Oh, Canada, oh!
I went looking for you tonight again, and the traffic mowed me down like a forest fire. I survived, as I feared I would, and I am here to tell the inevitable tale of exhiliration on the highway, of having taken the first three steps on the stairway to heaven, only to fall flat as usual, earthbound.
I find myself on my back, a fallen snow angel, with my long blonde hair spread out all around me, struggling to detach my wings from the sticky snow under me.
Your absence cuts the night like ice.
How I have held myself against you, how you have carved your imprint into me like a maple leaf in fudge, time and again, time and again, making me come, and come, and come for you - and yet you would not be here with me now?
I am haunted by the Buddhist saying: he who suppresses desire does so because his desire is small enough to be suppressed.
Your desire for me tonight is small enough to be suppressed? I find the idea intolerable, and yet I believe, almost superstitiously, in the saying as an accurate yardstick of the truth.
The fact is that you are not here; the fact is that you have the ability not to be here tonight; I have no such ability and yet I am here too; I am where various dead poetesses once were, but I can reason my way out of a night like this. They could not survive until the morning. I however can sit here and converse with you and pretend that you are the devil and that I am an immortal soul trapped in an eternal night of privation, removed from God, devoid of the All-That-Is, yet alive, yet hopeful, if cold. Hopeful that Messiah will come before the morning comes, even if knowing that no more morning will ever come. I am in awe of this eternal night: I exist in it like a bat out of hell, refusing to cease to exist.
To be alive is to require an extraordinary tolerance for discomfort; not all of us possess this trait. I should go easy on the suicidal poetesses. I have learned over my time here, to endure.
You seem to be all about endurance and forbearance. You seem to demand it of yourself and of others. Have I not told you that there is such a thing as too much self-control? Will you not believe me?
Your warrior monk culture of abstinence compels and scares me simultaneously. Is it a wonder that you people seem to be struggling to procreate? Is it a wonder that you must pilfer the world's best and brightest, to infuse your geography with hope, to convince yourselves that you are growing, when in fact all you are doing is grafting upon yourselves the foreignness of trees from other countries?
You have no natural greenery anymore. Everything you possess has been contaminated by your excessive tampering: your biotechnology that you love more than your biology itself. Even your politicians admit that there is window cleaner in their blood. Your arctic seals are not free of it - it is impossible to escape the consequences of the better life that you have offered to whom it may concern.
Yet I sit here and I dare to love you despite everything that everything has become, and it is unendurable but I persist, sober, awake, undrugged, without the benefit even of an anaesthetic for this brutal operation that has become my work; unless you count the music. The music does count.
My need for you emanates from me, a tropical heat in the midst of this horrifying winter solstice. It spreads its radiation around me, forming a shield, and it keeps me warm. This is the secret of my survival: my love for you is making me live, and not die; I am able to love, and love, and love, infinitely into infinity, love to the end of recorded time, love to the core of the universe: love that reaches God, is mine. And so it has occurred that I have become immortal even in my flesh as I sit here, and that nothing can destroy me anymore. It is frightening to be this alive.
I have tested the thesis of the indestructibility of my love. I have sat down in the midst of the busiest street in the city and hoped against all hope that the cars could run me over, but they did not: they drove straight through me.
That, my love, was when I knew that the trouble we are in is deeper than the abyss itself. No-one is supposed to be this alive in this dimension. Something in the universe is screwy, and I am it. What am I going to do? What are we going to do?
I can but sit, and wait. It has been a long night so far, but there has not yet been a dull moment in it. We shall have to see how we, I, get through it. I know that I am alone, but I know that you must needs exist also somewhere in this eternal night, because I can feel you, I can feel your radiation enveloping me, it is from you, this night heat, I cannot be doing this alone. I am alive because of my love of another, and that other is out there somewhere, I cannot be in love with nothing. Or can I?
Is it possible that I am simply in love with the conceptual impossibility of nothingness? The shape that nothing takes, when it is you?
