The Fiddler

This inadequacy in my heart, unable
To confront those energies that embody what
I thought existence ought to be about but it
Doesn’t seem to happen and here I am
No wiser in these last ten years than in the first
Ten nothing on hand the ambitions of
Youth burned to a short-ordered perfection
And too few walks in the woods while
The fiddler played an angry lay like most
Of mine and some of your's we walked
Away our sheltered ignorance uncontested
A conservative's world view—ego-driven
And still looking for a likely woman driving
By so very eagles in the fashion of what
Most thought the 70s were truly all about
The days jerk me around
I jerk myself around
The chicken choked
And the jokes recalled
The frizzed armor of the feminist girls
Salting the splashed spilled words
Of this auteur still incompetent
Down this loud dissonant oldtime story.

Mere self evaluation, doing the dance, shuffling the feet with either lack of faith or confident pessimism. You wake up in your thirties and think you've discovered what a self-centered bastard you have been, and then you wake up in your fifties and discover how you've tricked yourself again. Yet at the same time you know you have to discover what it is you value in yourself. This piece is a re-written post from 2005. I think it was actually new at the time. In any case, it is better now, than it was. Oh, and in the mid-1970s all the women I knew who were self-proclaimed feminists were getting their hair done in those frizzy perms. Not good for the tresses, but desirable in an odd fashion. I liked the really really longhaired girls, but even they would frizz the locks.