Specter IV.

On Listening to Sibelius on a Wild and Windy Night

{Substitute for Spectre IV.}

I.

There I walked, and there I raged;

The spiritual savage caged

Within my skeleton, raged afresh

To feel, behind a carnal mesh,

The clean bones crying in the flesh.

~ Elinor Wylie, "Full Moon"

Power cannot produce purity, no more than artifice can craft Truth. Anyone who has listened to the violin concerto of Jean Sibelius -- and listened with attention -- will understand this statement. The gentle, lachryomose lines of the first movement quickly give way to a violent outburst of emotion, a calculated effort to draw the listener into a world of angst ... Calculation, yes ... But no deception. This piece is one of the most honest compositions I've ever encountered. I attempted to perform it as a youth. I stumbled on the platform, scraped and missed several arpeggios ... oh

well.

Time and again my feelings let me know ... there is a power raging inside of me ... a force destructive, personal, and constitutive of my life ... I prevail because I am pissed off. That concerto rages until the end, when the silence overtakes the exhausted violinist ... The silence not of the grave but of the burnt-out soul, which hastens to its end, but not with a whimper ... a BANG!!!

II.

... ill doing ... or loss or lack ... or depressions or exaltations,

They come to me days and nights and go from me again,

But they are not the Me myself.

~ Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself" (4).

Crackles of the heart, phone calls, explanations, seeking understanding, a rage of emotion, an analysis that breeds only scorn ...

She keeps herself at home, with a sweaty body in the bed that used to be mine: Whore of a Woman! Death be upon you!

No: Love keep thee,

and let me know it again.

You fucking slut.

III.

A terrible grazhny vonny world, really, O my brothers. And so farewell from your little droog. And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip-music, brrrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries. But you, O my brothers, remember sometimes thy little [Edward] that was. Amen. And all that cal. ~ Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (slightly modified to include MY name) She rots in my mind like a fester ... She sticks in my maw like a poppy seed that causes irritation ... She scrapes my shit along the toilet at 3:00 AM and expects me NOT to drink. Bolshy yarblockos to that witchy whore! At the mid-point of my life ... Dante-esque ... If I wanted Love I'd have it now. Are you out there, you cosmos-shattering disgrace to femininity? No. You have someone else's sweat in your bathrobe. April is indeed the cruelest month -- and to ME the cruelest Name. She knows her power and revels in it. I know my weakness ... And accept it. Shantih shantih shantih