The Fundraiser

Even a poem

is too loud.

What is happening to me? The past few years have certainly seen this movement towards a very quiet life. I seem to be incapable of handling the way people swarm like bees, the hum of their conversation, the screeching punctuation of those who seek attention above the din. I CRAVE silence like a junkie. I am angry tonight because my neighbors are once again out on their postage stamp of a patio laughing it up like cancer has left the planet, and joblessness was soooo yesterday, and my son has not been spending his first four hours in Los Angeles on his bike, waiting for someone to let him on the couch. That sounds so jaded! I am angry at myself for being jaded. But I have weight. There are incredible weights...held, released, thrown, purposed, unpurposed. I used to drown them out. I suppose now I am facing them head to head, and distraction is just another semester to a diploma long past due. Noise was a deluge to thought. (Drown those dirty rats!)


I remember cooking in my kitchen...Marc Broussard on full volume, the melody, the sway, the words overshadowing my own, pots and pans making racket like ghosts in the attic, bent on driving the living from the halls of entitlement. It was only a stage...a brilliant light before the filament breaks a bone and darkness comes unexpected. This silence holds no distraction. There are no more shades on the windows, and filters are a thing of the past. This is where the mortar and pestle meet...in the coveted silence. Rubber v. Road. Truth v. Wish. The full monty.


I watched the sunset in silence tonight, as if it could prepare me for frivolity, as if I could store it. There was a bright square in the midst of that glorious display. I thought, "How strange that this block of light should be suspended above all that sets...hung up, unable to pass on...another kitchen ghost with unsettled business". I tried to photograph it.  After one shot, my camera said Out Of Memory. Oh man. God is speaking Annie. Pay attention. We cannot capture and hold. Life is a succession of filaments. Be aware.


Of course I cannot live in such silence and still play human. And so I am wondering how to manage. People are hard. I am people. I am a shell misappropriated in the egg white. It's difficult to put your finger on such a thing, surrounded in moving viscosity.

Silence is keen on exhumation

the quiet Archeologist

catalogues.

.


(I had to go to a fundraiser tonight. I had a panic attack. I'd been having them all day. But these 200 people in a cramped space...yelling...shouting as a group whenever a raffle prize was won, jostling, swarming. Sh*t. I thought I was just about gonna die. I wanted silence. I didn't get it.)