12252010

When we were young.
A friend said to me that we are not young men anymore,
just men now.

We weren’t doing something new.
It came out of us ,
then, and sometimes now.
I remember discipline,
before we had such things
to discipline ourselves against.

Before we learned to count,
and run
on treadmills.
Before we cared about the sweat of sport,
and the cut
of a garment.
I remember being a child.
We stayed like children.

Anyone who has ever known
something simple of happyness,
will always know
something of misery,
not everything,
but something

This was before happiness became complex,
like algebra,
or something else
that we couldn’t bother ourselves with.

I thought,
it would be easier
if our pasts were
a bit harder,
that is probably true.

Sometimes one can’t help but remember,
like nausea,
like cold fingers,
the body refuses
to identify with the situation
in a suitable manner,
for what should be done,
how it should be felt,
to make things easy,
moderate,
pleasant.

We did something,
well,
and we were children
for as long as possible,
which is much longer
than most people can say they had.

Now
that I consider myself someone
who should do something.
Who reads novels and writes texts like this one,
for people who enjoy reading novels.

Now
I prescribe a purpose
as an explanation
for the wobbles
in my mothers voice,
on the telephone,
not at home.

Now
there are choices,
prescriptions for those symptoms,
which the choices have created,
for a purpose,
an academic purpose,
choices
that require distances.

I am sorry for that,
for grief,
for demanding grief from someone
who constructed
concrete simplicity,
which i academically dismantled,
with drugs,
with words,
with discipline,
with garments.

I learned how to cover it up,
like
muscles
cover
bones.

When we were young
we knew winter different.
We knew white,
but not airplanes,
nor paintings,
nor memoirs.
We knew the distance from one house to the next,
and where to find a caravan of people.

And when i think of this now
i feel the need to run,
because then we did not need anyone.
Maybe we were lonely
but probably not,
probably
we knew how to do the one thing
that we did
that was enough.

Certainly
that is not enough now.

[A]