Le Mort d'Author

What is the role of technology in our lives?
Is a rich full life possible if you haven't set foot in every continent?
Does the universe conspire to help us?
When you put peeps in the microwave...?
Do tribulations exist as a sort of secular penance, the weedwhackers of evolution?
Questions to the lone sun, which is our destination star, what's for dinner?

In darkness there is the strength of absent friends and lovers. The bleeding artic sky, northern lights, aurora borealis, a hemorrhage of ghosts, dancing away their once shamed prudence.

"These were they who objected to newness
HERE are their TOMBSTONES"
-Ezra Pound

The Man in the Mask ran into an old friend in the Boston winds. Wrapped up in the upturned collar of a partitioned gloomy coat, looking ravaged and pale. Winter's toll on Comedy.
"How have you been old friend?" Asked the Masked.
"I can't remember ever feeling better. But doctor just told me this morning that I have cancer," said Comedy with tragic wry evocation. Pallid teeth smiling through shivering chapped lips.
"How can you say you feel great then?"
"He also told me I have Alzheimer's."
"I'm sorry! You don't look that bad."
"Hey back off sorryman. I don't swing that way."
"Haha. So the doctor told you that you have cancer and alzheimer's!?!"
"Yeah. What a relief though, eh? At least I don't have cancer!"
Comedy writes poems with refrigerator magnets and sometimes disappears from the Masked Man's life for months at a time only to call up out of the blue to ask the best question in the world.
"Do chickens have boogers?"


Yesterday's hot tabloids line today's wet gutters while the crumpled sketchpads of Rembrandts and Whistlers sell at auction hundreds of years down the line, for millions of dollars. Tree pulp fictions. Are we paper? Are people without convictions just runny too-soon-fade ink on a page? Why are some stories writ in stone and so many others etched in the sand?

To think of The Mighty Struggles of sailing men, viewed from the captain's chair, on the space station, everything lucid blues. The color of longing.

Sand, sea...
space, tree...
Sun, we...

...ask more important questions:
How about this 'Internet' phenomenon? You think it is here to stay?
Just another sandstone?

There's a moment between verses, an empty lulling space in time where I wonder if this is where I'm meant to be. A pause. A silence. And then, maybe, the chorus.

The Deaths of friends are but cheerful invitations to make a life of equal simplicity. Sooner or later the entropy of our lives must reconcile with the softspoken rhythms of a graveyard where all our friends are headstones and all whim dictated by the dance of the seasons.

There's not much else to say except goodbye. Could that be a question? Goodbye?

Hard questions at 2AM

It's too late

The action that serves as a catalyst in the book is a promise to never promise anything again.

SuppleSextusCinString: wasnt' that my new years resolution years back?

Jerry always said showering was optional. But never say forever.

Covering my insecurities, the badly-shaped coat, frayed and afraid, dragged and bedraggled smelling of---reeking with waste. while the essence of my life's work did occur, much of the experiencal texts are highly subjective.

And now he is dead

audience troubled by changing roles and identities. References meant for the men of his time fall obscure and wayside. Unclear. Uncommon, and poorly referenced. Who wants individuality this day and age? itstoolate

Hard questions at 2 AM

gggg+ Quondam, quaint wrecks, nothing but reflexive revulsions; lifeless and stationary in that backwater
masking an inner emptiness, with foreshadows of almost certain failure
The slow float of differing flutter fluff
a tragic past and a self-defeating canon
Senseless chaos and violence driving into buildings, canals, cemeteries and eating men and raping women to death. g+gg

Fortune does not change men, it unmasks them.
- Suzanne Necker

Sometimes when I can't sleep I put on Dinah Washington or Duke Ellington, or, if its bad, Billie Holliday and light- fingered notes tuck my head into bed like the blue achey moon alighting itself behind a fold of soft dreamers clouds. But that's another story .

DMM is only a cipher that exemplifies nothing but desire for women. Shielding inadequacy with big swords and bigger words, if you take off most of my masks you'll find hollow lust and the faces it wears to bed

[2:33AM]
hiyacutie232: i'm lonely!
DMsqdMn17: People calling you off the hook
DMsqdMn17: I just sit down to write about you
DMsqdMn17: A night on the town
DMsqdMn17: and you're LONELY!?!
hiyacutie232: lonely
hiyacutie232: dark apartment
hiyacutie232: my fridge snores
hiyacutie232: scary brain eating images

Pragmatic and substantially more than half mad 3 AM questions Now. "And we drink, and we drink, and we drink," he said.
SuppleSextusCinString: heck youre a testament t0, fuck, whatevrr
Get going on your own of your own and doing. His lived example fraught with complications that serve to undermine it as a viably replicatory option. Emulation is overated. Jerry forgate spokan promiss so they 'loved togydir more hotter than they dud toforehonde' and thus wz dr undoin'.

Forget shame & pride and Critique the Exemplory. Why not seek out the flaws in reality before the flaws in reality catch up and do you in? Why not patch up some of the holes in the masonry while you're at it?

"It's too late"
is just an inverted way of saying
soon it will be early enough to start anew,
as the night forever gives way to blushing dawn

But never say forever.

Correlations and time. "book that plot for something, just hold it here a overnight." 'Sall connected if you wait around long enough and stand high to see but I'm laying down and everything is blurry like milk in wine. Choose to stay up. It's never too much to add hours to conciousnesses toll, won't hurt for long

HttGrrl Numba21: i'm in pain
DMsqdMn17: Well, let the man in the mask serenade You to be first
DMsqdMn17: since I doubt anyone else is waiting up to hear what he's spouting into cyberspace at this hour
DMsqdMn17: during my frantic strained or passionate activity while
HttGrrl Numba21: i wanna taste every fiber of this day, i want to have all kinds of activities to do
HttGrrl Numba21: but i cant stop crying
DMsqdMn17: What can you do?
DMsqdMn17: I mean
DMsqdMn17: I mean to accentuate something that you ARE capable of
DMsqdMn17: and to focus on that
HttGrrl Numba21: i can be happy about you talking to me this late
DMsqdMn17: Yes!
DMsqdMn17: Be happy! be barely, dreamlike, trying to be awake, like me

Until it was the dawning of the day it was too late
Who are tomorrow? Where is, ever? Ever?

Adjust the contrast on virtue and failure. Box. My grandfather told me to never say never. That was forever ago.
Hazy and an apparent lack of cohesive nature, reality comes, what? what? Smell that?

This whole country spinning before more all red white and woozey, dog shit on the side of the highway now and off we go.

I had a dream that I interpretted to mean that I was asleep but when I woke up I was still awake & 7+ nine times howell hwl howl am n
b b8jhk

Whatcha sayin', now?

A translation:
Your mind and you are our weed Sea,
Tides have swept about you for score years
And ideas, old gossip, odd assortments of all things,
Strange knowledge of dimmed
Great minds have sought you—lacking someone
else

You have been second, and yet, always, for me

For all this deciduous seaboard of parts
Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff:
In the slow float of differing light and deep sleep...

there is, was, in whole and all,
no. No nevermind.
This is but you. And penny sails project me,

until the dawn

It's actually Ezra. We're playing a game he and I . He depicts a sterile canvas and I project my tortured words around his wiremesh frames that hold up so well. She may question the changes, but I wish she'd remember that I only get dressed in the morning because of her.
" a casual liason with more cultured lovers, leaving the lady without a sense of fulfillment"
Like me, come home to find everything where it was and a note left lying on the table saying 'Gone out.'. And, 'Further'
And here we are,
now.

I wish god were alive to hear this

"and there to be there still there"
-samuel beckett

Eternity is itinerant and a skinny imminent emo-kid disaster with long gothic eye lashes and an open book of suicidal and violent poems he'll want to read to you long after you've given up listening.

It clings, not desperate but plodding and plotting, abjection and defiance dancing through the thin inky strands of his unkempt hair. Patiently waiting, like a bored monster, annoying as a child, now grown vague and listless. "I'm not leaving until you listen to what I have to say," he says, "the sooner the better, but I suppose I can wait if you need a few minutes."

As opposition, in a battle that was never announced, nor has ever truly been fair, but like the Rocky movie (fights) is still filled with poignant and ball-gripping pinache;

The Present, is foppish and apologetic and sits in the corner biting his fingernails without making a sound. Obese and pleasant-smelling if you ever get up close, a sorrowful countenance webs his brow, baby-fat beautiful, with a family size bag of gummy candy that he occasionally reaches into for unobtrusive nourishment.

No one ever talks to it much, but when they do he has a habit of apologizing for all the wonderful things he has to say, and straying into tangential digresions that make you focus on other things: out the window, the weather, what you're going to do tomorrow, eternities. "The miracle of flowers, stop me if I'm boring you, the flower itself blossoms towards the warmth of the sun, have you noticed how cold it is in here?" Don't let him sway you. Keep focused on him. Stare him in the eye.

"the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill
A kiss, and all was said. "
-Victor Hugo

Vulnerable Violation

DMsqdMn17: *cough *cough..

Look over here!

Satan skin Boots: ahh! it's you

Satan skin Boots: what's going on?

DMsqdMn17: Er, um, yes

DMsqdMn17: I needed to tell someone about my dream.

Satan skin Boots: ohh tell me!

DMsqdMn17: I shall

DMsqdMn17: I was going to a very posh dinner party, and along the way, my date was swept up in a conversation with someone she knew from a long time ago, and I got distracted and found myself overlooking a pit, like at a zoo. And the big big wild cat there started looking at me, and then it came up and we made out.

Satan skin Boots: HAHAHA

DMsqdMn17: But the make-out session went too far, and the cat raped me.

DMsqdMn17: And then I crawled back to my date, half naked, bleeding and covered in cat scratches and bruises, crying and vulnerable, and she was already inside the event, dancing with two guys at the same time, and didn't even notice me.

DMsqdMn17: Then some people sat my sorry naked ass in a wheelchair and carted me out of there: a disgrace.

Satan skin Boots: indeed!

Satan skin Boots: did you happen to take acid before you fell asleep?

Satan skin Boots: that's a maaad messed up dream

Satan skin Boots: hahaha

DMsqdMn17: I know!

DMsqdMn17: That's why I had to tell.

DMsqdMn17: I honestly feel violated, by that big big cat.

Satan skin Boots: you're an angsty bitch

Satan skin Boots: but hilarious nonetheless
Satan skin Boots: i think you have a personal vendetta against felines

Satan skin Boots: and umm.. you're feeling vulnerable to everyone else?

DMsqdMn17: OK well, I'll work it out

DMsqdMn17: How U B?

Satan skin Boots: i be swell

Satan skin Boots: skipping class

DMsqdMn17: YEssssSS! That's my girl!

Satan skin Boots: the professor just pontificates to us for two hours... usually going over the same thing but in ten different ways

DMsqdMn17: Seriously. Why bother going?

Satan skin Boots: well, i go occasionally, but since he never takes attendance and i can get the assignments from other people i'm pretty much home free.

DMsqdMn17: Sitting home, drinking gin and jack, watching kiddie porn and eating jelly beans... That is what I imagine your definition of a weekday morning "Home Free" would be.

Satan skin Boots: HAHAH

Satan skin Boots: yeah, if i were a catholic priest.

Pivotal Reverberations

Wanted to be famous, but it's rough in the provinces. The days are short and cold. And dark.

I'm staying with my cousin in a house all to ourselves. He's still in high school. So I drive him to basketball practice where the other guys re-enact scenes in a midwinter parking lot from my own high school days. Ratty cars with salt stains and blurry bass-amped speakers, with resigned upperclassmen disembarking and walking across the parallel parked tundras like ex-convicts in a state standardized skid row. Funny how fast the years go by, but I'm not yet old enough for the really deep-seated regret. Yet.

"Who's The Masked Man?" he asked me, looking through my solemn neglected laptop. I've been out of the country for half a year. He's 14 and he seems to swivel between knowing absolutely nothing and being sublimely hip. Try letting your hair down emostyle. Don't wear that blue scarf with your corduroys. Hell to the Yeah. Anyway, he asked about DMM. "Is he, like, something your friends do?"

Who was That Masked Man? Don't know how to answer.

"Well I used to draw him in high school," I say.

The neighbor spits over to ask what I'm doing with my life. How long ya stayin'? Boy getchurselfa job. That sort of thing.
I'm a real novelty item because in this town they've got one old beatnik and a few years ago their first homeless person. Both eccentrics know their place and don't ever make a scene.
"They say Roger's parents have loads a money but he don' take any of it. Likes spending time at the library, sleepin out behind the grocery store. I go in 'ere evermornin round 5 for the bread delivery and there he is, wrapped in a blanket and gone. But that's how he wants to live his life." As if I needed an explanation.
"Yeah," says I, "some people need their own way to fit in." I feel like I'm talking down to a forty year old, but really I'm only letting down myself.

Coming to an understanding with one homeless guy isn't enough for me. I want to know them all. I want to experience the whiskey crawl of a lifetime and chase the spiral staircase screwdriver to heaven- really screw myself up. Shun affection with force and disappear into sunsets and emberous bonfire nights of the starfuck eternity. I recently went to the ends of the earth and ran into holy men. Weirdos and freaks. Dysfunctional ascetics and heavy-handed hippies.
How to carry what they taught into a room full of boozed-up yokels (ye olde friends) this weekend, old Masky expected to Provide and Conquer, alls he wants to do is curl up & howl wolf mantras at the resplendant moon?

Took this picture a week ago of a river where a sign had been painted on rock. "SWIMMING IS DANGER" it said. In classic fashion I can never hear the important advice: Go to College, Get A Job, Don't Drive into That Tree--- but instructional signs of little practical implication never fail to resonant deeply. Swimming is Danger. Of course. Don't go off the deep end. This is life man. This is the safe life. Swimming is Danger.

So I told Ben. My friend Ben. "I wrote three poems today Ben," I said, proud of myself. Ben, being a wise man, was unfamiliar with pride. He frowned.

"I didn't write any."

"Well that's okay," I said, "your whole life is a poem. You're living the poems." His lamentation relieved we walked on, and came upon the river after a time, where Ben stood and micturated for a moment and then made a sudden decision.

"Hold my things," he commanded, already confidently striding away. At the water's edge he stripped down, dove in brazenly, and swam. Happy wet laps. He came back up minutes later. Clean and refreshed, talking about God and living in a song I, at that moment, wished I could sing too.

There's so much more to learn, and having come so far I wish I could share a little and be famous. But the trees here are dead and the night falls fast around blurred edges. The dirty darks blend with snowy white and everything exudes cold safe gray. Grey, the color of America. Swimming is Danger.

My cousin is afraid to make a layup when he sees me standing in the gym door watching him, not knowing that I'm seeing him with impartial eyes that have weighed the world. I'm just another cousin in this town. Nothing special. Just a shivering guy trying out emo hairstyle options, a mask in my corduroy pocket.