new year's resolution

it's been a busy December, and i only just realized that tomorrow i will wake to a new decade. this is as arbitrary as it is irrelevant, but it gave me a moment to pause and recall the stream of consciousness that was my life on the night of December 31, 1999:

prophecy
tonight a book will end
pages yet to be written
empty lines crying to be filled
inked scarred marked barred
from realizing what they might mean
left blank at author's request
a superstitious fool
-ish to believe in romance
brave enough to-
finish a sentence without words
barreling forward with such force
one step left
leaving the pages be
enjoy their innocence
their ignorance of a world that knows
slashes and lines and an occasional curve
but never the beauty of the written word
unwritten unformed
unbound by the confines of pen
of ink of a writer's treacherous hand
betraying the feeling to thought
and thought to word
and word to ink
and ink to paper
paper to pad
pad to bag
until it's
reduced
to
-
no words
no worse

two days later i left for Paris, and two weeks after that i returned to Manhattan. by the end of the month, i had fallen asleep on a flight to Gainesville and dreamed about the saddest girl in the world...

but that point is yet to come.