Discipline, Perseverance and Other Voices of Insomnia

I never had much respect for middle of the road,

it was always the extremes which captured

my attention, the ones out on the edge,

pushing it right to the limit, leaving it all on the field,

nothing held back;

this is what I admired;

most of the good ones slipped away, like killers in the night,

discipline never a strong point, perseverance not a possibility;

I browsed through one of his ‘posthumous’ books the other day,

I almost bought it but eventually put it back on the shelf,

the words seemed to fit but somehow it just didn’t feel right,

it felt a little too ‘perfect’, a bit too ‘contrived’;

more than coincidence?

I imagined his widow sitting down at a table,

throwing a bunch of words together whenever the bills were due,

claiming to have some secret vault full of previously

unpublished material, then again I could imagine him

talking to her on his death bed, giving her specific instructions:

“feed it to em slow baby,

give em a book a year,

that’s all there is, but it should be enough

if you spread it out.”

either way, I put it back on the shelf,

I didn’t want to be guilty of supporting fraud,

I’m much too ‘clean’ for that;

much too ‘dignified’;

later I will go home, write all these words down,

the thoughts and ideas springing up from that short

book store glance, wishing I had bought the book,

knowing the words really belong to him,

wondering how he knew he’d be inside my head

16 years later, while sitting at a kitchen table

at 4:12 in the morning.

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