___

To be thrilled by the presence of someone just walking into a room.
Flesh and blood calibrated to every fibre of someone else's being.
Instead, I am sitting in a small café on a rainy Thursday at noon.
Hot coffee in hand. Some pencilled thoughts on paper napkins
and a Pat Methany solo playing to my view of puddles in the street.
Waiting for C while listening to a nearby table of academics
discuss Plato's milieu, that once all the extra details of society
are layered onto mere survival, their inevitability becomes
cannibalistic. And did I hear that right? That the practice
of cannibalism is always related to psychopathic behaviour
in a post-Freudian kind of way? And therefore take a look at
how we live in a post modern world?

I am watching a yellow birch leaf sail past the watery
curb. October wind and coloured leaves are trailing a guy-with-a-blue-and-white-Elvis-Presley-umbrella who
is tacking into the wind while waiting for the lights
to change. And it occurs to me that we are all sailors
in a nonsensical sea of existence. Hoping for waves more
than calm because just when it grows too still, our search
becomes limited. Perhaps what we really desire is a shipwreck.
As if to say that the life we will-into-being on a daily basis
is not the life we really want. Sailors and other souls
wandering alone in a waveless world which is filled-to-overflowing
with knowledge that has no depth. And so I watch the four
academics bundle their ideas into concluding commentary before
paying the bill. All the while wondering...where do the souls
of those who crave more go to find "the threshing floor that
makes us so fierce."?

"Poor little, lost little, sweet little soul,
My body's companion and friend,
Where are you going to now, little soul,
Pale little, stiff little, bare little soul,
Now that the jokes have to end?"
(TS Eliot, 1929)

And although C hasn't arrived yet,
apparently my lack of creative inspiration has reached its apogee.