Time is a Toy: The Selected Poems of Michael Benedikt

“Your Life is Your Own Life . . .”: Variations on A Theme by James Wright

217 “your life is your own life . . .”: variations on a theme by james wright 1. Your life is your own life & not just a compendium of debts; No, never just a mosaic of owings, whether real or imagined —A life like the latter would be no life, surely, but only an excuse for not living, & for existing as if continuously inside someone else’s skin; Nor can anyone develop “A Life Of One’s Own” in the opposite way, I think, & by looking at the world with eyes merely of creditor, or predator, —I.e., like someone who thinks that the balance of the world is out there just simply to owe him or her a living For our lives are surely our own lives, are they not; —& Not just a compendium of debts. 2. Some day I’d like to understand why even the very idea of the existence of individuals so bold or foolhardy as to attempt to think & live independently & Who have therefore only themselves to blame if something happens to go wrong, Should alarm so many people & even scare some almost half to death. —Apparently producing in the average mind, quasi- apocalyptic visions of the whole world falling apart, with the heavens falling down & seas rising up; & with volcanoes erupting underfoot with every step; With entire governments collapsing & institutions crumbling; &—still worse yet!—with even such leading members of the community at large As bankers & brokers & accountants Throwing clawing, despairing hands up to the heavens, as if revenues might yet be found there 218 As con-men & parasites of all kinds, having bitten their fingernails to the bone & torn out all their hair, climb out onto lofty window-ledges & prepare to end it all, By throwing themselves as hard as possible onto the smoking ground —While churchbells around the world toll out ominously, to warn the faithful of impending doom. 3. However, show most regimented people some really sleazy, two-bit miserable weasel Whose external life consists solely of various semi-balletic attempts to keep in step, toe the mark, or somehow fall back in line, & Whose so-called personal life is a crazy-quilt woven of casual, highly unreliable, or forced & fraying connections & Whose inner life is either virtually non-existent—or else some miserably shabby collection of endless, self-perpetuated ruses as to his or her own unique worth & It’s then that people start nodding & smiling to themselves as if understandingly—& suddenly start to show some real respect. 4. It’s refreshing, I find, to speak every now & then with people ready to take responsibility for their own actions, I.e., People who are really genuinely present, even as they’re standing there right in front of you. & Whose existences aren’t merely contingent upon ruses or excuses as they go through life, struggling daily under the shadow of endlessly-evoked mysterious, frightful injunctions or secret, invisible, awful obligations, I.e., People who aren’t either suffering from the dread disease of too much noblesse oblige or else, just plain helpless, hungry, or hard up. 5. —Not that I think that I myself have achieved so exquisitely liberated a state, despite my frequent, indeed constant efforts. Still, sometime at least, 219 I’d just love to encounter a whole playful day’s-worth of people fit for freedom at least by temperament & Who since they’ve gained relatively firm control over their own lives Can refuse flat out to make excuses for the lives they’re living —If only just to provide a welcome sense of relief, at least briefly, from the way things too often are; & if only as a form of experiment. ...