mostly hot air

When a certain moods hits, things get unusual.

A long time ago, I was divorced. I got very sad. Lost my bearings. Went up to Missouri, near Kansas City, to visit my parents. One weekend, they coaxed me to go with them out to some place where colorful hot air balloons were putting on a show.

Late afternoon. Big crowd sitting on the nice grass everywhere. Luxurious shadows cooling the summer. I sat there, watching the surreal balloons take off. I sat there, observing all the people everywhere. I was feeling very sad and quite lost.

A certain different mood hit, and things became unusual.

That mood was stimulated by the alien solidity of all those people strewn across the grass. They seemed to possess a disconcerting substance or concentrated will. You could see it in the experiential gravity of their eyeballs -- their looking eyes were intense with energy, like uranium marbles. Their collective body language expressed a kind of supernal entitlement. Being there did not flummox them at all. They were exactly where they were supposed to be at that particular time. They were one with this spectacle of floating hue and fabric.

That phenomenon of audience and balloons felt like a large conspiracy. Some secret ritual was occurring. I was an intruder, out of spirit with this event. As if a vapor in human form.

Yet...that mood of being almost nothing contained something wonderful.

In place of existential substance appeared a radical, deep, and beautiful ache. This pain was exquisite. How wonderfully awful to feel so alienated! Instead of being part of this tissue of shared time, I was splattered into pieces of null-yet-yearning plasma. Space became a far arena for absurd, impotent longing, rather than a bluegrassy plane for conspiratorial participation. This indefinite desiring into the impossible is suppler and subtler than the most poignant music. The texture of what is forever beyond one's disposition is a wondrous weave of ache and beguilement.

Thinking about this stuff now, I realize something. A lot of my poems are mostly hot air. A verbal peering into the invisible labyrinth of what can't be.