First Lines Of A Novel

Notebooks: March 1st, 2017

FIRST LINES OF A NOVEL

It is hard to live a brave life. I definitely haven’t lived my most brave one; it’ll be easier here, from my deathbed, to access that courage, the seeing clearly and acting from my deepest moral reserves. But know, though I wished it, and though I wish it for you, this was not the way I lived. For most of my life I was only partially alive. It has taken this whole unfortunate dying thing to wake me fully to the things that are worth doing here.

The two greatest battles of any time or place are fought along two axes: time and space. Labor is a fight to liberate time; housing and land are fights to liberate space. Who has free time, and where can they spend it.

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Maybe being partially alive is what it means to live. That is to say: a condition of continually waking.

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I left the first address at home
to rot and make a clown-like pose
it’s made of butter and silky clothes
and got inside my head like air

i’ll carbonate a fuzzy deer
if it takes that long to change this guy