Dearest Daddy,
I've tried for years now to satisfy your ambitions of me; your ceaseless and tireless yearnings for me to transform into something I can never, due to my own nature, fully become. I reach out to you time and time again--hoping for a glance, a nod, any gesture of pride to burst through your black framed glasses from your dark brown eyes and shoot directly into my soul. All of my studies, my travels, even the girls I've brought home, they were all for you really in the end. To show you that I am a Man. I am worthy of your love, your affection, and your honor.
I know that things are different now. We aren't as close as we once were. I know my abstractions and obscurities try your patience time and time again. But Daddy, without you my life is shallow. It is a shadow of an idea. An idea a grand man, no, grand Senator had at a time when a bond of friendship seemed so dubious as though it would not last the aesthetic spring, the ethical summer, or the stoic fall. But the seasons of our lives will always change. Even for those of us who live in season-less hells central to the wang of our country. The days of our lives will play out. Those Senators chairs that sat with such phallic poise in the foyer may come to grow cob webs. The artwork that adorned the Senate walls of old may grow dusty. The stains left by a Post Modern friend on Daddy's blanket for Bears may grow crusty. And the shattered porcelain remains of a violent outburst between Senators may come to be the ruins of a once proud empire that ruled a cul de sac. Confounded images of a raucous Buffalo Senator will dissolve as Goodbye Horses fades to silence.
I ask you Daddy, was this not all for your love? These things may come to pass like the discarded soiled tissue Nero thoughtlessly casts aside after folding his laundry, but my love for you will not. I will one day make you proud. One day make you love me the way you loved me in the quiet, forgiving dark of a London hostel. And you will come to see that I am not the man you thought or hoped I would become. But I am the man you love.
With love and reverence always,
The Senate
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Wandering through many countries and over many seas
ReplyDeleteI arrive, brother, for these miserable funeral rites,
so that I might finally grant the service of the dead
and speak, though in vain, to your silent ashes,
since fortune has taken your own self away from me
alas, my brother, so cruelly torn from me!
Yet now meanwhile take these offerings, which by the custom of our fathers
have been handed down -- a sorrowful tribute -- for a funeral sacrifice;
take them, wet with the many tears of a brother,
and for ever, O my brother, hail and farewell!
Daddy hasn't abandoned you, he's merely found another senate floor:
ReplyDeletehttp://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/08/05/us_sponsered_uranium_enrichment_in_hanoi
pshaw
ReplyDeleteHello darkness, my old friend
ReplyDeleteI've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence
In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
'Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence
And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence
"Fools", said I, "You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you"
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed
In the wells of silence
And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls"
And whispered in the sounds of silence