why was it so hard just now to make this damn decision?
to choose to walk this path that was otherwise inevitable…
to love this life, and to love the choices and their consequences
is a challenge that seems too daunting — for me at least…
the paper falls from my hand and has landed
in the box of murky fate…
hearts will be tested…will you love my way?
and pride put on the line
— ugh, the agony… my Gethsemane
I can choose nouns and verbs,
and name characters
and fill their mouths with words, perfect words,
crazy words — the kind of shit no one’s ever dared
come up with — yet I cannot take a step,
I cannot toe the line,
cannot jump the gap…
cannot commit to rise at 8 and die at five
can’t even bring myself to have a kind conversation
with a perfectly polite plebeian
with a totally ordinary, holy holy moly moly,
INTENT
…cannot look into the eyes of another
whose soul is dead inside…
why, why, oh why
my heart, you see,
it sometimes skips some beats,
hmm — maybe it’s just the caffeine
OR maybe, I need someone to carry me
no, no…
I take that back
you know, this was about as much a victory
as I could ask for
Garbage Notes:
This poem is about making real life decisions. It’s about owning a decision instead of perceiving it as inevitable.
Maybe there’s no free will. Maybe everything is determined. Or maybe it’s fucking chaos. I don’t know. Whatever it is, though, you as a functioning human being still have to make decisions. You still have to take responsibility for your life. That’s the big struggle.
I remember writing this poem at a sort of crossroads in my life. I had to decide whether to keep living a certain way. I was thinking about where I wanted to live. What I wanted to do for “work” and how I’d balance that with my real work. The writing.
I knew that if I continued along a certain path, the ending would be disastrous. So I had to make a hard decision. It was one that I knew would result in great difficulty and struggle and annoyance. But I had hopes that in the long run, it would be the best course of action.
Maybe it’s a bit much to compare my agony to Gethsemane. But it’s all subjective. All suffering is subjective. One person’s mild annoyance is another person’s crucifixion. Everybody is different.
A theme that is running through the poem is the struggle of the creative person—writer, poet, painter, musician, actor, you name it—to try and function within the structure of a regular society.
To ask someone who would rather be stretching themselves with wild ideas and mind-blowing fantasies to have normal mundane conversations about, like, what they had for lunch or what they plan to do this weekend or what needs to get repaired on their house, is a borderline painful thing. Because that creative person just wants to get fucking lost. Lost in their own head, lost in the possibilities that are not bound to the rules of this reality.
To me, it’s borderline horrifying each time I’m forced to interact with the banal. Especially when I really don’t want to. But then again, you have to realize there is still great beauty in the commonplace. The magic of this world needs to start somewhere. It needs to be rooted in the real. So we can’t fear reality too much.
We need to connect with everyone. And by making ourselves aware of the fact that some people like to live here on Earth with their feet planted on the ground. While a whole bunch of other people would rather be living in the sky, in the heightened hyper-reality of other planets and other worlds and other time periods. It’ll help us to be more sensitive to where people are at and what people might like to talk about.
Anyway, so going back to simple decisions and free will. I am personally disturbed by the fact that there are so many people out there who go around acting like the life they’re living is the exact life they chose from the moment they stepped out of their mother’s womb. I mean, we can’t delude ourselves that much. We aren’t in control of everything. There’s a brand of certainty and conviction to one’s own current situation that is kind of scary to me. But I guess we all have to cope with the nature of uncertainty in our own way.
We all have to deal with indecision, with loss of control, and with feelings of helplessness in the best way we know how. I’m learning new things every day about how “in control” I can be over my own reality. And, yes, while it does feel a million times easier for me to control the outcomes of characters in a fictional story than it does to navigate the course of my own life, at least I know I’m trying. Day in, day out, I’m trying. And that’s as much a victory as I could ask for. That’s the beautiful struggle of life.
Franco Amati 2024
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THIS POEM IS RIPE FOR AN ANSWER FROM ANOTHER POET, RUDYARD KIPLING:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph (victory) and Disaster (defeat)
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
THEN YOU WILL BE A MAN, MY SON...OR WOMAN OR PERSON
The dichotomy of choice: freedom as well as its personal responsibility. Humanity's eternal conundrum...
As you've written, it's all we can do to try; that's what life is about anyhow, pushing through the obstacles and just trying and trying again.