On Words and Unicorns

I feel incapable of writing anything of merit lately. Or perhaps the problem is deeper than that. Perhaps I feel incapable of producing any thought of merit. True there are those brief halfconscious inspired tablets of clarity that dissolve into glass water dreams drunk late at night. They may imbed themselves in my subconscious. They may manifest themselves in my nightmares, in which I am constantly on the run for crimes I commit. But there they remain lodged behind my eyelids gates, behind my prison guard fingertips.

Perhaps it is the children that sop up my angst. Little mops of black hair dabbing at the puddles of my myriad reflections.

Perhaps it is because I stand before an audience all day long. Because I spend all day talking, on and on before a fishtank. Not saying anything of consequence, not hearing anything of consequence. Bellowing sentences into the chasm of linguistic oblivion. A hundred miniature echoes return to me. Shrill peaking squawks from the bop bopping mouths of fish-children swimming in water over their heads in a tank at the bottom of the canyon. I could easily go all week without any real conversation. Mistaking echoes for voices.

I offer up the suggestion that I am an obsessive person. In a purely singular sense for I am obviously not obsessive about my health or my environment or anything really. It only manifests itself when some fantasy lodges itself between my lens and retina and obscures all but my periferal vision.



As a child, I mistook this lens dust distortion for some sort of poetic romanticism. Mistook cataracts for clarity. Mistook blindness for vision. But now I believe it to be simply a coping mechanism. Just as some lash out at authority, some shrink into shells of self-doubt, some make mountains, some make molehills, some smoke cigarettes, some devour, and some deny. Some also fashion unicorns from ordinary horses and place them within the fenced in green pastures between the lens and the retina where they watch their fantasy gallop across the rolling hills of their unbridled imagination. Stopping atop the overlook, as the unicorn is want to do. Nostrils flared. Powerful lungs like canons pound. Mane bellowing like a sail in the wind. Eyes glassy with a carnal nobility forged in the time before time.

But unicorns are fickle creatures and will often flee in search of greener fields or will keel over and die in the cruel winter months.

Do not place your faith in a unicorn.

* * *

Jesters, storks, maidens wandering around in a nonsense world. Let's meet up sometime.