In this age...

I'm okay. Just tired, so I won't bore you with more babble. Or shall I?

Comfort comes hard to me. The isolation of my discipline of my craft, of my faith, is sometimes too much to bear. But I am who and what I am, and to be less or different is to lie. Lie not just with wrds, but with my heart, my flesh, my soul, my legacy.

And so, I am alone. Better an uncomfortable truth than an easy lie. Better solitude than a false love's kisses.

I sat down earlier this evening with my manuscript for THEOCRICIDE. They're going to nail me to the wall over this one. The arrogance. The passion. The madness. The flourish. I can die after this one, although I'd like to finish the other several dozen still dancing in my head.

They'll forgive me when 101 GREAT EROTIC POEMS is released. Not completely, but enough. Enough. I am tired of accepting enough. I am tired of doing without or going 99% of the way because I am trying to set an example, to do the right thing. To build a path for those who need it.

I need to be writing more, focusing more, burning away more of the irrelevancies of my life. When all the photons run the same way, you get a laser. When all the talents, all the abilities, come to focus on a single point in space...

That's something to behold. The principal behind the Tokamak fusion device was to focus many high-energy lasers at once on a single point in space. Light. Heat. Pressure. Fusion. Welcome to my frontal lobes.

I may lack the vigor of my youth, but I haven't slowed down that much. I am smarter, more experienced, more eloquent, more sure of myself. In the sphere of Venus I learned war, to steal from C.S. Lewis. Lessons both costly and painful, but to a purpose, to make me a better man/poet/friend/lover/person.

I merely allowed myself, in the words of Ani DiFranco, to get "distracted". But the distractions, the butterflies, were to the purpose as well. And I am...grateful...for them. Them and the lessons earned and learned.

I still get wounded when criticized. I still have the same insecurities when I encounter a woman that I find intriguing. I still have my doubts. And my flaws. I don't like being lied to, or about. I don't like faceless critics. I don't respect those who use others, determining that they are somehow more deserving of life and success. But couer rage embraces the doubts and you learn to reach into the dark and hot spaces to retrieve what was never lost but must be found.

Yourself.

I've gained more than I have lost, though I can still mourn the losses. Both physical and spiritual, fiscal and temporal, both the folded walls and the dispelled illusions. The rusty taste of lost trust, or false lust, of morsels and mould on a crust of bread.