I've got to find some laughter, when you laugh they can't kill ya

I got the devil in me,
sadness, it's a cloud

****************

if you can ever remember
the place where dying first appeared.
not death, which was a comic book
or a cat gone to hunt farm mice,
but dying. it wasn't a horror,
it wasn't a nightmare, or even
a mystery. it was eventual.
even to a little boy
at 11.
who knew as much about time as he did 
about alters and living and about being god.

you used to eat it up
didn't you?
back then, when november was like the plague
and the possibilities still seemed,
in a word, endless.
there was no reason to doubt.
life was so eventual
that you swore you were middle aged
at 21.
the only alters you saw were old 
enough that they couldn't touch you.

but now the sun sets lower.
the sunset, slower.
you don't pretend to be disinterested
anymore, you just are.
the cruelty at the center of you
has bled its way to all of your extremities,
making your touch like the glass between
a snowstorm and a warm house.
at 31
life is so eventual that the only
alters you touch are the ones that make you older.

11/16/2005
manic