Friday, August 30, 2019

The Crime of the Last Kettelhack



(reflections in the wake of a 50th high school reunion)
.
I’ve been leaking three certainties
and one speculation my
dwindling load
of sentient
years is
causing
to drip
right
out
of
me:
+
One
.
Attractiveness proceeds from feeling
you’re at home in your own skin.
When you're comfortable therein,
you forget to think about yourself:
you just are you. It turns
out that’s a very
big draw.
+
 Two
.
it's the connection
not the activity. If the connection
is there, the activity either takes care
of itself or never mattered to begin with.
+
Three
.
The deepest wisdom consists not only
in easing up to the inevitable finding
that, like God, you're a solipsism, but
.
that you can learn
to bear the eternal
aloneness inherent in
knowing that you are.
.
Wisdom means
accepting
you're it, kid.
+
Maybe the pursuit of happiness,
and therefore happiness itself, which
seems more a product of dopamine than
of serotonin – that is, it thrives only in a state
of yearning – maybe happiness is
a chiasmic balancing act wherein supposed
opposites accord. Maybe that's what
we'll, you’ll, I'll be doing next.
.
Ever thinking that life
and time were
a lack
amounts
to the crime
of the last Kettelhack.