Conversations with a Ghost

If you loved life you would have come here. But you didn’t—you waited idly in your darkened corridor, the lamps already low and used. And what did you take from this sojourn? This ephemeral morn? Your life was spent in empty chambers of hollow rhetoric, in endless shopping malls with dripping musak and plastic people. You congregated with a thousand priests beneath the city’s crusted church and democracy’s neon steeple. Your lasers cut pieces out of the night. You left the stars; you dropped them onto sunset strip, and no one looked twice.
But you didn’t find it, did you? You never answered that strange itching discomfort asking you to live as your heart knows best. You were double-bypassed. And the mimicry of your brain took hold.
So why did you wait? Why did you let this restlessness play out itself ? How could you have not put words to the music in your ears, put voice to the song in your breast?
And so you punish yourself in uncertainty, always questioning your own motives, second-guessing your instincts. Did you learn to put these words in the bar, scuffle the notes with numbers? That strange haunting won’t leave you. No acquisitions can quite remove it—stand in the way, bounce it off like sun-rays to scatter in sunsets—but the sun also rises.
I wanted you to come here. I thought it would make it better—make it better for you. But I couldn’t have known that you had already lost the middle of yourself, had tied your brain up with your genitals. What was I thinking to hope you could leave the thing you had grown in; the thing left here by our ancestors to delineate the future between men? They were my ancestors too, and I know that then they had acted for the creation of a future relative to the sustenance of their present. How foolish to think that there is no change; that change isn’t effected and affected simultaneously by the action toward instating a norm. But they were young and dizzy with the creation of civilization. Who can blame them? I do, but I don’t hate them for their accident. I always dug Frankenstein.
Your face is paling. Every time I see you—it’s been years, I know—you seem whiter, frailer, leaning heavy on your wonder-stick as even now your little-toe becomes more useless. You poor animal—could you really love your inanimate pets more than your own imperfection?