mikevarley.com

Against my Truer Judgment

I don’t want to accomplish.
I don’t want to strive.
I don’t want to make something of myself.
I don’t want to be smart.
I want to be an intelligent failure, a voided check, a serial reject.
I want to write pages of babel that flow into the pit of nevermind,
flip the notebook over and try to find space on the cover between
the abandoned checklists of surefire immortality.
I want to believe in the blind brilliance of personal revelation.
I want to tap the cloisters.
I want minimum wage pantries forever.
I want sociable tendencies to rise from me like steam heat and take their leave,
leaving me optionless and static.
I want children, too many to manage properly, and
I want to put my life’s hope into the possibility that they will be
the generation to dream.
I want to own uncertainty like a birthmark and dodge boulders with casual grace.
Most of all, I want to escape the body and swim in an inkwell ocean,
where a black calm spans the horizons and all thought in the universe
is written and unwritten in the stroke of a forearm.

[audio:http://www.mikevarley.com/old/words/MikeVarley.com Against My Truer Judgement.mp3]