(Lamentations) Meditations on A Lost Apprenticeship 

In the apprenticeship period hopes are high. There is excitement that nature is not resisting the will to form casual images and sharp words. All solid things are safe and play easily in the mind.

The only gods of youth are the roar of crowds and the excitement of victory.

But then, who will save us from our own crimes?

A wildness laughs its way through the city streets; youth follows them and, too, celebrates the uselessness of things. A hairy, naked man stands in the doorway threatening the passer-by. Lovers scream obscenities in a night not prepared to perfect them. Instruments are heard from the hazy avenues; it reminds youth that life is dance that leads from the body to the mind.

Happiness that sweeps through us when infinity grabs the full weight of our poor suffering, dispersing it among the angels of undiscovered planets.

There is, then, a maze of hallways one meets with in dreams that conducts the soul through a circumcision of sorts. This is no happy walk through the maze of the madhouse. It sees us walk and demands that we run. In the strange silence of the parks, worlds are imagined and laughed off.

Violence leaps from the stadium and sweeps like an angry ghost through the town, full of frustrations and hope. But, the violence that is imagined is more cruel. A mere shadow of a city remains in the dim light of the brain.

Where are the happy, happy days and faces that move, like wonderful and exotic animals, through the sunlit forest of youth? It is filled, now, with the death of Presidents, death of nations, death of sacred words, death of hope, death of cities, death of futures, death of beauty, death of inheritance, death of ambitions, death of mothers and fathers, death of all the green spots the spirit seeks, death of trust, death of the eyes, death of the dance, the death of death.

Time takes out a whipping stick and knocks us forward. Do we remember what we pass through? Is there anything articulate about our sharp cries? Voices come to us from far-away to try and impress our souls. Everything looks so ragged, so dragged down to states of the unforgiving.

Please, do not take our memories away! We sound like madmen at times and go read books to bring us back to something sane. Perhaps, we think, the madness is real and the sanity a mere phantom we create. We will, then, create the sanest world we can imagine and people it with the heart's desire.

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