The Attack of the Imposing Figures

Narrow unexamined behavior. Narrow examined behavior. Narrow behavior. On the

straight and narrow. Narrow. One more narrow, for the muddled metric slash imperial measure. One more narrow, for bad measure. A narrow extra bar. Put narrow in your barrow, take it home with you, it's what I'd do, in my right brain, with no philosophy or poetry, just a tired inclination to try and say something, anything.

So, I learned to run this maze, I got my circuit. I learned there's a button at the end, that I can press, to feel alright. Except I don't feel quite alright about it anymore. But maybe this time, it'll be like old times, when I press the button.

LOITERERS WELCOME

the sign said, trying to reverse psyche me out of hanging around. I examined this ploy, and went my narrow way, to the blues bar next door, and played an open stage, without drink or drugs. But I don't call that novelty. I haven't milked George Street, haven't sucked so much as a drop off the teat. But that's neither here, nor there, maybe a crossroads, but a speck through the lense I'm de-telescoping through, to this vantage of what's normal, either sleep dep or sloth, over medicated, too sober and too much coffee, but no amount makes me manic anymore, there's just some kind of grinding sanity, a narrow sanity that I can't see past, to what must be with the remainder, the coincidental confluence after application of the narrow theory that works pretty well for cleaning a house and driving a car, in every sense of driving a car.

Now, what can I say, but that I want more - it would be a yearn, but the anti-depressants keep me in crushing mediocrity, I barely feel alive. No ache, no sharpness, just the dullened pain of unfulfillment. Not that things are all that bad, no, this is a trough on an upswing. Yeah. But it all looks flat from the observatory, the place where merit has meaning, things have value, magnitudes are measurable. Because the dullened yearn is still there, buried under bullshit, and it wants me to write some poetry, not to write poetry, but to fucking well express what's raging against the lucid daydream, in fitful halfsleep.

Narrow search criteria. Yarrow sticks are probably a coincidence. They might prove something, if I could apply enough paranoia to the problem. Absence of proof is not proof of absence, HEY! That is what I was gonna title my improv, it still amazes me what things I retain in my memory, that serve no purpose, but I still gotta respect the integrity of that cerebral cortex. Maybe its non utilitarian functioning is why I love it, It, that alien gray bundle of nerves my feeling is perversely bound up in, by some cosmic accident, cosmic man, how else would I say it? It's what I came up with during this 666th trip down the maze. And I tell you, I don't believe in talismanic numbers anymore. I guess I'll just thank Santa Rosa I'm simply mediocre and tired and bored, and not complicatedly manic, and feeling that joy is tragic, and all frigged up therein. Close poppy.