City of Legends

I am alive.  I am writing.  I am recording.

All other considerations are secondary.  I am in a strange space, what my first wife called my "dark countenance" phase.  My second wife never really got her brain wrapped around it, one of the reasons we speak of her in the past tense.  .

There are times that being Ronin, being without love and lover, is of value.  Feels like Hell, and would like to find nice, brilliant, beautiful, earnest woman to share bend and bed with, but I am patient (the clock mocks, but I will not be pressed into stupidity by the next sweet succubus who promises me that she, not all the others who threw the term like a well-chewed Frisbee, is my one, true solumate).

Last time I counted, I recall at least six times I fell for that.  Because I wanted to believe. 

Yes, I am alive.  Not broken.  Not jaded.  Not pessimistic about the future of poetry and love and religion, as the three are one in the same to me.

Just a bit of the dark countenance, that’s all.  And it is good for my writing to be there.  I have friends in the virtual universe who sustain me so I do not fall through the worm-eaten buttresses of my sanity.  I have peers with whom I swap sweat and spit of the mind to make strange offspring.  I have my sons to keep me on my toes and to keep my ego in check.

And I have my writing.  A virtual house of mirrors that bend time.

Curiously enough, I am thinking of this on the 10th of September.  Okay, maybe not so curiously, but the day frames itself subtly.  It has been a few years since I last spoke with the woman who inspired that line and the name of my third book (third book…yikes!).

But I was having an exchange with a different friend today.  Yes, a young lady.  I will call her Iulia, as that is her name, and she prodded me on several accounts concerning how difficult she finds it, at a fraction of my age, to not become jaded by those who are not what they seem, or are disingenuous, or cruel, or just plain damn no good.

I told her that when we allow ourselves to be savaged and crawl away to die, or become hardened, we give up that which makes us better than those who have given up and given in.  What I specifically said was:

"Jade is not a colour I wear well. I have always fought to keep my heart earnest. It’s tough. I have been betrayed more than once, lied to, lied about, and mocked. But if we give in we give over the power to those who have struck at us, we give them victory.

Love like there is no tomorrow. And more importantly, like there is no yesterday."

Her response was that she would write those words down.

And I wrote them down, even enshrining them, here, in this City of Legends, with the Leopards, Panthers, Valkyries, Goddesses and purple fruits of the nightshade family.  With love and doubt and fear and pain and joy and sex and all the other splinters of the winters of my discontents and glorious summers.

But can I live them?  The reflex to duck and cover remains.  The joints creak, the muscles groan and although the poetry comes, it passes therough veins that are shredded with stress and grief. 

I keep fighting to awaken and to ascend once again, but it is a tough, rough, gruff world, made for the greys of mediocrity and compromise.  Trust me, I know this.

Maybe these few thoughts, sparked from an unexpected corner, will be what I need.  We shall see. 

It’s not a revolution if all you change is the colour of the box.

It’s not a rebirth if nothing is allowed to die.