WHAT IS THE POINT of anything? What is the lesson learned? These phrases ceaselessly circle around one another like hawks riding a thermal. Around and around. Wondering. Wondering.
I wonder, lying in bed staring up at the night ceiling. An auto rattles up the street. The vulcanized rubber tires jog the bricks. Headlights silhouette limbs and leaves on the stripped wallpaper. The rectangle of light folds across the ceiling and hanging lamp, casting shadows like moving cubism.
I lie in bed waiting for the conveyer belt to start up roll me into slumber's yawning pit. To the then and there--where I no longer wonder what I should have learned. So that I can pinpoint exactly what I didn't learn.
Plans collapse. Motives change. Whispers become shouts. Innuendos often become headlines. Obvious situations are ignored. Lies become slanderous truth. Truth is written on cheat sheets. The real is too real to be known. Money is everything. Money is only paper. Platitudes are subtle and subtlety is obvious. Metaphors are real. We seek the truth but lies are more convenient. 'Is' really isn't. Obese people never feel fed. I am alive and I am dead. All the time and then again, some of the time.
What, again, is the point? What, again, is the lesson learned? How is this catastrophe different from my last egregious episode? How deep is the weary sigh in my resonant lungs? How is this dreary-drenched sigh different than the last time I mourned myself?
What is learned? What is the parcelled out truth? What is the remedy? What did I do wrong again? What will I do wrong again? Why do I have to do the things I do?
Am I resolute in learning nothing? Am I tenaciously fighting a learning curve? Do I, in fact, have a soul or soufflé?
I close my eyes and rub my eyelids to conjure the interlocking paisleys like an animated Esfahan carpet. There I see patterns. Better to see those patterns than the patterns of the self. To dream what a Persian carpet maker designs to usher me to the threshold of sleep. To dream. To forget. To deny. To live.
