Words.

Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot?

-Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot.

Les Champ-Élysées
in springtime: strolling right down
the myrtle alley.

There was a pear tree in the orchard next to ours, laden with pears, but not ones especially apealing either to the eye or the tongue. At dead of night, after messing around on some empty plots in our usual insalubrious manner, a group of us young delinquents set out, our plan being to shake the tree and make off with the pears. We carried off a vast haul of them – but not in order to feast on them ourselves; instead, we meant to throw them to the pigs. And though we did eat some of them, we did so only for the pleasure we had in tasting forbidden fruit. Such was my heart, O God; such was my heart, on which you showed your pity in the depths of the abyss. Let my heart now tell you what its purpose was; why I was gratuitously evil, and why there was no reason for my evil save evil itself. My evil was loathsome, and I loved it; I was in love with my own ruin and rebellion. I did not love what I hoped to gain by rebellion; it was rebellion itself that I loved. Depraved in soul, I had leapt away from my firm foothold in you and cast myself to my destruction, seeking to gain nothing through my disgrace by disgrace alone.

-Augustine, The Confessions.

The Step Forward
No ambiguity. Pushing along,
they hold me by the sides.
“Let’s go on,” I say, “I can go on.”
I had waited years
for this to happen.
After such a period of immobility,

the stains on my hands
soak through and through.

I move on now, to verify these marks.
Leaving behind the horrors,
onto more horrors,
I take the step forward first,

(Cloak off, please. Your head, this way.)
my knee the second.

And I tumble into blood
face forward: drowning.

Morning breeze creeps in,
flushes my soul out.
Weights hang, lighter in
the still of pre-dawn,
still unde the cover of darkness.
Running to the West.
Lighter minds, lowered censors,
Memory awakens.

There’s nothing new that can
come to mind,
only from within, we,
the only point source of all
returns.
Crying to hear, no being
released from itself.
The crack of sunlight peers through
a far flung slit,
I am forced towards it.

April Fool’s
Day breaks again,
again my pen rest between
my forefinger and thumb
poised: To spill ink over
this page.

I hear birds chirping,
joining lustfully with the
waking roar of engines,
people-movers for this factory country.
Puttering, puttering,
and a few rude slaps of
footsteps on a pavement
somewhere below me.

Derrida, Donne,
Shakespeare and de Beauvoir
lie stacked up on my table,
Milton, Plato and Marlow
in another pile.
“This is my art” so a post-it
tells me,
as I look at each
creased spine and worn face,
remembering Eve.

A bang of the metal gate,
my father at the door,
to work again, he, a builder
all his life. My mother
off to school.
Click. Click. They leave.

And I shall make my departure
soon.