It Was Twenty Years Ago Today

by Billy Shears

part the fifth

Winter’s night; the ranch

Rage, Rage against the dying of the light

Dylan Thomas

As these installments are, reflections in some way into the dying of the light, I felt a feeling for the past, an inspiration into the colors of a youthful ambition. We shake the cold off of our jackets and find a way to hide in the cozy corner. Ambivalent and ambient to the free associations we corral. The kind coal warms in the furnaces across this country, fuels of conscience wrestles in the knit, long waiting the sun to be a goddess for the skin. It is odd what we find lost in that desert shop, folded beneath calendars and parking tickets.

I rented a room one time that was above a garage. I froze solid in the evenings, drank heavily while trying to keep warm sitting outside smoking, listening to blues, memorizing quotes of Bogart, Dylan and contemplating the existential meanings forging in my head. I made myself some promises on those evenings, you better believe. Just like I did some ten years before that, some twenty years ago now; that I could come to some reasonable form of dismissal to some of the trying moments up to that point.

It didn’t finish there, so much has come and gone and yet so much still remains to fill the caveats of happiness and serenity. We have pictures and visions to prove to us something greater has become us. The epitome epoch, the shy linearity, the such-much of desire blinding the eyes reasoning us to mistaken identity. People forget that they have the opportunity to make a difference and that difference is in a garnishing of solitude thoughts. The remainder of our lives is to finish those prayers and conclude on those dreams.

This is our manifest. To cling to the matter that we have yet to extinguish in the landscape we entertain.

I don’t mean to ever doubt my life or the people who have been in it. We march to our own music and that music is slumbering in another room that awaits our entry. Our lives are extraordinary because of the emblem we established all those years ago. If measured we would have a difficult time with all that has been forgotten. We remember what happened when we were ten years old, not the grace we embodied picking up fallen features. Meaning becomes history, the misbegotten motif staunch and circumspect, a cruel irony, but nothing we can claim to be the author of in the spec of what is a definition. We are defined by the actions we take, but no the actions we chose.

This is why I ask for folks to listen to how things are said, not what is said. This is why it is important to reason out what we do not understand. This is why we must realize that we have no definition that is not fiction. Do we remain fixated on what we think is happening or what is happening? It is all significant, the sober, somber evening that the sleepy television controls. The stubborn ideals. The quest of what is.

Tonight, I went back and spoke with that kid, drunken, smoking and feeling torn down and asked; didn’t you know it would be like this someday? The answer I got was, sometimes.

We must battle through the dark ages, the unforgiving circumstances and grow beyond the pale of what is overwhelming. I don’t know exactly why I feel like dishing out sentimentally as much as I want to establish a message that I believe in. I think what I see and hear lately is a lack of hope, a reluctance of sincerity and a time to re-evaluate the ground that has been covered individually in success and failure and vividly command a dead reckoning. Hope was in my responses all them years ago fighting against the dying of the light.

My friends, the work is hard and worth it. I look forward to twenty years down the road to see what this wounded lord will do. Tonight was idle. Today was spent. Sadness eddied in some sorrowful news that made me think of if I ever thought about giving up, perhaps. The new years coming can be fraught with founder, but we must remember what is at our core, heal the wounds, forgive the unfortunate, fix something in ourselves and give it away unconditionally, always try to be a friend…

no fiction of fame,

shall blazon my name, all I ask,

all I wish is a tear.

Byron’s The Tear