The Old Ghosts Once Again

Funny how the things we can describe in greatest detail are often the things we want and not the things we already have. Desire is specific, while possession is vague and indiscriminatory. For instance with a hunger I want a turkey breast and American cheese sandwich. The turkey sliced thick and the cheese trimmed thin, on a hard and crusty bread with a slathering of mayonnaise a single frilly green leaf of lettuce and two big thick slices of the ripest reddest Jersey fresh tomato you ever did see, the type where the juice from the tomato mixes just a little bit with that mayonnaise and sinks ever so slightly into the soft underbelly of the firm yet fluffy bread.

I can not, with any such voracity, describe the meal I just had only a few hours ago.

It's the same way with the seasons. In the languid heat of early August I imagine with great desire the beginnings of any winter storm, the specks of snow twirling in the brief illumination of the street lamps as they fall. In fall, so often my favorite, the evenings growing shorter and cooler I long for those near identical days in spring time where the difference is found in the bending of the light and the knowledge of the days direction.

Familial moments with children I shall never have, familiar moments with friends who have long since forgotten. The bittersweet love you can only hope to see reciprocated. The knowledge that you have done the right thing, without any chance of the world sharing in it.

I can describe in immense detail nearly any conversation I have ever had, the words of others floating like lillies in a pond waiting patiently for me to pick them out of thin air and restore them to their rightful place in long lost confabulations. But it is in the construction of the endless conversations I have never had that my true wit reveals itself. I am rarely bothered by L’esprit de l’Escalier, in fact it is quite often the things which I said which haunt me most, and not the things I had not thought to say. When speaking I rarely think of things to say, no, no indeed. I simply choose amongst a long and varied list of things previously thought of. I do not have conversations, I create them. Bend them to serve my will, or to fly in its very face.

But, right now, they can not speak. Silenced by mine own voice, they sit quietly and wait, and plot, and plan. They will come some day, but it matters little...for I am here already.

~

The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want, The Lord is my savior I shall not need, The Lord is near we shall not stray.

For I will be the crying King and you shall be my Queen, and we will dance the numbered waltz on a shore that stays unseen.

In the end we do pretend that made of might are mighty men.

The King, the Queen, the paupers too, do tell the Lord what he shall do. Till God awakes and then He sees, what a fool the world has made of me.

So until the end of light, a kiss goodbye my sweet good night.