Luftmensch

Luminous in the sky….I am unsure whether or not you are a streetlight

Disappointed at the thought that you might be man-created

I shyly peer out my window

To my amazement, you confirm my bright and wild hopes….

You are the moon!!

As wondrously important and protective as I could ever imagine you to be

I used to be a Saint.  But over time, I decided to break all the stupid promises I made to myself:

I promised to always be grateful, even when I was bleeding

Even, perhaps, when I was bleeding blood that I could not see

My Father once told me that I could be immaterial

It is possible that I asked him if I could be immaterial and all he said was

Yes

When I got older, I lived in fear of my own insanity, and thus became further depersonalized

The family genius that bordered on madness, that had been passed from my Grandfather to Father to Me

Kafkaesque: I believed I was living in a double-bind

If only Others knew what I was thinking and feeling…..

But the more sane I pretended to be, as I tried to hide my chaos,

I felt as if I was losing my mind

And slowly, but surely, I began to implode

Until the implosion became an explosion

And I cracked open

Rays of perversion and trauma spilled onto everyone around me

I wanted so badly to remain unchanged from the moment of my birth

I hope to God that I have not hurt anyone

How can we explain Medea? How can we explain patricide? Worse than wanting to kill the Other, an easy target, is wanting to kill those most connected to Us.

In my early twenties, my Father and I fought constantly.  He wanted the closeness of our past, I wanted my freedom.  He would condemn me for not spending more time with him, and I would sit there and scream with my eyes, “Why are you so fucking controlling!?!”

Then I thought about his relationship with my Grandfather.  As lax and absent as he was, my always stoned academic Grandfather had a mythic dominance over my Father for most of his life.  Maybe ours is a family wherein one generation overpowers and tries to destroy the next one, until they reproduce and repeat the cycle.  After all, is it not rituals such as this that prove our ability to survive?

Hello world…I believe this is enough.