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Carl Halling Aug 2015
I seldom indulge in letter writing
Because I consider it
To be a cold and illusory
Means of communication.
I will only send someone a letter
If I'm certain it's going to serve
A definite functional purpose,
Such as that which I'm
Scrupulously concocting at present
Indisputably does.
It's not that I incline
Towards excessive premeditation;
Its rather that I have to subject
My thoughts and emotions
To quasi-military discipline,
As pandemonium is the sole alternative.
I'm the compensatory man par excellence.
                                                              
Deliberation, in my case,
Is a means to an end,
But scarcely by any means,
An end in itself.
This letter possesses not one,
But two, designs.
On one hand, its aim is edification.
Besides that, I plan to include it
In the literary project upon which
I'm presently engaged,
With your permission of course.
Contrary to what you have suspected
In the past,
I never intend to trivialise intimacy
By distilling it into art.
On the contrary, I seek
To apotheosise the same.
                                                              
You see...I lack the necessary
Emotional vitality to do justice
To people and events
That are precious to me;
I am forced, therefore,
To at a later date call
On emotive reserves
Contained within my unconscious
In order to transform
The aforesaid into literary monuments.
You once said that my feelings
Had been interred under six feet
Of lifeless abstractions;
As true as this might be,
The abstractions in question
Come from without
Rather than within me:
                                                              
My youthful spontaneity
Many mistrustfully identified
With self-satisfied inconsiderateness
(A standard case of fallacious reasoning),
And I was consequently
The frequent victim
Of somewhat draconic cerebrations.
I tremble now
In the face of hyperconsciousness.
I've manufactured a mentality,
Riddled with deliberation,
Cankerous with irony;
Still, in its fragility,
Not to say, artificiality,
It can, with supreme facility,
Be wrenched aside to expose
The touch-paper tenderness within.
                                                              
With characteristic extremism,
I've taken ratiocination
To its very limits,
But I've acquainted myself with,
Nay, embraced my antagonist
Only in order to more effectively throttle him.
Being a survivor of the protracted passage
Through the morass of nihilism,
Found deep within
"the hell of my inner being,"
I am more than qualified to say this:
There is no way out
Of the prison of ceaseless sophistry.
There are many things I have left to say,
But I shall only have begun to exist in earnest
When these are far behind me,
In fact, so far as to be all but imperceptible.
                                                              
I long for the time
When I shall have compensated to my satisfaction.
I never desired intellectuality; it was ****** upon me.
Everything I ever dreaded being, I've become
Everything I ever desired to be, I've become.
I'm the sum total of a lifetime's
Fears and fantasies,
Both wish-fulfillment
And dread-consummation incarnate.
I long for the time
When I shall have compensated to my satisfaction.
I never desired intellectuality; it was ****** upon me.  
I'm the sum total of a lifetime's
Fears and fantasies,
Both wish-fulfillment
And dread-consummation incarnate.
I'm the compensatory man par excellence.
"The Compensatory Man Par Excellence" possessed some kind of autobiographical novel written around 1987, and whose ultimate fate was, so I recall, to be destroyed with only a handful of scraps remaining, as its starting point.
Yes,
I know,
Sometimes it feels like all the people
who you've once loved and cared for,
are the very ones trying to dig
your own grave

And yes,
I know,
It feels like the world is crumbling down
at the very touch of your fingertips,
while everyone else is ecstatic and enthusiastic
about the life that they're living.

I know what it's like,
to believe that your being
is far more useless and unimportant
than anyone else's

And yes,
I know that all you want is
for the people you
love and care about,
to just love and care for you back

But sometimes, yes
we need to realize that
what we want
isn't always possible

And that being cared about,
or loved, or treated with
the respect we deserve,
isn't always palpable

But yes,
I also know that to me,
your eyes are able to light
up an entire room,
when I'm surrounded by darkness

And I know
that you can get knocked down
over and over and over again,
and I would still be there each time,
to bring you back to your feet

Because I know
that you are worth more than
what any harsh words,
or human damage
can do to you

And I know,
that there are an unimaginable
amount of places and things
for you to go,
and for you to see

And you
should never let
anyone's mistakes
or inconsiderateness
break you down

Because I know
how special you are,
and I wouldn't ever let that
slip out of my grasp

You are stronger than diamond,
your loveliness is  greater
than the depth of the sea,
you are capable of amazing things,

And,
I know this.
Dr Peter Lim Dec 2017
I can measure, to a reasonable degree, the work I have done
but not the extent of my unkindness and inconsiderateness.
Francie Lynch Feb 2018
I don't remember which class it was when I first encountered Randy. Might have been Sixteenth Century British Lit course (mostly Milton). Randy loved Milton's blindness. He once said to me that Milton thought his poetry was improved after his blindness set in. Something about the cadence and word thought process. It sounded plausable. Randy was a bright fellow. Had a lot on the artistic side about him. His music, poetry, passion for older women.
But Randy did a terrible thing. Horrendous by any standard that include psychosis on the ruler.
I'm guessing about the diagnosis. Could have been anything I'd read in those University Psych texts.
Any doctor of any worth would agree Randy was not well, but he was a high functioning not well.
The Honors English Degree was not a walk in the park. So, by the time fourth year arrives, the herd's been well-culled, and classes got smaller, and those attending more intimate. I'd shared classes with these people for three years, by now we had long finished feeling each other out, and time outside class, and campus with one, two or three others for a beer in the pub, or someone's digs, was happening more often. We were serious students, so our party time was limited to one night a weekend.
It was really never planned. A few beers at the Grad House, and so on.

Randy was somewhat of a hanger on. On the fringe of our conversation, and interjecting just off the bubble of reason. And he didn't handle alcohol well. This one time, the girls were talking about wanting to **** an uncircumcised guy. Well, as it happens, being born at home in Ireland, on the farm, with a midwife attending, the brothers and I are in the hood. I mentioned this, and the lasses started with the teasing, but Randy missed the tease. I could see in his eyes the strain as he held back from I don't know what. But he was on hold.  We left the Grad and I went one way across an open field of one foot snow,
to grab a bus. Randy and Nicole left on a divergent path in the same field. Randy didn't hold back.
A few minutes after parting, I heard a scream. I did. I looked back and saw Randy, Nicole pinned down as a kid would be pinned by a bully sitting straddle on the victim's stomach to flick his nose. It took me  a minute to run back through the snow, and by the time I got there, Randy was past her outer coat, and digging deeper. I pulled him off. Sent him on his way, and walked Nicole home. She was ok. Shaken, but it was a different time. She knew they had talked that way purposefully in front of Randy. Randy had, in one of his interjections, admitted his skinning.

Anyway, this isn't the worst of it. Besides walking in on my girlfriend when she was on the toilet, washing his hands and having a conversation with her while she was, yep, speechless. This girlfriend was as pure as the driven snow. We met when we were fifteen, and planned on marriage at the end of my Degree. She was the original model. I was the only driver. Continued with that model for forty years too. And never drove another. So, she tells me what happened. Here we are. I've got all my old buddies from my home town at my apartment. I invited Randy. I admit it. Thought he could use a little time with some reasonable friends. They weren't university students. Just my old high school buddies. Plumbers, electricians, sheet metal workers, construction workers.  I was the only one of the lot that went on to school. They met Randy. Some asked me what's his problem. Now I must tell Randy he has to leave. My girlfriend is embarrassed; worse, she's mortified. She really was. So Randy says he understands and leaves, but insisting he meant nothing by it. I let him know I believed him, but it's time he call it a night at my place. A few days later, when I'm at the library, researching, Randy drops by my place and gives my mates a bottle of wine and a joint to apologize for his inconsiderateness. In retrospect, I'm lucky to be alive today.

No one knew how volatile Randy could be.

We had finished our Honors Essays and our comprehensives, and we were ready for a party. We knew that our times together had come to an end. Each of us would be going to our respective hometowns, and after the summer, we would pursue courses in Grad School, Teacher's College or Law. A few of us had marriage plans on the table, and would be saying goodbye to our University years and loves. Rhonda offered her place for our last hurrah. We numbered eight, including Randy. The beer, scotch, wine and **** were abundant. At one point, sitting around listening to Phoebe Snow's rendition of “The Poetry Man,” and winding down, I suggested we heighten the fun with a bathtub party. I didn't know what that was, in fact I'd never heard of one before, but  the group began *******, and one of us went to turn on the taps. In a flash, all were naked, standing in ankle deep water. Randy was ecstatic and frantic. It was harmless fun, and some nice skin. Everything came to an end, a drunken ****** end, around one a.m. Randy said he had some scotch back at his place, and I, with early onset alcoholism, walked back to his ground floor apartment for more.

Randy had two guitars, headphones and an amplifier. We drank and played live. I still had to get to my place, and left Randy on the guitar, with headphones plugged in, between two and three in the morning.
That was the last I ever saw of Randy, but not the last I heard.

Two weeks passed since I left my University digs. I was at my parents' home, in the massive garage my brothers and I built with our father, re-finishing an antique sideboard as my wedding gift to my girlfriend. You know how it is when you feel someone before seeing them. I looked up, and heading towards me on the drive was my life-long friend and roomie at school, Jim. Jim knew Randy from association. And he had quite a story for me.

“Did you hear about Randy?”
“No.”
“He murdered his landlady.”

I heard the remainder of his story, and was able to deduce he murdered her soon after I left him playing his guitar, wearing his headphones. I'm lead to believe that the landlady, who lived upstairs from Randy, came down to complain about the noise and the hour. Randy followed her upstairs, and with a plain kitchen spoon, took out her eyes, dug too deep, and managed to scoop out parts of her brain. The police followed the trail of blood back to Randy's downstairs apartment. They woke him from a sound sleep, covered in blood and gray matter. I understand Randy was found incapable of being tried, and was subsequently incarcerated in Penetanguishene, a facility for the criminally insane.

Fast forward twenty-five years. I'm at a house party. Present was a police officer from my University town. After some social conversation, I ask him if he was on the force when Randy did his deed.
“On the force? I was the lead investigator. Horrible story.”
He filled in many of the details, some mentioned above, the rest I will leave out.
“Is the case closed?”
“Long since,” he said.

I asked him a few detailed questions about the night, which grabbed his attention. He had already told me about the students at the party Randy was with that evening, and the many interviews he conducted with them.
“You never interviewed me.”
“You weren't there!”
“I was there. I was at Randy's apartment too... that night.”
At first he was incredulous, but I told him about the homemade peanut butter and the emptied bottle of Johnny Walker's Red Label sitting on the kitchen table. I also mentioned the guitars, amps and headphones centered in the living room. He believed he'd interviewed everyone at the party. Why my name was never mentioned by the others, I don't know.

“I know why he did it,” I suggested to the cop. “John Milton. If the landlady was blind she'd have a greater appreciation of Randy's early morning music.”

It's been fifteen years since I had that conversation with the cop. To this day, I still expect a knock on my door, or a rap on a nighttime window, and there, looking in, like Jack Nicholson,

"Here's Randy..."
A long, very long, found poem.

— The End —