self-deprecation

My unabashedly riotous guffaws are the product, a lifetime in self deprecation. Over which father and I would compete in odd places. Times. Remembering now my mother, who seldom laughed, was looking for a hat in Bloomingdales of all places. When suddenly he and I, in the mirror, appeared beside her grinning in ladies chapeaux.

I laugh now with more than a tincture of sadness, for the memory, while humorous, betrays what I saw in her eyes; terror.

Mercurial in the best of times, worse when intoxicated, a daily event after five of the afternoon. Latter on, the marriage failed, she alone, would disappear for sometimes days and my sister would find her alone in her, always Cadillac, two vacated quarts of Scotch on the floor; unconscious.

"My love life is terrible. The last time I was inside a woman was when I visited the Statue of Liberty." - Woody Allen

. . . we’re a pair M&me two spirit ghosts dancing; passing through one another. And it was she who invoked within me, without knowing really? that I in the end would rather enter a woman’s soul than her body. Few of the many I’ve known came remotely near the passion, the - to me - sacrament which M calls aggression . . . Small wonder now she once called me a ‘priest’ but then I love her all the more for her confidence. I’d no real life before, thinking myself too stupid to live. . . . Worse. Attempting to prove it.

I’m an old man alone, growing older moment by precious minute. Formulating the thesis that success is an illusion. Happy with a companion cat, laughing and crying, about/over which, she the cat, Annie, is bewildered and consoles me. A sailor of the galaxies I know well the term “cats paws” barely rippling the sea becalmed; calming me with her barely perceptible touch, asking are you okay?

Forgive me please all those loved and left to find myself at long long last happily alone. More cautious with language spoken not written, Thanks Be To God! Or whatever/whomever speaks to me now awake or sleeping the dreams impelling me launched into wakefulness.

Obvious to me and should be to you; I’m a very bad boy. So much so to defraud all my longings to be otherwise.

I know the Master loves me, as does M, neither making of me a slave to anything or one.

“To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.”- Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

. . . which I now, even now, and forever more, add the pearl of great value is within each of us; seek it nowhere else. As grateful as I am for M and the Master I know only now that love is not that which we receive but give. Our true selves.

. . . candy is dandy, liquor quicker, money works too, but to be real, give of your soul; forever renewed.

. . . oddly, or perhaps not, discovered when I went to post:
“Conquest is an evil productive of almost every other evil both to those who commit and to those who suffer it.” C. S. Lewis

130318 01:16 self deprecation
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved