Oh what a morning, what a day,

The starlight shines in sun’s rays!

What a unity, what great unity,

That the soul sees itself whole,

One with an atmospheric goal:

To live, to breathe, to be alive.

Every second of the day is life,

And life a second of a lone day,

That we are is a miracle;

That we see our own fate,

Is a subtle gift to ourselves.

As gods, we cross the skies

And rise like cresting waves

To crash ‘n some unseen shoreline,

Devised, but not created, by the self.

“We are all socially contrasted!” She screamed in my face. Idly, I sought a tobacco pouch in my leather-coat pocket. Her fanatical hand shook her poor cup violently. It’s contents poured over the brim. I felt sorrow for the cup. Afterall, it dealt with her angst aimed at me. She repeated herself, rocking back on her heels and unconsciously salivating on her lips. Perhaps to stall the salivating, or only to save myself more annoyance, I nodded my head.

“Whatever you say,” I added for good measure. I knew from the huff she’d find “yes-men,” as one of my close advisors and friend calls them, to bad mouth me. I smiled at the knowledge that she would not search too far to find one. I began to pack my pipe again, only to be distracted by a snow-lined window.

Outside, the winter moon hung heavy on the skyline. It was the only celestial stoic enough to resist the frigid winds. A small snowdrift leaned on a white fence. The fence formed a box around another snowdrift, as if it was on display in the zoo. Wooden stakes peppered the drift, the final reminiscent of what might have been a summer garden. The placid scene was drapped by the distant howl of the winter winds. Occasional dislodged snow gave the appearance of romantic schneekinder gently cascading from the heavens.

“Scott?” I turned to see some dark-haired girl with thick glasses hesitantly sipping blue alcohol. “I wanted to say Merry Christmas.”

“It’s the twenty-first.” It didn’t occur to me to be “hard” about it. I don’t know why I corrected her. I immediately felt like an asshole. “Merry X-mas.” I had forgotten her name; however, I remembered she had argued for DuBois against Washington. “I wanted to say I liked you discussion of Double Consciousness and how Washington is veiled by his need for ‘usefulness’.”

She smiled a blue-alcohol smile. “Thanks. I really didn’t understand what you were saying about Washington’s pragmatism.” I couldn’t remember what I said.

“Eh, I was probably bullshitting anyway. God knows I was out of place in an African-American class.” I smiled to signal I was joking, though I lacked the blue-stained teeth. I finished packing the pipe finally. Sticking the plastic tip in between my teeth, I saw her greens eyes perk at the sight.

“You smoke a pipe?”

“Got to catch Freud somehow.” She didn’t laugh; I told myself she didn’t hear me. The pipe slipped from my lip and fell. I barely caught it, dumping tobacco all over my leather coat. “Fuck!” She looked taken back for a second. I looked around to see if any little kids were around. Seeing none, I shrugged.

“Well, have a good Christmas, Scott. Are you graduating?” It always seemed to me people asked that in one of two ways: doubt or delight.

“Yes. Shortly.” She nodded “congrats” and stumbled away.

I repacked my pipe, again placing it in my mouth, and struck a match. “Hey!” an obnoxious girl from my literary theory class yelled. “I’m allergic to pipe smoke!” She was gruesome in every dimension. Her face resembled aged parchment, her lips fluffed fodder, and her clothing was like sheep intestine about a sausage. Had she not be as pompous as Ruskin, I might have forgiven her genetic defects. As it stood, I thought her just above goo.

She stormed out of the cigarette haze, arms cycloning the foul air my way. In her wake, followed a thin wisp of a girl. From rumors—which she started—she had once weighted double the rancorous leviathan proceeding her. I couldn’t see it in her form, but her attitude spoke towards her achievement. “She does!” screamed the young wrath. Mary, the leviathan, and her cancer, Dara, tore forward until they were directly in front of me.

I let the loose pipe stem sag in my mouth. “There’s no difference.”

“My doctor told me,” Mary corrected me with her typical smug, shit-eating smile.

“He told you there was no difference in the tobaccos? Well, he was wrong and right—“

“No,” Dara snapped her purple-painted fingertips. “She’s allergic to the oils put off from the bowl.”

“Well, I think your safe. Unless you plan on licking the briar—” Seeing the sheer delight both were taking from the conflict, I rolled my eyes. “Do me a favor, when you smoke your cigarettes, breathe real deep.” I slid the packed pipe into my coat pocket and slunk away. From the cackling over my shoulder, I knew they were enjoying my supposed defeat.

English school parties always suck, mostly because they are populated by English majors in their various stage of evolution. Because of my new sullen disposition, I stood in a new corner, near the bar and appetizers. The bar was a plastic Rubbermaid table and was composed of various schnapps and Jameson whiskey. The appetizers were various vegetarian packets, meatballs, and small foods. The only food worthy of direct mention was the quesadillas brought by one of the only worthwhile people in the department. Somehow, the beer was missing, despite the various people staggering around with Miller bottles. I noticed someone bending down. They gazed about, as if they alone knew of their victims grave…I say they, since I could not determine the sex or physique of the loosely-clothed person. Anyway, they pulled something syndical from a box. Beer.

As I made my way quietly to the beer box, my adrogenous savior rushed back to the party. I saw a Yuengling. I held it tightly in my hand and praised a Kali the Destoyer for granting me mercy.

Then, as if that bitch Kali heard me, my American Romantics professor appeared behind me. The man was a Zero-sum game for me. Some days, I found him profoundly inspiring. Other days, I wanted to plasticbag myself. It seemed this was going to be a later day.

“Swill.” He tried to force something into my hand. It was a Bass.

“Excuse me?” I popped my beer quickly and shook my head.

“Bass is a superior beer.” The audacity. Yeungling is America’s oldest brewery. More importantly, unlike that German shite, it is brewed in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. If it tasted like sixteenth-century French seamen, I would have drank it over Bass. Not out of any true objection to Bass’s taste, but because there is something to say for Traditional state values. Especially in a global market polluted by equally as terrible beer. Perhaps there is something wrong with that belief, but I valued hometurf.

“Americans know nothing of beer.” He shook his head. I knew he was probably right. Then again, I didn’t care. He was a reserved professor, an anachronism of the old academy. I had heard the man lecture on Hawthorne and Melville, and it reminded me of what it might have been like to hear Lewis or Tolkien speak, to actually listen to the profundities of an oracle without a desire for truth. Never mind the actual information, but to allow oneself to be awash with those theories and opinions well-wrestled with, and not the pedantic prattle espoused by contemporary grad students.

Sipping my beer, I nodded apathetically. In the past, we spoke of the farm. He said he idolized my lifestyle, my Romantic engagement with Nature. I never had the heart to tell him that those true farm workers cared nothing for Transcendentalism. They were engulfed in their temporal lives, and the wreak of impending death loomed heavily over the farm’s life. Had he sensed it, he might have sensed my dread. Instead, I let his Academic dream constructed my conversations. I’d not ruin anyone’s pleasurable musings, especially in the light of their own torture.

He wandered away to engage others, leaving me to my own musings. With the beer in hand, I felt reinvigorated. The night had drawn on since my first annoyance with Foucault’s disciples. It would not be long before everyone began to drive home slightly-inebriated. Hopefully, the winter gods would not look too readily for them. Then, in the midst of my prayer, I saw several of the enemy.

They were the Academic creative writers, the most worthless of the worthless. Trained, lectured, and molded compliers of trite prosy and pre-conceived imagery. They were the Crips and Bloods of the writing world, and like Doom’s flower-children, they drank dry any true attempts at creativity with their stagnant minds. They saw themselves as some bridge between art and life, some fresh air to the fixed world. They were the overwhelming Sophists to every Socrates, selling Peter’s shards at discount prices. Perhaps worse then the ideology they represented, was the materialistic greed radiating from their wanton eyes. Scornful of literature, they shoveled their Kerouac’s and Kite Runner to the top of the NY charts, and spoke of the Pulitzer as it if was Heaven’s drooping tits. Somehow, they all hoped to be buried kings above the ground, and to be anthologized in Norton’s afterlife. With every ounce of my being, I loathed them and the writers they represented.

Sarah, who read a poem about Marie Antoinette last month, stopped me on my way to the door. The stem of my pipe hung loose in my hand. “Going out for a smoke? Nice pipe, I didn’t know you smoked a pipe?”

“Yeah.” She made me feel ostentatious, as if my desire to smoke a pipe was ornamental. It pissed me off. “The smoke is lighter than cigar smoke.”

“I heard you read your Winter story last month. It was the best Zombie story I’ve heard in a while. They should make it into a movie.” Is that what they should do? I thought. They should make a movie on how the materialistic Yuppies, with their cul-de-sacs and townhouses, were both supporting and killing the farm I loved? They should turn my story on the nihilistic desperation of worthless man into an epic movie with guns and blood? Given what the School magazine, Kenosis, did to my work, given that they hallowed out my poetics, my ideology, my authority, I’m sure it’d make a fantastic action story: devoid of all attempts at social-commentary. They live up to their name: the hollow, conservative words enslaved to their catholic dogma. Levi-Strauss rolls gleefully in his grave.

I suppose it took me to long to answer. Perhaps I resembled the zombies from my own work, cationic in idleness. Being one of those annoying bubbly people with too much to say far to happily with now real intentionally behind the act of speaking, she asked, “Do you want to see my final project?” I didn’t, but it was in my hand regardless. It was a poorly constructed book of poems, strung together by yarn stitching. Despite my misanthropic nature, I tried to be polite. I arbitrarily opened the book. On the left side (verso), there was a picture of Sarah gently caressing a horse head. Given that it looked alive, I assumed it was her horse. On the other side (recto), a poem was violently (perhaps I should say passionately) written:

The fields

All Gray, White beneath the Boot

Lies the roses of the setting Night

Killing to live,

With bounding leaps,

We destroy with each enthralled Step…

Thus ran her opus. I gave my stock answer when confronted by the paradox of my poetic ego and my need to be civil. “It’s Interesting,” I paused, twisting my face to seem stupefied, “It’s…very interesting? Have you read Equus?” She shook her head no. “You should, your picture reminded me of it. Hey, I’m gonna go outside. I’ll be back.” I handed back her academic work.

“I’ve been accepted for my master’s this year!” She clapped frantically. I beemed a smile. I lingered a second. In one glorious epiphany, I realized she would graduate with a higher GPA than me. Thankfully, following this depressing thought, was the knowledge that any student that could spell could get a better GPA than me.

“Awesome. Good luck. Let me know when you’re famous,” so I can kill myself. I needed to go outside. The stifling realizations of my own academic short-comings, the inflation of my poetic ego, and the unfortunate understanding of the instintions were personified by all the denizens of the party. Everywhere I looked I saw Satyrs dancing ‘round one great capitalistic endeverior: fulfill your niche market, get paid, buy more. Buy more books, force your students to buy more. Somehow get entangled within the corporate bookstores. Somehow, while you sip your Starbucks (Melville Curses you Seattle, or else I do for him), you stomach it. As self-serving as human nature is, I wish it was more Hobsian. For me, it’s not cruel or short enough.

I walked past the mutton-chop male writers, and the mismatched shoelace poets, and stepped onto the porch. Even this was full of nicotine chasing professors. I imagined them sucking the yellow-tar from each other’s bony fingers. Like Chaucer’s Student strung out cold turkey. Some of them nodded to me. I waved to the nice Restoration and Irish-Lit professors, the once that had stooped to giving me an A-. With an awkward gait, I moved onto the sidewalk and lit my pipe.

I’ve always thought solitude a necessary aspect to understanding ones’ self. Where we are a part of everyone, we are foremost ourselves. The individual self alien to the world. It’s amazing what you miss when slushing through social bullshit. I grew up in a moment, the briefest combustion of air and flame, and every step of that moment was friction. As if to prove my point, the silent snow began to fall. The world froze silent. My heart beat. My chest rose. Everything seemed so dynamic but simple. I saw unity in the great machine called nature. I brought in a little smoke and blew it out. The hot breath blended in with the carcinogenic smoke, a twisted spiral of natural ends, the exhaust of living and the inevitability of death. I felt organized, a secular being as it truly existed. Even in the momentous unity, I heard the haunting voice speaking to me of the true state of things. The world was more than the self. It was the death, the birth, and the omnipresent struggling between the two; yet, it was no more than this. The intricate edges created for it sat ostentatious, like a jeweled crown of thorns, on a troubled brow. With great weighted shoulders, the world drug on, perpetuated by the Sisyphean cycle of pleasure and pain.

Somewhere, forgotten in the social manifestation of the cycle, the lonely soul wanders alone. More than just an observer, it was the ghost of awareness, of conscious wandering, and the anticipation of all things. Like an awakened voice, it spoke to the angst of a worthless era, the profane coal moot against the glamorous diamond. It was the ignored protestation slain by the mob’s echoing rebuffs. Finally, dragging its ever-opened wounds across a desert of glass edges, it dies unrequited, somehow better for it.

Suddenly, I felt a wet cold under my ass. Startling, I leapt from the wall, cursing venomously. A frigid wind called from the south, rushing down the street and stirring the idle flags into salute. Wearily, I shivered in the winterfront. There I saw a man’s back as he also gazed into the southern winds. Wearing a gray fedora, the man’s white beard shivered alike. He tightened his arms about his torso. He continued to look away from me. I watched him quietly. Although I could not see his face, I knew he was lonely; I could see it in the placement of his feet, the small snowdrifts he wore in on his hat, and the kneading knuckles under his gloves. Was he the monolithic testimony to my romantic theories? I did not believe in such manifestations or theories, both sickly dust worth more trouble that not, but even I was susceptible to the illness of hope. Like all men, I sought wisdom in others and in the self. As paradoxical as it seems, they were symbiotically reliant on each other. In the shifting snow of our world, I thought perhaps he was my antithesis and I feared him.

Anne exited the house. Shivering violently, she walked down the stairs towards me. Somehow, she was ignorant to the man standing on the sidewalk. Perhaps, I thought on noticing this, I was reading too much into occasion or coincidence. I was known for doing so. She smiled and waved, quickly slipping her bare fingers out only to replace them.

“Are you ready to go?” She stuck a pouty lip out.

“I can be.”

“Okay, let me get my purse. Can you start the car, it’s freezing.” She kissed my cheek and ran quickly back up the stairs. For a brief second, I thought she was going to fall, but she stumbled upright. I shook my head out of concern, but she didn’t look back.

I slushed through the snow. The man had slipped away during the discussion. A distrustful part of me wondered if he wasn’t ‘casing’ the cars, maybe looking for something to grab…but that wouldn’t make sense, right? I shrugged away the fantastical dreams of my Id. Too many movies, I thought. I got into the car. Pushing in the clutch, I started the car and waited for my girlfriend to come out. I think the radio blared a Roy Orbison song. I grew content as the car warmed, and the song played. The moon slumped in its crawl. Its shift was over, the nightly throes all but gone again. Soon, the stars would fade to crimson, to saffron, and then to azure as the sun reclaimed its domain, the rightful ruler of its celestial moment. Somehow, the knowledge that the Sun was a star with a proper nomenclature was unimportant during that moment.