The Guy That Died And, More Importantly, The Things He Saw Before His Death

I saw Leo Tolstoy in downtown Portland, Oregon.

I saw myself driving through the thick forest country and recognized that ambition has deserted me. It stirred in me the need for a torrential cry, and the water has been amassed along my dull eyes since then, refusing to fall. I desired to cry and I couldn't. Just as I desired to come and I couldn't.

I see in every gesture and hear in every word of every person the secret wailings of their heart that they themselves sometimes cannot. I wish I were a bandage the size of a human heart and not a person. Then perhaps I might be useful.

I see what Townes Van Zandt saw. I see what Salinger saw.

I saw lightness of spirit in a person so entangled in unlove and I saw how lightness gets strangled out so acutely. I saw my own entanglements like seaweed dragging behind my sailboat.

I have been everywhere and I have felt everything.

I saw a poor heart, as I have seen in few others, deserving and desirous of a place to stand and commune with the universe and with the heart of another. A heart trampled by the beguilement of others who hold no true sense of communion. But a heart beguiled, like a cascading waterfall, is unclimbable. I see selfless people existing in a selfish world and feel sickness.

I see too much. I see so much that I see things that are not there.

I saw a friend. I saw goodbye like a death sentence.

I caught a disease in Oregon. Not Giardia, but Rex's blues.

I saw Leo Tolstoy in downtown Portland, Oregon standing somewhere between the street corner and the fourth plane, and I prayed to join him, but felt quite harshly the impossibility of that.

I saw the problem.

I saw that the problem is that I was not built to last.

Perhaps I was not built at all.

On the plane ride home I sat next to a little girl named Hope.  She spoke to me of her cats and her brothers and her deep sea search for her gum in her purse. She searched all the purse's pockets to no avail and then turned the purse round and round, this time only sniffing the pockets for traces of her peppermint gum. I wondered deeply, "Does this have any significance?"

Sitting next to hope, I mean.

---

"Sorrow and solitude;

these are the precious things.

And the only words

that are worth remembrin'."

"Brother flower, are you listening?
Let me sing a song for you.
Brother flower, petals glistening
in the bashful morning's dew.
Brother flower, when the sun shines
and the dew has flown away,
if you don’t mind weak and wrong rhymes,
brother flower, may I stay?

Brother flower, you ain’t lonely
for you’ve always been alone.
But I haven’t been so lucky
I had love and now it’s gone.
I have arms to hold another,
never to hold her again.
I have life to give a lover,
you have life to give the wind.

Brother flower, when the snow flies
and you lay your beauty down,
brother flower, are you sleeping
there upon the cold, cold ground?
Brother flower, please awaken,
show the sky your face of blue.
Let me know I ain’t forsaken.
Seems like all I have is you."

-TVZ