Article.

I just felt the need to put this article out for people to possibly stumble across. It's worthwhile, and short.

What You Do Is Amazing

Now.

Like a poem

my life was never finished

only abandoned

And honestly...

I don't know why I'm here. If it's to write truth or lies. If I'm supposed to make believe or make fun.

If possibilities end at the door out in the garden.

If truth is only ever possible when everything is documented, does that make every word I write a lie?

If I hadn't seen her in days, only to see her in skirts walking out of the dining hall, is that a sign? Or a reminder?

If another week has run it's course am I closer to resolution or absolution?

If I can hear his voice, but I dream about someone else, does that make me a traitor to my country or myself?

If I could really be anyone for an entire day, would I want to be dead? Or am I just saying that?

And if I meant it, could I come back?

If time was running out, would I go to M and talk to her, or would I opt to take a plan into Canada and say goodbye?

I can write it without crying. I can see H&G, L&N, K&W, M&T--all pairs without sadness. Only minor aches and pain, and by now those have physical explanations.

Time is running out and I don't have the world down as well as I ought to. My reading for Tuesday will be done before Monday, but there's an emptiness inside asking if I'm really living or just attempting to exist. I want to be elsewhere. I want to be elsewhere. To learn something different. Something new.

He told me to shake up life when it got stale. I've always been afraid to. I let other make the waves when I've already got my sea legs. But I guess I am a swimmer, and jumping headfirst into waves can't kill me.

Only I can do that, when the water's a metaphor for thought.

Today I warned the world that only true delinquents always dress nicely. That the man in the top hat and bow tie is more likely to walk out of the store with an extra knife. That maybe this child wants to know a bit more about the wild side, so she changes into a gentle-looking soul and cusses out the world while holding a knife to its throat.

I'm my only savior, and I'm my only danger. I just need to remember it. Appreciate it. Learn it. Love it, even.

But that's a maybe. Because maybe love is too touch a pill to swallow right now. Take people one at a time, slow ways mentally.

Tiny steps, baby steps, towards something new. The day starts here.

Face it.

It only aches occasionally. But then it's like dying a little more. And I wonder...

I still miss you.

I find traces

hidden across the shards

of the web,

across the powerful notion

of nationality

pride, maybe values.

With you inside, hiding,

in that way you have

like you'll get a laugh

by bending rules

until I break.

And maybe I've learned to miss you

or maybe its only an idea now

just trying out new wings.

Juxtapose what sings

over the dying screams.

But maybe.

I find faces

in these places and

reconcile just for a while

within the smiling

aces -

only a short day's graces

bend and break

nor give nor take this

facade away

not now, never today.

Only tomorrow,

the way we promised to

return to the past

broken moments

maybe meant something

to someone

anyone

no one

I'd believe again, but I'm me again,

too far away to be seen again

if ever

if only ever

belief comes from never knowing

only holding

only hoping the present

won't break into

mosaics.

Like the bits and pieces I

knew from when sky dyed

blue-grey-green - the sheen

of sun over the taste of lies

might as well be

the truth, or both of us

will die.

Swiftly, maybe, gently, save me.

Seeking Asylum.

It was all in the way they looked at me. From behind bars, as if those bars could keep them safe. Or keep me safe. as though padded walls and white - brilliant, blazing, god damned white - could prevent my mind from visiting corners in the shadows.

Shadows are everywhere. Everwhere, neverwhere we expect -

They came and stood, twittering like mad birds outside until their voices blended into the surrounding air. Until they were not there.

The hallways were bare, and all the bars were gone. Unless I tried to reach through. Then the bars came back, clamped down, like the angry jaws of some forgotten man eating-beast.

Sirens sounded, then, and men in white - so much fucking white! - came. They held me against the white walls. Shined white light in my eyes. Took notes on white paper clipped to a white clipboard with a white pen and they stake of paleness and death. Mental decay.

"Easy there," one man in white said to me. "Easy," as he took his hands off my throat and the padded floor stopped holding me when the man kneeling on my back got off. And the floor gave me my breath again.

(("You keep that one here much longer," he said, "and things'll go rough."

"What d'you mean?"

"See that?" He pointed. "People like that aren't meant for places like this. Suffocating in open air. Y'hear the raving at nights. Always the same - 'White, white - goddamn white!' I'm telling ya...it'd kill to keep 'em here. ))

I heard voices but they were far off, and the walls had eyes, so the voices were no longer important. Only the eyes - red and blue. Rage and violence.

(("This place isn't natural for someone like that," he said.

"So what? Set them free on the streets? Are you crazy?"

He shook his head. "No. But they're not either."))

Fifth floor.

And I'm alone still.

Again.

But I can hear the screams down below. A few floors down.

And if I close my eyes I can trace them.

Like that high pitched one a few moments back was from third floor, cell six. She's been here for two years. She's a youngster. Barely begun.

They move you up with each passing bit of time, each human being who passes over. Gives up. Goes under.

Those are the lucky ones.

You know when they go out because you can hear them start to sing, and it's fucking eerie. Like an opera singer when whale, or something with a bit of wolf howl thrown in for flavor.

To explain why they always sing more on a full moon.

And after a month or so, then they stop singing.

And we never hear them again.

But the screams on third are softer now, and there's a bottle of isopropyl on hand for all your painful needs.

Cuts, scrapes, burns. Cleaning, waking up, getting sick. Burning shit.

Except the only way to bleed is to claw through your own skin, and they try to keep us from being able. Smooth walls. Smooth enough to go mad against, and the only other flammable substance is thought. Everything else just seems to wait, laughing.

But as torture poured into sinuses, it does the trick. It hurts, and it's impossible to sleep through.

But I wish there were more matches. It feels so wrong not to have the graze of fire on my skin.

Like a bit of me has died. They tell us the need will go away. We know it doesn't. That they don't know what they're talking about.

That these men in pale green and alien suits have never known the touch of a knife, or match. Have never dreamed what release it brings.

Have never -

Singing.

It's coming from the seventh floor. May souls rest in peace, in a hell less hellish than this one.

And as for me,

I'm sleeping now.

Don't much care when,

Don't much care how.

And when I wake

I'll sing a tune

And laugh and play

My own soul's doom.

Beyond.

Mayhap we've reached beyond our boundaries into what borders on riotous insanity. And perchance we'll never see it again, but maybe we will...maybe we will.

Wednesday 26 August 2009

Let's play a game of let's pretend. Let's pretend - let's pretend that these words are etched on stone, engraved, until they cannot be forgot. Stuck, written, placed in minds and memories. Think a thing and design it in words. Therein lies the beginning of remembering, once one no longer needs to remember.

In learning we hear, and we take. In writing we understand, and we give. Memory, spun from the failure of ink and wood pulp, placed by the individual, built for the masses, even if intended for individual alone. Once in writing a thing may not be forgotten, memory erased by time. Once in writing, this book is open the world to know.

The inconsequentials, the stories. The written word, left unheard and held by those whose voices remain silenced but for their own version of a sign language, thrown across continents and time, a span only breached by the exceptional. And now we're vanishing again. Into the summer mist. Fog. Jealousy.

Have you been jealous before? This knowledge, a knowing of feelings... I never wanted jealousy.

He's here.

I keep touching what his mind would say, and I wonder if he's still alive, because I don't hear the words much anymore. I don't hear much of anything anymore. Just a faint hum somewhere off in a distance that I know I'll never reach, since it keeps growing with every step I take. I will never be close enough to rescue my present, and the future is only words on a page. The past is what might be solid, if everyone else could remmeber. And I still have the makings of the best story never told.

Because there are pieces that I can never let go, and those pieces are too dear to try. I hold them, and I hurt them, and eventually I'll die bleeding from them. It's the way I built my other sides, and the way I heard voices from the time when I was young enough to know better. But I'm not the only one who hears the voices, and I won't be the only one to need rescuing from them. They bite, you know.

Sometimes hard, sometimes not. But teeth are teeth, and memories are dull as protection.

Collective Unconscious

It's only a touch away from the familiar, a bit out of the ordinary, slightly removed from what we haven't yet known.

And if it's only waiting...

We passed the End of the Earth sale on the way here.

Maybe things are just beginning.

And maybe...

In mid capture of conversation, we find the calls that draw on memory and melody.

And possibility.

They say it's general holocaust - that everyone is dying.

That it's anything you can imagine.

So bad the Italian music got involved and the movie store down on West Lane.

But even though it's a bullshit excuse, it's still why the balis are banned. And not just in Ohio.

He was in Chicago for eight years.

So that...that became home.

It's only dark intelligence hidden under wanna-be curly hair.

Or even wanna-be wavy.

Sullen eyes and a high voice, the way I imagined.

Do you need to remember?

A blossoming music career.

Disguised as something much more.

Exotic, but it's a carrot.

I had a diet coke, but I don't know where the the glass went!

Silent with a smile and pity in blue eyes.

My wife worked down in LA and I had a job at six flags...

Were you the bad guy or the good guy?

I was...the...rogue-ish.

The morally questionable.

Just recalls the thin boy with no smile and a beautiful voice, who knew that Broadway was a dream he'd been reaching for his whole life...a dream just out of reach.

Did you ever see Mickey Mouse being led out in handcuffs?

The feet were big enough that they caught the baby?

Lewis?

When do these parking lots ever end?

I dunno Clark.

America's one big parking lot.

Not simple Alice, though.

She doesn't know what sight train is.

Simple Al?

She wouldn't have much to say.

Lean forward over the table, brush nose, lean left to adjust pocket. Her right hand up to her ear. He smiles and looks up. She plays with her hair. He sits up, hands to lap, wipes mouth, leans forward. She withdraws, scratches right shoulder, holding cup, speaks and drinks. Head tilt, watches waiter - sees him go by, glances down. Subtle. Mirror body language - heads tilt.

She's in jeans, flip flops, grey tank and black bra, straps showing. Dark hair, faint purple overlay.

Him in yellow, but dull with green writing: Surf and Turf. Watch on left hand, a broken smile, far back hair and he drinks tea.

Her right foot keeps shaking and she tries tea - daintily.

He smiles and looks down, leans in.

She's not smiling anymore. She has a ring on her right hand, second finger - index. And gold earrings, a scar on her right arm, just above/across the elbow. She's fidgeting.

Waiters have black pants, white shirts, red - bright - ties and apron skirt like things. And no one notices because they're all the same.

All the same.

Ties in front with two pockets and black book stays in the left one. Unless it's the right and a pen next to it.

It's true.

Every time he takes a breath of air he exhales dollar bills.

I want to make a difference in a child's life.

A creepy old man's tshirt.

Your rent is collecting souls.

Bring them to us.

We will kill them.

It's always the bright ones.

No one ever laments, "Oh, and she was so stupid.

So little potential."

Simple truth.

And now you're gone.

It might have been easier if you'd died.

Aug 24 2010

So surreal

Being alive, and not

breathing air near the end

of the tunnel.

I can't breathe,

and I can't...

The hours pass

as a collection of moments

broken moments

that threaten memory

to fade and fail.

But these moments

these memories

are all that keep me

from being beside

the absence of fear

just in the light

just alive

just beyond and

just behind and

just beyond and -

This is the justice of

the air, hidden inside,

trapped in these words

that promise nothing

but missing who is gone

Just vanished

like smoke or my dreams

of echoing the human side

of things.

Of people, places.

It's all blood under the

scars; can't you hear the screams

I ripped mid flesh

while the background

muses hum,

mere humans complain

that they never had a chance

that they were trapped

before their time

and all the words they spew

come away as fire

and icicles

and laugh

as the days pass

because

hold

onto the world

the way you wanted

I can't let go

and don't want to

the way a man made magic

the way I heard

the creaking devil bones

and wanted something

more.

Just the stories, but with

the bones.

I heard it, and I felt few

And they only say

Jesus and good versus evil

like my mind falls through

into a stoner's haze

when the stones begin to fall

from a cut wrist

leaking pebbled blood

a monument, a testament;

just a letter that might be

mistake;

because I've planned to

and I promise I will

because promise...

Amuse your mind and

free your hearts.

And blood draws in the

background in evil voices

so I fall asleep,

passed out on the stars

that pretend I was human

all along

that I could love

human all along.

But this is inside

and I was just a star.