As far back as I can faultily remember

I have been upon the edge - marginal,
but rarely edgy, and not worried that I might be
one-of-a-kind, alone in the worldly world.
Thoughts keep me company (books too, of course,
and landscapes) and I am always thinking,
just as swifts are always flying, but less capably,
less elegantly, for thoughts are less than air
(yet horribly more, of course), and humans,
now already ego-choked and throttled by each other's egos,
tend to get mired in, housed in, trapped in thoughts
(usually other people's) - and if not in thoughts
then (worse) in merely following, obeying.

I feel compassion  for, empathise with, dogs,
horses, monkeys, rats, snakes and centipedes
rather more than 'fellow' humans.  A moral crime !
the moralists might say. Psychiatrists and sociologists
would find me less than 'socialised' despite
the fourteen years at school, where socialised conformity
was a much higher priority than Greek or even chemistry.

Love is not necessary, if you feel good
and feel good about your wanting self,
your smells, the landscape, what you eat and drink
and listen to - and every day a little - or greatly -
different and chosen from all the possibilities
of marginal autonomy, not doing things
because you are commanded or expected to,
nor on unconsidered whim, nor because you, merely, can
as you did long ago as legendary cave-woman or cave-man.

However, you and I - like it or not - are we.

Carlos Castaneda tried to show that there are many possibilities
for quite different perceptions and enactments of realities
- but that considerable effort upon effort and miry miracle
must be made to find, choose and (temporarily) inhabit them.
His books are allegorical - apparently phantasmagorical
because they challenge 1+1 and A cannot be not-A.
We are capable of magic, but confine ourselves to a single
metallurgic, demiurgic, reduced pseudo-reality: slavish conformity.
We fear the awesome, unutterably utterly, and have not
the slightest idea how to use enhancingly even lowly alcohol
to transcend our humdrum states and moods -
let alone far better substances and foods,

and music, the only activity that we do harmlessly and well.

Yeats knew this. Rilke too, but they bound themselves
by fabulously well-wrought language : our Ur-undoing.
In daylight we lie down on the emperor's pavement,
like gabbling shadows, repeating slavish mantras
- and are squashed to pulp by Hubris, Nemesis, nonentity and Destiny.
The Emperor is not God (artifabstract of stressed minds),
nor man, nor mage, nor yet a holy beast -
but unholy and heuristic writ.
And, O I-you-we-they who live by measurement and numbers!
that's the sum of it.