Worm
in the apple of life
I was angry
in a dream last night, objecting to the objection of some girl at school as to
the reason a door was damaged. I told her this was a world of realities, where
people are dying real death. Children are being beaten by drunken parents,
women by men who can't solve their own head-problems.
I don't know
why I dreamed this. But I woke with the anger still brimming over in me. Why
the pretentiousness of someone in my dreams should bother me is a mystery, too.
I don't think
it's me, or my lacking anything. Maybe it is an unconscious reaction to middle
class people passing judgment without knowing the facts of the ghetto. I don't
much about the ghetto myself and I live in the middle of one.
Outside, the
morning comes with the
I'm cold.
Spring has returned after a week of near ninety temperatures. It is good
weather for job hunting, if that's what you have to do. I'm stuck with it,
though I've caught Jimmy's disease-- resenting the unequal posture of boss
verse employee as if working meant something dirty or disreputable. But I've
folded the want ad section of the newspaper under my arm along with my
notebooks, going to the waiting rooms and lunch rooms and offices of
employment, trying to look humble when I don't feel it, trying to look as if
the process of self-degradation is pleasing to me-- for only the truly
masochistic would suffer though such things willingly.
Meanwhile, a
singing bird teases me with its freedom. I don't curse it so much as envy this
part of its life, when the sun is shining and the worms are fresh from the
earth.
Work? Ha! The
only worm in this scenario is me.