The spirit that walks with you walks with me too. I’ve heard it in salvation’s rings. Though I know: every living person walks alone. Our stone is not in tune; it’s no damn use. We spend money we don’t have just to try to laugh. We spit on the debt accrued and call it rude and feel so blue. I bet one little bag on the life I had just to try to laugh. I walked from the path that’s right in the bit of light that made my shadow shed. When I confidently cried my eyes to red, I felt all right. ¶ I find it strange the process of feeling shitty about writing. I can sometimes get so overwhelmed by how pointless it feels, reading it back. But I think as long as I try enough, I can find something like truth to say, something true to me, and that somehow is bearable at least. Maybe its being true to me gives me something like hope. I’m not always so sure. Even if it’s a sad truth. But I have been very happy to walk. I will walk alone for however long it takes to get somewhere. I am very happy, to walk.
A Modern Film But in Black and White
“Then rebel yell, despite the wands of yov. Me like the way that nothing shut it off. I come across a hundred trials a day. Not even one can serve to take me away; I’m a herder yah.”
A Modern Film But in Black and White
The recreation of the scene in May. There is a picnic blanket and a pair of people on it discussing nothing. The dialogue is voiced over. A bald man with a handlebar mustache in a wifebeater and suspenders mimes smoking a cigarette or a jay. Many many bald eagles congregating on the snowcovered branches of a Canadian forestry. A hundred or so butterflies flit about in a churchyard some in focus some in blur some going in and out of frame. It is all in black and white. The director desponds the film. He doesn’t like stories. The crew of seven know nothing of what to do with the day. Now and then I pick up my thermos and sip a bit of bitter coffee, watching on from the knoll. Where Distresser wants me, I go, and I watch the world like his eyes and his ears and olfactories and gyroscope and I know very little of what to do with my day. I set down the invisible microphone in my hand I’ve been using to narrate, wanting to be the mime in the film. I do not know what it will look like. I want to be at one with day. I want to hear and fear and be swept away into something. I want to know everything. Even about very little. I want to swing up eternally and fall forever, too. The director says, to the couple on the hatchwork blanket in the summery park in the day, “You, move over this way. Just a little. Yeah. And you. Be alive. You only have today. This is your only day.” I want to be the director, directing things. I want to be the smooth alive fire in the eyes of the grizzly looking into my cabin through the window in January. The Christmas tree over nestled presents in December. The thanksgiving feast being eaten. The whole damn month of November. The ghosts of Halloween. The reversal of autumn from winter back to summer, forever, going backward to the very beginning. I want to be all things. This May. The director quiets his mind. He then says, “No no no it is all all wrong. We must develop a patternless sequence. Other pretentious things.” I kind of scoff from the knoll. Where I’m sitting, just in earshot of them. To myself. I don’t think it’s pretentious. I think the word’s overused. I think Why count yourself out like that? Man? And then I think, But it is dumb. Shut up. Shush. ¶ The corrective arrangement of my garment today is a loose white shirt depicting the poster for an old movie I’ve never seen. I walk barefoot out in the cold through the fallen leaves of winter. I feel cold inside and all over. I don’t have a judgment for the day. Not yet. I become water, spilling over the rim of a sad fountain. I smile. I am a giddy sad fountain smiling walking barefoot through the leaves of the autumn over the well-thick grass of the yard. Little bits of black bark. Green. Brown. Soft beige. Yellow. Leaves and bark and grass in various stacks. I smoke a cigarette in a shed and write down about all the things I never needed but somehow want anyway. I watch God overlook me as another example of the conditional human. I come home in my heart to a table that is never made. How dumb do we get when we are. Here. Forever, I am not too sure I know. I gliss over the word count. Gliss is a word I think I’ve made up which I likely haven’t. It means, “verb: To gloss in a blissful and/or speedy way.” I tap with the rapidity of an ear-scratching rabbit’s foot on the keyboard about essentially nothing or essentially something in order to pass the time. To feel my fingers move across the keyboard. I knock on the door and my God opens. I cannot see it, though. Whoever’s responsible for opening the door. When I walk inside, it shuts, and all is black until I eventually bump into a light. I write on the fictional truth from the perspective of a real thing. I do not know where any given sentence’s start will end. I become somewhat turned in on myself as I begin to think and so stop thinking for a moment and utterly zone out for what feels like a long time but is probably actually only a few seconds. I go from 700 words to 800 words. It makes sense that it doesn’t make sense. I write about the black and white modern film that I never watched getting made. Pretending I am a fictional person. I assay to describe things I have never seen in person as though the videos replayed in my head are true. Who knows what is right and what is going truly on this way or that way. I do not pretend to enjoy absolutes or to understand. I maybe do. I do not pretend that I have to understand. I maybe do. Watch out while I move over my hand to the ash tray. To ash the cigarette I wish were a joint. I am sober going on four months and cannot make sense of it. I want to be at least a little high right now but cannot manage it. I think I’d right a lot better, at least a lot freer, high, but know that’s probably not so true. I want to turn upside down the plate on which my mind’s dinner sits and watch it fall onto the floor in disarray and go uneaten and weep about the tragedy of the self-sabotaging I’ve done. This was the person I once may have been. It is all fictional now. There is something under the current of things I cannot get at that I feel may at least be true but which does not seem to want to show itself, if it is there. I want to read about the You and Jean-Paul Sartre and Blue Bayou Bangarang Awful Shoe and the woman with gnarly thighs who lives in my head’s dreams for a future life and the pet pup I may never have’s name I may never give it and the ladder that extends for seeming ever somewhere so far up and down that the terminus of either cannot be seen. I want to subsume the fictional manuscript I’ve created in my heart and subconscious and assume it and write it all out in a dream and print it all out in real life. I want to take into consideration the most honest things. I want to become one of those old dire figures the stories get written about writing a thing that writes a thing. That is essentially what the book is about that I’m working on. I’m just afraid that I won’t be able to do it so well. I know I should do it anyway, but I’m tired of saying “should.” As well, though, as the last sentence which so much imbues the hoary old cliché more than anything. Yeah yeah. It’s all respective to me though. And here I am harping on myself, though, in realtime. That’s maybe why other people and characters are so necessary. They take us outside of ourselves and let us go somewhere else while still relating to a person. They let us relate to *another* person. I think this is a good thing. I want to watch the pond village eat up all its leaves’ dew drops. The little Atlantis of the Squibblesquabs living there get overshadowed by the ice age of this winter until June fades suddenly into frame and the whole civilization is gone. Washed out to the mud banks. ¶ There is a necessity to at least create a story at some point. To run in tune with something that is there because it may not be there all the same. There is the sense at last of something gained you so desire. It requires the work to make it music, though. And, though it is written as though it’s been gained, it has not been gained. I wonder.
Before The End of Time
Because I’ve only just become able to understand. Surrounded on all sides by everything. My anxiety can be let to eat me alive. If it is so allowed. Otherwise, who knows. There are too many options sometimes. There are too many ways things can turn out. Though. Even the way my hands repose is just as much a signifier of these and times and times and times. Sometimes things don’t make any sense. And the senselessness wills the snowballing of dents. I become a bird above an airlock trying to fly against a vacuum’s pull. I have no clue why or to whose order I owe the things. There are processes I still can’t understand. Even as the madness takes hold, there is a part that can stop it all. It is a man convincing himself he is crazy, just as capable of being sane. Imagine, though, that the one thing that makes one crazy is believing they are crazy. Isn’t that a trip. The seed of the idea is the problem itself. Were it this way or that, who knows. Then when you find yourself above or below the pinnacle, will you know? There are journeys we’re on that comfort us for forgetting. Where we’ve come from what we’re doing what’s been going on all along. Who can tell if it’s this way or that that we’re meant to go. Who can tell how a meaning is meant. Why am I as much enraptured by the shapes of the letters on the page as I am by the words and their meanings they create? Is it because it’s all relative, inside me, anyway? Is something really wrong with me? Who is to say? Against what measure or what art. Who knows. “There are sometimes too many things” across the spine of a book. My eyes twitdh and throb and my body jerks sometimes in my sleep. Backwards. Like I’m being pulled. To or from where I have no clue. I would like to learn though, at some point. ¶ Then what brick by brick step must I be arranged to climb. If I live in a town of gloom and who I’ve become is not the same. If my grammar abandons its rules, so long as it helps my point, who’s to say? There are ad infinitum streams to say there are ad infinitum things. The theoretical library full of every type of book imaginable, including the ones which include the library. Similar to Borges’ intimations. And then there are other rooms with other people at other times. If there is really a good or bad way. Again on the multiphasic emblems the time decides. If one part is wrong, the rest all get thrown out. That is the way it typically goes with these things. Maybe the very best way to start it out is to imagine a frame getting drawn. I don’t know. But I like how a friend said about why humans like to watch fire so much being supposedly because there is no distinct pattern to the flames, and this stimulating the brain. I’m not sure how but I’d like to be able to do that with my writing. Or maybe I think that’s what I’m already doing. With all this nonsensicalness or whatever. I want to open a door of light and fall to sleep inside. With no distractions from the tired blank array. To take on the weight of a slight ray and warm myself. Become all one. I feel like a stranger unable to understand. Why anyone is kind to me. Through a lens turned destructive against myself. To not understand. Why I can’t understand. A billion light years out from one moment to the next. Not a single clue only blue-blue blue. Noble noble hey, hey. Runs from hell-bent angels ensue. Why would I want to understand when I just have to get away. Then what more could I have to say apart from the same old thing? Blue while old the cold veins disarray. Nothing but a Saturn setting itself on rings. Nothing while us on our way. Told from the perspective of the light. I’m become my own the end of things. End of bureaucratic problems, with them all, all the time. Maybe some time. No one stays. Only a little later. We all find out ways. Maybe a little later. Who knows. ¶ Then there are days. So some of us say. There are days. We make a part of ourselves open. They become the we we were wanting all along. All for ourselves. They become nothing we become one. How can I parse this bit for you? What do you think it says? The engine leads the manuscript along a supply line. The Readers take a look or two, as it passes along their conveyor belts. Not one part is recognized; not one bit is known. The publisher prophesies what is his own. I do not know. It is satisfying, though. Read each word. Let it fall through your head. That God can recognize what is wrong with you. There are problems. All the time. Everywhere. You don’t need to be apart to get away from. But which you feel so keenly you’re in distress. Not the only thing to be read aloud. The man at the mouth of the mirror watching himself get closer as he leans in. Watches his eye. I dis-apart come clean with the coke up my nostrils. Breathe steadily not known just yet. My face is a runaway paradise gone strange. Not this once I like to listen to dissociative songs. With underlays of off piano over which the ambience of a room plays in which some date is talking to you. Not me not my voice on the stereo. Not my voice on the record. The staunch despondent the road that says “die” the nomad who must walk it down. Twisting away the camera lens which records me looking into it confused. Become anguished long darks set apart by song. Become the one strong thing still in the guitar and synth wisping away. Lapsing over the rock glow of my pills in their containers. S.O.S. distressing setter down of light things. Whale’s slow heartbeat. Ringin’ out. Baby’s laughter. That was yours. When you were a child. Tomorrow’s anvils coming down hard. Yesterday’s forgotten gray fading slowly just recently bolder than it is now. The tablets on the wall mirroring your face wanting you to suffer in silence. Having wants, being inanimate. Rough exposure “But it was only a fantasy. The wall was too high as you can see.” ¶ Now can you please lift me up, God? Again? Show me when you’re being so honest. I cannot tell the sky from sea. There are reasons I should not see. I know now I was not alone—all this time I’ve been on my own. Come back the siren quire forever in deep. Come back the truth you’re forgetting now, don’t forget, remember. Remember. Remember.
Early Morning Sleepless Squabbles 1
About some of these things, I can’t even read. Much like how you are what you eat, you are what you consume mentally as well. I have not been doing the best in that regard. I could do better to put something good into my ears and eyes. Speak some good things out my mouth. There are times it is just second nature to idly sit by through the day and do nothing. But the fixation on not doing anything is just as much a problem as the not doing anything itself. If I were to really change, what would that look like? Are these all just testaments to how I’m like a battery getting perpetually charged and recharged? Just material—some material thing? I’m listening to “Echoes” by Pink Floyd. The sheer quality of their studio recordings is incredible. I really admire that. It’s also kind of peaceful and profound to me. Their songs let the instrumentation and ambience sing as much as the voices do. “And do I take you by the hand – and lead you through the land – and help me understand the best I can.” Just a kind of a lilting from one line to the next. I am trying not to idolize things so much anymore. It’s very easy to do. Some of their music seems slightly boring to me, in a way. But I also like that about it. I think there is a need for some boredom in things. The problem isn’t in the boring parts. The problem is in how you treat the boring parts. You can either let yourself absorb and come along or stay behind and shut it out with meaning. I’m tired of always looking for meaning in things. I’m too symbolic. I need to just be. Pick and choose. Realize I’m investing in whatever I’m giving my attention to. Give my attention to better things. Don’t judge so much. Let what is be. Be what I am. The watcher watching things. Even now, I am thinking too much. ¶ The light upon the hall calls will I never be the scented reed that smells like waves of fields the winter wrung. Candles lit beneath my feet feel like a cool white whirl of air that courses up my soles into my eyes. No one has to stand alone, and no one has to understand. The way we want the truth to be is wrong. I come to pass my open mind with eyes that see for once beyond myself to where the door is buffering. I see then through the rest and don’t relieve my body of its weight; I am not what I seem; I am to seem. So what with all I think. Right now I am able to feel my own body but do not really ally to it the way I think I often would; maybe I do so more, now. I am typing something out. It is almost ritualistic. At this point in the song, I can almost feel my soul floating through me. Into my body with its veins a little tight, my back arched, on the couch reaching out to the keyboard. The voice is just another sound. The voice is round and comes out loud, even whispering. To what to where my heart connects I pride myself on little things. I have to think or else I have to be. Don’t this don’t that do whatever I say. In the vocal range of Mickey Mouse. Or Alan Watts. Or God. To determine for yourself your own higher power. Mine is a thing, for sure, though I’m not all too aware of what it is. I know I have a name, a true name, I just don’t know what it is really. Or else I don’t relate. I do, however, really enjoy tapping into my own body like this. I do whatever I can whatever I must whatever is necessary to adjust to the harsh this the harsh that the next thing the true fact the big lie the dumb con the wrong place the right on. I know I know I know. No one knows the same. But I do. And I know. And I know. And I know. I am in the process of becoming either crazier or more sane, and I am coming to become less concerned which it will turn out to be. All I have is this little tin crumb of a moment passing by slippage out my hand the one lonely ornery true thing. I get pulled out like I’m doing acid, but I’m over three months sober. Must have some of that in my spine, still. Either way, I love you love you rosy true way out there where beneath all that weight I’m passing on. Sometimes you just have to let yourself tap a little longer into the chaos. Fingers made of words pull the page apart. Then there is no longer any you or I and only the mindless forever, whatever the cause. There are parts to play and I know because this could quite honestly go on for forever, because each forever can contain another one and each one is muddy black tar-soaked clay forming the shape of a person behind the page behind the lens pointing the camera at the thing that becomes the words the very words on the page and even when I have no vision left or hearing or words I will know and be in touch with that still tune going on all the time inside all of us inside everything. There is no respite from the vibration of timeless space. I am my words I am the space they take up I am the space I am in I am space itself I am the fabric of gravity’s reality, maybe reality itself. All you have to do is see your eye. The black hole at the center, sucking the light in. That is how you’ll know. Heavens to Besty. Don’t we all. Jumbling scrabble, scree despondent waiting on a the edge the width of the eye of a needle each little rock, each pebble on the mountainside in space.
How did you get to be so sad? Oh. I know. It’s not so easy, once you’ve gotten used to it. To have become the shadow of yourself. To be cast across the floor while you stand. That is the essence of what I mean, here. My writing is indulgent. It makes me sick. To no end. And I cannot seem to do anything with it the way I once felt I could. I cannot seem to feel about it the way I once did when I’d read it back. I am dramatic, overly. Even now, I am moaning. I cannot get away. But there is a light in the essence of the slow. The seeming freeze that takes hold in the wake of the world ending upright. I don’t know. Sometimes I just have to let my mind lose hold a little. Spout some nonsense so I can feel like I’ve done something. I just want to create something, and be proud of it. Sometimes, I think. That is all I want. I am not the most consistent. I don’t really read. I could do much better with doing a little more of that and a little less probably of writing about how I can’t write. I may just be actualizing all these fears. What I mean to escape keeps confronting me. And I do nothing to service my own ability to face. I’m so sick of it. I want to do something real. I want to make something. The work as a being of its own. I’m so sick of being in my head about who I am. I’m so sick of caring so much what other people think. I’m sick and tired. The expression. I’m sick and tired.
So Thens
So Thens
(bespoke to self on the actualization: life doesn’t have to always make sense. At least say something, so long as it is true.)
Let’s begin with what we were really inspired by. Sitting in AA, the woman with the intellect said something about sitting in the void of not speaking. Biting the tongue until it falls off. So something like some true inspiration may just be able to take hold, now. What is the course of love? How can we know? Jest in Junes, Mays having passed, about the future’s all-wilds. Quest to the beach where sun do shine and waves do splash, hey. I was somewhat aware. I would not let myself make any money or be any responsible, though. Oh, what a life the lazy man leads. Being a loser for the sake of filling a need. And I have been there.
But laid across my open mind, the ocean’s rind of splendid dross as set in buoys floating out beyond the sandbar were just surface spots above the lots of life beneath. The fishes circled fishes circling. I came to orbit on myself a bit more than I’d care to tell. But either way, the end was not in sight. A long-told passage out of time sits wary in a slate of stone and seems to mean that someone’s suffering.
Man, bemoan your little spite; it matters not the cause or care; it only serves to keep you where you are. Just get up for this once today. Control yourself if you can. Exercise the will to live at all. The passage read that if you tried, you at least did that before you died. The passage ended midway, buffering. The stone the stencil pairs its rod a soft dull chisel ´way bespeaks the ending of the things it handed down.
Test
This is a teszt fo shoooo, though, y’know, you edon’t alway know, y’know? So what we got here, funky junkies, is the reason the blast zone so big. We have here the exodus to a massive state of RUST. Wait up, hill cats. There ain’t no more road for the lone nomad in the Exclusion Zone. Hiya!