'Going Home'

I feel a pang of the most beautiful sadness - sitting in my rooms in my chair with my pipe and the smoke wreathing out into the room, becoming its own, as I inhale the world as my own, and exhale it back again, kissing farewell to it all through smoke rings, listening to the soft sadness of ‘Ode to a Mountain’ by Melodica, Melody & Me as I should be writing about Milton’s Lucifer and his pitiable descent below even the deepest pity, as the clock clings close to five in the morning, with the snow clinging close to the frozen ground outside - when I think of the man I met in Isla Mujeres. It was with the same sadness, I know, that Kerouac typed out the last sentence of his first novel. ‘I think of Dean Moriarty’. I think of Art. I didn’t quite catch his name, but he smiled when he told it to me, was silent for a while, and returned to his guitar, singing about going home. I know that I will never meet him again, but I hope that I will always remember at least a shadow of that smile, and at least some broken fragments of that song - as he sung I like to think he strung his soul out across the whole world, broadening ever with the breadth of his smile, and promising at least a glimmer of light for us all with the glimmer in his eye, that could drown whole oceans with the half-suggestion of a tear for me, for everyone, and for home. There are crystals in everything, and there is always the unbreakable, unquenchable pain at the heart’s core when one is most nearly alive - cut on such edges we bleed tears. I cannot express it well enough, and will return to my pipe, thinking of Art, or Arty, or whatever he was called, and his music, and his tears, and his smile.

5am 2nd Feb '08