Beware Woeful Wisdom

I'll be back to write more in this soon. I'm sure I'll need a break from the paper I'm working on right now. It's about desire and capitalism and advertising and it's proving to have many unruly angles and I'm viewing it through a lens that is stuck at just-out-of-focus.

I haven't really done any school work in days. But if you've read this for very long or happen to actually know me, you'll realize that isn't really news.

In the mean time, here's a poem a Cafe-friend shared with me:

Unwise Purchases
by George Bilgere
They sit around the house
Not doing much of anything: the boxed set
Of the complete works of Verdi, unopened.
The complete Proust, unread:
The French-cut silk shirts
Which hang like expensive ghosts in the closet
And make me look exactly
Like the kind of middle-aged man
Who would wear a French-cut silk shirt:
The reflector telescope I thought would unlock
The mysteries of the heavens
But which I only used once or twice
To try to find something heavenly
In the window of the high-rise down the road,
And which now stares disconsolately at the ceiling
When it could be examining the Crab Nebula:
The 30-day course in Spanish
Whose text I never opened,
Whose dozen cassette tapes remain unplayed,
Save for Tape One, where I never learned
Whether the suave American
Conversing with a sultry-sounding desk clerk
At a Madrid hotel about the possibility
Of obtaining a room,
Actually managed to check in.
I like to think
That one thing led to another between them
And that by Tape Six or so
They’re happily married
And raising a bilingual child in Seville or Terra Haute.
But I’ll never know.
Suddenly I realize
I have constructed the perfect home
For a sexy, Spanish-speaking astronomer
Who reads Proust while listening to Italian arias,
And I wonder if somewhere in this teeming city
There lives a woman with, say,
A fencing foil gathering dust in the corner
Near her unused easel, a rainbow of oil paints
Drying in their tubes
On the table where the violin
She bought on a whim
Lies entombed in the permanent darkness
Of its locked case
Next to the abandoned chess set,
A woman who has always dreamed of becoming
The kind of woman the man I’ve always dreamed of becoming
Has always dreamed of meeting,
And while the two of them discuss star clusters
And Cézanne, while they fence delicately
In Castilian Spanish to the strains of Rigoletto,
She and I will stand in the steamy kitchen,
Fixing up a little risotto,
Enjoying a modest cabernet,
While talking over a day so ordinary
As to seem miraculous.

Side note: I'm also working on a terribly long essay about empire and church and life and practice and... well, you know, "stuff." I'm worried it might inspire me to do something abundant. I mean, I have always wondered what it would be like...
Don't worry, I won't post it here.

A Voice Cries Out

Tonight I’m wrapped in this strange soulful-ness. I think it must be partly because of the snow.

I’ll slow down any day for snow.

These crystalline motes that hold the secret of life captive in sparkling beauty are collecting on my almost-balcony tonight. And I’m warm and folded in a blanket, resting against cushions and pillows, just inches from it all. I’ve just read and read and read.

Even the cold pizza straight out of the box was romantic.

Like, tonight, I’m a real student. Like Pinocchio, I’m now a real boy.

I know a story about America in which a Father, coughing and pale from days in the coal mines, drinks himself half to death over a still-born baby. The still-born child is out of the ordinary. The near-death drinking isn’t.


The father collects that little body in some spare blanket, soiled in blood and afterbirth, and carries it through town on a muggy Midwest night in August. Or maybe a crisp November night on the plains. It doesn’t matter. He’s alone and the child’s body is cold and blue in one arm. He’s dragging in his free hand a shovel.

He finds some corner of the town cemetery no one will be jealous of and he sets to digging, swigging at the bottle in his back pocket when it occurs to him to swig. When the hole seems deep enough or when he can’t keep his balance over its lip anymore, he places that little stiffening body at its bottom.


And for an hour he anoints the soil quickly filling this little grave with his tears and his sputum and his retchings. He does his best to hide any sign of a burial. So no one asks. So no one knows.

When he awakes somewhere unlikely the next morning, his wife wants to know where her baby is buried. Where’s her little child. Her beloved passenger of all those months.

And he doesn’t know. He can’t remember. He'd drank so much. It had been so dark. She walks the rows of the town cemetery, but every over-turned stone or patch of grass looks like every other.

She never mentions it to him again. But often times, as he’d endure a scolding through a hang over, she’d pause and look east and he’d nearly stop breathing.



Being in my twenties often feels like being that little infant child on the day of the resurrection of the body. So confused and sad and lost, having passed through the suffocating crush of earthen darkness that our forbearers have baptized in mourning and dying and self-pity, only to realize we’ve no idea which way is home.

But what if the last few layers of our eschatological ascent are through crisp, fresh-fallen snow that our own lively body heat melts into a new baptism. And so we come to stand, people anew, warmed by the Son and ready to disturb the still and quiet of a world in waiting.

The Luminous Look of Lovers

It was my sincere intention to let Valentine's Day go by well and truly ignored 'round these parts, but this picture... Well, you get the idea.

"It's a beautiful thing when you love somebody... and if you love somebody, you better let them know."

Also, A Poem

I want every poem
To be read like
I read them aloud
To myself
On the toilet, with the door open
When my apartment is empty and
I wonder if anyone
In the hall can hear
My impromptu rendition
Of a stranger's beloved
words, published for
promotional purposes.

And my enjoyment
too, I suppose.

Aptly Alternating Alttitudes

There wasn’t a square corner in the place. Every angle pinched acutely or yawned obtusely. Every line bowed this way or that. If you rested your temple against the wall and looked towards a corner, it was as if you perceived the curvature of space itself. The building was skewed with the drunkenness of its architects those generations ago. It lay at the edge of the clearing in a murky wood. At this elevation, nearby peaks caught hulking afternoon thunderheads as they trundled past, but the golden hour was often left clear and placid. God Himself tied finishing touches on the day in rainbow’d ribbon. The soil beside the deck was spongy and cold beneath her feet as she waved goodbye to the guests who’d ventured here only to speak in generalities and leave behind the odd article of clothing.

The parties were nearly as unbearable as the stretches of aloneness. Anyone she invited out here never came alone. It was always handfuls of people and usually one or two more than there were seats for. They staggered and sprawled across worn out rugs and worn-smooth floorboards alike. They would parade through, like a band of mendicant friars, in a clinking of glass, a shuffle of feet and a dull, spiraling murmur of vacant illocutions.

“This place must be a hundred years old.”

“Don’t you get lonely out here?”

“The view is just beautiful.”

Usually, on the second or third day, everyone would come to a hush, the better to hear the muffled sublimity of the afternoon tempests beyond the meandering walls. That was always the day they’d leave and the only one she wished they wouldn’t.