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.