Dan's Words

So you wake up one morning and nothing is pouring out of you except manic free writing and feelings of confusion like rain. Delving into the deeper nature of verbal jazz and arriving at the door with a handful of fluff to offer your hosts, and they kick you out, saying "get back to your houses until you can learn to write like Burroughs and make it WORK." So you shove off towards that known horizon, realizing the plan was only ever in the back of your head and maybe written on the back of your hand, if you were feeling responsible that day, but never really realized. You do not truly Know that horizon, only imagine it constantly and speak of it. You lost the touch of divine inspiration and out of you now flows foolish self-contemplation, which proves useless to your listeners. So instead you tune into A Love Supreme and try to lyricize your own narcissistic eternal internal ballad in a way more easily identified with for those who prefer the cynical yet hopeful tongue-in-cheek method of communicating. And here it is.

I’ve borrowed these lines above from someone who once captured the vanity and paralysis of creation at its most vulnerable. A perfect picture of a moment, a photograph of a situation existing only where there is a need for fulfillment. The heart, the head and the hand working in unparalleled symphony just to brush the feeling with a stroke on the canvas. And there I laid unable to move, for he said everything I am feeling right now. He had words to help him live through the rough. I’ve always imagined I had words to help me cope with his absence. Even on a foggy day, when he saw no direction and was crying out for help, he used words to channel all his excess energies from bad to good. I’ve borrowed these lines above from someone whose ghost I’m getting ever closer to taming.

I have a rose. I have a rosebud. I’m loving it and feeding it and watching it grow. It’s growing tall, it’s growing beautiful. In my spiraling soul mutilation that I carry out as a ritual from time to time with the aid of my past love, I manage to entwine objects and cities and feelings and words and thoughts with only him. Offering nothing exclusive, the rose becomes just an object of memory. The symbolic nature of everything that surrounds me sometimes burdens the wings of my imagination, but I feel I need to be fuelled by the things gone through me so there’s meaning, at least for me. The rose was I. The Rose was the Little Prince’s. The story was ours and the book landed with him. So the fact that I now nurture a rose, that I have a rosebud who is only mine and who will bloom only for me, is greatly symbolic in me facing the ghost that he is, that his love is.

"It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important."

"It is the time I have wasted for my rose--" said the little prince, so that he would be sure to remember.

"Men have forgotten this truth," said the fox. "But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose . . ."

"I am responsible for my rose," the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.

This is more of a burden than a sweet memory. I long to shed the things that lock his name forever in my memory. I hope my rose will help me. I hope he at least suspects that I do feel and will forever feel responsible, that feeling responsible can be nothing else than feeling love. But I’m free and have for a long time been walking away and that makes me proud of me and of my rose and of my memories and of my love for him.

"Good morning," said the roses.

The little prince gazed at them. They all looked like his flower.

"Who are you?" he demanded, thunderstruck.

"We are roses," the roses said.

And he was overcome with sadness. His flower had told him that she was the only one of her kind in all the universe. And here were five thousand of them, all alike, in one single garden!