psyching myself up with other people's words

"Everything will be alright
tonight

Everything will be alright
tonight

No one moves
No one talks
No one thinks
No one walks
tonight"

- David Bowie, "Tonight"

It's time to, once again, step up. I think of the marvelous speech that Nicolas Cage gave to Cher in "Moonstruck":

"...love don't make things nice - it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren't here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and *die*. The storybooks are *bullshit*."

Believe it or not, that holds true for any real romantic. We write our own storybooks, we write the poems and embrace the Annabelle Lee and La Belle Dame Sans Merci and our totem beasts, irregardless of their ability to step up. I have spent my life crossing the river with a scorpion on my back, knowing it *is* a scorpion and unmindful of my fate, as long as I could reassure myself that I was doing the romantic thing, the charitable thing. The good thing.

I told the Panther years ago that she had brought me to my knees and that I would not again in this life go to my knees, that you would hear my thighbones splinter and snap before I would allow myself to go down again. I am content that I have defied, to this point, the harsher forces of fate. And, if you could see my face right now, you would see I am smiling. Life is good, just as a fine dinner is good, even with the moments that fail you, the brushstroke on the tree in the background of the painting that is less than a masterstroke, even when your lover moves the wrong way and you bump noses.

Without the nurturing illusions, my kata for emotional prep for a read is very different. Not even sure I have an unshackled kata yet. When I played host to the Mississippi Gathering of Poets, I was already pretty much on my own...the reads I did this Spring for National Poetry Month were zero-G reads (reads without an emotional anchor)...I need to either find how to go without an anchor, or find a new anchor.

I am glad the boys called last night. Elric didn't know how old I was, that was kind of cute, but also sad (for a son to not know how old his Dad is...what kind of world is this?)

I am sad for those I did not hear from. If you've ever read "A Thousand Deaths" by Orson Scott Card you probably can grasp the other side of it, as well...enough pain, long enough, and you become numb to it.

Some animals just don't housebreak, time to accept that and get on with things.

The read.