All the ways I’ve failed
The broken schemes
The plans that fell into the gutter
The dreams, draped in black crêpe
The hopeful child, left alone in an alley
The stuff in the newspaper
The stuff in the attic
The nest of creatures likely living in the box with my old journals
The unrealized, the unexpressed, the unfulfilled
The. . .

A lot can happen in a month.
It doesn’t always.
Some months seem very much like the ones before it
And some inch forward very slowly
Like a tree growing
Out of the corner of your eye.
You’d never know that tree was climbing upward
Unless you measured it against your own body
(likely fairly static in its height these days.)
But I can think of months that changed everything.
That July in 1989, for example.
I was fifteen, going on sixteen
In Radford, Virginia
Learning passionately,
Surrounded by other kids who took art seriously.
For the first time,
I’m not alone
My brain is humming with ideas
My social self reaches out in every direction like an octopus, like a sponge,
like a spongy octopus.
My teachers treat me with respect
They treat me like an artist.
We are a community of arts
We learn from other disciplines.
My roommate plays the marimba.
I’ve been searching for utopia from that little month ever since.

That’s how it is with love
And also lust.
You’ve gone twenty years without something
Then suddenly you get a taste of it and it
Just tastes like more – – –
The more you hold him
The more you want to hold him
The more you kiss, the more you gaze into each other’s eyes, the more you touch,
the more you want to touch.
Desire creating more desire
Creating more desire.

Memory rolls in like thunder.
You can hide under the bed
Cover your head with a pillow
Or shout to drown it out
But it will keep rolling.
You may think it has stopped.
You count the seconds while you wait
But it will roll in
Closer and closer.
It will crack right above you
If you stand in just the right place
(or the wrong one)
it will couple with light
and rocket through you
burning you through
with the past.

Hamlet the king:
A god – a Sun god
Lighting up the sky
Holding back the wind
Protecting his beloved queen
From the elements.
As king, he is not required
To love his wife,
But it seems as if he did.
And so tenderly, it moves
His son
Simply to think about it.
How does the sun
Shield his wife
From the wind?
How does the son
Shield his heart
From breaking?

This is what makes Hamlet so human –
This listening to himself speak
Listening to himself think.
He begins with something – a thought bubbling
Then suddenly, he sees what is there bubbling and has to
Remark on the bubble he just posited.
We all – nay – most
Of us
Do this all the time.
Like, just yesterday –
No it wasn’t yesterday
It was last week – –
Can you believe how time passes like that?
Is it the human experience to marvel at the inconceivability
Of time? To look at what we have
and wonder. To reflect and find ourselves stunned.
The two things that we cannot ever get our heads
All the way around
Time and death
Both together in this sentence
So humanly wrapped up in one another
Like a knot of experience
Impossible to untangle.

Most phrases in the play are so heightened
So out of the realm of the ordinary
That it would take a sort of arch pretension
To get away with saying it in daily life.
This one, however –
This one –
With the right provocation,
This could fall very easily out of my mouth.
When my back’s against the wall and I’m compelled
To take a horrifying job
Or sew up a rag of a garment
Because I can’t afford to buy a new one
Or beg a friend for assistance
Or swallow my ethics or values to survive.
I’ve heard it from friends when they have to hide
From their landlords
Dodge the bill collectors on the phone
or work for an eighth of what they should be paid for their labor.
A work of no imagination, with no artistic merit
Raises $5 million for its presentation to the public
While artists who make heart-expanding, relevant, innovative, brilliant work
Have to push aside their symphonies or sculptures
To work for $10 an hour in a garbage dump.
That it should come to this!
Justice, if it will come, has been stretched so thin
It may snap like a breaking rubber band.

In this garden
Those gross in nature
Have taken hold of all the real estate
Holding it hostage
Making space only for others
As gross as those that already possess it.
The discerning
The sensitive
The sweet smelling
The creative
Get pushed further and further back
To the back corners of the garden
Until they are pushed out altogether
Or buried under the climbing weeds
Or choked by the twining vines
Gasping for water, for sun, for space.

The world will grow what is thrown into it.
Without careful cultivation
All the ugly, aggressive, dominating plants
Will grow right over
The delicate ones.
A kudzu vine, given half the chance, will grow right over an orchid
Or a small violet.
There are those who would suggest
Leaving it all up to nature
To let seeds fall where they may.
But I fear a world with no violets
A world with no orchids
A world with no quiet delicate beauty makes me nervous.

Hemmed in by futility
Penned up by the trying and the trying and failing
Over and over.
One note, played in a long drone
Or repeated in metronomic rhythm.
It is this evening out of highs and lows of life
That concerns me most.
Wailing with grief or screaming in ecstasy –
That’s all good
But life flat-lined?
When all sense of purpose is negated
When all agency feels stifled
One long note
Could drive a person crazy.