at four in the morning, the materialistic lemmings desire to hurl themselves to the conglomerate evil maw of the holiday season overwhelmed them, and the crowd broke the doors of the store down and trampled the employee to death.

TO DEATH.

Are we the first country in history to have a SHOPPING MARTYR?

A man who gave his life for the CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY HOLIDAY DEALS TODAY ONLY AT 4AM! How do you explain that to a family? How do you reassure a mother or a daughter or a wife or a husband that their beloved died because this country’s economic circumstances made this Black Friday a Black and Blue and Blood spattered one?

I have spent the last year of my life balanced on the scythe of abject poverty. I have racked up credit card debt for items like groceries and deworming my cat. I don’t recall the last time I bought a new piece of clothing. I eat so poorly I delighted in the array of vegetables my parents served at Thanksgiving, because I couldn’t remember the last time I ate a vegetable that wasn’t a pickle or a stewed tomato slice stolen at work and smashed to oblivion between two pieces of bread. I cannot regret more the quantity of time and energy I’ve wasted on the entire money bullshit problem. And you couldn’t pay me to go near a store on Black Friday.

Where are the priorities really?

I am so tired of being miserable because I can’t afford x or y. There is so much free and beautiful in the world, so much joy and passion and pleasure to be had merely in the company of friends. To relish my walk with Cass in the morning through the graveyard up the street from the apartment costs me nothing. An oasis of history, a perspective on mortality, a daily sobering stroll through the passages and markers of those who have fallen before me and cried their last tears over the finicky nature of life, while my dog defecates delicately under a copse of maple and birch.

This morning, while walking, my mind wandered to the cemetery somewhere in New York, where a man is being returned to the earth,

ashes to ashes,

dust to dust,

coins to coins,

in god we trust…

Fury.

What true ugliness, what true darkness, what real greasy film of grey creeping over the landscape is not winter, but cruelty flushing the pallor of a population of faces.

Self preservation, preparation for the “hard months ahead”. When they come.

When it is my day to breathe my last and give my earthly shell back to the mother from whence it came, I would rather die owing a million dollars to the faceless, evil companies of the world, if there could be a heart inside a million bodies I touched in some way.

mane of consciousness

October and its tar-clad lions drive a chariot of cornstalks and birch limbs with pumpkin wheels and tall wild torches burning eyes and streaked locks of mane through the night.
You stand aimless in a dark lane dark like an underwater cave. And suddenly in the blurry, fuzzy, all consuming blackness there glitters the vehicle and her minions -time drawn by her burning clocks.
These torches roaring toward you faster and faster, brighter and hotter and so huge the tinder of your lungs flares up like newspaper curling and frying with scream after scream composed of dust storms and dry heat and bleached bones whiter than the cotton filament of pain, the smitten heart of lightening, the unfaithful, blind eye of the candle.
And then, just as sudden as it came upon us, the chariot draws on.
The pressure, the heat, the fear of death bigger than any chasm in the tender, foolish earthen skin, leaves off, and the absence of it is almost more than a body can bear.

The lane is dark and silent, and relentlessly empty.

What comes after is a kindness of nature.
The pity of soft, warm rain to rinse upturned cheeks and wrecked, cracked eyes.
A hoarse sigh through peeling lips and the moment of desperate panic is passed for now. One returns completely to the present, to the body and its myriad levels of destruction.
A glass of water like a dream and a promise.

In the aftermath, there is preparation, and the nights grow so long they stain the days with their coal dust skies. The rain does not let up, and it becomes the solace of routine. One begins to carry an umbrella, forgets why the sky was welcome to crash down on one's head long ago. The solemn songs of the encroaching cold call from steeple to weathervane, garret to gable, and yet there is some forgiveness still. There is a little longer to stand in the veiled night and examine the moon.