Darkling I listen

John Keats was sitting at his kitchen table. Everyone else was asleep. He was drinking filter coffee and wishing espresso wasn’t such a pain in the ass to make.

It was very humid. He was trying to write something.

He wrote, “Blah, blah, blah.”

He wrote,

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a…

John Keats took a drink of coffee. He wondered what time it was. He looked at the corner of the journal he was writing in, as if there would be a clock there, and marveled slightly at the way use of computers colors one’s use of print media.

“Darkling I listen,” he read.

Then the cat ran into the kitchen. It ran in circles as if something were chasing it. It stopped, then it started again, in full panic mode. John Keats squinted, and perceived that the cat had a petunia stuck to its asshole.

The cat ran back out of the kitchen.

John Keats went into the living room and meditated. Then he got the kid off to school, and went to work.