Friday, November 10, 2006

It's all spinning ...

... out of control? I think I'm losing myself.

I need to pack up, ship out and find something that makes me sing. That makes me write. I know that I have a problem when I'm not writing. I haven't written a poem in months, months and months. The last thing I wrote, period, began like this:

i'm letting myself go from you
because bodies aren't meant to be
burned with words, leaving
ashes laying on toes and hoping
memories can make their way
in the wind.

Anyhow, on my way to the coffee shop I passed a man selling flowers at a stand. He was cutting the stems and singing in Arabic or Hebrew -- I honestly couldn't tell. He was using his shears to create these bouquets he was selling near a bagel shop in Dupont Circle. I felt, for a moment, like I was somewhere else. An Ethiopian man passed me, followed by two men in business suits. I felt like I was somewhere important for a moment. The diversity and life here is intoxicating, and makes me long for so much.

I turn around and then it's dusk. Time for me to go to work. I wish I were heading home to curl up with a good book, some Itzhak Perlman and a fireplace. There are these things I want, these places I long to be, despite knowing how wrong it feels, that I can't get to. Be it fear, be it the unknown. I long to immerse myself in the books of rabbis and scholars. To feel like I belong again. How quickly I've been flooded with the mundane.

I can't live like this.