For Ray and Fred
…and, from despair
Thus high uplifted beyond hope, aspires
Beyond thus high, insatiate to pursue
Vain war with Heaven…
Paradise Lost, II: 6-9
John Milton
O my brother come to this. Now you face the final demons down
They will win that’s just how the game was set up. We sensed that
long ago, tho’ it doesn’t give much solace. Perhaps it would have
been better or at least just as well to have duped ourselves and lived
these fleet years in obduration. As if that were possible; we were born
into the quid nunc club, Cursed to be ‘gifted’ with some unholy vision
of what oughta be yet can never come.
The problem of suffering is a joke.
Until, of course, one steps right in it; then its inextricability shows it for
what it is; a big ol’ pile of the First Cause’ shit. How did we think that we
might plumb the depths of such theosophistry? Well, maybe we did each
in our own way wrassle with our lesser angels, maybe even, once or twice,
took them down, but knew (if not, do now know) that the final count comes
down to the same silly down:
The old dry whore fucked us, sure, with her greased hole providing a
simulacrum whereby we somehow managed to pump on blind and stupid;
one more day, hour, minute, one more false thought
that something we were doing might not be all for nought.
This elegy provides no comfort. Nor can it.
The only plea we might have before a final judgment is to have
lived and loved in self-effacing, brutal honesty. Go then, secure
in that knowledge and know you have prepared a way for those
of us left behind to follow.
We will try. We will try.
poetastrophy 