The muse has left me, so I must be patient, I must wait in my poverty, but not make a cathedral out of it. I do not wait in a magnificent cathedral, I wait in the rain, I wait naked and alone for the muse to return, not to give me comfort, but to be with me in my discomfort, not to give me unexplainable happiness, but to be with me so long as I am unhappy and cannot explain why. Cars drive by as they so often do, the day has begun without me, while I waited for you, while I wait, the day does not wait for those who wait, the day does not wait at all, but moves along as a pace it sees fit. And here comes the guilt, here comes the thought, ‘should I be doing this, or should I be doing something else?’ here comes the thought, ‘what is the best way for me to pray? Should I pray like they tell me to pray, and how do they tell me, and who is telling me to pray in a certain way?’ Should I sway today like your play has come like a truck and demolished me, should I fall into disarray, should I plant a seed in the heart of she who does not notice me, come now and tell me what exactly I should do. I am perplexed by my own death, that it will occur, I confess that I have a too high opinion of myself coupled with an impossibly low one, and it is difficult to continue when in such a bind. I believe vanity is just a word for death, and a wrong kind of death, but I’ve died and lived so many times I think I should play a trombone because of it. Your words no longer have the same ring to them, they are growing brittle, flat and absent from truth. The truth is you, but you are not where you are, you are nowhere you can be, you are where you cannot be, for you are where there is no reality. Why did you go back there? Who did you expect to find there? You will die, but why make a scene out of it? Why find yourself deemed deficient by someone who pretended to know? Why worry about the concierge and whether or not she thinks your suit is proper for the occasion? can you blubber that the world owes your supper, and believe your cuddled thoughts? your protected heart is not the true heart, your directed thoughts are directed at no one in particular, but you must keep writing, do not let the fear enter, or let it enter and then say hi to it, what’s wrong? why are you afraid, young one? because you will not complete the task? because the task you will complete will not be good enough, not exceptional enough for your ridiculous standards? but of course, that is a part of the curse and the gift of the true striver, for that is what you are, and later perhaps, when you are wiser, you will see the futility of all your striving, but until then do as you must, as is deemed proper to those lacking trust in the grand scheme of things. The land seems to be dragging a dead walrus behind you, a bloody and torn seal deprived of its horns or its tusks, but who are you to swear you will come back and be healed by your own wholeness? who are you to forget how to remember your true nature? I rehearse what I will say to the god I do not understand, and all I can do is stand there, trembling and sweating throughout my entire body, and unable to experience the calm and untrembling soul that stands behind my standing. Man, the words keep coming, and nothing goes the way it ought to go, but everything goes the only way it can go, and I go my own way, not knowing where I am going. I am where you went when you had nowhere else to go. I go where you wish you could go, and I envy where you are going. I go where no one else could possibly go, and I wonder why I am the only one there.
Prose Poem
“Forged in the Fire”
I look for and fail to find a single living poet. Because of this, when I read poetry, I read those poems left by the dead, left by those few who were truly alive, who were forced by overwhelming longings to divorce themselves from the coolly detached and burn themselves in their own fire. I do not seek to express a cool and detached position on reality. I have no icy illusions of chilling mastery. What feels real to me is the fire seething in my breast that I cannot escape. A poem is a prayer, a fleeting moment of wordless weeping, with no identifiable cause, shared between reader and writer. Are there no more poems that will shed light on the darkness that cowers in the cold and cramped corridors of my soul? Very well, I will have to create them myself. When the world has gone cold, it is time for me to bring it fire. I cannot become as cold as the world is becoming; if I do so I am lost. When no living poet can inspire me, it is time to seek inspiration within. What burns in me burns in silence, and yet I begin again, seeking to give sound to what would burn me to the ground without the words to give it meaning. I do not know in advance what I will say, and I will not let my ignorance deter me. I will not get a Ph.D. in poetry. I will not be schooled by the too-cool, pressed into submission by the passionless, or possessed by the indifferent. Indifference is one demon in me, but intensity is a stronger demon. I cannot write poems of hungers being satisfied, or of not being hungry at all; I cannot write poems of lukewarm fulfillment, of ease and unearned Sunday afternoon contentment; I cannot write poems of skating on the surface of frozen lakes, of letting myself be frozen. What is a poem that does not go through the fire? Not a poem at all, but words alone that leave me cold. The true writer, as wordsmith, forges his words under flame and hammers them onto the page, twists them until they no longer resist him, pounds them in until they drive him home, until they voice what never rests in the depths of his soul. Each word I write goes through the fire. It cannot be otherwise. Each word must be wrought like iron in a blazing furnace, then wrung like water out of a cold shirt just before it is flung aside by one who smolders with desire under the torrid desert sun.
“The Sorrow”
The sorrow is always closer to the surface than it appears. The need not to show it is part of it, and so is the need to dramatize it. The need to be part of it—whatever it is, wherever it is—that’s part of it too. A bar filled with young people on a Saturday night, sweat-drenched individuals with bodies so close together, yet each so separate from every other, and all of them trying to drink through it—that’s all part of it. It’s all a part of it, especially when it seems apart from it. We’re all trying to get out of the valley, where we were all told we should go, and we’re running out of gas. The mountains are always too far away. Even if we get there we aren’t there. The sorrow, unlike the mountains, is never too far away. Maybe you head off to work and realize just as you’re about to arrive that you forgot your lunch, and you feel a frustration out of all proportion to the forgetting. Forgetting your lunch feels like it felt to be forgotten by your friends one night as an uncertain thirteen-year-old girl. It feels like remembering that you’ve always been alone and feeling that you always will be, and not being okay with that, wanting it to be otherwise. The sorrow is so close because you are so far from any sort of source, yet it is too far to admit, to grasp fully. Writing about it is part of it. Even writing about it well does not make it less. Writing about it, and writing about it well, only brings it closer. The one who writes can feel himself becoming a part of it, writing himself into it, finding it even on a late afternoon in the crisp high desert air as he sits with his eyes closed on a cabin porch, with nothing that needs to be done, enjoying the November sun that warms his naked torso. The one who writes can feel himself becoming a part of it when he no longer feels himself coming to be or believe, when his grasp on what is true and what is false loosens, and is lost.
Brian Leibold 