He’s an eccentric old man, isn’t he?
One has to wonder at his stability.
He just sits there
in total quiet,
watching the world.
And always writing.
What could he possibly be writing?
He stopped talking long ago.
Somebody heard him say something about
how one day he realized
that he had said everything
he had to say,
and he had heard
nothing
at all
new.
Conversations all began sounding
the same to him –
and they all
sounded
like
noise.
Whatever that means.
Well, that’s too bad for the
eccentric old man,
just sitting there
in total quiet,
writing.
I’d feel sorry for him
but –
he seems to be smiling all the time.
Like he knows something…
And laughing.
Laughing at something…
But who knows what.
Well, I tried to qualify it with “certain” and by making it plural.
Do you think there is only one reality for the old man?
I was thinking that the old guy had to have several realities otherwise people wouldn’t think him eccentric.
Well I would think we might all have several realities. Different things that are real to us, genuine, authentic, significant, at different times of our lives. Energies shift from one thing to another in perfectly natural processes of growth. And so I would suggest that – perhaps – the shifting might not be so eccentric, although from an outside perspective it might appear to be so.
But now I am in grave danger of explaining too much of my poem which, as The Underground Man and I have agreed, belongs – once written and posted – to the reader to interpret…
An author’s direct explanation of his own work has never stopped me from interpreting the text in a manner that resonates with me. I am eccentric (not old yet) so I simply say to myself: His explanation is sufficient for him but not for me.
I say: embrace your eccentricities, hug old people.
Sometimes, their silence (and the attendant smile) is having lived long enough to have left all the facades behind to become real (to themselves).
Perhaps eccentric? Possibly. Or it may be knowing there is no way to say, “Come here and let me explain 70 years of living.”