Scarlet, my dearest, it seems that I have fallen madly in
love. Again. I know this timing is dreadful, but is not it always when it comes
to such things? When it comes to such things.
You can’t possibly imagine how difficult it has become for
me to rise from bed these mornings. The gelid sting of it all whips me into a
composed dissolution, and so I lie bricked under heavy covers in wonder-less
antipathy towards daylight and other mediocre tchotchkes in the clutter of
being alive. On some days merely crossing the street seems like a Herculean
labor. (You would say, “Heracles.” I know.) On yet others I am confined to this
dour room in a state of nervous apathy spelled by quaking bouts of ferocious
want. Please do not disown my kind just yet. We are all, after all, merely a
bunch of sorry suckers stuck in these bodies. What can one do?
Scarlet, my lovely. Can you not still sing for me with that
voice you own? The most wonderful pipe set in the known world, it is. If my
druthers were but mine alone, that voice would ring out beyond the hills of my
sadness for all the grape-green world to hear. Alas, this purporting gets one
nowhere. I grow stale and shiver, dreaming of hot water and mischievous
handmaids.
The crowds have come for me. I cannot shake them, or this
emotive tug on my willpower. Laundry is war; nothing is fair.
Scarlet, my Chattanooga baby. Lest we fail to take into
account the charity-case of my disappearance from broader circumstances-- us,
who should be so fortunate, fortunately not to bevel our lives with such
circumstantial stuff-- there, in the coddled bowsprit of a Tennessee blush,
like face cards never held or folded, well-not-to-do or be, we are.
To what merrymaking does sturdy the functionality of
rise-and-shine readiness to face another day of whimpers and high ceilings? To
where? And who faces this reflection daily, too? Who? Well, let me not
disregard the alarm from this disaster. And I would definitely enjoy to
extrapolate on the condition of the sober pansies of the world in these meager
and cushy times we find ourselves in the midst of; but that is but a work order
for one more substantial and hardy than I. You do not nor ever have or could understand
such matters, correct? If I were but only wrong. Another if. Yes. And we, as
always, are just these fluttering, flimsy and fragile organisms who run on
bacteria and sunlight; who shave and take in the paper and feed themselves and
mope about their surroundings. Leading on that there might be more to us, we
developed this ability to craft language, to sucker those around us into
believing it too-- as if any of us who live only in a drop of eternity’s split
second could matter at all. “Just passing through,” as you used to say, just
like only you could.
Deepest Scarlet, all the colors of me are runny and blurred.
Madly in love? Perhaps that is just a substitute for this dissolution I’m
behaving through. My intrepidity has swam away in a riptide of fashion. To
fall, to grandly just go, to reach a “there” in love’s throes and echoes. It is
all madness. You must understand this etiolation brought on by the constant
shift from fasting to gorging. Perhaps I will trademark it. Set up shop on the
14th floor of a decaying sandstone office building and sell my wares
low and high, and lower and higher all the time. But, alack, I am not a
carpenter either, and you are not my lady. Madness? I am shifty with it.
Scarlet. I am boring.
Through the window’s blinds I see slits of outside. I am
wound loose, sashed, disposed to lugubrious tries. The shutters can’t keep me.
The curtains are for other more heavyset dahlias-of-fancy to contemplate. Turn
me in. I am not pleading. Through the opaque glass I am lost, eyeless in a
thousand Gazas. Do not let on to the help. Disguises suit and betray what
condolences I have left. Another thing’s coming. I am certain of it.
To train oneself in the business of disaster, corrosively or
not, to a matte finish, and then, again, the imponderable chore of rising from
bed each morning evolves into one long evasive morass. “What next?” I ask
myself in the long shadows of another drizzly ominous afternoon. I lie there
and inspect the ceiling, its cracks and peels ribbing out in absurd faces of
bulbous eyes and racehorse brows. Cartoon bubbles of lurking skulls and
guillotined smiles. Scarlet? You know me. I can never lie low enough.
Love’s mad vilipending intercedes, and I know my conscience cannot take what is proffered; but, again, I take and take without regard to
sense’s hark or thrift’s lump-of-coal sadness. Scarlet, my Scarlet, lie low
with me-- or lower still. We could roll and rock away all of this, together, in
the company of each other’s arms. Do not envy the dash of what this moon-mad
music portends. Just one more together, and then…splat goes the moth’s dreams
against the wall.
Again. There it all goes. Society hushing all genius except
those whose genius is making money. It gives the finger to the temperamental
genius of the artist, for it produces no taxable income. Again. There I go too.
With it to be mostly not with it. Without it, and, at last, to be without you
too, my lurid Scarlet. Yes. I am broken. But were not I always?
As my feet grow colder I have taken to placing my socks on
the heater. Pulling on those toasty cotton foot-covers is now my only
pleasure. But it is a great one at that. And I do not think I would be still
here yapping away about these things if it were not for it.
So. Blather, blather, blather. Scarlet, this was not done
for you, or only for you. Not at all. I am not what I think. Blather. Blather.
Scarlet.
I am not so true,
sincerely,
Oberon’s Jester
Posts
