Skeleton Crew

This being alone thing.


I don't know. I guess it's alright. God knows I want to be alone often enough. But this is perhaps too much of a good thing. I don't know what to do with myself. Don't feel right. I am trying to just be with it, not fight it or wish for it to be something other than what it is. Trying to learn a little bit about myself when I'm not being reflected through someone else. It's odd. I feel invisible to myself.

I have to learn to see myself as more than a ghost. As more than a reaction to the outside world. Get corporeal.



With this school thing I'm totally unplugged from my artwork and writing. And I don't have my camera. I'm not into it now anyway.

I think of myself as an artist, a writer, someone engaged in the wrestling match with the world and the self. Of late I feel like one of the great sleeping masses. Not a spark of an idea in my empty skull, not a bit of heat in my chest.

Not dead, but not quite alive.


I suppose a fallow season is good. Something is resting, something else is getting ready to push up from the dark soil. It's just that I feel like the dried and dead stalks of last season's harvest, not the impending new growth.




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This polygraph thing has got me pretty creeped out, too.




I can see into a place I shouldn't be able to.






Of course, the perfect new skill for me. Only reason I became a cop was to watch what you all were doing when no one was looking.




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The only poetry I can stand to read lately is Dugan and even Gilbert I find too histrionic. Simic seems like a smart-assed dandy. Collins a wimp. Maybe I'll go read some of that Loudon woman. She's pretty tolerable and damaged and anchored in the wild green body.


Anybody else out there?



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What do you do when you're alone?



I mean alone alone.




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