The waking dream. It's a nightmare really. I won't bother you (or me) with the details. Let's shake it off, shall we. Let's imagine the audience, instead. What's the purpose, what is the end game, the result of all this. And Bashi pulls a chair up close, hops on for the ride, sniffs my face and puts his paw out for a high five. All right brother. Tell me again what's going on in the world.

The quest: quit everything. Quit the paperwork and the leases and the internet connection and the need for gas. Quit love, quit microwave ovens, quit health care and teeth. Quit watches and metaphors. Quit fences and highways and cell blocks and neighborhoods. Quit trying to approximate meaning--with words with the sunrise with models with phases with the moon with the year.

Would real meaning come rolled tight in a backpack and Basho at my side--outside of time and place and love and desire and commitment and rent and paper and making nice?

Isn't it just another approximation?

Get rid of the stuff because no matter how much you love that book or this piece of music or that bit of machinery that makes you feel less alone, it weighs you down, it lies to you it tells you you are not so alone. The only truth I know, I know, and this I know in every atom every small lost place every fake second of every fake day, the only truth is Basho. It is not love. It is not trust. It is not metaphor.

The rest of this life, there is no making sense of it. I do not understand the geography of space and time and paperwork. I do not understand where, exactly where, my family is. Where are they in the vast and intricate stuff of the world? Are they happy? Are they home? Are they sweating out deadlines? I do not know.

Too many times to remember I have almost swerved myself off the road because I do not understand this. Bashi, each time, he flashes truth and I stay the course.

I want to come in from the cold, to come in now, to be let in. The puzzle--no no that is too inexact--the fakery of this life, which is all so formless and shapeless and we hound it into sense beyond sense, I'm tired of it.

Let me in already, I am senseless.

And so I play the game, the one where I'm dreaming this current bit of walking about tired from computer screens and small talk, the one where I come home to a house in the neighborhood and the one where my dog is merely a dog for whom I have a responsibility and who, in return, provides me some measure of companionship, the one with landlords and the one with a job and the one with a terrible terrible isolated life. The real thing happens in secret, across the uncut earth. I am walking. At times I have a long stick, at times Basho leaves, at times I am permitted to feel and know bone deep know like I know the truth behind the words my dog, that I am terribly alone. But Basho always comes back and I know then, like I know now, I am not ever alone.

Poetry of Departures
Philip Larkin

Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.

And they are right, I think.
We all hate home
And having to be there:
I detest my room,
It's specially-chosen junk,
The good books, the good bed,
And my life, in perfect order:
So to hear it said

He walked out on the whole crowd
Leaves me flushed and stirred,
Like Then she undid her dress
Or Take that you bastard;
Surely I can, if he did?
And that helps me to stay
Sober and industrious.
But I'd go today,

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo'c'sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren't so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object:
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.