lust for life

if i were to steal titles from punk albums it would be iggy pop and the stooges record of the same name as this post. oh, and the idiot too. i've been longing to write a chapbook length sequence using that one as well. it is so, as the kids say, apropos.

i was feeling rather down yesterday, goofy as well, but as i walked to work in the cool of an early autumn morn i was thinking of my limits. we all have them, limits. as one gets older the future narrows quite a bit and those limits we think when we are young that we can overcome them, those limits turn into brute facts.

i can't sing, can't add or subtract, can't even vector worth a damn too. yet what worries me the most is losing the ability to be at times amazed at being alive. that amazement is married to a sense of humor as well. life is a tragedy, yes we all know it, but as sam beckett reminds us in his works, that tragedy is often damn funny. sometimes the joke is on us, and sometimes we are in on the joke but what is living without laughter and the dumbstruck awe of the absurdities.

like the classical chinese poets often wrote, no talent, no ambition, but if i can stretch this conceit out a bit more, what i can do is translate this life into words.