when things fucked up

i woke at dawn, bolt upright in the clear consciousness of the idiocy of my predicament.

suppose all time was not the way it is with me. suppose it's mellifluous curves and parabolas, it's contractions and contortions, the love and hate were of different mathematics altogether. what if?

one truth comes to me strangely, out of the blue. for no reason i can think of, the thought comes to me that for the first time in my life, i am fucking sorry. and things are closing off.

everything he said is precise and to the point.

i found myself close to tears. but i couldn't cry and at such moments i felt fear edged with despair, and occasionally despair edged with fear.

i was scared shitless. it was a powerful thing happening, a sudden outcome of truth deeper than what i had known about myself -- i hurt him. it was painful, though in the scheme of things pain is a kind of strange word.

yet alone with my thoughts and growing unease, i found myself adrift on a broiling sea of guilt in a galeforce wind.

there are times love would seem to be the only word capable of describing the frightening physics of this momentum. there is desolation and then there is each other.

the only way to deal with the Hyenas of this world is not let them into your lives. blind yourself to their wares.

puke

sleep. the place where a deeper unease can penetrate through sick bone and aching muscle, an unease so fine and lightweight it can settle even on the atoms of oxygen in your lungs, coat them with dread silt, weigh them down, so you puff restlessly all night and whimper into the dawn.

when i'm drifting into sleep, sometimes i jolt half awake for a moment, and i realize i feel scared. then i think about the things enveloping my life. what's outside the mist? surely goodness and mercy shall follow me, i dunno, it seems such a tall order. so then, i think -- and i'm half-awake, mind you -- this too shall pass. it must. i will reenter the world: free at last to choose from all its parts. not just forced to choose only one of them.

forced to choose. hmmm.. near sleep the mind throws words around. compulsion. independence. all that shit.

on any given night i dream of horses, car accidents, mental asylums, endless train journeys, storms, boats.

then in the morning, i wake up, there is nothing but fear, oceans of it, no boat to be seen, and how long can i dog-paddle? the water is everywhere, every direction i look. a mean day, the gray water. nothing is not fear. the day takes place.

this is so unsettling. things. events. they just happen, you don't control them. it's away from the madness of daylight, in my dreams, i find the sadness that my days just can't connect with. out in the day, i can only survive.

i would vomit up my life if i could.

holden

sometimes, because of the logic of the poetry, the name of the game is hauntingly accurate. love. for instance, it was called that because if you were taken out and shown, you wouldn't know it was there. lots of people don't. it sounded obsure and exotic and i wanted to see it. i had never seen a big one and wanted to. i am young enough to be sharp as hell, for my regular doses of slammed doors, crabbily chainsmoking and the traditional family psychodramas. i am convinced that one day my heart is simply going to explode. i mean, go completely kablooey inside my chest. i don't even care. my lifestory: "the woman who desperately wanted to be hit by lightning".

until girl interrupted meets catcher in the rye.

talk about someone speaking to you from beyond. it just woke me up and never in my life have i lunged so instinctively for someone as though he was intrinsically a part of me -- like a leg or an arm i'd casually misplaced for twenty two years. he was left staring at my poor, battle-scarred soul, under the enigmatic smile. he tried to think of something, anything, he could do for me. he emptied the contents of his soul into mine. you could imagine his strength -- his soul -- was a white laser beam shooting from his heart into mine, like those light pulses in glass wires that can pump a million books to the moon in one second. this beam was cutting through my heart like a beam cutting through a sheet of steel. he could take or leave this strength that i so obviously lacked -- but he just wanted it to be there for me as a reserve.

he'd never given one nanosecond's worth of time to anyone -- all mine, just for me to hold on.

i could give my life to this man. no regrets.

goodbye

on the edge of sleep she thought again about the way -- he had addressed her, in that strange talk. she had not seen him express emotion before or since. even his lovemaking had been a silent thing, the only at the last had his breathing roughened and then stopped for a minute. he was like something out of a fairytale or a myth, the last of his breed in a world that writing the last page of its book. it didn't matter. he could stay for a while. tomorrow was the time enough to think, or the day after that.

she slept.

love at first sigh

a forced sigh emitted. body knocking against body; standing room only -- just before Ortigas a seat opens up, almost glowing angel, singing, just for next to it sits a man with good hair and stylish glasses.

vibes.

but it's all demeanor and dress. well, modish glasses, good hair and a reading book are just what i need now. calm karma, patience, i see, thoughtful.

so the best part of this empty seat, besides the man sitting next to it -- him, looking down at a book -- is the man's age. a mid-to-late-twenty-something , i seat myself with grace, with poise -- but, my timing is perfect, sitting down before the driver slams the pedal, before the bus lurches forth, and immediately i love this seat: he looks good, he reads, and God, he smells good too! i look at his book for title atop page, but seeing none, continue to enjoy his peripheral presence.

LSS

ever experienced a song that had been playing itself through your mind all day, the maddening kind of thing that will not let go, that stands mockingly outside tha apse of the conscious mind and makes faces at the rational being inside?

how does that grab you?

cigarette butts

if a God watches over it all, does He actually mete out justice for a race of gnats among an infinite races of gnats? does His eye see the sparrow fall when the sparrow is less than a speck of hydrogen floating disconnected in the depths of space? and if He does see, what must the nature of such a God be? where does He live? how is it possible to live beyond infinity?

well, so maybe the universe offers a paradox too great for the finite mind to grasp. as the living brain cannot conceive of a non-living brain -- although it may think it can -- the finite mind cannot grasp the infinite.

quit your job

i live small life on the periphery, i am marginalize and there's great deal in which i choose not to participate. i wanted silence and i have that silence which i arrived here speckled in sore and headaches, my colon so tied in knots that i never thought i'd have bowel movements again. my system had stopped working, jammed with the odor of QA monitoring sheets, mineral water, the smell of three o'clock in the morning and the endless stress of "is this a telemarketing call?" done grudgingly to little applause. i had compulsions that made me confuse shopping with creativity, to take Advil every eight hours and assume that recently watching DVD on a Monday morning was enough. but now that i have to live,things are much, much better.

november 9, 2001

"strip." "talk to your self." "look at the view." "masturbate." it's a day later and the two of us are rattling down along Banaue Avenue., handed for our usual road trip. we're in your Toyota Corolla, an endearing gray model of some sort driven up the sides of commercial establishments and held together by popsicle sticks, chewing gum and scotch tape. and in the car we're playing a quick game -- answering my open command to "name all the activities people do when they are by themselves out in the desert. "take nude polaroids." hoard little pieces of junk and debris." "shoot those little pieces of junk to bits with a shot gun."

"hey," you roar. "it's kind of like life, isn't it?"

i guess.

memoirs

In a fleeting moments
as I looked up at the azure sky
All is gone in thin air
In the twilight of the horizon
Helplessly wondering why things went awry
Dreaming of a love that has not been
Perplexities unfold, devoid of happiness
Disillusioned by promises that hold no truth
A nightmare
That couldn't be gargled away in the morning
Memories keep haunting me
Reminiscing times we were together.
Abyss of loneliness creeping up
Oblivious to falling debris
I walk slowly
Leaving yesterday behind me
Seeking the light
And in time
A world, in its overwhelming chromatics
Will give life to my weary soul

thoughts

I can hear the rain like a rush of divine energy beating at the earth. Or maybe that's the fan. Either way it is a welcome hum to settle my mind into a soft clarity. It keeps me alert, but content by washing away the thoughts that fight to flood my mind like an overwhelming wave of fear.

I've wished that whatever I felt was just safely locked up in my mind -- no one could probe into its depths and wrench its secrets. I've made attempts to reverse it, but I almost lost my sanity or whatever remains of it. My passion is overpowering -- it's like grabbing hold of a tornado. The thought of you is an obsession.

Every morning I have to face the night thinking of you. Every night I have to face the day just the same. I have begun to prefer neither and wish myself dead. But it is only a wish -- not a desire. Not something I would ever try to accomplish myself. It's the will for life that anyone is born with, the instinct that prompts defense and attack to keep one's life safe that prevents me. Or maybe the fact that I would undoubtedly miss you if I am dead.

All my life I struggled not to be a slave of anybody or anything, but as I now pause to scrutinize the image I see in the mirror, staring back at me, all I see is a slave in its peculiar but truest form. I have become a slave of you whose smile or mere touch overwhelms my passion for anything. Would there be a single thing I would not do for you?

During the night I find sleep difficult to obtain, but once my wavering consciousness is prepared to fall into the depths of slumber, wonderful thoughts come to take hold of me. In some subtle haunting way, a vision of you creeps into my mind -- a vision idyllic and jeweled. My attention would immediately be riveted to you, like an oarsman in the dead of the night fixing his eyes on a lighthouse miles and miles away. You would grant me the privilege of your company, and like a kitten I would purr contentedly on my master's lap. I would keep my eyes on you until the last contour of your face is out of sight, trying to preserve every detail of your appearance in my memory until the time I will see you again. And who could recount, without convincing me of madness, the trembling, the waiting, the anguish every time I long for you… the terror that each time you left my sight you would die?

I loved your eyes most of all. They must have been the same eyes Noah had upon seeing the rainbow after the Great Flood. Swirling masses of dark clouds and slowly, one by one, little fingers of light coalesce to reveal a brilliant arc of colored light in the sky. You would look at me even in just a passing moment and you might have touched a dormant nerve in me, unlocking an arcane sanctum in my mind. Everything would stop just like that. It was as if the world has ceased to exist; your glistening eyes and the vertiginous dance of my heart. When they said money can't buy happiness, they must have meant the happiness that comes from your kiss.

Would it be right to tell you exactly how I felt that night I slept with you in my dream? After I'm certain you're asleep, I examine at my leisure your eyelashes, the skin of your eyelids, your collarbone with its fluted wings, the purple knot of the nipple, those firm and powerful legs. Nothing escapes me. For a moment, I don't want to think of anything. You are there, for that moment you are mine.

I wanted my life to begin there, as I looked at you while you sleep. How in the half-light of the room you cast your own light as if you are all made of amber?

After that night I haven't left you. Not ever. Do you know why? Because I recreate you in my memory. The scent of your skin, the broom of your mustache, how you fit in my palms. I rub warmth in your fingertips. I wanted to run my tongue from the hollow in your throat, between the smooth stones of your chest, across the trail down below the navel. I remember how I loved you with a pleasure close to sobbing, how you still the trembling in my chest.

I don't need to ask; I've seen it for myself. It's in your eyes. It's always been there. Since before I knew you. And beneath that fierceness, something ancient and tender as rain. I wished I could rub the grief in there as if it were a smudge on the cheek.

What are you to me now? With that disarming charms and wicked wit, you're not just a man; you're a legend, a myth, a god. But you are as well my husband. Albeit only sometimes.

You may say I've grown crazy from living with so many thoughts. Then, so be it. And I took to eating black thoughts -- the darkest, blackest thoughts to make me hard and strong.

But for now, I let myself wander in haze as the rain has ceased its soft cadence. Funny that I should hide when the sky is clear, but journey through my mind when the rain falls.

11.09.02

unrequited

I put my lips to your forehead. And we fall asleep like that, with your one arm around me. To look at you as you sleep, the color of your skin. I know every cave and crevice, every back road and ravine, but I don't know where I could hide you from myself. You're tired. You're sick and lonely with all of this, and I don't want any of those things to ever touch you again. It's enough for now you are here. For now. Under my roof again.

Just sleep. It's only me circling above you, wide-eyed all night. Staring at this face in my hands. I miss you. I miss you even now as you lie next to me…

Could I have been mistaken? In this case, it seemed to me that you would be the very man to suit me, and I thought, who knows that there may not be a chance for me yet? But by the time my night had crumbled into dimness, it struck me that my little castle had also wreathed away and vanished.
What I said was, as you know, very simple and to the purpose. I knew quite well that your fancy was elsewhere; mine was with you, perhaps as hopelessly placed. Yet you were entirely free to use me as you pleased: make love with me, make a friend of me -- I was in your hands. There I was, ready to spend my life at your service. That is to say that I did love you, madly and truly, without romanticizing the thing.

You've been well-disposed towards every soul you come across. You love to be loved and try with a sweet artless art to win and charm over each woman that you meet. I saw that you liked me, that you felt at your ease with, that you held me not quite your equal and might perhaps laugh at, as well as with me. But I did not care. My aim in life, heaven knows, has not been to domineer, to lay down the law and triumph over others, least of all, over those I love.

Love? We don't say that word. I couldn't go anywhere without that grief inside me. As if the days to come did not exist. And when it seemed that the grief would not let me go, I would try to remember that night I came to live with you. That night when we balance your body on mine as if you are a boat and I river. I remember how your skin smelled sweet as the rind of watermelon, like the fields after it has rained. Mornings and nights I think your scent is still in me, wake remembering you are tangled somewhere between the sleeping and the waking. How I wanted to lose myself in the deep, plum color of your sex, the skin of your eyelids were as soft as the skin of the penis. To feel its warmth from my left cheek to the right.

A silence between us is like a language. When I held you, you kissed me in the hand. I remember that, and it helps the days pass without bitterness. Does it surprise you I don't let go of little things like that? There are so many things I don't forget even if I must do well to. There was enough to distract me in the day, but at night you can't imagine -- I dreamt of you. When I awoke I was sure your spirit had just fluttered from the room. I have yanked you from my sleep before into the dream I was dreaming. Twisted you like a spiral of hair around a finger. And when you would not do my bidding and come when I commanded, I would turn into a soul and keep vigil in the branches outside your door to make certain no one would do harm to you while you sleep.

The days I would turn from raging fire to coldest ashes, I don't think you understood my reasons. I assume I made no difference to you as youve always prided yourself in being independent. You don't belong to me or to any other woman. Or so I thought.

One night, my heart circled and trembled against my chest and something beneath my eyelids palpitated so furiously, it wouldn't let me sleep. When I felt my body whirling against the beams of the room, I opened my eyes. I could see perfectly in darkness. Beneath me -- I saw you asleep next to a woman, that woman you love sleeping beside you. And her skin shone blue in the moonlight and you were blue as well.

She wasn't at all like Id imagined. I came up close and studied her. Nothing but an ordinary woman with her ordinary woman smell. She opened her mouth and gave a moan. And you pulled her close to you. Then I felt a terrible grief inside me. The two of you asleep like that, your leg warm against her, your foot inside the hollow of her foot.

What did you tell her about me? That I was just a chapter of your life which had already finished? But I am a story that never ends. Pull one string and the whole cloth unravels.

From your silences, I understood I was not to question our relationship. It was what it was. Nothing more. If I complain about these woman concerns of mine, I know you will tell me -- "these aren't times for that" -- wait until later. But I am tired of being told to wait.

You rarely talk. Your way of talking is sudden, quick like water leaping. And yet I know what that voice of yours is capable of.

"You need not to know everything", you told me. It made me feel a little crazy when you hurled that at me. Those words with all its force, how a pain entered my heart like a current of cold water, and in that current were the days to come. You grunt those words like hail that splits open my skin, and I cry against the infinity of the sky when the stake pierces me. And in your mouth, the words were flint-edged and heavy, makes a drum of the body, something to maim and bruise and sometimes kill. But I said nothing.

What is it I am to you? When you hesitate? What am I? Sometime lover? Companion? Whore? Which? To be one is not as terrible as being all.

I've needed to hear it from you. All I've wanted was words, that magic to soothe me a little, what you could not give me. But even if you have the words, you could never tell me. You don't know your own heart – even when you are speaking with it in your hands.

We have never been much for talking, have we? Poor thing, I don't know how to talk. Instead of talking with my lips, I put one leg around you when we sleep, to let you know it's all right. The days to come, I thought, erasing the bitter sting of your goodbye.

Isn't it the way with all of us? We begin by liking universally; as we go on we pick and choose and weary of the things which had only the charm of novelty to recommend them; only as our life narrows we cling more and more to the good things which remain, and feel their value ten times more keenly? And now that I have almost come to the end of my story, that is, of those few days of my life of which you were the story. But if it is for the last time I do want to tell you what a precious and exciting thing it has been to know that you have sometimes wanted to be with me -- the greatest thing in my life.

03.25.03

lice

let me tell you about the lice.

one of the hazards. you get the lice, you went to the pharmacy, you bought a lice lotion, you get rid of them.

not us.

maybe our lives were a little limited. but to be invaded by such predators was a fascinating thing. these were primeval creatures that licked our blood, as we did. creatures that pierced the skin and sucked back blood and existed for one purpose only.

as we did.

dud

at any rate, when you're pretty crazy yourself, you really don't want to know it. you cannot afford to know it, and don't want to show it to anyone else. least of all the one you love. the whole thing was a lost cause. but it takes the slowing down even show the madness in the first place.

memories

memory is a fucker, the way it blur things. somewhere the past has changed, i don't want it. i don't want the present. there is no conceivable future. there is only the relentless of coping, punctuated by naked singularities of bliss.

this was a time of life being out of whack. sometimes i felt on top of the world. i've heard since that this is called "denial". it makes sense. the brain shuts down at times of true crisis, and nothing but the locus of hilarity is active.

the radio plays low. memories. i hear "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" and i am enchanted by its dreamy sadness.

awakening

sometimes, because of the logic of the poetry, the name of the game is hauntingly accurate. love. for instance, it was called that because if you were taken out and shown, you wouldn't know it was there. lots of people don't.

it sounded obsure and exotic and i wanted to see it. i had never seen a big one and wanted to.

i am young enough to be sharp as hell, for my regular doses of slammed doors, crabbily chainsmoking and the traditional family psychodramas. i am convinced that one day my heart is simply going to explode. i mean, go completely kablooey inside my chest. i don't even care. my lifestory: "the woman who desperately wanted to be hit by lightning".

until girl interrupted meets catcher in the rye.

talk about someone speaking to you from beyond. it just woke me up and never in my life have i lunged so instinctively for someone as though he was intrinsically a part of me -- like a leg or an arm i'd casually misplaced for twenty two years.

he was left staring at my poor, battle-scarred soul, under the enigmatic smile. he tried to think of something, anything, he could do for me. he emptied the contents of his soul into mine. you could imagine his strength -- his soul -- was a white laser beam shooting from his heart into mine, like those light pulses in glass wires that can pump a million books to the moon in one second. this beam was cutting through my heart like a beam cutting through a sheet of steel. he could take or leave this strength that i so obviously lacked -- but he just wanted it to be there for me as a reserve.

he'd never given one nanosecond's worth of time to anyone -- all mine, just for me to hold on.

i could give my life to this man. no regrets.

ashtray

it really makes me sick. it's like being in an empty room: empty hologram people walking around peeking at themselves in mirrors and surreptitiously misting their tonsils with mouth spray, just in case they have to kiss another ghost like themselves.

i began to see this world as one where citizens stare, say, at the armless Venus de Milo and fantazise about amputee sex or self-righteously apply a fig leaf on the statue of David, but not before breaking off his dick as a souvenir. all events became omens; i lost the ability to take anything literally.

and then i had an uncontrollable reaction. my heart went bang; i broke into sweat and the words of Rilke, the poet, entered my brain -- his notion that we are all born with a letter inside us, and that if we are true to ourselves, may be allowed to read it before we die.

so the point of all this was that i needed a clean slate with no one to read it. i needed to drop out even further. my life had become a series of scary incidents that simply weren't stringing together to make for an interesting book and time was running out.

whether i feel more that i want to punish some aging crock for frittering away my world, or whether i'm just upset that the world has gotten too big -- way beyond my capacity to tell stories about it, so all i'm stuck with are these cigarettes and coffee.

i feel insulted either way.

eroticize intelligence

CULT OF ALONENESS -- the need for autonomy at all costs, usually at the expense of lone-term relationships. often brought about by overly high expectations of others.

MID-TWENTIES BREAKDOWN -- a period of mental collapse occuring in one's twenties, often caused by an inability to function outside of school or structured environments coupled with a realization of one's essential aloneness in the world.

NOW DENIAL -- to tell oneself that the only time worth living in is the past and that the only time that may never be interesting again is the future.

SPECULARISM -- a fascination with extreme situations.

VOTER'S BLOCK -- the attempt, however futile, to register dissent with the current political system by simply not voting.

CONVERSATIONAL SLUMMING -- the self-conscious enjoyment of a given conversation precisely for its lack of intellectual rigor.

OPTION PARALYSIS -- the tendency to, when given unlimited choices, to make none.

GREEN DIVISION -- to know the difference between envy and jealousy.

obsessions are awful

know what the fastest way to get rid of dogs that beg at the dinner table is? give them a piece of carrot or bean instead of meat, and give it to them with an earnest face.

they'll look at you like you're mad and they'll be gone in seconds. granted, they might think 'less of you', too.

until

until last night
i was missing
the key
to the places
i forgot existed.

until last night
i was afraid to
express myself for
fear of rejection,
retribution.

not until last night,
when i raised my hands
and reached through the
looking glass
to touch the
reflection
of she who was
a naked girl
running free

believed all women
would stand and walk tall
until i saw my mother
crouched in fear against the wall
searching for protection against
an uncontrollable hurricane
of misunderstood emotions.

sliding-glass doors
shattered by rage
set the stage
as i moved forward
never looking back
creating an armor of flesh
buried memories
and a silent tongue.

years disappeared
taking with them
denied emotions,
until i could
no longer
remember,
where this seed
of rage and fear
first appeared.

until i started
on the path away from
self-destruction
and caught glimpses
of the flame inside,
uncovered where the
masks came off
in games of peekaboo
i see you.

fingertips

To: afriend@hotmail.com
From: hyena@yahoo.com
Subject: happy birthday

okay, so all of a sudden you are twenty three and you notice that you are still fighting off living the life you are "supposed" to live. you know, you don't show to work exactly on time and you don't have monogamous boy-girl relationships. you are still dreaming the big dream. you are still young, and it is still okay to be idealistic. but then you start noticing all these older people who you always thought of as complacent are still living life to the fullest. that's when you realize that thirty is not too far off and complacency's only a state of mind.

-hyena-

--0--

To: hyena@yahoo.com
From: afriend@hotmail.com
Subject: automation

I am glad that you wrote. I was starting to think you might be upset with me. Honestly. I was going to write and ask. I know you are busy, but I just miss you and my feelings of being disconnected from your life turned into insecurity. we are all just so busy. I think it is because of everything we can do. we are connected to the world through our keyboards. we never even have to go out of our homes if we don't want to. we can study, work, order food, order videos and whatever other kind of entertainment we want from baby toys to porn on the net; and we keep in touch with our friends all from one chair in one room. And we can do more of it, as a result, feel the pressure to do more of it. How do we develop community, how to balance work and play, inedependence and companionship, computer screens with compassionate hugs? I think i am just missing your arms around me.

--0--

To: afriend@hotmail.com
From: hyena@yahoo.com
Subject: long lost e-mail!

i hate when that happens. i just wrote you a really long e-mail and it was brilliant and everything (like everyone thinks their mind ramble is). but then, when i went to send it, without having saved any of it, this mesage came up saying time ran out and so the message is lost to cyberspace. uugghh...

while you sleep

i am painting hearts and little question marks
around your head

wondering where you are
most ticklish, riding your chest
with my eyes as it rises
and falls, listening to your breath
as it changes from day in
to day out, hoping that you will do
the same.

eat your parents

and so i suggest you do the same thing with your parents. eat them. accept them as a part of getting you here, and get on with life. write them off as a business expense. at least your parents talk about the Big Things. i try to talk about things that matter to me with my parents and it's like i'm speaking Bratislavan. they listen indulgently to me for an appropriate length of time, and then after i'm out of wind, they ask me why the hell am i so negative all the time, why do i have to see something depressing in everything. tick tack. give parents the tiniest of confidences and they'll use them as crowbars to jimmy you open and rearrange your life with no perspective. sometimes i just like to mace them. i want to tell them that i envy their upbringings that were so clean, so free of futurelessness. and i want to throttle them for blithely handing over the world to us like so much skid-marked underwear.

virgin runway

i cannot say that i have known better, yet i have surely known different, just as i've known rivers. and this winding body of water has led me directly to the source of the unknown, where i have no other choice but to strip myself of all my layers of judgment, self-merit, doubt and fears, and jump in.

monster exist

in the end, life can be seen to be inconsequential, in the way that nothing matters on some vast evolutionary scale. but everything matters, and i know that when life seems most horrific, when at each instant of time, all the space around me is everything there is.

don't eat yourself

everybody has a "gripping stranger" in their lives, a stranger who unwittingly possesses a bizarre hold ever you. maybe it's the kid in your neighborhood or the woman wearing an eyeglass who stamps your book in the library -- a stranger who, if you were to come home and find a message from them on the answering machine saying "Drop everything. I love you. Come away with me now," you'd follow them.

i am not jealous

other things seem to be awkward truths rather than inevitabilities. it occur to me that what i lack on balance, i make up for my familiarity with fear and unease and occasionally despair; and that this itself is a kind of balance. i try to tell myself i must accept certain private inevitabilities. i will live a life full of continual deep fatigue, for example. i will carry in me, like a poison, like a virus, rancor for most things, and while this conditon will not improve, nonetheless i will learn to live with rancor as if it were a minor irritation. there will be many achievable things that i will not do and then there will come a time when i realize they no longer even achievable.

the outlook of my life is narrowing.

i don't think of this truth but i feel it, as if my breath has been taken away from me as when a rollercoaster begins its plummet. whoosh. the outlook is undeniably narrowing. the horizon is shrinking. then again, though i can hardly speak for the others, maybe it's also true to say that everybody's lives are narrowing, one way or another. if that's the case, why even bother to think of it? certain flashes of clarity come when it seems better instead to stop thinking.
but it's best not to trust clarity. better to welcome and accept the mist that seeps into our life, that clings to our clothes, that soaks us to the bone in this scrapyard we are lost in. the mist. if the options are thinking and stop thinking, and you know you can't stop, that's where the idea of suicide comes from. of course there is despair, when things fucked up and you want to be dead but that's just circumstantial. that's just bad feeling brought on by the adrenaline of events, by violence or rip-off. bad feeling of the imminent sadness. sadness looms like a mountain, i tell you.

and then there is love. you were transported, elsewhere, another. the unswerving purpose of someone in trance. like a mental illness.

i knew nothing about mental illnesses. i didn't know what a nervous breakdown looked like. if any signs were obvious, i think i must have buried them. because when you think you're inlove, you don't want to know about the things that could end it. it was sad. it is so sad that feeling sad was so rare. it was sad too that feeling happy was frightening. it only meant wanting to feel even happier.

it was better to be sad, i guess.

pillows

when i stare at things or hear things, i think there might be some kind of beauty to them. i mean the little things, the way we make it through the day, experiencing pleasure. trees in streets or a small bird flittering around the garden, paint flaking from the kitchen windowpane, dust motes in sunlight. i am alert, you might say, to the beauty of these things, the local nuances that bring life alive.

but all there is, is sadness.

i am so far removed, from everything, that i can't even cry. there's a chasm between me, where i am, and the world i am in. the world i move my feet through. the atmosphere i breathe is like golden syrup, twenty-seven atmospheres thick. i'm wading through the swamp that my body has become. so i miss a lot now. so that's why everything is fucked up. i am fragile like porcelain plates though i feel like a block of cement. this is not a weather forecast. nonetheless i feel the outlook is bleak. i am tired.

but i have to ignore that, and hardly sleep, and scar my brain even in dreams, and wake up again tomorrow. still, how can i think of the future when i can't even think of the past or today? but every now and then, even during bad times, i get a glimpse of state where the mind is free to roam through spaces greater than what the body knows.

waking up, it is possible to envision a plane of such endless proportions that atom contains specific scenes of interest. stone pillars crumble. this takes place over centuries. you have that much time. follow the path of an eagle, wings spread wide, as it traces in an infinitesimal rate of curvature. a swoop of beauty so painful it takes your breath away.

the eagle's eye can hone in on a speck of dust; not forever, but for a very long time. here is the mote growing larger and larger.

the eagle is the perfect hunter. one atom will sustain him.

it is possible to follow this thought into others ( emulating with some grace, the path of the eagle ), even when the world conspires against you. for a while, in the gray between sleeping and waking, for seconds, or even a minute, it can feel okay to be alive. and then you wake, properly.

and it all comes rushing back. you ask the question, who am i? and the answer is always the same. i am nothing but need. i will hate today like every other day. it's so hard to experience beauty when it all stands in contrast to a greater unbeauty.

so i go back to sleep. in the faint phosphorescent light of the storm, i submerge myself to dreamland -- nothing could ever be this close. i close my eyes and feel entirely dislocated from the earth, which has never existed.

define normal

late at night i think that if i could somehow write a list of the things i like, i could somehow write my way out of the mess i'm in. i don't know how this works or even how it occurs to me that it might work. how the fuck could it work? write a list. it's a bizarre thought. but what would i write? i like reading, i like books. i like movies especially in the early hours, when the rest of the city is sleeping. coffee. cigarettes. making love. but the list i'm trying to write should not include the statement i like making love because that won't help. i sit for a while in silence but the list sort of peters out at this point and my mind begins to wander. i try to concentrate and bring it back to the list. but it's hard to think of things. snaphots. i like family photos.

ten years ago, on what remains as possibly the most unhip day of my life, my entire family except my father, all five of us, went to have our group portrait taken at a local photo shop. as a result of that hot and endless sitting, the five of us spent the next fifteen years trying bravely to live up to the corn-fed optimism, the cheerful waves of shampoo, and the air-brushed teeth beams that the resultant photo is still capable of emitting to this day. we may look dated in this photo, but we look perfect, too. in it, we're beaming earnestly to the right, off toward what seems to be the future but which was actually Mr. Garcia, the photographer and a lonely widower, holding something mysterious in his left hand and yelling "smile!". when the photo first came home, it rested gloriously for maybe one hour on top of the TV set, place there guilelessly by my mother, who was shortly thereafter pressured by a forest fire of shrill teenage voices fearful of peer mockery to remove it immediately. it was subsequently moved to the master's bedroom, where it hangs to this day, like a forgotten pet gerbil dying of starvation. it is visited only by me, in between my ups and downs in life, when i need a good dose of "but we were all so-innocent once" to add that decisive literary note of melodrama to my sorrows.

again, that was ten years ago. this year, however, was the year everyone in the family finally decided to stop trying to live up to that bloody photo and the shimmering but untrue promise it made to us. this is the year we decided to call it quits, normality-wise; the year we went the way families just do; the year everyone finally decided to be themselves and to hell with it.

oh, Mr. Garcia, how did we all end up so messy? we're looking hard at that camera you were holding -- we really are -- but we're just not seeing it anymore. send us a clue, please.