Lanced Hearts of Lovers & Martyrs

I don’t know how it happened, I’m still in some euphoric haze over it all, but unless I’m dreaming, I think just bought 3 box-level seats to the Detroit Opera House’s final performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio for 17 bucks.

So come this Sunday, I’ll be donning my top-hat, banding with the most suave of all the college friends I have—a rag-tag gang looking straight out of La Boheme—, dressing as petit-bourgeois as humanly possible, and storming the D like its the Tullieries on a Parisian revolt. And spending the afternoon with the Romantic of all Romantics, Beethoven.

First day of the year it truly feels like Spring, through and through.

Celebrated by popping the sunroof, rolling all my windows down, and proceeding to blare Tchaikovsky as loudly as possible through town all the way home from work.

Neighbors appreciated it, I bet.

I’m moving, moving out of my old place,’Craiglockhart’, as I’ve come to call it; that mental ward the two war poets Owen & Sasasson met. Good riddance, I say. A bit liberating to be out. My friends’ condo’s been made into somewhat of a limbo for me; a place to stay between now and the next few months that I figure things out for University.

First on the list of packing was to mobilize my emassed library of second hand books I’ve collected through the years. My car’s filled right now with nearly half the novels I’ve ever come to own.— It’s quite literally a literary vessel as epic as Odesseus’ (he himself’s somewhere in there, too) carrying within her the cargo of thousands of years of man’s thought and verse, not to mention one young boy’s own life’s worth of stories. Were it to go down now in some Atlantic street wreck, King Phillip II’s lost ships of Aztec gold wouldn’t buffer the losses my childhood’s reading pleasure would suffer. But in just being melodramatic. These days ahead look pretty bright. I’m glad to be off to a new home.

White smoke rises as the world burns.
& up from the ashes of the Suicide of our century’s World,
a phoenix to our souls cries “Peace” against the War.
But not a sound breaks the thunder or the shells,
Or the deaf-tone cheers of olden hearts,
set for glory no further than our external shore.

Tribute to Benedict XV, Vicar elct. 1914.

All the words that I utter,
And all the words that I write,
Must spread out their wings untiring,
And never rest in their flight,
Til they come where your sad, sad heart is,
And sing to you in the night,
Beyond where the waters are moving,
Storm-darken’d or starry bright.

-W.B.Yeats

Love at last has finally freed me,
Once 7-years’ chance from a death at sea.
        A light of love, unending, outshining pale-star’d skies,
        I find there dawning in the glimmer of your eyes.

                   They can lay my life unto the ground,
but love will take to soar,
For my soul, eternal, shall find your arms once more.