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| Non-Colours of White
I’ve not quite lost myself. Not somewhere
along the line – not in violence, neither music
nor silence. Not even in words. But something
is missing, misses. I find myself wishing
for a more elastic world. Why is there something,
instead of nothing? I remember pain. Parts of me
were burning, though I’ve forgotten
whether it was the fever, or the drug she passed
to me, like Eve gave Adam the apple – a haunted
expression in her eyes. Like she knew more
than she was telling. I couldn’t move,
then. There were people, voices around
me, in that room, a party. Perhaps it was my
party – but, I couldn’t remember getting
home. People everywhere, fading, like dreams, but
so many dreams – so many dreams and all
in the now. Vision like hopscotch, sometimes
skipping, sometimes on one leg, moving up
numbered ladders. Spinning, playground games,
I remember twirling down a red curly slide, static
in my hair, my hands, my clothes, melting into smooth,
calming plastic and gentle electricity. Finally, dawn
breaks and white, vibrant light shows over and through
the visions. It’s not amazing that we can see light; it’s
amazing there’s something to get in the way
of light, a beautiful kaleidoscope of morning and
sunshine and life and I was still breathing, after.
I’ve been busy. Doing things that seem more important than they are.
But yet - choice. Choice, it’s been on my mind lately. How utterly lovely and terrifying it is, in every aspect and both at once. Someone told me,
once, that you needed to be slightly insane to hold two contradictory
ideas in your head at the same time.
He’s dead now. I wondered why, when it happened - but don’t now.
Now, I wonder why I don’t wonder why.
I wrote that, and I’m not sure why. It’s not meant to be meta-[fill in the blank]. Not meant to be anything, really. I believe most things aren’t meant. Aren’t defined by choice.
I have an infatuation with lies. With capital-letter ideals. With suicide jumps in movies and literature, free-falling and intent on dying. I wonder what would go through your - my - mind at such a moment.
When it happened, it wasn’t anything special. Fear was all, really. Afraid the world might still be here, even if I wasn’t. Terrified of an ending and a beginning - and even more frightened that there wouldn't be another beginning. Screaming inside your, my, our head that I was still here, even if I wasn't me. If I was we. Or us.
I’m entranced with odd images. With fine writing. And trash writing. (Think: Umberto Eco vs. Tom Clancy.) With love, with hate, with violence, with moments of stillness.
With secrets. Yours. Mine. Preferably yours. With rambling, sporadic updates that make little cohesive (read; linear) sense.
I’m intrigued, most of all, with
| | |
| Outer Banks, N.C.
The sky is soiled. Dingy with gold-brown haze, rusted edges of
peanut-brittle clouds. Shapes, jagged shapes – mailbox,
corrugated
steel rooftop, yesterday’s newspaper – criss-cross above telephone
lines. The wind, proud codger, hurls itself shrieking into a
long slur,
mellisma of fluid motion. Bells ring unattended, a late warning,
pull-cords whip forward, back. A running child falls, meets
ground – sand sidewalk grit gravel – crying. His shoe,
shoelace, stuck
tight between concrete crack and upside-down wheelbarrow. I
pause,
restless to act the hero – take his hand loosen his shoe
carry run duck move –
to the shuttered hotel. His mother grabs him, ungrateful,
glaring,
presses him to melon-breasts, turns away. I root for
the hurricane to win. | | |
|
When bees cross-pollinate
clementines with other fruit, their desirable
seedless
characteristic is lost. Yet still, the pregnant
belly of the mandarin fits
comfortably, almost inside my palm, a deep glossy orange
that arches, stomach outwards – as if to greet the world.
I carried it for a day, until the skin grew bruised –
and I, tired
– and where the navel pressed, trapped close
beneath my nose, I inhale. There is nothing
but the dusty scent of pollen.
Claustrophobic aroma.
I’m not ready for that slow arousal,
the growing dilemma of softened skin, ripening
flesh and pulp. But tell me you don’t feel
more alive,
that your heart doesn’t race at the terrifying vibrance –
a hurricane, burning building, baby’s cry.
| | |
| Because I've not in a while.
***
That pretentious whore of a journalist ...
And yet I've
already forgotten what deviating tangency I had stumbled upon. From
hedonistic analysis of Christian religions to the more recent Hezbollah
conflic with Israel, déjà vu and the current complications of
hallucinogenic overdoses of long ago. Coincidences that aren't and the
mesmerizing prospects of control and partial behavioral patterns.
Cults
crossed with psychological experiments, books filled with a thousand
mindfuck-inducing ideas - all thrown against a wall and left to dry
with a sort of violent chaos that settles into the murk of
consciousness like silt in a raging torrent. This is a fucking deluge,
a flash-flood of rain and water, sex and white-picket fences,
splattered with mud and plastered with intimate gossip, painted as like
billboard advertisements and the need for new and shiny, bright and
useless.
Burnt popcorn and the smell of acridic mornings,
Hallelujah and pretty places. Empty sidewalks, broken sandals, closing
restaurants, broken hearts. Memories of a green ogre and a crowded lounge,
upstairs lobbies and rooftops with unseen stars. Park benches and open
confessions.
"Pack our bags and get away - they're catching on to us."
Symbols,
Sodom and Gomorrah, rustles of curtains and whispers that aren't there,
reality sets in so fucking quickly, and it's all over before it
begins. The names that are no longer numbered, even in my head, just
the same names spinning the same fucking games. Conscience betrayed
just as was the city Jericho, the ideas from memes and declarations
from what some call terrorists, others call patriots, and still others
call the founding fathers. Are we still so different, so un-same, that
we can't see the irony of life?
It's funny. Life, that is.
It's fucking hilarious in its simplistic bullshit and attempt at
consequences. It doesn't matter who's right and who becomes wrong by
the another's rightness. The worst that can happen will happen
eventually, and there is no true scale to compare against an infinite
backdrop.
We're less than ants, here on our own little world.
Full of dangerous ideas and scrawled notes in yellow stenos. More than
some but less than most. Isn't this fucking fantastic, the concept of
absolute freedom, no consequences and no guilt, isn't this fucking
terrifying?
I am extraordinarily happy that more persons don't think
quite this way.
Locke and Lewis, confliction and paranoia,
explanations that never quite answer and questions that never quite
ask. Implied odds and the lyrics to "Eulogy" playing, screaming, in
the lower levels of thought. | | |
| ... On the search for the elusive three-legged midget.
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