“What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.”
Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers
Why do I fear
Fading faceless into the night so?
Loves lost, I trawl this desert of desire.
Where do I go?
Nights awake, silent smiles I offer; mid-days I burn
in this hot deadness of the real.
If this reality were an illusion, would you then lie beside me?
This hand, would you have held it, as they say:
‘forever’?
Evenings, I hope. ‘Hope springs eternal’. I close my eyes:
I bleed, you shine.
These emoticons that she transmits on spectrum: effluvia of another life;
I value their worth in gold. Does she?
A smiley is a dangerous thing. “Where is this leading”? Conspiracies.
I lose my strange lady in visions
Of what would have been. Parallel worlds, perpendicular smiles. If only history had waited her while.
I retreat. She flows into the other sea.
Day breaks. Goodbye my friend the street light.
I await your company again tonight but
For now, let me lose my way in some other paradise.
