everything except himself

Poor Prometheus!
I, if no one else, know that
The true fire is not a flame but a fountain!

In contrast, our daily lives
Are a sinking boat
On which our fair futures float.
Though, we don’t get very far –
Life is a pond
Where we and the algae dumbly abscond.

Lying on our stomach with the water’s floor,
We claim to see the whole world and more.
To us, it is all darkness at best,
But, Darkness, confess!
Worlds within worlds from you can be wrest!

So I light my torch with that knowledge –
For in dreams and lighter things
We are not to rules bound
But in that free space found
To break or hold laws
For our own unwieldly cause.

See past what is in front of you –
Look into the depths!
Cast out your soul like a bucket,
And draw in what you can.
Drink deeply like the sponge you are!
And maybe you will go so far
As to tell the algae what it is
And tell your surroundings what they are not:
That they are not the whole, but just a part.

He lived everything forward. In the morning, he got up, went straight to the bathroom — he’d laid his clothes out the night before — on to the shower, ate breakfast after shaving, brushed his teeth, and went out the door. Rising from bed, he would sometimes feel as though he were pushing against something. His doctor said it was his age — he was an old man. The old man always informed his doctor that the opinion was only half right, went to get his prescriptions filled, went home, ate dinner, laid out his clothes for the next day, took his pills, and got ready to get up the next morning.

He talked to himself. He would sometimes say things when he pushed his way out of bed. His wife had heard all sorts of things — that is, before she had passed on. She had once remarked to a friend that she was worried about her husband. She was so frightened once by the tone in her husband’s voice that she thought a burglar or a robber — as though there were really any distinction — had startled her husband and moved him on to a rage. She told of how he made the most strained and forced noises. Now, her friends all knew her to tell stories high as the Sears Tower, but she convinced them all to gather around the apartment door one morning, bright and early at 5:00 — precisely at five is when the old man woke up every morning. Well, what a sound they heard! One of them almost had the mind to call 911 for an ambulance or the police or something.

He didn’t like rainy days. He would always yell the loudest on mornings when the weather was bad. He’d always mumble to himself about how “it wasn’t enough already” and “you just got to go and do that — today of all days.”

His life wasn’t especially exciting. In fact, the highlight of his day was getting up. The woman in the apartment next to his tried striking up conversation one time when she passed him in the hall — she had planned it, too, but never again! She asked him if he had company over that morning, on account of all the noise. He replied in a very serious way. He said he couldn’t get rid of the company fast enough! She knew — ’cause she’d watched and watched a lot — that he didn’t have any company. She didn’t try talking to him again.

His doctor told me a peculiar story. The old man had a heart condition. The doctor said that it took some doing, but his remaining family convinced him to get surgery. Well, they put him under, started to operate all serious-like, and there goes the old man hoopin’-and-a-hollerin’ like the comin’ of the Lord was upon us — the doctor-surgeon-man was a long-time Baptist. He said the old man was yelling all kinds of things, mostly hateful — like fightin’ words or something.

The man recovered. He seemed to get a little bit quieter though — I learned that from his nosey next-door neighbor, the one who about called an ambulance when she didn’t hear the old man screaming at 5:00 in the morning like usual. She probably should have. He was at the hospital by the end of the week.

Stingiest old man you ever saw! I was one of the hospital staff on hand when he came in. He grabbed me by the hand as we were rushing him to the ER. He said very deliberately his name and address. Then he told me that, just to the left of the apartment building, there was a funeral home and that, not a mile more, there was a cemetery — said it was his part not to be a burden, what with how much of a rip-off caskets were already.

Spoke in his sleep, too. You’d never believe what it is he was yelling about. I got to know him pretty well on account of working graveyard shifts and his garrulous out loud dreaming and all. I asked him about all of it one time when he was awake during my shift — we went to check on him because he wasn’t being noisy. He told me about how he had to yell all the time at time to keep it moving; otherwise, he’d catch up to it, on account of it being so slow — said that before that he yelled at it for taking his wife’s beauty away — said that he yelled at it because it hadn’t taken her with it! You should have seen the nurse’s eyes roll!

He died in his sleep. Honestly, I don’t know how he did it, being the way he was. It was on one of my off-days — poor guy probably thought he was doing me a favor, seeing as I was one of the regulars that took care of him.

Anyway, it went just like he said that first time I met him. He spent an afternoon at the funeral home, got visited by his family and a few people living in the apartment building next to the place, and then he moved on down the road to the cemetery, where he was gotten ready to get up and go the next day.