Journal 22 – Lazy Rivers and Morning Ghosts

Morning film is blurry on sleep-sodden bleary eyes.
This sentence repeats and rolls around my soft
morning skull – vainly trying to raise itself to some
stylistic pleasure. Gone are the days of Shakespeare.
Beethoven stole the show and used up all the cognizant
available yarn. But there are others. Pound, Eliot, Joyce,
Rilke, Auden, Cummings, Dickenson. Dylan – Zimmerman
that is – surpasses them all – after Shakespeare and
Beethoven that is. Fear not – Dante has his place of
exaltation. Arnaut too. I admit I'm a bitch of Pound &
Eliot. The moon hangs like a ball of cotton candy
in the early evening. An illusion I am surely
told. It still smells like cotton candy or the dying
electric blue of a short lamp post in 1938. Keats didn't
return any yarn to the spool you know. Dying young is
not a mulligan or do-over. Kovacevich is close I think
to Beethoven re-incarnated as a performer of his dead
ghost works. Ghosts are such petty silly stuff these
enlightened days. I once was told by such an enlightened
man his belief in ghosts was acutely pre-empted by his
disbelief in other wonder-filled things and beings entailed
by belief in minor beings as ghosts that to believe would
surely be intellectual suicide. Would I were enlightened.
Lazy as an inner tube on a lazy river on the other side
of the magic kingdom life would flow like an
effervescent dream where beer and wine and cheese
are offered each pass by the arithmetically distant
starting point. Oh so good. Lazy irreverent rivers
are a thing of the present pounding and trilling of the
black and white keys of the time-blasted keyboard
of Beethoven – strong and practised. The performer
is everything. Anxiety about our flailing economy and
waffling angry seat of the pants leadership should have
me tossing in bed like a goldfish dropped from the
Wal-Mart bag on the way to the car – but instead of
nutrient rich water I have the soul-swathing rich elements
of Yeungling and Jim Beam to lay me down to forgetful sleep.

3.19.09