Coda

being at land's end with only queers and queens for nightlife, no Target for over 100 miles, and only three good friends is starting to make me feel incredibly lonely and isolated. i try to write and instead watch deadwood. i try to draw and instead get stoned. i try to climb the pilgrim monument and instead go to the library and stare out the window.

it's like i'm focused but on nothing or all the wrong things.

there are many things to take care of and none of them are getting done. and i keep going back to a poem, oddly enough, by jim carroll that i read when i was 16 and have had swimming around my head since then. it's called "coda" and always comes up at times like these. which makes sense because even just the idea of a coda is comforting to me:
Main Entry: co·da
Pronunciation: 'kO-d&
Function: noun
Etymology: Italian, literally, tail, from Latin cauda
1 a : a concluding musical section that is formally distinct from the main structure b : a concluding part of a literary or dramatic work
2 : something that serves to round out, conclude, or summarize and usually has its own interest.

i don't have the text of the carroll poem here with me at land's end but in my search i did find other poems called "coda" which i like just as much.

CODA
Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world.
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable.
To learn to see.
Your glance scattered seeds.
It planted a tree.
I talk
because you shake its leaves.

--OCTAVIO PAZ


CODA
A strong song tows
us, long earsick.
Blind, we follow
rain slant, spray flick
to fields we do not know.

Night, float us.
Offshore wind, shout,
ask the sea
what horn sunk,
what crown adrift.

Where we are who knows
of kings who sup
while day fails? Who,
swinging his axe
to fell kings, guesses
where we go?
--BASIL BUNTING

i do remember that the carroll poem is better than both of these or than dorothy parker's, which i find depressing, because of its simplicity. it goes something like...
tallying how much is due.
doing now what is needed
for what i am becoming