(fragments)

“If you are determined to carry out one particular thing, you must not be upset that other things fall through.  Nor should you be embarrassed by other people’s laughter.  A great enterprise is unlikely to be achieved except at the sacrifice of everything else.”

-- Kenko, Essays in Idleness (Keene trans, p. 161)

My Sweet Lord

Writers, it seems to me, ought to be the very humblest artisans.  Potters have clay and painters tubes of paint.  I am making something from nothing.  I should take care to always keep nothing in mind.

I am following my own unlikeable star, taking the path of the world’s number one least popular god, Lord Chitchupakupec, the deity of pubic lice, who, like Lord Ganesha, may either make the trouble pass – or bring it on.

Envy.

My darling plays piano at the preschool graduation.  The five year olds wear caps and gowns; their parents are awash in so much helpless love that we have all been lifted several inches from the ground.

I stand beside the piano turning pages, the evil person required for every happy scene, the poison in the apple, my heart as black as soot.

My name is Envy.  Imagine having had a mother who was alive, or a father who was kind or sane?

Set-up.

The fundamental facts of this container.  That which is most commonly called the set-up: a crippled leg, a dead mother, a mad father forever doing harm I am forever unable to stop.

This gimp kid, co-parented by Mad and Dead.

Aim.

Inside this form, within these limits -- I improvise.  I make the wish that these improvisations will be luxuriant, acrobatic, outrageous, horny.

I aim to cover this wreck with flowers.

Hard as it is to imagine now, all this was once an apple farm in New Hampshire.

But This is Just How It Is: We Lose Everything.

For consolation, here’s Tokyo.

Thirty three million people in the metro area: look at how they hurry about and how they go on living, though they, too, have lost the great green world.