All very rough.
Question
Do I exist and live and die to bare my heart in vain
like the unregarded droplets bursting on the window pane
in the ever-falling sorrow of the melancholy rain?
Do I exist to bare my heart, and bear this all, in vain?
Chariot
Let the figure be composed:
two winged horse, a charioteer;
in gods they are of fair breed,
in us they are mixed, one noble, one ignoble,
difficult to manage withal.
The soul cares for all the inanimate part,
traversing every heaven,
manifold in appearance, shape, and form,
some perfect and swift-winged,
soaring upward then to rule the world,
some imperfect, unfeathered,
failing in flight, falling to earth.
Essays
Essays were made for babbling, trying out things, gibbering, jabbering, talking out randomly, lying out loud, wheezily whispering what deserves a good shout, and yet by deals in dark backrooms, the rag-magazines, crypts we call classrooms, somehow it seized the reins of our words, and all words by essays are measured. I tried, I tried, I truly tried, but no more will I live this lie of babbling, jabbering essays: better words more artfully made, better outlines and disputations, better posts and confrontations, than words bound up and rationed by irrational self-parody of prose. Is not the essay nothing but loss to language, to life, to thought? Has it not made the mind to rot in pedestrian ways pedantic minds love? It is complicit in the ravings of degenerate minds gone mad, it is fluff, it is guff, it is puff, and filler and filling-stuff is all we ever see (not that we see much). I tried, I tried, I tried, but to try is not enough; that here and there is one worth reading--that too is not enough. And the saddest of all bad things in these essays that never assay, is that essays can never be taught, never be learned (banish the thought!), can never succeed save in lie, for by nature it can only be tried, and trying is far beyond the reach of even the finest teachers to teach. I have had enough of it. It is time that we got rid of it, time to teach the world to craft its words and cultivate language like gardeners' flowers, to capture again thought's wonder and power, and find in each word power and wonder, and banish this generic non-genre.
The Lady of the Garden
The garden bears the vestiges
of Our Lady of the Rains,
baptized from conception,
gentle Mary without a stain,
never without redeeming grace
from God made flesh and slain.
You are a flower in the garden;
beneath the trees grow I,
and the roses grow in splendor
with bright blooms that never die:
all are nourished by praying tears
she beneath the cross did cry.
