oh, my "goodness" (oh my god)

I.

There was a time in my life when I couldn’t read.
I would look at the letters that make up words,
and see only lines and squiggles,
meaningless shapes.

Now I don’t know how not to read.

My mind is drawn to words,
pulled in by them,
compelled,
helpless,
an object in their gravitational field.

I used to have a stop sign hanging in my bedroom.
Sometimes I would sit and stare at it,
willing the letters to turn back into shapes,
into lines and squiggles,
but they never would.

I have become a reading machine,
and I can't ever go back.


II.

The self-reliant, neo-Puritan Father figures
(who sit in hard-backed chairs)
claim life is about learning to say,
“I don’t want to, but I will”
(what ender wiggin said,
when they asked him to kill

to save humanity.)

They drag you out to shovel snow
and when you whine that you want to quit,
they say, “everyone wants to quit”
and “what would the world be like if everyone did what they want”

(unknowingly invoking Kant,
who knew everything about everything
but never left his home town.)

They say, “Hard work.”
They say, “Grit and Determination.”
They say, “Suck it up.”
They say, “Do your Job.”

In the name of self-denial, they deny you things, as well,

among them your freedom.

III.

Lately I have been trying to follow my instincts.
      (“Were you doing something else before?”
       asks a cynical voice inside my head,
       the Postmodernist on my shoulder.)

And it turns out my instincts
drag me out of bed at four in the morning
to drink black coffee and read the New Yorker,
and practice piano,
and write,
and grade papers,
and go for walks,
and talk and listen,
and do the dishes and clean the apartment.

And shovel snow until the driveway is clear,
because it wouldn’t feel right to leave it undone.

I worry that I have been absorbed by the system,
the established, Modernist order,
that i love Big Brother,
that what I call passions are surrogates.

I fear that the Combine has gotten me,
that I am Matthew Arnold at best,
that I have joined the ranks of those who were once
original and interesting but became conventional,
who were once multicolored and bright
but faded to a dull gray
(and at only twenty-six.)

But I can live with all that,
if I can find a reason to believe
there is a way back,
a trail of breadcrumbs
leading me back into the woods

if I can see
(for just a moment)
letters as shapes again.