There is a bit of mystery that shrouds everything we touch, mystery in socks and waffle house signs. There are many reasons to feel this; the awareness that so much of our ordinary day is surrounded in other's random decisions, the thought that we ourselves could merely be the product of a right thought at a right time. It is either the mystery of randomness or a deeper mystery, the mystery of providence. Either way we are befuddled in ideas too big for our bodies, encircled by paradoxes and illogical conclusions that are the most logical conclusion we can make, tainted by the supernatural in every seemingly slight event and entity.

Honestly

I have no strength for anger.

I sit placidly idling time

curious for the way people stand,

tense, feet set wide, arms barring

chests that swell in defiance.

Sneaking around the stalwart figures

I glance rigid backs, curved necks

arching up, bulging calves and bony elbows,

but then a certain weakness underlies

the left shoulder, a snag here,

a bit crooked and bending down.

Smoothing my rumpled pride I lean

against the palm of my hand,

blood rushing into my thumb's knuckle

and trace the downward dash with my eyes

and (sadly) smile.

confusion

"It is thus writ in heaven that any critic who has not given up will remain to some degree confused." -Wayne C. Booth

This pretty much sums up my thoughts, not just on criticism, but on life in general. There are so many avenues we could explore, but can only haltingly explain, especially when we try to take into account the full entirety of what we know or could know (not even to mention what we can't know.) If our words and thoughts do not become muddled it so often seems that it is because we have oversimplified and abandoned many legitimate ways of looking at something.

Of course I do feel a deep kinship with France (a novelist) as Booth explains Paul West to view him (though I have read nothing of either France or West.) France is explained as a man who has "nothing coherent to say," or someone who tries "to reconcile high intellectual ambitions with an impossibly cluttered mind." So it is possible that my mind is more cluttered than most. I can be a pack rat. Though, to be fair to myself, probably most of us can feel this way, at least occasionally. There is so many thoughts to sort through of so many people on so many issues that even people with well organized minds will have to check all kinds of drawers and folders to collect the necessary knowledge.

Layers of color hold me,

the lustrous combinations,

flecks of light violet and yellow

or dark white and teal blotches,

shadows stretching lanky grey people

upon the speckled asphalt.