I can feel myself becoming more normal. My writing, my patterns of thought, my music, my friends, my priorities. Becoming gradually those of my parents and most people around me, as if the stereotypes that I grew up sort of hating and trying to avoid, the ones I held in my life, are the ones that stuck around the longest and thus became the most meaningful. Then again, I still think I’m losing my mind a bit as my ability to remember and make sense of things begins to go. The fact that people are beginning to look flat scares me. I guess flat is a rough way to describe it; flat characters have a single characteristic they illustrate and tend to be static. People seem like boxes then. A grouping of emotions, not just one, all moving through time. Or something. People are so isolated, and I forget that because there are definite times when I find myself up against them and there’s a whole group of them and they are all in it together and will always be happy because they’re together. That doesn’t happen often but it does happen. Then again, seeing everyone miserable because they aren’t together wouldn’t make me happy. To each their friends, let him have them and enjoy when the chance is there. But… People seem flat like boxes. Like I could sidle past them without them knowing if needed. Like I could fall through the cracks of all these rocks I’ve put in my own hourglass that is my time. Like, slipping through at breakneck, I find an intimate whom I quickly ignored only because I can and because I feel I must. And all those famous people, or the popular ones, or the happy ones, or the ones with something going on, it all looks like they’re just as flat, drilled into a role and trying to fulfill it constantly. Was it there idea? This was mine; this is ideation right here and now and here I am implementing it, flaws and all. All I am is intimately aware of all these problems, especially those that I created. Too aware for my own goof. Too concerned.
your synthetic openness
I refer back to it, the way you would once repatriate
aside any forlorn mellowness
Shacks shaken, mistakn risk taken
Pornographic ends statement
Broked unto the findings of all unheard
awrks in the stars
gulls crying out or mars
behind bars and my on mui understanding
mis compreheeenndded in the am
so stay up nights pm
we in and out
falling all surrounded and about
if i pass, remember these lines on my way out
forgotten tests unallowed and disavowed
keys no realer than my eyes or hands are mout
I shake in a quiescence, lost my mind and all it’s essence
no explanation for what goes in or out
it’s not besides the point but the obvious solution
you’ll have to do without
I remember you. The young man who said everything and felt everything. Believe in a greater sense of what came naturally, facts presupposed by experience. Words, endless words, the sum total of every experience. But you grew up and found the joy in giving up thinking, writing, reflecting, and the like… Just doing, doing, doing, and you might have even been happy with that. But here, back, fingers on keys. Clicking away silence, alone at a screen. The same as it’s always been. Some people are out there happy. A while back, that’s all it would’ve taken to set you off. “it’s all downhill from here. I’m worthless.” and yes now you see a bit broader picture, they are me and I am something they could someday be. Not better, future set or otherwise heaven sent, but arriving at conclusions coming about form doubts underneath mind bent.
She probably thinks about you. After all, you never stop thinking about her. You never stopped dreaming– completely– you just kept moving and with you came the inertia for years of unthought experience. Now here you are, what did all of this add up to? No sum, no solace yet. You will wake up and wonder if you’re dead. It’s no different than the times you always said “I believe in what’s inside my head.” And that is your life now, and so it was then. It’s not that nothing changes but that nothing matters if it does, crying open bleeding hearts, hoping to become and come undone.
Tonight, I was walking home and saw our neighbor (Ralph, Randall? Something like that. Mom told me.) sitting in his chair– after all he is a paraplegic– on the curb at the edge of our driveway. Going in circles, he appeared to be moving nowhere in particular, so I say “hi” and he says “good evening”, I ask how he’s doing. I had to. I couldn’t not. There was no way I could walk home. I felt him, right there, this man I knew was always less than 100 feet from me when I was home, always in need of help, and yet I never had done anything. I was a piece of shit for that, but what was I to do, I was home with my parents, they had done little for him and there was no need as far as we could tell– so I ask him how he’s doing and he says “I’m waiting for my roommate.” I knew it was this son, grandson, perhaps stranger, this guy not much older than I that lived there, I’d seen him, who he was referring to. And before he could comment he said “I’m locked out of the house and he has the key.” It was the end of all things desperate and sad, I fumbled down the driveway, saying something like “Well, maybe there’s something I can do to help you get in?” Probably not even that optimistic, he must’ve known I was just trying to get to sleep but the fact is I just wanted to see the old man okay for once, he always seems like something I have nightmares about ending up like. To not be able to walk… I mean, I barely walk during the day, this job asks so little of me physically. Sit, type, think. I guess it’s a “dream job” in that regard, everything I’ve done for the last 7 years bundled up, sensible enough that I ended up but I’m doubtful yet of why, how, or what good is to come…
I ask/tell him that offering and he said in some strange way that it was fine… to go. I let him be. In a chair. Driving in circles. At least the weather was nice. A bit cold, but livable. Wonderful, even. Seeing Taylor’s face. Seeing her parent’s tiredness after a long day; a long day of joy and being in love fully with their only daughter, what could be better. I remember K’s face. It feels like ages. It’s been barely over a week. It was warm, soft, tender, always ready for me, always nervous, always confident, found in itself perfect symmetry and peace in Seattle. Love for all things in front of it, eyes, camera, me. Whatever. Joy in the midst of such sadness; such wasteful, self-absorbed, unnecessary and unkind sadness that is me and my center of being.
Shaky world, tell me where to stay
Where joy resides, feet may
Be caught up in the step of marching bands
Resounding over streets that they
Reside in time when they aren’t away
I shape the space between notes
I neglect to play
I hope you will be with me
One day. K.
So I can tell time/And the rhythm of the feel of each/Second of mine/In the back of my mind/Beating, pulse after pulse, /like a syllable you wrote/On inches of skin,/Instead of of holding it in,/Trying to force a decision I never meant to pretend/I had any means to make/Or seconds to take,/Waste on abalone, ebony, ivory snake/heavenly ebony tellin’ me, swellin’ me up/to the size of a felony cup, pour over the sides/we find a rush in the kinds of mirrors in our minds/as the time dries up, we wring it out/alarm clock, nap time/you could not take mine, but you could have mine/a shine over eight times/what a great sign from a canine/with a waistline fantasy/dark, so many teeth, and he sees/we screech, we speak, we need/to take two weeks to repeat/all this moving energy, mine/to dream more of our goodness over/from one to another to the first and former/repeat for one last chorus.
Youth walking away, life after a lie
working intently, gravitating gradually into the truth we may become
repeating endlessly every past that we run from
So then, there is and there must be room for all things and all space and time, all place realized in a rational race for the mind. Moment to moment, flowing through it, understood notions of who we are and what we aim to be become words in a flowing river soliloquy. I’m often too caught up in observation and realization to understand anything fully and really; the influence of a score of drugs, some with names like “fear” and “infatuation” and others the simple drugs abused time and time again by seemingly everyone around me, has been and will be felt, perhaps for a very long time. Here I am, thus, the most pretentious man on earth, knowing nothing and admittedly so. Unable to write a word a few weeks ago, even now it doesn’t feel as natural as it once did. It’s automated, regulated, calculated; somehow when nearly all fear has abated there is nonetheless the struggle to create and the fear of the same unknown, of the same failure. But now, I stop myself and instead of simply worrying, instead of the anxious/paranoid/guilty unending feeling of last year, there is the unceasing calm flowing through me. As though I have found at the base of all things within me a tree stump with roots so deep and so wide that they cannot be pulled from the peaceful earth in which I live, that nothing really could shake me from the world I’ve come to know and understand. Paranoid fantasies are just that, caprices and delights are just that, sex and joys and noise and all the rest come and go and flow and flow, you know? You know. I didn’t; at least not for a long while, but underneath all of this worry and isolation and fear of who I was and was to be I found peace. I found more than I had perhaps ever hoped and began a journey to fulfill and join an unending rope, tied, knotted, marked by the error of my mind of the years, but satisfied and pulling taut everything in between. All the past, present, future, all the struggle and war within, all began again. The river deep and wide erodes and erodes and becomes the valley in which it flows. So must I, a river, flow; through all the world, unending stream, unchanging course.
