Ego consumes my brain soaked in chemicals. It spurts words and thoughts. I latch onto them, clinging to them lest they float away. I wrestle them down onto screens and pages. I massage them, crafting them into a likeness pleasing, hoping for a reflection of me. I shout them out on wires and algorithms, in poetry and prose and heated argument and excited lecture. And in each turn of phrase, an entreaty, a pleading, "Am I enough? Do you like me? Am I cool enough? Will you not leave me? Will you stay?" It is sad sometimes to realize that who I am has become who I am. That ego soaks through the brain to the page and screen. It stains in ugly gray and short circuits connections. How can I get past the dark enveloping my window? How can I leave this room I have wrought in my image, a shrine to the self, the singular journey I have traveled? How can I let my words walk freely by my side, not clutching them, but guiding and being guided by them? How can I let my actions be love of the bird on the sill? the stranger on the train? the friend on the phone? the family on the line I walk? How do I let wisdom in to soak through ego and rinse it clean? I have so much more to learn.
Commentary
I like to write at night, and I’ve started a series in my notebook of poems written at night, inspired by a book of poetry I randomly skimmed at a bookstore and never bought. I don’t even remember the poet’s name. But they decided to produce a volume of poems written at night, and I liked the idea, so I’m trying it.
This is obviously very rough, stream of consciousness, lightly edited free verse. I’m not sure I want to polish it; it is in the spirit of the “essay,” when Montaigne started the genre—that is, it is a “try.” A try at what? At attempting to process what I’m going through.
“You Fuckhead” was a turning point for me. It was a moment of clarity that I was missing something, perhaps colossal, though I’m not sure what. And this poem was a try at resolving it. I am gesturing at ego death, or at least ego control. Towards a way of living that is not trying to love, but simply is love. A wisdom not attached to who I am.
I hear in these words the echoes of the Christian teachings, the Stoic teachings, the Zen teachings I have read, but not comprehended, or at least not fully embodied or become. I am done pretending that I have arrived. The position of student is the one a teacher often struggles to take. But it’s where I am. It’s where I must be.
The next question is how can I wake up and walk through the streets as a student?
Thoughts welcome.