Do not go gentle, do not go away.....

Been generously sifting through old heaps of books all week. Books that cranked my creative generator in the formative years...I came across my first ever book of prose/poetry by Kahil Gibran and can still remember when I bought it in High school, at Willow Tree second hand books near the north side of Town. Willow Tree heavily reeked of moldy-cardboard and thick, dusty old paperbacks with jaundice pages. Beautiful Rachael, the girl with the china-doll ashen face, velvet choker and thick black hair that hung over her bosom like renaissance drapes in the Louvre guided me to the poetry section. She was studying English at Southern Illinois University but had just dropped out for reasons she chose not to share. 

Rachael wore thick burgundy fairy-tale dresses and bracelets. She was always sitting in perrfect erect posture reading behind the counter; her glazed marble-eyes stared into her current hymnal like she was gazing through stain glass in a eurpoean cathedral at dawn. I used to flirt with her. I had already been to Europe twice and was myself a "Poe-it" my unfledged poems, a branch stemming from the thick trunk of ego that someday, (thankfully) would be gradually axed into pools of saw dust. 

  She told me she had dabbled in poems herself, that she possesed a poets heart, only her professors in college had told her the her original poetical-tithes weren't very good. She played George Winston, enya and early "Under the Pink" Tori Amos in the store. There was a cat she called Dorien Gray that "lived" underneath the sky-line of books. There was a stash of complimentary Herbal-organic tea that I stole a box of once and snorted and then periscopically floated around in a helium cotton-cloud lavender haze for days.

And there was A TREASURY OF Kahil Gibran, a book of short stories which one-ups The Prophet. As the introduction made note, oddly enough, Gibran's short stories were often more mystical than his poems.     

I remember the night I first read Gibran's short story THE TEMPEST. I remember how each page smelled like an old leaf salvaged from previous autumns. I remembered the wayfarer getting purposefully abandoned in the Tempest, so he could take refuge with a reclusive Hermit and hopefully glean a shred of mystical insight. 

I remember how my bed was made with the quilt mother had stitched for me. How I had Ralphael and Renoir and Durer paintings tacked to my wall. How I had snap-shots of Big Ben and the Eiffle tower and a closet full of the old suits my cool Italian Granpa Frank used to wear-- fashionable 1940's jackets I'd wear to high school amd smile when I was mistaken by faculty as a Student Teacher.

I remember how I used to tape the Texaco Opera broadcasts. How I planned on proposing to Cecelia Bartoli on her next American tour. How I would attentively listen to The Writers Almanac every afternoon, at Three fifty-four, after cranking out an article for the school newspaper. I collected weekly editions of the BOOK sections shed from the chicago tribune. Everytime I read an article and came across a word I didn't know, I would circle the word and punch the  definition into a word calculator my father had given me. 

I misused words all the time in highschool. My highschool was more adept in churning out gangster disciples than it was Rhodes scholars but a few of the older teachers seemed to be amused by my forged poetic parlance. I told fiery red-haired Karen Strickler that it was very "pensive" of her to think about me over the holidays because I had read that the word "pensive" meant "thoughtful".  I wrote a detailed paper about teen-angst and depression in a prozac marketed economy where I discussed the on-going perils of teen accentuation (A word I derived from 'accentuate' to emphasize 'stress' as on a syllable, not on a person). I remember very vivdly having my senior high school teacher lacerate my paper on "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" out loud chiding my excessive brooklynite-big poofy haired voacbulary so that my peers, a scattered handfall of sloped-scholars in a high school that boasted the Highest teenage Pregnancy rate in the nation my senior year, chuckled and derided me for weeks after.  When I finally broke up with Jana Solomon (for good this time, I swear) she adamantly informed me that I misused the word 'facade' all the time in our relationship, and she knew words because her Uncle had reviewed Rick Moody's Purple America for the Tribune.  

But words. Buckeling the perfect word in the perfectly constructed sentence; strapping it into the confines of the paragraph as  delicately one would strap a child into a car seat.

There's no greater time in a writers life than that moment when he first slips on wet sentences and becomes inundated with language. I remember ferrying my original copy of LEAVES OF GRASS in the side pocket of my retro brown jacket my Dad had leftover from '78. I remember the color of that autumn, when the world chipped open, when I was in love with a girl who was unavailable and the only way I could manifest my emotions was to sit on my ass, crack open my skull and pour whatever carbonated heart I owned on to the perimeter of the page, whipping my pen, left to right, casting inky-waves into an invisible placid-sand shore I would someday find myself washed up on.