"He Wished To Observe Instead Of To Be...

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Despair was a lady hiding in his room.

The flame had stayed alive for many years, giving no warmth,
merely illuminating the falseness and unworthiness
of the beloved, cauterizing him
against other surrenders.

The old friend of his youth had failed him because he fails
to give him back his youth.

The gray little half-people resigned to failure and poverty.

Any protest of injustice brought on more injustice.

You become guilty and you feel guilty
as soon as someone treats you as guilty.

You didn’t have to be a mind reader
to know the reasoning of the rich.

Belligerent marble eyes, the grasshopper jaws
about to clench the biggest steak.

Feuding forever with your ancestors while you boasted of them, 
sitting up there in your family tree dropping coconuts on yourself.

W. had only enjoyed his own mother when she was too feeble
to resist his maternal care and dictatorship.

W’s charming little doll wife was his Frankenstein monster
confronting him with all the sawdust with which
he himself had stuffed her.

X reacted to men of fifty or more, of established reputation
in business or public life, securely solvent, the way
most women react to a fine masculine physique.

Like shipboard acquaintances X and Y confided freely
everything about themselves except what they did
last night or were going to do do tomorrow.

Z had always had the artist two portraits of her, one in formal dress
for her husband and one thrashing around on a chaise lounge
with nothing on for the artist.

You can’t figure some people out by arithmetic 
when they never lived by it themselves.

These gentlemen preferred to sit in taverns boasting of angry viragos
waiting for them with frying pans lifted, for it made their dawdling
in bars and wenching more brave and manly.

We get sick of our clinging vines but the day comes when we suspect
that the vines are all that hold our rotting branches together.

When a lie was involved there was never any safety.

Better to have people jealous and skeptical than pitying or scornful.

It was a looking glass world and it must be that he was the rabbit.
Dawn Powell
The Wicked Pavillion

With the exception of W, X, Y and Z...every word 
on this page is quoted verbatim from Ms. Powell's novel.

Her next page is here.
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