Tonight I lie with loneliness

Tonight I lie with loneliness
And a kiss dreamt from the air.
The room is blue, my new acquaintance.
The sheets remember the shape of her.

To see the world as one big shrine,
Love is the device for this.
It burns your eyes until they’re blind.
Tonight I lie with loneliness.

God is everywhere she insists.
I’ve never seen though forever stared.
The only place where I’ve known bliss
is in a kiss dreamt from the air.

Maybe He is hiding there.
My eyes grope in the darkness.
They can’t shape Him anywhere.
Tonight, the lie of loneliness.

It’s all around me, I make my peace;
Let flowers be what they are.
Through empty rooms I send a wish
for a kiss dreamt from the air.

Of all the absent the one I miss
is a kiss become a dream of air.
The room is blue, my old acquaintance.
Tonight I lie with loneliness.

Cricket

I was meditating, grateful to the miserable weather
for condoning my isolation, when I heard
a lone cricket throbbing through the cold, wet leaves.
What was he chanting? I wondered. Must he sing to live?
“help, help, help,” he ached, or maybe “please, please, please.”
I went out to find him but when I approached he
vanished into silence. I stood in the rain, listening,
wanting him to teach me how to endure, to thrive
in an inhospitable world, but he would not give himself up.
Back inside I found the silence I’d requested.
Today summer has been granted a reprieve.
Again, the crickets try to chirp
their way through the walls.

Smile

"What is so defeating is this everlasting good-spiritedness, the application of enthusiasm against loneliness. The expression of the force that seeks to go with the grain--actually to become the grain--is, everlastingly, a smile. But the smile is a lie, and it makes people glum. And the glumness then flows against the grain, being confident of its bit of truth: that there is a lie in the smile. In our time, nearly all art has been made from glumness and has had very little to do with power, because it feeds on this tiny bit of truth: that there is a lie in the smile.

It's so little to feed on. That little bit of truth. Feed on it only and you go mad. Nourished by just that little truth, how can you have strength to resist your enemies? The smile, for instance?

How lonely white men are. They are not the grain that goes with the grain, nor can they bring themselves to die their hair green. They thought they would have both things: the flow of history, because they knew history; and the edge, because they had talent. But history belongs to children, and the edge belongs to adolescents, so they have neither. What they have is a kind of superior whining, and the one freedom they have been able to make use of is the freedom carved out by certain adolescents to make an aesthetic out of complaint. So this is what they inhabit now: a tiny space where they struggle toward a sense of history and a sense of edge by refining their whimpers."

-George W.S. Trow Within the Context of No Context