The Efficacy of Duplicity of Mind or Lying to Yourself

by Gilee

January 28, 2020

I write everyday.

Not in a disciplined,

Organized way.

It spills out

Like effluent

Contaminating the clean white paper

Waiting for pretty words and deep thoughts.

Random thoughts as they occur.

However, this stream of consciousness will not organize itself into elegant

Prose or verse.

Where is my muse?

James Joyce has abandoned me.

My dad’s arbitor of all that is brilliant in literature.

I am letting my father down and trying my mother’s patience.

She thought I would be somebody.

Can’t be a somebody in a vacuum.

I had a friend that named her fetus Aloysiys.

I never named my fetus.

So, random thoughts as they occur

Stream of consciousness

I the vessel channeling out of the

Jungian collective unconsciousness.

The cosmic mind.

I am still trying to crack this egg.

Dad are you watching this?

It is interesting this connection with Irish madness and Jung’s work with the

Schizophrenic.

I think dad wanted me to be the next James Joyce or a Lear, or KiImer.

Not one of whom is a woman.

Not a one of many held up to me as examples to be followed.

I want to be a woman who can scratch her balls

And pee standing up. and matter in a man’s world.

I want to be the female Henry James,

Whistler or Sargeant.

More so I want the men to fit in a woman’s world.

Kilmer was an odd choice.

Dad recited “Trees“ to me as brilliance in the bunch

I too very much liked his “Trees”,

Although Ogden Nash and others parodied his sentimental style.

What says this of my own abilities?

Sentimental is a poison word

To a poet.

I have known some people that write

poems about breaking hearts and losts loves.

Pathetic pathos - pathetic mediocrity.

That’s my fear.

Dad built me up too much. When he wasn’t putting me down.

I put ink marks on the paper, much like a splatter painted watercolor.

I try to make the ink resemble words.

Letter by letter as I spew them out.

Isn’t this unnamed fetus ready to come out?

My words are wrung out in despair to the ticking

of a wind up clock that is running down and slowing down.

It could stop at any moment.

Writing that crawls down a page and turns itself on its side and crawls back

up the edges to whence it came.

Writing that fills every remaining blank spot until arrows are needed to point

The way.

I am loath to turn the page.

Got to get it all out

Before I start judging, second guessing, comparing and criticizing,

Then quit the task.

So the hand has to keep moving the pencil

Can’t stop to turn a page

The words might stop.

I crank it out in near trance obsession.

Got to leave something of me behind.

Something I conceived without a sperm.

I labor but

This creation is a breech birth.

Still I write until a filled notebook looks like

The nervous breakdown I am having.

The writing trembles with anxiety.

I tremble with anticipation of actually finishing something

Before the earth’s rotation stops.

Before the sun implodes with its last breath

Or before I go off on another tangent.

Someday it will all go to trash

Burn in a supernova.

Dust to dust.

So I ask myself what’s the point?

Is it enough for these efforts to be art for art’s sake?

Existential zeitgeist?

Being present in the moment?

Is it being the latest fad of mindfulness.?

Or to assuage the dread of death?

Is there a point to being here?

To the things we do?

Or are we just the walking dead?

Lying to ourselves.

I want a point to all of this.

I want to finally give birth to this growing fetus,

And live forever.

Until the burn.

Something wrong with this poem?

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