OFF

Go off to go on. Not off as in shoot your mouth, that’s everywhere without any pennies for the blast of gas. Nor off the byway and into a ditch stuck in the muck of dead ideas. Nix on tossed off, no sweat, good enough, the first thing that comes to mind. Off the deep end, not what cuts all ties with a bowl full of lies and blows a gasket for the rush, all bleary, smeary, and weary.

To go off the beaten track has no recipe, no rules, no by-the-book steps to fame and good looks. You won’t go if you’re not free. Not simple. Some say don’t get mixed up with that free business—no telling what you’ll get up to and say out loud. That’s not the half of it. Let’s say no one and nothing is in your path, and you have all day every day to go off any which way. Go ahead. I’ll wait here; come back with a spark for the dark.

It doesn’t have to be like E=mc² or nothing. It might be free equals love, plus time takes you off that beat-up track. It can happen in the library, the kitchen, the garden, the mountainside, a blank piece of paper—so many ways the noodle can doodle. If it means you read all of Dostoevsky and nothing else, what does it matter? The world is not the same; it’s somehow more fully packed. There are less Joe Blows and more Joes, good, bad, and sad, that burrow into your glad.

Say you go off the straight and narrow with free equals love plus time plus X, and you make a thing whole with beauty and terror we can’t take our eyes from. Off the rutted track, you’ve come now bitten, even smitten, with the flash bangs of the high of the mind’s inner thigh. “They’ll” say, take this away, not worth a dime of anyone’s time. It will take some free to stick it out. What about the money, honey? You talk as if this free is free. There’s no good answer, or the beaten track wouldn’t be a mile-wide littered with uncorked dreams. Some things have no way, no book of try for leaving the ground-down path. Still, there are as many ways as travelers.

Free is not about the constitution; that’s a given. Isn’t it? This free is an inside job. Sitting on your chest is a lard bag of who-are-you-to-do, a bout of doubt, a cold hold on two feet, and boy, this is the adult table. The desire to create draws battles to heave off such louts or pin with a knee one that won’t toss. This free is a game of throwing off and going on.

After I see Hamlet, the drama queen, preen with Yorick’s skull, oh poor, etc., I think. Alas, my ass, on gazing on our bones with doubt. See we intend to leave nothing idle in our purse but spend it all down on the merriment of time. Gambols, jests, fests, oh yes, song, fancies, why not? Sure, with so many who’d spend a penny to see our painted feint, sly stumbles, miraculous leaps to nowhere you adore and then sigh and roar at our languid, splendid, mysterious goodbye.