Communion

            It’s the unreasoned responses that tell us most about ourselves, and incite us to introspection. 

            I mean “unreasoned” in two senses: first, we do not think before we act, and second, there is, at first blush, no explanation for why we did precisely what we did. 

            And I think those experiences are a window on the soul for manifold reasons: we don’t see them coming, and so we have no chance to grab honesty by the collar and talk loudly over our embarrassing inner child, hushing him with harsh hands all the while.  Reflection really is that surprised parent, not realizing the child’s absence until he’s off making trouble, and when it catches up it has to make sense of things.  And that breathless mix of shame and confusion is where self-knowledge is synthesized.

            I know this because I just had one of the most relieving experiences of my life—at least of this new period of my life, where reason and emotions reel anew each day in the newness of the physical and intellectual space, and where the mind sees as much distance ahead as the eye in this beautiful, haunting, daunting moonscape.  The past few months of my life have been a background of creative starvation punctuated by the dry rancor of loneliness, shot through from all directions with intellectual rigor that demands one’s soul on a platter with near nothing in return.  I am growing though, so let’s not dally on the way to enigma.

            Today I went to church—to a Catholic church, though I’m not Catholic—after a weekend with family and girlfriend, a brief pause in the bleached onslaught of reading after reading.  I think my mind shut off this weekend—just refused to work.  Like the well-published and respected philosopher they found drunk off his ass in his office one night, and toted off to jail, and his disgusted philosopher-wife refused to bail him out, and they got a divorce.  Like the countless intellectuals, burning bright at beginnings, that either check out in time and spend quiet lives washing windows of inner wealth, or burn out into the oblivion of near-mental illness, only to keep inflicting hollow masterpieces on the ever-more-apathetic graduate students of the world. 

(Ah, the grotesque gorging of the self-deceived creative spirit.)

            The end of the service is communion, and as I sat waiting for the Catholics to commune and be done with it, I glanced to my right and saw a professor from my department, a red-blooded Kantian to the core, walking back up the aisle, head slightly bowed, lips straight, hands pressed into prayer at his chest, like a child with a firefly, and then out the doors, skipping out early—the devil—and he was gone. 

            I can’t quite formulate why this had such a stirring effect on me—as it did, as I inwardly cheered, fist-pumping, for nothing, for nothing, for the three-quarters-fabricated feeling of camaraderie I felt sitting alone on a pew.  Was I merely reassured that true devotion is possible in the upper echelons of a discipline sometimes hostile to an ad hoc-delineated definition of irrationality?  That, of course, plays a part.  More, though: anxiety over whether my dream-laden goals can come true—to actually care about my students, to believe that academia can be salvaged from irrelevance, that the university has not found and eradicated the last corner of purity, of the ideal, of true learning and growth—that anxiety has been eating me upwards, spurred on by cynical professors and the malice (laced with despair) of ambition at every turn.

            Yet I get the same feeling when a quiet colleague sneaks a beer into the office, when the error-immune academic admits with a grin that he doesn't know something, when a professor just-too-fondly shows me pictures of his dogs—in short, when the human spirit moves, and I infer life amid death.  Then I know that self-centered ambition and the impersonators of meaning have not crushed that scintillating, sometimes-silent thing that makes us laugh, that makes us laugh and laugh, laugh so hard at the absurdity of life that our cheeks cramp and we fall on the ground or stumble down a maze of streets under the orange glow of streetlamps, not giving a damn for direction.  

Grace

            The authentic religious impulse has just been validated for me, after a month or more of whitewashed inner withering, the soul’s incessant second guessing.  I still never see it coming—vindication of scientific theories and God’s possession of personality. 

            Here’s the deal: I’ve been stoking the compassionate impulse for months now—a new city, beautiful apostasy from the old self’s defaulted accrual, that autumnal feeling of urgency with one’s novelty in the world—and it simply hasn’t worked.  I’ve consistently ended every day feeling as if my mark has been lost on the world—or worse, that the mark was made in someone else’s name.  For there’s a sour side to the urgency of alienation from one’s surroundings, predecessor to the weary relinquishment of one’s presence in the world: discouragement seeps from every smallest crack made in one’s attempt at change, whether of oneself or others. 

            But today something slipped into place: God is deeply active, and surprisingly so.  The intersection of 1 John and a million of life’s grinning contradictions—I was riding my bike home from school when it hit me: there can be no love without knowledge of love.  (Surely it is best put simply, but the modern in me wants to slap the blunt apostle.)  We cannot convey life if we are not actively experiencing life, for we cannot give what we do not have. 

            And on and on I go, turning the sharp little thing in my mind, ultimately never figuring it out.  But surely this makes sense—surely we would not be calculating the distance between our lover’s lips as our hearts beat blisters for the next brush of skin on skin.   

 

Ramble-Tamble

            The natural response to an environment hostile to one’s creativity is to create—and yet, the creation is strained, limited to bemoaning the wasted remains of one’s subject matter, one’s spirit and drive.  Bad times make us narcissists. 

            And there is a certain tragedy to that; one of the few instances where a call from youth’s cloud kingdoms of idealization seems the only move to make, and a healthy reconciliation with a necessary reality.  Yet the fact seems to be that there is a point of suffering where we are unable to transcend ourselves.   And that is…what?  Sad? 

            Yet there are gems in the jam.  How about this: the fact that suffering impedes transcendence of one’s concrete situation, of one’s very self, implies that if transcendence follows upon normal, healthy conditions, then transcendence is part of the proper functioning of the human being.  And of course this is no necessary conclusion, folks, but as long as I’m preaching to an empty auditorium, I can relinquish academic neuroticism. 

            And here we have Exhibit A versus Exhibit B, optimism versus pessimism: for to many embittered brow-beaters out there, a concentration camp entails the negation of faith, grounds for eternal expulsion of optimism or hope.  That’s a plausible inference—more of an emotional reaction, though.  The problem of evil in this guise means for many that if there is any situation that temporarily precludes faith, then faith can never be.  It’s a delusion, a wet dream, a perfect example of someone who is more clever than himself. 

            But why, the writer begs, is this a necessary conclusion?  What is so wrong with saying that we live in a tragic world, deal with it? 

            Well, perhaps God, if he existed, could have made a non-tragic world.  I have never been fully affected (relative to the normal reaction) by this argument.  And why?  Because hope endures all things, my friends, and after all these considerations the question remains the same: do you choose to believe even still that God is?  Because come on, folks, this little argument from evil couldn’t have been your first bitch-fit with the world—and if it means your fall from faith, I smell a little intellectual pretense. 

            To recognize the human condition at its most basic is to realize that we know almost nothing, and that things are not always as they seem.  If this does not allow faith in the presence of evil, then I’m out of suggestions. 

            And by the very bootstrap act of creativity here performed, I have proved myself wrong.  Thank you.

Meta-Nostalgia

Invasion of a nauseous outpouring of self-expression from the distant past: I pull up the unrecognized document in the folder, only to be lambasted by a quick scribble of a soul-aching creation from years ago. And suddenly I’m back there, realizing where the pain will take me, namely here, where I sit reading this ancient plea for comfort, thankful that empathy implies externality. Thankful that I’m not there; thankful yet again that if I were, I could do it better.

And that is just it—that pain, the release, and yet the irony of cathartic nostalgia! Worry, worry, worry—I worried my time away on that lonely trip, worried moreover and the most that I wouldn’t take hold of the pain, that I wouldn’t use that depth of discomfort diagnostically, self-realization, growth, beauty, creation, art, depth, God. There’s a lately-born release to it now, to look back on that act of creation squeezed from my weeping soul, and to see the dynamic, then-invisible wonder of it all, the predictive glance turned backward to assure that self that I would get…here.

And yet now, as these hands come out of hiding in adultish comfort to renew the tapped-out pact with keys and screen, as these fingers dance to the rhythm of inwardness once more, and I make this absurd little attempt at creativity—which nevertheless is born in another realm as the resplendent experience of meaning—I come to realize, in stuttering non-response, that more legitimate than the fear of not harnessing one’s pain—is not feeling it.

Ivory Tower #2

And here is where philosophy falls: the suppression of truth-intuitions in the interest of keeping one’s coherence. For that matter, this is the downfall of any systematic pursuit of knowledge lodged within a necessarily critical institution: I have just taken a break from a paper I’m writing, stopping in the middle of a thrust toward completion, in the middle of a hasty deletion of a thought because it didn’t fit, and I was afraid of a bad grade on grounds of self-contradiction.

At this point, then, I succumb to an irrationalist epistemology, because it is clear that we’re just saving face.

From the Ivory Tower

The academic does not long for anyone: he is quite at home taking pleasure in things that are not there.

He truly has an addiction to abstractions, to the not-here—at times to the nowhere—and thus you stand right before him as he closes his eyes to dream of you.

Yet there is a salient difference between academia and romance, though you are to both something which you are not: the romantic loves you via his imaginings; the scholar loves his imaginings via you.

On Priorities

I’ve almost come to understand those pale, staunch Christian denialists who barricade themselves below the world, in defense against any uncomfortable opposition, armed with judicious undertones and that insecure and therefore all-too-self-asserting ignorance. No, not the few who have no treasure to guard—those latently nihilistic ideologues—but those whose blind faith, yes, in its most derogatory sense, is weathered and accepted by those who practice it merely as a means to an end. And here is something I sense any cynical smarty-pants will never catch: the meekly religious will go to great lengths and sacrifice all worldly gain—indeed, in many cases, their objective sanity—to preserve what is many times a deep experience of the Spirit of God. Once you find that treasure in the field, it is indeed truer than many realize that no good is too prized to sell toward its cost.

CPR

Doing philosophy today is like shaking hands with a corpse.

My Ambition

"His Master said to him, 'Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things...'" Matthew 25:21

Here is what I want from life: to do well with what I have. The only approachable goal is self-referential--that is, did I do all I had the potential to do? Anything more is an invitation to insanity.

And in humility, stripping the shards of non-self, we come to know ourselves.

Sound familiar?

Terrorism: The unlawful use or threat of violence esp. against the state or the public as a politically motivated means of attack or coercion

"I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department."

“Officials in and around this White House...[are] routinely praising radical leftists and Communist dictators and the wonders of socialism in spreading the wealth.”

Slow Leak (For You, Larkin)

Stopping to fill my

Tire with air,

My mind sleep-talks:

"Hissing bliss--

Hit and miss--

Of the pneumatic

Kiss."

Then, satisfied

With this versified

Smack of mundanity

(And scribbling shy memory's

Wrinkled receipt),

I drive on.

My Proof of God's Existence

Women rapaciously seek the security marriage affords, but for the whole gulp of human history have been almost completely politically disenfranchised, and hence could not solidify marriage as a cultural-religious institution.

Men flee from commitment, squirm during the ceremony, and consider the ring a hollow button for freedom’s termination—yet they controlled every major cultural and religious institution up until about yesterday.

Now you tell me--who dunnit?

Concision

Here is something I found in a discarded journal, wedged humbly at the bottom of the page in sloppy resignation, after a protracted treatise stippled with the spray of anxiety.

"Meaning is the convergence of all experience on and the eruption of all creativity from a single point in the individual, which is in fact the individual himself, at his deepest point, which alone gives earnest coherence to his otherwise multifarious existence."

If your response is a replayed plea for gender neutrality, I'm afraid you've missed the point.

To Rilke

I.

Though none hold you holy,

I think you are sacred,

Snow.

Stopped in my tracks

(For now they appear),

You are no blanket,

But life's unveiling:

A step entails commitment's crackle,

A sin against silence,
Yet standing still invites

The fate of statues.

Whiteness of life, so

Silently insistent:

A whispered demand for your own

Desecration.

II.

Yet soon you are mended,

And we are forgotten in your fabric.

Then all of that anxiety--

Where to go? What to do?--

Anxiety over how best to imprint ourselves

Is lost in the layers,

And all of our questions are answered

With a billion blind ellipses.

God,

Still we fear

That you will cease

To fall.

Loneliness, def.

If you could choose between the experience of the substance of life and the ability to communicate it, which would you choose?

Me too.

Social Virtue

Here is a man to whom all are drawn as to the source of all laughter, as to the bottom of all slopes, as to the movement to which all words point. Brightest of smiles, glibbest of lips, his whole personality implying answers to all of life’s despairs. Everyone is in love with him, and he likewise is in love…not with them, nor with himself (straight shot through subtleties of vanity)—but with their love for him.

The irony of his character is as sharp as his wit, and the deepest of gazes will send the onlooker into a despair more profound than the happy heights are high to which he escorts his adorers: for it is he who loves the crowd’s attention—who may be not infinitely virtuous but have rather an infinitely sensitive ear for an audience—who is most alone.

New Love

How transcendently beautiful it is to have someone constitute a significant part of your life, rather than a pillaged whole.

(The individual must be partially submerged in silence, to have a piece of life to himself.

Full commitment to any Thing is self’s cheap sale, though they will bargain incessantly for your soul.

You must learn the bully’s bluff: that anything but God has a claim on your time.

One must live for the ideal, the ideal for which one can live and die.)

I have learned to live for little things.

Banishment

Creative people used to grow organically out of their time and place, to the point that the virtue of creativity was trueness to one’s roots. And people affirmed “their” artist to the extent that his words sprang from their spring, that he sang their song with a voice they didn’t have. And that was the criterion for good art as well: trueness to oneself, which translated then to trueness to one’s culture.

Only stratified romantics could still idealize the present world this way. The only good artists left are the suicides—those who are utterly alienated from their surroundings and heritage. Proust barricaded himself in an egg carton-lined room, Kafka couldn’t stand his father, Dostoevsky drank himself to death and Tolstoy ran away. It’s like some damn demented nursery rhyme.

Pan to ancient Greece, where plays were the center of city-wide festivals, where poets and playwrights were lauded for their patriotism and grace. I’m not lamenting the loss of culture (pretense of the elitist), but pointing to a radical difference in art’s place in society—which, art being a compass of culture’s illness, points to something more significant.

Because to be an artist, these days, is to banish oneself from the world—not opprobrium, but something much worse: invisibility. Quite appropriate, too, for the artist toils in the realm of the spirit, melds the mind to beauty—traffics in invisible wares—while society either scrounges for the capitalist’s crumbs or feeds the system with a nihilistic materialism that starves the spirit into ironic submission.

And so alienation is the artist’s self-prescription, choosing solitude and bitter loneliness over a high place among the damned. In that sense, art is still a product of the times, for man is utterly alienated from himself, and thus the artist represents the conscience of humanity, calling out in an eloquent whisper drowned in the hidden howling of despair. He is not alienated, but walked away from.

Hide/Seek

The dead make quiet claims on existence,

Gazes glowing less with dust and distance.

Few can pass passion through fashion's fall, pall

Of past's silence which is breath's death to haul.

Dusk's true danger descends on those who hide

From the night in brighter lives. I tried

And found only pell-mell smells of meaning,

Plus a cold sweat at threat of solitude's weaning.

But behind your eyes the sea's reasons speak

To salt's sharp sparkle on a beach's cheek--

And I am afraid of this foreign tongue,

Lapping clapping language as a sea's song sung.

Your nocturnal churnings, you too light to see,

Your laughter darkly blooming: I will let them be.

Come with me.

Newness

Life is predicated on a paradox—perhaps defined by contradiction. The true, earnest life is lived in the crunch of contradictory concepts, in the space between the ease of ideas, where the gaze of immanence blanks in the blind spot.

And that spot is a skinny slice of the pie, too, for our self-reductive thrust toward simplification is more clever than we. (It has to be, if we are to survive.) The world is a puzzle, and we crave predictability. The drive to interpret our experience within the meager framework of our own knowledge amounts to less than we would expect: the bright epiphany of a conscious click, when the mind bluffs comprehension, amounts to the assimilation of novelty to the past’s easy distinctions, which in their turn were likewise reduced from their dazzling mosaic. That is, most meaning is gleaned by assimilating perception to past patterns. Striking reduction, that. Life makes sense in light of itself, and we proud knowers, who nonetheless so little know ourselves, walk past the circularity in weightless relief.

So what is human nature? Here is a humble suggestion for you: insecurity.

And what occurs if we simply let confusion profuse? We could stand outside the institutions screaming for our allegiance (that noble raping of uniqueness); stop this shameful cowering in the corners of life where we cling to broken toys of distinctions; the individual could recognize himself as irreparably such and stroll into the mystery of his particularity. What if we see the self’s strangeness in relation to a given situation—and, though tempted to pretense of familiarity, as blind men greet this quiet comer with quiet joy?

...Then we might add a new jingle to our pocket full of rhymes: change.

&

Nausea greets the weak of stomach, boredom the weak of art.

Judgment

We only have ourselves to blame for being judged. The passive voice a little paradoxical there? Perhaps.

Walk with me:

Open your eyes and you’ll see that there are people everywhere who just don’t give a damn. And, stone me for it, but most of the time they’re the people with the most obvious absurdities, the most vulnerable targets for a very presumptuous criticism.

But let’s take a look at the presumer: on what ground does his judgment rest? Perish for a moment the cultural relativity, the fashion’s fickleness, the ultimate superficiality of seeing simply surface. What I’m aiming at is something a little more obvious, that the critic has placed himself in a vituperative framework of his own free will, has submitted to this arbitrary, fluctuating value system on his own, while the sublimely unconscious victim is outside, in some foreign sphere of actual involvement with the world. And nine times out of nine-and-a-half, the critic never says a word, arduously forging those mental daggers that stay stabbed in his memory. Even if he has the gall to let loose, those insults stick with him, and he perpetuates the harshness of his own criteria—and the child slides on, to play another day.

We do not realize it (we fallen ones), but in judging others, we judge ourselves. Take note, ye resentful downtrodden, for the King of the Trivial will—I promise you—one day fall victim to his own knives. For in cracking that uncreative joke, he has unknowingly set a standard—a standard that he is now slave to fulfill. And time will pass, and he will get comfortable, thinking that he can have his life and murder it too…when just then he’ll see himself in an unflattering light, catch a laugh’s updraft, or—God forbid—discover himself taking self-forgetful interest in something, and that censor will swing back on its maker.

 

So who is really doing the judging? Near nothing gets said, and what does is interpreted through subtleties of tone and gesture—an incredibly unreliable science, given the variance of idiosyncrasy. We merely assume people’s critiques, in the end. And the blots of blatancy are easily shrugged, if you can see clearly. But returning to the original question—who then is doing the judging? Condemnation is usually a case where it really is all in your head, where imagination runs wild with improbabilities, pure fictions of concealed meaning and unheard gossip.

I will repeat ad infinitum, dear reader, for I want you to see this, to comprehend this obvious fact that has eaten away at me for years, all the more humiliatingly at the discovery of the insight pre-recorded and printed on the very leaves of the trees: “Judge not, lest ye be judged.”

The problem is a simple one, of values, reiterated now for thousands of years: where does your treasure lie? In your socially constructed (that is, false) self? Or in something else, something deeper and more essential to your character, a commitment by which you place yourself in a position of humility before your duty?

Here I grant your answer. Why is the world so critical? Who do you fault for your social anxiety? You have already guessed: yourself.

 

The social critic is damned to self-consciousness. And in this, God knows we should pity him, even as he cracks another witless curse, even as he laughs through the gates of the underworld. For he cannot escape the merciless gaze of his own idol; we can only hope that one day he will recognize it for what it is, in humility return to the world of things and people.

It is you, you lucky forsaken one, that should rejoice, for you are free from those chains: only be wary that you do not return slap for slap, take on the vestment of the maniac to avoid his gaze. That’s one thing you can’t do, because then the maniac is you, and you still have not escaped judgment. You’ve merely become a masochist.

The critic, oh remorseful maniac, why does he do it? Unfold the mysteries of the human mind! I see only an endless chain of inheritance, exacerbated by the frustration of the victim’s freedom from himself. For that is truly why he grinds you, meek and mild one—he is taking his revenge on you for not being him.

Passivists

What sizzle in the word “pacifist” forebodes the world’s implosion? The shocked stare’s transparency, the slow concretion of fear into obstinacy—yes, I see that you hate me for it.

I’m not one, of course. That’s preposterous, for some eminent and unspoken reason. No, but sometimes I like to pretend—and let me tell you, ideological slaps in the face are way more satisfying than slinging around stereotypical stamps (see hippie, democrat, liberal, etc.). You don’t know what hit you, and you can’t catch a retort as I sit and await the congealing judgment. Why? Oh yes, because you’re a Christian, and now you’re trapped in an irony you can’t quite catch: you hate me for assuming the duty, yours and you know it, which you’ve decided to read over (as the Spirit guides you to blot out the very Spirit of the text). And the hate circles around your conscience and gives drowned Guilt a second bite…because deeply, you know that’s wrong too.

Hopefully you see the humor of this sloppy labeling system of yours: I am not a Christian, because I value peace, freedom, tolerance (NT style). You are a Christian because you value ignoring your own complicity, demolishing divergences from complete cultural prostitution, and general mental laziness. And this last is what we call Love, children. Praise hate then, and just call me the Anti-Christ. Behold, Christian, the offspring of your illness.

Funny? It would be funny if the thousands of deaths weren’t such a numerical nuisance in the way of bright sights and sounds, money in the bank, and children to leave unloved. Ah, this is life. Blessed be the Lord who has bestowed such riches upon us.

A few enigmatic insights for you, brother:

1.) You are not always right.

2.) Jesus was not a Republican.

3.) Or White.

4.) Or Rich.

Meditate on these spiritual truths, my brother, and perhaps one day you too will enter the realm of Reality. You cannot be saved if you do not exist.

Query:

If a Christian needs his Bible to tell him what to do……….
………
………
…is he really a Christian?

Observation simply attests: people are incapable of trust. And trusting God is not so simple as strict adherence to [an arbitrarily accepted subjective interpretation of] a book—however holy or acclaimed, however stripped of substance, however abstracted into desultory systems of slogans. In fact, that faith may be just the opposite of true faith, for it conceals a deep hesitancy, a deep mistrust of any active impetus. Humanity hides in the finite, but it is the Spirit that gives life.

We have facilitated to the point of falsification.

If faith is the ticket, then the Church will be turned away.

Amen

Yes, an ash-absolved piano to my right; yes, a cheap coffee table in perfect leg-length, dense books abundant and the gray taste of hot tea on my tongue: I am alone. Here I sit before the well-worn throne of poverty’s wry wealth. Here I bow over the keyboard’s chattering sacrament, the shuffled alphabet’s silent song to chaos: after months of soul-suffocating misery, I am reborn. Give me your hand, friend, as I tread from the cobwebbed womb of staticity’s constriction. I will not look back.

Yes, Indeed

"Yes, if you call out for insight
and raise your voice for understanding;
if you seek it like silver
and search for it as for hidden treasures,
then you will understand the fear of the Lord
and find knowledge of God."

Proverbs 2:3-5

On Luck

Redemption's psalms are only sung
Over sighs of relief,
And virtue taunts from the folds
Of good fortune.
Hence, the fine fellow
Both bores and disgusts,
Because his salvation
Was no work of art,
No push toward freedom,
No dance across coals.
Spoiled on habit and inheritance,
With homes and thoughts
Rarefied right out of reality,
The lucky curse the honest.

Rolled from the womb
Like a gambit of the gods,
We pray to saints for lucky breaks
And then paste them on our resumés.
We are not our own,
And yet perceptions sing siren-truths,
And we swear we have a say.

I say
Prove it.

Search

People don't grow--they just change clothes. To grow one must be committed unconditionally to the ideal, so that one's self is never truly possessed but in its pursuit. Which entails an implicit apostasy from the religion of the given, the immediate, the apparent--yea, from the very idea of self-possession--so that what one deeply is cannot be grasped in what one has inherited.

We become, for being hides in potentiality, revealing itself only in retrospect.

Too Much Reading, or, Paging Apostasy

I miss the distance of criticism.

To stand aloof in the slightly pained stance of unutterable uniqueness—that is the faint implication of commentary. The calm gaze of the critic glows forth from the singular abundance of an ossified criterion chiseled to perfection: the honing of the self.

And this distinction, the incommensurable contrast between the individual and his environment, the slow space of brewing between the comprehensive gaze and the crafted response--this I miss in the monolithic lethargy of unpunctuated comprehension, the guilty gluttony of mere knowledge. The protracted inhale must give birth to my sigh, both enraptured and fatigued with the inestimable intricacy of life.

And yet even these verbose exultations ring of over-richness, of a spoiled intellect, the mind's consumerism...

I must speak. And the world, my insatiable interlocutor, both aggravates and enchants as I try to get a word in. To respond to life's ecstatic soliloquy—that is the vanity that shames me into a stutterless silence.

To You

I'm honored that all the omnicompetent world has in some superseded stage of life effortlessly mastered the elementary discipline of being what is the eternally elusive object of my parched becoming; I respect with the utmost solemnity the universally implicit understanding that everyone now has something much more noble to do; and yet, for all this, I'm all the more utterly confused that none have as much passion for life as for pretense.

Thank you, you may resume.

Dancers, Glancers, Lancers

There are dancers and there are glancers. That is, those who perceive your treasure and picture it in their hands, and are therefore willing to perform for you--to flay their personalities in any direction you choose to push, if the prize is enough--and those whose appraisal passes right through you, for you are no means to their end, and therefore you are nothing. Nothing but a waste of energy.

Ah yes, and there are the lancers as well: scar-sucklers looking for a nervous system to assault with verbal tackles and emotional rapes. Here there are artists, though: those subtle sadists who have condensed their vengeance into a seed of patience, manipulating the ascetic virtues of the distant days of spiritual striving to add a scent of style to their torture.

Is there any explanation for this state of affairs? Aye, and it reveals why there is no dance of light in the darkness, no poet's gaze praising every pore--for to do that, to give instead of gobbling up another's emotional resources, to gift grace to the inconsistencies, would require silence. Stillness. Thought.

And we all know that only weirdos and lunatics ask for that.

Self-Portrait in a Minor Key

A man walks in rapture down the street with all the trappings of one who sees—his special glasses, his binoculars, his periscope straddling his neck, his thin hand stretched out across his forehead to guard his gaze—and he points to invisible entities for all who cross his path, with ringing fervor and a poet’s taste for precision. Some who encounter his assault merely stare on; others, detecting the irony, whisper behind poised glances and cupped hands, while a few are openly incredulous and say, loudly enough, wanting to be heard, “What a fake.”

For--can't you see?--this man rolling through town with all the equipment and idiosyncrasy of a seer has no eyes.

Something

In my life, in my writing, I want only this: urgency. The urgency of a deeply-kindled purpose. When I am read or heard or felt, I want the onlooker to be--the in-looker.

For the highest honor is for each of one's gilded, scintillating utterances and each act bursting into bloom to be an overflowing, the generosity of inner abundance; rather than the scourged shell, the bad actor's mockery, the hidden shame--that is, need, boredom, laziness, etc.

So yes, poor logician that I am, I ask for the contradictory from life: the frantic pulse of self-creation, the lazy oblivion of inner wealth.

Prayer For Us

A wave's prayer is whispered
As it bows back to the sea,
As it pauses at the peak of its inhale,
Like a pendulum's wink before the swing.
Nursing its hunger for the terrestrial kiss,
Churning, it recedes, rolling back upon
Ecstasy and itself.
Within that foam-hinged boundary,
That damp stripe of the sea's soul,
Where wave awaits rebirth
And only the parched sea's salt is constant--
There I will wait for you.
We will practice Poseidon's rosary,
Swim through his undulating language,
Sing crystal choruses to the rising tide.
Only oceans and angels
Know the value of repetition.

And if the waves could speak
But in that whispered crush
Of green mystery,
Their words would console the sands
With the promise of reunion.

My love, I return.

Exercise

The Gospel of Mark says that at the beginning of Jesus' preaching and healing bonanza--that is, the beginning of his ministry: "When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying 'He has gone out of his mind.'" This suggests not only that Jesus' ministry began very suddenly, but--I think--that he also had a revelatory insight, a fundamental change of perspective, an insight great enough to produce a sudden and unprecedented change in his character and disposition. Recall also that a prophet is never accepted in his hometown. (What changed?)
Not only did the people--who presumably knew him before--think that he had "gone out of his mind"--which itself suggests a major shift in his disposition--but also his very family seems to be surprised by the information.
If this new Jesus--who happens to be the only one we know, apart from such apocryphal gospels as Thomas', whose depiction of the self-consciously divine child-Jesus is here contradicted--rather, if this Jesus is new at all, as the reactions of his family and acquaintances would imply, then what does that mean about who Jesus was before this sudden change? And what does that imply about his purpose and his own conviction concerning it? Most importantly, what does this insight entail concerning Jesus' fundamental nature?

Point, awaiting counterpoint. Seize the present uncertainty: faith, child. Faith.

Conquest

There’s a subtle narcissism to romantic love. Practice in selfishness, as I’ve heard someone say.

She loves you, and you slowly transform her into yourself. If you’re good. Otherwise you exploit her naïve praises, her very nature of worship, to reflect your egoistic fantasies. You don’t have the originality for transformation. And you don’t know yourself well enough to model.

You lover, you imperialist. You conqueror of mannerisms, you stealer of laughter. That praise was meant for world, for God, for creation, and you are guiltlessly reflecting it upon yourself. Tan, boy. Steal her glow.

You obliterate her happiness when it doesn’t hail your glory. Your schemes, disgusting, you schemer, so obvious, so exploitive, and yet you still deceive yourself. You are righteous, justified in your indignation. Yes, you have the right to be jealous. Know your rights and then live by them. Lean on, leaner.

Loss

What if my sins have ruined me? I know I can't court the past—I just want to know if I can still become what I was meant to be. Have I stepped too far in the shoes of my side-demon? Am I condemned to a Euclidean window-view of a bright life in parallel?

&

Writing is a skill in that it takes practice—but the practice is in the intervals. The arduous act of writing is merely a peripheral practice in looseness. Life informs your words.

We humans must practice living.

Dear Society, School, Evangelist, etc.:

I regretfully must decline your offer.



Sincerely yours forevermore,

signed,
Ironic.

In Praise of Atheism

The blistering irony of this entrenched school of Creationists is that every one, down to the last purblind book-burner, seems dead-set on roping the theoretical world down to a base of the most exhausting uncreativeness. The stale, repeated dogmas that exemplify man’s unique capacity to combine a mind-stabbing irrationality with a Grand Inquisitor’s hate; the deep-seated determination, stemming from a well-masked resentment, to debase all freedom and happiness; the anxiety, and, overall, the fear of something completely foreign to them: these things and other unutterable absurdities somehow always combine in just the right proportions to produce those blithering dogmatists—a process which might, with a laughing glimmer of divinity, be the sole stirring argument against an evolution that thins the cowards and weaklings.


The paradox is that most Christians deny God as they affirm him, shout the existence of an all-powerful God while limiting that power to their own ability to conceive its manifestations. All hail the God of the Picket Sign.

But I must ask, is the amount of time and effort, the emotions and souls lying broken on the wayside, the men and women you’ll distance forever with your almighty and arbitrary vehemence—are all these things worth it? Does the how of this divine existence matter more than…than existence itself? Would you, you silly child, argue with God your father if he told you himself that he liked to take his damn time?

Let’s examine the case.

First, the Biblical material. We have a mythological creation story. Correct, kind, blind sir, mythological. Examine the context: historical, cultural, linguistic. In fact, we have two creation stories (catch that?), written about four centuries apart and by completely different traditions. No sir, Moses had no part in this. That’s a fact. In fact, the two stories were not really authored by anyone—they are all that remains of a transcribed oral tradition. And just like the cosmogonical stories of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and all the surrounding….

But let me just stop here, because I have a feeling we have just encountered a larger problem. The problem, Sir Creationist, is that you have already stopped listening to me. If you are a bit more sophisticated, you will take advantage of this pause to launch into your rehearsed assortment of anti-liberal bullshit and condemnations of modern science, painting fallacies through my words and misinterpreting to no end, digressing about my fundamental presuppositions and whatnot. If you are the common Creationist layman sort, you will simply give me a dirty look and call me a damned atheist.

No, sir. I am no atheist. The truth is, I might just possess more faith than you. What? Yes, by the highly scientific definition of faith as non-leaningness, I do. For I am not leaning on my stilted argumentative techniques, my contrived proofs and disproofs or my general hatred of any unimpeded son-of-a-bitch who dares to defy society’s faceless mandates (i.e. God’s eternal Law). Faith is infinite resignation: to give up all that has previously given you that sense of security, all that you have previously relied on, whether it’s your stocks, your bonds, your wife, your groundless theories, your preacher’s jokes, your way of life. Jesus said to lose your life for his sake (Matthew 10:39), to leave everything, and it is peculiarly significant here that he also commands us to have no place to lay our heads.

(You see, I am capable of digressing about the elusiveness of faith, the delicious seduction of an unattainable definition. My metaphors lie pining, my words fall short. Your faith is a legal document. You should be ashamed of your ABCs.)

The goal is to seek the truth without cementing it. The goal is to follow God’s commandment against idols. The goal is to worship God over our theories of how He did it.

But these Christians still murder the wide-eyed mysteries of the universe. I say, long live the atheists, the killers of God—for they have opened up the door to a stranger who knocks. They are the salt of the earth when the salt loses its saltiness.

Diagnosis: Sanity

Religion is the domain of the human spirit. It is a big boy’s game, unassailable by the infantile critiques of science and merely rational people. The illusion is that the faithful (in the wider sense) are lukewarm; in reality, religion is a calling so high that it necessarily breeds a dialectic of faiths pregnant and bursting with the polar void. Either/Or. Either you have faith (i.e. true faith), or you reflect your self-hatred upon the world (i.e. popular faith). Religion is the great irremovable mirror. Either you define your life by constant change, progression, movement—or you wither into a shell of a human being, you murder the world on the altar of your guilt. You win or lose, you live or die, but there is no in-between, and you will be supremely human on either branch—either angelic or demonic in your humanity.

The secular world, on the other hand, calls for the middle path, the wide road, the reasonable alternative. But we are not called to be reasonable. What is reason, anyway? By most accounts, it is merely enlightened self-interest. And that is the fundamental error in a scientific, reasonable perspective on true religion: the reasonable man regards religion as merely antiquated self-interest; he is the true knower. He looks at the sacrifices to the weather gods, the prayers of petition, the benefits of a unified ethic, an us-versus-them mentality, and his reasonableness seems better suited for his own preconceived, unself-conscious presumption: the primacy of self-preservation.

When, in reality, the truly pious are swirled toward a vortex which they do not even understand, they are blinded by a reality that transcends the aims of reason.

The question is not, “Are we ready to embrace reason?” It is, rather, “Are we ready to forfeit the danger of our humanity?”

The mass-movement of faith is essentially faithlessness. This I will, with God and the heavenly host behind me, concede. Faith, defined by its most popular usage, is cowardice; the driving proof of our faith is not what Kierkegaard described—faith itself—and not as the worldly realists demand—Evidence! Evidence!—but rather, our own emotional need. Hence that conservative fear of knowledge, that attack on freedom. The truth is, we want the world to be as somnolent as we ourselves, we demand that they stop interfering with our dreams as we squeeze our eyes shut in pretence of unconsciousness. Oh, we know the world awaits. We just refuse to wake up.

And yet, have I contradicted myself? (Who cares, really?) Truth, as usual, hides her face behind a veil of incomprehensible complexity, a guise of ever-morphing subtlety that forever eludes formulation. For who, really, is the coward here? (“Cowardice is not the crux of the question, I want evidence, evidence! Down, down, down with the praise of human nobility!”) The Christian, who, though perhaps fearful of the empirical assault, though demanding support for his faith (in numbers, in “proofs,” in signs and wonders—all contradictions of faith, at bottom), still manages to maintain his human ascendancy, believes without seeing, takes that leap of faith which requires indomitable courage and individuality—or the cold, hard scientist who refuses to risk error, falls back in the same way on his ungrounded assumptions, but with an aspect of grotesqueness in his pompous leaning, who refuses to live dangerously and, yea verily, for that loses his soul, his life, his ineffable particularity—his humanity?

Who wins, between these two? I guess it depends on the game. The atheist loses his soul but gains the world: his precious, concrete, scientific (subjective, debauched, infinitely contingent) world. The believer? Ah, just turn the table and pour God into the adjectives.

Child

This child standing so hazily in front of me
Defeats my heinous attempts at sanctity.

His gaze is empty:
Silent as the stars,
Drinking in the world,
Seeing each crisp occurrence
In the space around him
From the distance of his solitude—

He:
Vapor angel,
Fading
Into
Air.

And I cannot compete.
My gaze breaks with each expectant object;
I cannot converse with any one in particular.
The grown-ups approach,
With chatter and noise,
And I am ashamed to know their lingo.
He lingers on,
Dreaming in the green currents
Of his secret revelations.

Yes, they seem secret even to himself…
And that is his beauty--

Beauty that deprives me of my gravity addiction,
And slowly I float into the marginal realms
Of this noisy room, never
To be heard from
Again.

Elegy

We
Screamers,
We lovers of laughter,
We children dancing
In the warm wavelengths
Of life as it spins us,
Smiling, proud—

At the end and in-between
The hushed holinesses and
The jittering inconsistencies,
The dolorous dark daisies of doubt
In the blind night
And
The redemptive chill
Of the morning’s red caresses,
Underneath the hills
Of our meager thoughts
And howling out of the mountains
Of our emotions,
At the deaths of pets
And in old people’s eyes—

Yes, we know, but not soon enough,
That kisses are from lips
That wrinkle and sigh,
That years are emptied of their months,
Which sob out their weeks,
Which blink through their days,
Which are made of mere hours,
Which are made of mere minutes,
Which pass by in a mere sixty seconds
(Seconds that drip quietly from a faucet
As we sleep through a third of our lives)--
While all the books
Bleed out of print,
While the Word
Drowns in the darkness,
And the world sleeps softly on…

So we fade:
Our dying exhale
Follows fast
On our new-born gasp.
Choose your words wisely.

Existentialism

How the hell do you presume to form a unified philosophy around a fundamental devotion to individualism? The myriad divergences are dizzying. The paradox is apparent. The devotees are self-baptised saints. The dogmatic god is dead and from the soil over his rotting body grow flowering acts of ownership.

On Seeing (or, I'm Sorry, You Hyperactive Sentence Snatchers)

Occasionally, in some un-searched corner of my day, as life swirls about me repeating its sardonic maxim that I am not in control—mocking me, pinching and poking, and then, like a playful father suddenly addressed by a business associate, straightening up with impenetrable features and a stone-like jaw—yes, as life spins about me like a myriad of streaming faces circling a dizzy carousel, and I am running and flailing about in joy or despair (it doesn’t matter which—only the movement brings the paralyzing realization)—occasionally, my chaotic, desperate spasms coincide with life’s undulating waves of faceless motion…and I catch a still-framed glimpse of the force that is so absentmindedly tossing me about. An he, in shock, in indignation that such a singularly muddled creature as myself—a creature born into emptiness and doomed to either a bitter, dark honesty (graying with age to a nasty pessimism) or a self-deceit so strong it must continually change faces to avoid falling apart—he, almost embarrassed that such a naked, tear-streaked child should happen upon him as he tinkered with the next trap to hurl at my feet, his face involuntarily contorts in unveiled conceit and he slaps the spinning globe into an even more fearful whirl, casting me once again into the pressing darkness of my centripetal void….

And eventually I forget the time-tucked pause. But sometime later, when the winds have whistled countless tunes to my dancing toes, when my dialogues with eternal days and hours have slowly and profoundly twisted and kissed my deepest being into new shapes and rhythms, after my path has diverged at such subtle points of sin and redemption from its previous direction—in short, when I have so consistently lived in the moment so as to be completely transformed in my power of forgetting—then, unexpectedly, the textures once again catch, the revolutions of an overpowering Life and my tiny, virginal one coincide and entwine for a silent eternity. And when again life has outsmarted me, and world which encompasses my narrow fantasies has proven too proud for me to discover to any extent but that which both teases in its gasping brevity yet quenches some unknown area of my soul—when this happens, it seems undeniable that there is a progression slowly forming, that these seductive and elusive slaps of reality are forming some mysterious and inimitable story, some dialectic among the gods concerning my fate, spoken in a language I cannot comprehend, but which, at such hopeless points of resignation that I am turning to give up, I catch a familiar turn of phrase. And the universe is a twinkling puzzle expanding around me, and I am its center, and God’s glory is blinding me from every direction. And I never forget.

Wrap

Angel, reappear.
The plains of my sadness
Roll out across the world,
Curving the earth,
Falling forever,
Torturing the cascading orbit,
Forever fictionalizing ground
As a dream of the gravity-stricken.

Return, dark angel,
Warm goddess of the night;
Return, silent siren
Of the small smile
And the incandescent giggles:
I’m drowning in the void of your absence.

Were you apparition or delusion?
These streams sing chaos
Through the empty fields
And the crickets croak dryly,
But my footprints wink mutely with the wind
That I have gone.

Laughing star,
I search your source.

&

Why is the world such a desolate place?
Because people are lonely.
Why are people lonely?
Because there is, at the deepest core of human nature, an incommensurability (quoth Kierkegaard) with the world. That is, an insatiable thirst screaming from our souls—and it is going unquenched. Why do we hide—behind friends, beneath alcohol, within dogma? Because we do not know who we are. We haven’t met ourselves. The irony: that knowledge which needs no source but ourselves—that is, self-knowledge—that is the one knowledge we have not the tiniest tickle of.
Hence the black-hole of modern science—gorging itself on nasty theories of the corporeal world, ever eating, never full—and why? Alas, not because the scientist has a deep-welling passion for the art (yes, the art) of empirical observation, but because he is escaping himself, that anonymous naked screamer on the wet streets of his soul’s cold midnight. Behold, the holy oblivion of objectivism: to transform all individual (perhaps irrational) aspects of one's self into a strangling blankness of methodical suicide. The scientist systematizes to escape. Indeed, escaping—like the professional lounger who dreams in cubes and technicolor, like the drug-addict who sells all (yea, even himself) for that numbed oblivion, like the aging woman I saw last week, saying, as she sat world-weary on the couch, “Oh, you know I don’t think after 4:30.” All living is a tumbling flight from the heights of existence, an escape from the pain of an inner glance. For what would one see there, beneath the mask constituting every aspect of one’s countenance? Just what we all fear: facelessness.

&

Only in a moment’s self-reflecting ecstasy can I forget: life is a never-ending oscillation between pain and pleasure. Sometimes I get motion sickness.
The movement seems slow but the changes are sudden. One moment I am sitting on a couch consumed by a depression that growls in the bowels of my being, and then I exhale a quick prayer or recall the ripple of a smile across her face—and the waves have receded, the clouds have cleared, and the night’s gnawing hunger has been spontaneously transformed into the dazzling infinity of the first day of summer.
Or else the other way. An unconscious harmony underlines every word I speak, every itch I scratch, every sound that breaks on my melodious ear. The world is for once a perfect sphere, the people so perfectly proportioned across its spinning surface that the revolution breaks into a divine balance. And suddenly, the tower, built so high and so steadily that my conscious attention had never rested on it, topples down; children scream, mothers mumble drunken diaries at a cluttered kitchen table, and Satan falls again onto the fragile world, breaking and bending anew all my clever constructions.

&

Kafka said that writing is a form of prayer. Here is my hunched back, Lord—here are my nervous fingers! My hands fly anxiously across this keyboard, out and in, coughing and cackling, meeting briefly in the middle only to fly apart, never joining in solemn supplication.
I can’t do anything, because I want to do everything. But something tells me that that’s not good enough, that I can’t fall back on a mere desire to be great. I have to collect myself in a holy act, and verbal vomit does not suffice.
The problem is, my standards are too high. And running in stubborn parallels are the two competing urges: writing and writing well. There’s a major distinction here: I can’t write because I need to write well, and I can’t write well because I haven’t written. That is, writing well takes practice—and practice implies a lack of greatness, which I cannot tolerate manifested on a page. So I’m stuck. I’m paralyzed by a lack of talent.
And yet I feel called not only to be patient—that is, to realize that being is essentially becoming, and that I’ll never get to a stopping point, and therefore will never be satisfied with where I am—but also to take hold of this present immaturity, to squeeze life’s fruit for all its joyous juices, to drink in my receding childhood—but also to practice. Not only to endure weakness, but to take to the field and chase it. Laughing as I fly.
The aggravatingly practical maxim slaps me in the face on every rotation (I spin, it’s steady): writing well takes practice. And practice implies imperfection. So, I must learn to tolerate imperfection.
That’s truly the heart of the problem: I’m a perfectionist. Sure, I’m not freakishly neat, and my car sits stained by my inattention, but perfectionism is usually partial, anyway. Most people have it and keep it well-caged. My feeling is that some amount of perfectionism is required for status as an interesting person. It’s the ones who are sane in every aspect that bore me to death. No one keeps score in an asylum.
Nurse your neuroticism. (Life is passion.)

Plagiarism

Readers! That clandestine phenomenon, that hidden selfishness—readers are merely lazy writers, preferring the easy feast on the fruits of another’s tedious labor to the strain of that solitary scribbling, the dreamy recline to the dolorous hunch, the concentrated potency of what took hours to line up to the nakedness of one’s inability. We read to fictionalize our own originality.

For to read—that is, to read well—is to create. Oh no, no, I banish that postmodern relativism that dethrones the conquering author to praise the impoverished reader. (I prefer the divine mandate of a poetic tyrant to that gross textual democracy.) But to read is to participate in the author’s creation. Anything less is skimming.

We, the readers of great books, are the envious, the malicious. We hate the writers we praise the most. In the act of reading them we reveal how much we want to be them, and yet cannot, else we would be blinking at the desk instead of yawning in the recliner.

(What else, other than colorful pillars of plagiarism, are full bookshelves?)

Bubble

You trembling sphere, you quivering world:
You rise toward the waves.
You are anxious, submarine beauty,
As the scene you ascend sleeps in aquatic silence,
Laden with gravity and fear.
But still you rise.
When you arrive, you will not retain
Your form, like a retired bullfighter
Wearing his cape to breakfast.
You will dissolve, fearlessly,
Into the pure fullness of your being.
You will be sky, wind, breath
As I breathe you in, tortured by the mysteries
Of land and sea—and suddenly,
As I sit scratching my cheek, my heart rises
In defiance of my anchored emotions.

Blink

Your eyelashes flash, fluttering
As pages stutter blindly in a thumb’s
Slow release.
Syllables quibble off of my paralyzed lips
As I take you in.
Your gaze breaks
From its jealous object as you turn
Your attention toward me.
I lie,
Framing jokes and acting sane,
As your little laugh shatters my world.
I’m quiet,
And you are beautiful.
When you are again distracted from
My thin attempts to see you smile,
I turn again to my pen and paper,
And sing your praise between blue lines.

On Being Loved

I’m glad I had a shitty home life. I can’t imagine hearing myself whine as much as some of these polished porcelain children who can’t seem to get over the realization that nobody’s going to be there when they break.
Of course, I’ve got nothing to complain about, myself. I grew up with enough to eat, enough to read, gnawing nipples and fingering knives with a sly smile that would make Freud reach for his pen. Yea verily, I went resentfully to a federally subsidized school, that pride of the middle-class taxpayer, that torturer of tapping feet and wandering minds. I spun sinister plots on that playground, bending fresh fantasies daily like a baker smelling yesterday’s bread as he turns on the lights. My parents hated each other, of course, but they were fairly quiet about it for a while. The grain of guilt festering in the filter of their stressed-out heads kept them roped together and only silently contemptuous. I fought with my sisters like any good boy, pinched the dog when Sunday’s backyard was sleeping, and cried in silence at the static on the TV screen when I woke up for cartoons and didn’t know what to do.
Sure, I was a fine child. But never really loved. My father never called me by my real name, preferring to hide impersonality behind a nursery wallpaper of postnatal christenings and a funny falsetto, pinching and tickling incessantly but never really wanting to grasp our innocent giggles, ruffle our sun-touched hair. My mother would have liked to love me. The heavy boot of her work-ravished world repeatedly stomped the shards of the bright daydreams I sometimes imagine her fondling through college. She had a strong mind—imprisoned now—and I imagine her youth, that muscular mind plowing through the soils of her education, breaking with a smile to chase faceless children to the house where she would someday live with a handsome husband. The reality—that she was not permitted to love me as she was so obviously dying to—that, at times, makes me question my faith.
And now, these people appear before me, rising from the crystalline lakes of a golden childhood, guarded from the evil sneezes of a sick world by all the medicine money and love could buy—and they waste it. I look into their eyes and see frail frames that have never had to fight for anything. They, the ornately programmed and musical machines, well-oiled, well-kept, that run well for a dime—that have never learned anything on their own. They who are spoiled on love, those merely affectionate beings: I look sternly, steadily at this portrait, cough into a clenched fist, and continue quietly down the hall.

Ode to Women

Poets, rush the last lines
Of your odes to women:
There are strangers on the street
Who won’t rip you apart.
Leaves kiss whispered dewdrops
Unrealized in the wilderness,
And dogs whine waiting to be loved.
Women arrive to introduce diseases
And then dangle the cure—
Those missing pages,
Those beautiful vultures.
There have been men, honest,
Who looked at that door
And refused to enter, preferring
To protest the mad instinct,
To burn like Buddhist monks
In the fire of the unwanted desire,
Laughing in the flames.
So christen this crisis the last;
Bells toll the tide’s approach,
And your clocks are out on the sand.

Alone

Door by door, you're passing me by, laughing and crying into ears that aren't listening; and I'm sitting inside, all alone.
Because you could open me up. Yes, it takes depth of character and years' experience to get it down right; we're all drunk on our own insecurities, howling in pain underneath pristine exteriors, crawling around amid the shambles of our feelings searching for something to sell to a consumer economy. But just stop a minute, and listen carefully: I'm here to meet you, as torn-up by the world as the world is by itself; I'm standing just on the other side, waiting for the slightest insinuation, a faint falter from the heights of your indifference—a slip of the censor, a prick of the hidden tenderness. Knock, friend, ever so quietly; place your palm on the knob, and I'll let you in.
God, how it hurts to see the world place you back on the rack. Society’s education is to learn to see oneself through the eyes of others, who have been taught the same thing. And the murderous insight of the unschooled is the realization of the system’s insistence on mandating who you are and then condemning you for it.
Where does all this come from? Hurt feelings, naturally. I don’t know if I’ve ever been slightly understood by anyone (I really don’t), but today the person who I had imagined as catching a scent of my simmering essence, who caught a glimmer of my movement in his periphery, and for whom I had crumpled up so many lonely hopes—today that person refused to see me as I actually am. Some stranger said something that alerted him to a coincidence, a condemned eccentricity in my character—and I watched from the ground as he went flying around the corner, having tripped over my wasted faith as he ran. Held his breath, afraid of the quarantine. I watched the curtain fall over his eyes.
The world is a vampire, ain’t that the damned truth. And I sigh as I hear the heckling of those who love me unconditionally, enraged at the use of a dirty word.

Note

Here’s the deal: when I tap my foot on the ash-stained cement, you be the butterfly mounting invisible treble clefs to the conduction of city sirens. That’s it, and that’s all. The people passing in cars being beaten apart by over-amplified basses can watch as we re-create musical theory; I don’t want anything but the simplicity of this streetlamp’s warm territory.
Forget the tangled knots you stuffed into your pockets to deal with later; let’s not gift existence to these trivialities by holding solemn conferences over them. Let them rot on the agenda.
Conversely, let the future die in the fictional distance. I’m sick of committing. Horizons lie, anyway. We’re orbiting reality, love; let’s slow down to the terrestrial tug.
So here we go: the street expects, the finger finds, and the interrupted transitive implies impatience. The decrepit conductor turns, straightening his coattail and running a cool hand over his pallid pate; lips are licked and pressed to polished mouthpieces in romantic preparation; and eyes straining under the weight of disdainful brows search out the source as my whispered joke reaches the punch line, and your hand flutters up to contain a muffled chuckle.

Apology

The cosmos paused before the storm awoke,
And the sneeze teased, and the water waited.
The doorway’s torpid tension never broke
Between out and in. The music faded.
My home’s moment of respiratory
Crisis, the pendulum’s pause at the rhyme
Of its smile, a gray hour’s purgatory
Implying the absolute. On ticked time,
Her fretful fingers swinging make-believe
Rings around the hole where I watched the lights
Fade on and off. Then the air coughed, the sieve
Strained, and fingers danced on keys in the night.

Your image clouds with my trembling exhale—
In the storm’s static I raise my shirt-tail.

Glass-Topped Table and an Underline

A prophetic mug cramps the diffused profusion
That slowly reaches self-realization on my
Coffee table, its parched cavity telling vestigial truths
Of future reuses.
Several bygone sepulchral celebrities
Drown in their undesired glory as they hang on these walls—
Preoccupied antitheses of those nonentities that swim
Through the profits of their prostituted beauty
As they slouch on wire racks in-between
Cheap chocolate and the real deal.
Mountainous academia seems self-suspended
Over my extended legs, as my toes huddle
For shod consolation between four sundry sentries
Guarding the ancient inexplicable eclipses made by
My stifling textbooks. Other objects of interest include
A gas heater reminding me of thermal pockets of paradise
In-between the dually depressing horrors of
My pulled-back covers and a teacher’s icy exhales—
And a quaint collection of poetry that slyly reminds me of
Happiness, and suddenly the sheets are slipping.

Here's One From the Lazy Days of Summer

My goodness. It seems like the day starts right before it starts to end. Where does it all go? Down a hole? Is there a reserve somewhere, and a stringent distributor? I always lie in bed at night, having pushed as far into the morning’s hours as my body allowed, with the taste in my mouth of not having enough drink to wash down a dry bite. Turn up the glass to get the last drop, concentrate the flow, swallow with steady force—and it’s still not enough. A cruel proximity to satiation. And then I drift off to sleep still dry-mouthed, I awake in the morning, sit down to a long wooden breakfast table at the other end of which is seated a man silently snickering behind the blind of a quivering newspaper, and the maid who refills my unwashed glass with the exact same amount of liquid as the day before seems only a little better at hiding her hilarity. I try bargaining, sometimes pleading with her for more, but she scurries off quickly, somehow embarrassed before my confused inquiries, her seams about to burst from the tension of her restraint. I swallow slowly, satisfaction escapes around the bend of an imperfect angle, and then—off to bed. That’s it. Nobody looks me in the eye. And I never get anything done.
Wake up, brush teeth, eat breakfast (an illogical order recognized here), book, store, home, lunch, phone a friend, regular exercise, lethargic languor, hazy words on the printed page, pitiful attempt at creativity, and then off to bed…still thirsty. And feeling like my day consisted merely of carrying out those dull daily prerequisites for experiencing life’s true substance. I’m perpetually preparing to live. A sigh is all that comes out when I pose for prayer, and my words haven’t had time to simmer to moist divinity. I spend a moment hoping that God knows what I mean, and then somnolence sneaks up from underneath and kicks me into the reflective waters. That was another day—and here I am, with two sad paragraphs and eight to ten fingers’ worth of alphabetical buttons.
And every night I’m revisited by the recurring dream of being blessed with insomnia.

Please

The arduous melody flees through the wind-tickled trees and the band players tremble in blushed intimidation at the well-fed notes being born of their horns. My steps transpire on the sidewalk’s surface as if on a coarse independent plane (a squarely sectionalized pathway to the absurd), my mind absorbs the tones and colors of my own psychological projections, dressed and deemed worthy of a fine play on words, and my eyes roam over this town which I’ve seen a thousand times, which I’ve never seen before.
And all of this in my mind. In reality I sit in a church office thinking about her, trying to decide how to die and with what style and which pants. The old people—old couples, sad men, quiet widows, all smelling like embalming fluid—that have been floating across the span of my open doorway for the past three days, here to have their pictures taken for a collage of everyone who hasn’t realized that someday they will die, talk always about their hair and ailments. Ironic, that they perpetually complain of illness and never really die. My God, is it impossible to have a purpose at that age?
My thoughts return to her, her as she stands there blinking into the silence, sits here laughing with that silly friend, her as, eyes gravity-stricken, she whispers to my confidant that she can’t tell who I am. I—I try to justify my jerkiness with cynical syllogisms and existential angst; I try to cry, but I only sneeze.
And every night I pray for hours. Isn’t that funny? I pray for hours and never talk to God. I wake up and spit sloppy insults, write contemptuous words about the sweet, if virtuously mediocre, old people sitting quietly in the folding chairs in the hallway, I refuse to let her into my mind (it’s so messy—I’ve just seen off a raucous band of criminals that ate my food and ignored me when I tried to entertain them at the breakfast table), and I don’t know how to respond when someone actually cares. Funny, right?
Yes, quite funny. I laugh it up in my dark psychotic basements or out in the streets as I burn down the edifices of innocence, drunk as hell.

Prayer

Let me forge these days as my weapon
And not let them merely fly by, raw material.

The earth spins over the years, you know—
Millions or billions, trend dependent—

But our work is to mold it.

Eight Lines at the Beach

The crustaceous arachnids crudely crawling
A slow scamper sideways across the rocks,
The beer-laden duo covered in sandy tattoos
With their illusory masculinity poorly mooring
Weak wills and weird fears,
The tide rises over the bobbing bodies
Of an anxious cluster necessitated by the raging waves,
And the naked girls’ blind butts outshine the seashells.

Sadness

And the strangest thing
Is that you let them.

Yes, you—you sitting there smiling
As they make their ridiculous demands
On your peace and quiet,
That band of political pirates.
And you walk away,
You walk away somehow proud—
Like a teenage girl who let him
Go too far.
They’re raping you,
Little girl.

Spiritually ravaging you.
How could you let them?
Because, you know, this is
Very avoidable: God only waits
For you to say the word…
Silence.
And I sit, dissolved into a corner,
Letting them laugh on in the thunder
Of their excrement,
Watching as they take everything from you.
Your ancestor’s heirlooms,
Your kid’s candy.
Sometime down the road they’ll
Beat you up and take your clothes.

How? Or why does it take place?
This conformation to foreign fashion,
This imitation of their inattentive conception,
Their desecrating cartoons of your
Holy confession?
(The neighbor’s muddy dogs running
Rampant across your poor mother’s kitchen floor.)
Why do you act like they want you to?
Why do the girls give up like that?

I’ve yelled these questions into
Mirrors and madhouses.
I always end up insane.

And the craziest thing
Is that you let them.

I Laugh Sometimes A Lot

On the porch, reading and whatnot. A glance at an impatient cell phone screen tells me its 1:15 a.m. This is my favorite part of the day, as scheduled. A dark bark from an unseen dog, the undulating roll of the crickets' exchange (somehow never monotonous or annoying), me snickering and hearing myself--a self-repeating cycle ensues. The night's appropriation is saved for those who can look back on a day of satisfying self-assertion. Me from the morning is a long way off, far enough now for me to wave at without this mocking expression being perceived by the distant figure. The orange haze from the streetlamp filtering through the leaves, the thick impersonal darkness closing my perception into a manageable space, contrasting my consciousness in a way the sunshine never could. This nocturnal weight presses the juices from these long-standing impressions, and I miss her, that quiet girl. Then I laugh. The coincidence of multiple instances of me drinking wine and loving life just a little more than usual is humorously and forebodingly scaring me. But it's funny.
I have a doctor's appointment at 10:15 in the morning. I need to leave time for an only slightly laborious waking-up and those purely necessary hygienic routines. This would be a suitable time for me to go to sleep--but I don't much like suits anyway.

Death of a Bicycle

The midnight fight of pale headlights,
Like a raging cancer patient falling out of bed,
The backward burn of that secret red
That shows the frightened dust
Falling from these vague leaves
As the vacuous cat purrs with me inside—
I’m leaning out of its side window.
The small house where we picked him up,
Him and his bicycle, where we came to get it—
The house opens its eyelid and
Sees his mother waking up within.
The detained light is a danger to our whispers.
And me the seated beast’s last voluntary victim,
Her stomach plays horrible music
As I watch these floundering friends
Take him apart, the bicycle.
A sudden blow to his bisected head and
He is on the ground, his veins twitching still.
They are upon him all at once,
Dealing out the suffering blows
In the crawling crimson vapors
Of our secret sadism.
I turn away, I turn away as I hear
His gurgled cry for help.
A firefly perforates the night air
And I pretend to connect the segments;
A lone lamp stranded in the country field
Melts a pool of orange butter below—
But I still see them tearing him up.
They deal him their gasping frustrations,
Unnecessary now, and take him apart
Piece by piece.
He must fit in the back, you know,
And I am chosen to squeeze in there,
This mechanical corpse all unbolted
And disfigured.
So I stare straight ahead, and giggle quietly
As I imagine that vacant tire’s
Dead gaze, haunting my periphery.
These friends laugh loudly, and we drive.

Spiritually Speaking

If you're looking, you're going to find it. And if you're not--well, maybe you'll get lucky.

C

The ugly thing about beauty
Is that you’re not here with me.
You pretty girl,
You unknown force,
You swirl of subtle movements that
Compose some profound silence.
You devastation.
The vibrant vibration
That has made it’s home in
A room behind my stomach,
The dizzy winds that spin
Scintillating around my head
Serve only to awaken me
To a very small hole that
Runs right through the middle—
The circumference of the finger that I
Once felt so faintly in my palm.

(You opaque presence in this room
Of half-human transparency.)

Yet everything is divine.
I awake into infinity
And act ecstatically.
The day is everything, but
Nothing more than a composition
Of a million open moments.

(But in weak minutes and quarter-hours
The days are merely parenthetical asides
In a story of me awaiting the entrance
Of the compelling absent protagonist.)

Just like that,
The movement suddenly turns tragic—
A sudden disorientation with no explanation,
A subterranean shift,
A rare scent on the wind,
Amnesia in the courtroom,
That feeling of waking up lost
Or forgetting why you walked in
Or anticipatory anxiety
Or maybe just
Fear.

Fear
Of unveiling something empty
That’s wrapped up like a present
Or opening your mouth and finding
Nothing.
Fear of
That woman with the scissors and the
Ghostly eyes
Or maybe some mother who
Drinks in the back room.
Fear me, because I fear you
Showing up out of nowhere and
Finding me like this.

(Open me up and inside you will find
A muttering old man neurotically combing his hair.)

I’m afraid that
Somewhere between the clouded frames
Of my magnified self-conceptions
The handsome proprietors of
My unsanitary solitude are
Slowly murdering you in my mind,
Quietly and behind my back
The thieves of my timetable are
Defiling the collage I had formed
From the things you said when
You thought I wasn’t listening.

Perhaps the next time we pass on the street
Or greet in my dreams
You won’t fit the description.

Or
Perhaps,
Like a bright bell twinkling
Through this voluptuously
Volatile night,
Like the small touch of a child
Descending your dreams of destruction,
Perhaps this is not so bad, after all.

I’m struggling in your arms
Like a child in a nightmare.
Hold on
Tighter
Love,
Look at me
And smile.

Nietzsche Could Have Said

Nostalgia is felt by those who dream longingly of times when they were not fully awake.
No one who seizes and swallows every harbinger of life ever looks back with anything but fondness and approval--and that for but a moment before they keep on.

Night Drive

When all I ever had was right before me then:
A faint flourescent line and a monotonous warning refraction
A weight was contained in a pale beam's divorce
And lifetimes passed by as I waited to die.