a forest of birches

It came to me at half past the hour that this hour would never come again, and that all the men i could have hated in any other time but mine were now dead and gone, fertilizing the earth with the matter that was them and echoing their thoughts in people who knew them.
Hating men, of course, is not something i would like to be at the forefront of a page or a story or a thought, but hating what people have done in the past is a feeling that often and easily finds its way to the top and perhaps even succeeds in running the show; the show being, of course, my mind: what it dictates to my body, namely my tongue.
Sometimes i wonder if it is so easy to live in the past and even long for it, for something that we can perfect only in our heads, because it's a way to avoid the fact that the present isn't that much different: housing pain in the worst yet joy in the deepest, and the present demands to be faced for it to become the past.
And so we're faced with facing the present and turning our backs on the past, but never learning from it, like an idiot who is surprised when the red stove top still burns his finger.


If the sun sets behind a forest of trees, what happens to the shadows? They're moving all day and in the end are stretched so thin that they vanish. Is it the same shadow the next day, or has it changed? Does the shadow even exist? Only if the tree changes, you say. But even more, it is there because of the sun, the light from behind. If there was no light would there ever have been a shadow? If there was no tree did the shadow ever exist?

I think of tree shadows, because the picture of an eternal forest of birches at dusk, their thousands of shadows stretching out longer than the trees themselves with the sparkling dust in the air glowing in the twilight, has been in my mind for quite some time. And in some way, there is nothing more hauntingly enchanting or beautiful than this scene to me.
I imagine the world to revolve around this forest, soaking up the reality of time in its glittering particles and allowing nothing to escape except emptiness and ugliness and the strange axle of our lives that is time.
I hate hate, and i hate the power of hate, but hate's power will not subside until time releases its power over our stupidity.

killing a mockingbird

the sun makes prunes of us all
i open my eyes and i'm asleep
don't sleep in the grass,
it will eat you alive;
you stayed in the grass too long,
and it ate you alive.

you make the devil's angels say thank you,
the folded blades of grass
will never recover their height.
mexicans get pretty in the sun,
i just get hot and burn.
sleep on you father's ashes if you must,
he's been in the dust
you just didn't see him.

mockingbird is tired of repeating
he just wants to be like you and me.
the pirate ship is waiting to take you away;
finish that beer, man
get your head out of your pocket.

the sun is hotter than you think,
people you don't know are dying,
like your brother and his family,
and you keep feeding the mockingbird.
he's tired of singing to people without ears.
sick of it,
sick of singing,
sick to death of mocking.