Misery

Within fifteen minutes of awakening this morning (or should I say rising from bed? I prolong my mornings by resisting the upright position), I wept for nothing. Just a melancholic seizure. Afterwards I realized I need not trash the day because of it. I can still write this blog. I can do the dishes. I can do the wash. (I hope my wife doesn't see this, but she rarely reads my blog).

Here's a quote from "The Radical":

"He walked on and on, his hands clasped behind his back,
his shoulders stooped, his large head inclined forward
slightly, a woe-begone expression on his dark face as if all the
misery of the world were weighing on his shoulders, as if
the wail of the winds on the lake were the voices of the hungry
and the poor, calling out to him to right their wrongs."

I was looking for a quote from Lincoln, when he said something like "If all the misery of the world were gathered in one sack and put upon one man's shoulders, I am that man."

If anyone knows the true quote please send it along.

I had three poems accepted by Tryst, one by The Pedestal, one by Blue Fifth Review and four published in the anthology, "Heart's Content." When links are available I'll alert you here or on Facebook.

Facebook has in so many ways supplanted e-mail and blogging, as has Twitter. Do you Tweet? Can your life be squeezed into 150 characters? Are you really that important and busy?

I've tweeted a few times, I have about twenty followers, but I don't know who they are or if they read what I write. It seems like pissing blind into the ether.

As part of my discipline in depression, I wrote a formal poem:



Once More for Sanity

To not think about oneself, to not
think thoughts at all, not to name
absent objects like a green hat,
a silver cane, a tub of margarine,
not to think how thought winds upon
itself as in a golf ball’s center
or a plantar wart to limp on--
See? Thought pains itself. Why remember?
Remember what? Self-loss, of course,
that your derivation supersedes
your contrivance, that what sacred force
you assign identity concedes
to all the barkers’ monologues extant
in carnivals where you were resident.


Always the question of identity, how much is construct and how much imitation? And why ask such questions unless a psychologist or depressed?


4 Kilorats,

Dr. Chaffin