Why?
"Because the world's full of music-
Beautiful and brilliant and beyond my reach;
And I'll never understand how to make
Love in Spanish.
Because the few moments of utter comprehension
Pass between my fingers like so many grains of sand-
And my words flee me before I could
Capture or enslave or ink or kill them.
Because television promised me too much,
And the novels these days are promising me too little,
And I understand little of postmodernism,
And nothing of microeconomics.
Because I forget everything worth
Remembrances, and every Sun sinks
With an ominous promise of a day when all
Will be forgotten or nonsense or both.
Because I was allowed
Everything that light ever fell on,
Yet there's so much in the world
That's beautiful, which I shan't lay eyes on.
Because every second of my life
Witnesses poverty and cruelty and unfairness
And the instinct for survival will never let me
Wallow in empathy like I probably should.
Because tonight I'll promise myself again
To tell you that we can't keep seeing each other,
And that your cooking is bad and your poetry worse,
But I'll just smile politely at dinner and nod at all the right places."
