Monday, March 31, 2008

The Blind

I saw the shadow—

Sweep it away! I said, hushed

now it's gone; hush, now


How many times have we heard it said, "I'll believe it when I see it?" There is something quite action-orientated about visual perception. Or, seeing is doing. Doing is being. Are we what we believe, or is this a myth?
Maybe we are mere byproducts of our experienced environment? The answer lies somewhere in your choices.


If you're blind, does your periphery expand to the horizon?
You can't see your skin... so do you just go on and on forever with personal space as broad and void of any firmament as the clouds?


BLIND ROOMATES
: A MASKED MAN COMIC


I met her having a round and she said she was a chef downtown.
I am Spartacus, I said, and her friends all but left us.
I could cook for you if I knew what you like, she said.
To achieve intellectual honesty, I said
She frowned.

I followed her home and the angels were on our heels.

Her roommates.
Time mixing with alcohol, dimensions skewed on a summer evening.
I'm moving out in a fortnight, she said, these three are becoming the death of me.

We all listened to the living room radio. Crude dramas from the 30s. Horrifyingly urgent.

They jumped at the gunshots, gasped when the cop turned out to be the killer.

Her eyes were closed. Time for bed.


See an empty curve and fill it. Lights out. Hands rushing where eyes cannot.
Breasts like hanging fruit, legs long full of contour and texture.

What she turned out best was a recipe of regret
And once she had gotten her fill I dressed and left before my own meal was finished.


I never saw her again, although I heard her a few weeks later.

Seems I'd bit off more than I could chew, and in my haste, left behind a hoodie with my number on the tag. She called in the middle of a lonely night.

Hello? Why haven't you called me back?

I'm not here you can't see me, I said, and hung up.


I'm never going to see that hoodie again.

She was moving out within a fortnight. God knows to where.

Sunday, March 30, 2008

Face up to it, Can't do any better

Wake up stiff feeling futile. Limbs snapping back into place, eyes moaning and glazed over fresh from the alleyways of dreamland. Something so pleasantly rendered about that makeshift imitation.

Even nightmares, taut knives of the night, are nice by comparison to this. All hazy and nonexistent, like a brown river eddying around high rise apartments, whole worlds, lives, screaming and puckering in a voiceless halfway sort of hunger that we can just wake up from to go make some toast.

Only the bread’s gone green.

The real world destroys our dreams. My drowsy drive too wet to spark aflame in retreat.
Stomach gnawing, tiny battles lost, you know what I mean, distracted by pictures on the internet.

Seems she’s been to the
Caribbean and there is the evidence. Plastered across my newsfeed. She. In the blue bikini, she, out of the blue bikini (still playfully still covered), she, she, she...

So I dive into the archive, until she’s found again. Never-closing eyes, a new sleep of repeated strokes ’n motion. That far away resolve never gratified. Later buried angry, black cloud ashamed, but the struggle continues now and then she is there, she is years ago, there she is, there she is in the garden, there she is with you.

And nothing was more real when I saw you and knew that I could go no further.

Friday, March 28, 2008

God is a Ceiling!

 Hanging out with the guys.  The past is a Limited Edition Collectors Set of brittle glasses, filled with air.  Remember that, if you would.

Friendly conversations with the 'so called shadows in the alleys'.  Sheaves of breath, edged along the wind-left wall, coughing into the beautiful black air phosphorescent.

god who can blast or console, but who too often leaves us alone.

That's the problem with mental stress and not-enough-sleep combined. They team up on you and say "HERE, HAVE A COLD!!"

god is a vampire machine.

 

And so I sit.  Stay put.  Too weak to repulse our Common Enemies. The beautiful black air.  Her name writ in smoke.  Time, a frenzy of good and evil all the same under coiled god sun overhead swooping destruction.

We're all lost in space.  I could complain, but I won't. 

Life on paper means nothing

 

Where is Success?

Computers.

Harmful or fatal if swallowed. Keep out of reach of children.
Eye irritant. Contents under pressure.

Highlights and Interstices.  that god has a universal view of human suffering.  Mirrors in beautiful black air.  Where light can't escape, but your reflection can.

dizzying array of thoughts

broad rainbow columns

the firmament isn't permanent.

Remember that, if you would.

Remember that, if you would.

God is a Vampire Machine

"GOD IS A VAMPIRE MACHINE!" I yelled as I sprung out of bed. The couch. Where am I?
"Bad dreams?" asked The Dude, standing there cleaning a gun. I got up and got a pen and a piece of paper. God is a vampire machine.

"I fell asleep in class one time, just completely bricked," said The Dude, "and when the Professor called my name I snapped out of it and apparently yelled 'whu, whau, THEY'RE SMUGGLING HEROIN in the TOYS'. Haha. Seems I had been having some sort of dream about how to stop drug trafficking, and I suddenly realized that they were stuffing teddybears in South America. Everybody just looked at me like I'd just said the most brilliant thing ever!"

So did I...

Words like Silent Raindrops Fell

Giving someone all your love
Is never an assurance that they'll love you back!
Don't expect love in return;
wait for it to grow in their heart
if it doesn't, be content it grew in yours

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Sick Racist Wordplay


Distended stomach. Ache!!  Am I sick?  Perverted maybe.  What is Sick?  Wittgenstein thought that all problems were in fact simply difficulties brought about by language. 


---Brian was sick last week.  And so were several of my autograph seekers in Vegas.  Maybe I got it from them.
--I remember I ate some crabfish a few days ago.

-And then yesterday I got stabbed with a rusty syringe by an 80 lb homeless girl.


That might have something to do with it.  Or maybe it was the medical testing I volunteered for to get some cash.  DO YOU VOMIT MORE THAN THREE TIMES A WEEK? Yes.  DO YOU CONSIDER YOURSELF OVERWEIGHT? yah.  ARE YOU HAVE ANY ALLERGIES? No.


Keep out of my life!  Sorry.  Sorry. 
I’m not angry with you.

Merely projecting my hatred for multinational corporations.


Oh!  Did I mention it’s GAME DAY
Yay!  Game Day!  I shit thee not.

Today’s game will be compromised of a little audience participation, since every once in a while I like to answer some of the many questions I get either posted on my blog(s), or sent directly to my mailbox...


No offense baby, you’re still the one (of the ones),


CONVERSATIONS WITH OTHER WOMEN
THE GAME
First; The Masked Man’ll answer these questions &
Second; send me more questions, and I’ll answer those!
Yay!


Q: My boyfriend and I are very environmentally conscious and so we always recycle in our apartment, and we turn off the lights and take short showers.  But for some reason my boyfriend thinks it’s okay to take longer showers when we’re away from home in like a hotel room or something.  He says that its not our water and so it’s okay to stand in there for a half an hour or more!  Am I wrong or is he just being really wasteful?  Hotel water comes from the same source as tap water in your home, and it goes to the same place afterwards, right?
A:
Hey!  Fuck you!  This isn’t your local government FAQ page.  What do I look like, Bruce Jenner?  Treading water is for sea otters and seventh graders. 


Q: That wasn’t very nice, or coherent.  Are you sure you’re feeling alright?  The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, "like a cuttlefish spurting out ink…"  That’s George Orwell.  But seriously, I think you’re only playing this game to insult us.
A:
David Byrne says heaven is a place where nothing much ever happens.


Q: Hey did you know that before the 17th century, carrots were purple?
A:
Each day I dye a little more.


Q: Have you seen ’Hot Rod’ yet?
A:
Not really, no.


Q: Why not?
A:
Actually on Wikipedia, under Douchebag it has a picture of that movie, and lists Andy Sandberg’s parents for letting him live past the age of 7 seconds.


Q: Any advice for would-be equestrians?
A:
Watch out fer da jocky camps. A lot of Not Straight people live there.  And I don’t mean Well Rounded.


Q: sorry i just have ot ask, is ur mask a symbol for teh common man?
A:
Interesting.  Go die in a fire


Q: Are you a racist, or do you use racial stereotypes because "everyone else is doing it"?
A:
I’ll have you know my acrid little immigrant child, Everyone Else is NOT doing it.  Look at Wayne Brady, for instance.  He’s black.


Now comment with, or
Commence with Questions.  We’ve got answers. 
You SUCK Radioshack.


-DMM


Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Aftermath

The city starts to change around 11. By 3AM it’s another world entirely. The aftermath. Sounds like a vacuum tube. Shadows stretch out into nether realms where you can remember everything ever thought but never spoken. Images in darkness passing like night fog, tried to impart, slowly shaped and proven in the fires of passion and regret. "We need to talk," sayeth the desert pearl. The Bird, violetized in a magnetic sky matrix of sentiment prescribed by our throbbing pulse of compulsions. Or is that just a passing Wilco song?

People's behavior is determined by their environment. I never wait in lines. I’m in my twenties. My whole life has been a hunger strike. I resist the barricades of crowd control and DANGER KEEP OFF GRASS. That’s Gumption. That’s a hole you can’t step across. That’s a sea of broken dreams.

Stretch the boundaries and you find what's left of him in a wheelchair off Main. "He likes fruit salad, if you know what I mean..." The Bird nesting in the residence of criminal God. The enigmatic nature of our dreams. It’s okay. You don’t have to look me in the eye.

Poverty, prostitution, garbage lined streets of dust and rundown ranchero homes. The view from the pool. Splash my face with scorn. The view from the highway. Underwhelming cars overtaking trucks in installments on the freeway. My vision of the world scorched and haggard.

Greyhound handjobs. Greyhand hound jobs all cock and pull and crazy coin outlandish. Politely squealing "the British sank the Bismarck." Speak up. B Cup. Call girls and incomplete grunt sentences. Bail fast. Circuit disconnect. If you want them to hear you, speak softly. If you want them to love you, blow up in their face.

Madagascar through the eyes of a lemur. The Bird lost at sea in a giant squid dress. Gay black man scared to come out of his iTunes. He loves to bottom. Out fast. Outcast. Tanlines on my face from the mask and Damascus. Back to class. A giant dentist’s drill grinding into the great teeth of the universe. The jaws of time open wide. We see only so far as the longing abyss between us.

I wrote a long childish poem about all the words and walks and whispers, and when I cut away all the onion layers of adjectives and fuckall the only word left was; "schism," before I paused and erased that too.

Saturday, March 15, 2008

The sIDESwalks of MARCH

The nights are easier than the days, which start out with such steep expectations. Each and every morning, the sun comes up and the light hits like a wall impenetrable.

Are you suicidal?


Tyler: Only in the mornings.


I never got that till now but today I found myself in the bathtub just thinking about holding myself under. Looking at the man in the mirror holding a razor and thinking the kind of thought a man doesn’t need to act on more than once for it to take permanent effect.


This morning I contemplated taking those few regrettable steps that all men eventually go towards. To the kitchen, of course, to forage in the fridge. I didn’t. Ain’t shit to eat in this house and I’m starving and I had a better plan anyway.

Black kids stepping up but going nowhere on an abandoned Stairmaster. A box of teardrop dew dotted VHS tapes left out on the street corner.


I’ve gone out for a walk.

It’s easier for me to stay in the basement these days, and that’s not entirely a metaphor. The newspaper read by noon, I feel like all the world has gone into a minor key. My clothes lying all around the floor like the empty dead, snake husks, everything collapsing in on itself. Time to go out for a walk.


Synapses starting to misfire like skipping CDs. Broken records strewn along the penny pavement. The truest judge of a civilization is the condition of her sidewalks. I’m going to get lost tonight.

"masked faces

and sleek heads the outward souls of many

acting as one."

-John Allman


I can fit in anywhere. We’re all trying to. I can. The Masked Man. Even those who stand out are still just slight pigments in the broader spectrum. Pigments of my imagination. I am Brutus and Caesar. I am the bum and the man in the suit. The fireman and the smoking hot.


"Hello, how are you doin? Nice mask yer wearing," and I turn. Roses for sale. Strange sort of release a man gets just a few blocks outside of his norm. The nothingness of not working, not eating, not sleeping life. It’s impressive what nothing can do to a man.


Men driving trucks

men in all night diners

men loosening ties at the end of the week

men ordering another beer


A met a man with a pack and a rolled up sleep bundle trying to catch a train up to Oregon.

"My freight made a wrong turn," he told me, dry hands holding out his sign to drunk kids smoking out of bars. TOO UGLY FOR PROSTITUTION it said. "If I can get six more bucks I can make it up to Oregon by tomorrow." Everybody’s trying to get out of this city. Take a few more steps away from The Projects. Fancy cars cruising. Tourists standing outside hotels talking loud sports and stories. Further. Streetlights are a marvelous invention. The nights are easier than the days. I just walk and walk.

Shuffling steps and thousand yard stares. Mendicant Filthniks and a vagrant who I gave three coins to so she can catch a bus down to San Mateo.

"Sparenchange mang?"

"Which way headed?" I ask, "North or South?"

"South," she says, pointing, "if I’n g’jus a dollar more I’m goodta go ta San Mateo."


Women who never got over "everywhere you go there you are"

women who find ’Deal or No Deal’ the most apt metaphor for life yet.

women who see colors but not much else in the way of shape or substance.

women who dig men if only because society has informed them that gauging reactions from the mirror alone is unacceptable.


We the vagrant masses in an unsatisfying lover’s parade. Waddle while you reek. Determined meat fists and angry lost refugees of the day drifting past crane necks and drug addled miscommunications. There are no days, at night. There are no jobs. No sit-down meals. No impenetrables. We clutch the darkness and roll with it and no one sees our lives catapulting after sunset while the world sleeps devoted to its hungers and thirsts and discount warehouse possessions.


The nights are easier than the days. Voices ring out in the shadows and the moon comes out from behind its cloudy bed to take a look, and then its gone. I feel good. Have a few drinks and siphon away my self control into the inevitable black vacuum. There it is, crawling drunkenly across the floor. Self-sabotage, carving away at the roughest of the remaining edges and shattered expectations until all that’s left is a hope.


A pretty girl just around the corner.

A smile.

A gentle brush of dawn.

A sunrise that’ll probably just lead to regret.

In a few hours.


Let’s just let it be night for a while.

It’s easier this way.

Come out. Let’s go for a walk.

Step away and disappear and let it all become another memory.

Because at least this is something we can do.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Nudity Implied



It's Game Day!
Yay! Game Day!

Today's Game:
Describe the first person you see when you close your eyes.


Leave a Comment.
-DMM

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

A Way

I'm sick of playing games, like getting my hair cut. It's still just me. Peek-a-boo! Your life is still in tatters! We change clothes and styles and masks and the darkness sifts down and we take hold of the earth in small palpable handfuls, like Neanderthals shitting through the night.


Hope is tomorrow's veneer over today's disappointment.
- Evan Esar


Love is a tether. Grapple on to it and ride to the top. Some find it de-stresses them. It distresses me. But I'll ride. It's a way. I wish I could be as wise as she is cruel. Cool as malice. It's a way.

(What's) A question I could spend my life answering, if I had to (?)


D'COMMISERATIVE SECOND:

[Insert every complaint anyone has ever shared with you]


DMsqdMn17: I'd love to tell you not to love…

he said, standing vertiginously on this wobbley rock as it totters away from the of the sun, but unless you light a fire you'll never know the warmth.

We all find our own way. Niches. In the dark there is a light. And no one knows how this will end, so we go. We play. It's a way.

The way?
Fuck (me) if I know.

Games That We Play

DMsqdMn17: How fortunate the pawns. Over and done with before the game even really starts at the higher levels.
SuppleSextusCinString: oh, wow....
SuppleSextusCinString: that is profound, you know, except that every pawn is a queen if you reach the oposing side...
DMsqdMn17: Yes, yes. Reincarnation.
DMsqdMn17: The story that some pawns achieve enlightenment... the Kurt Cobain chessboard Nirvana theory.
DMsqdMn17: that's the story organized religion is based on.
DMsqdMn17: Don't believe it. We're still just pawns.
DMsqdMn17: The ones that get transformed aren't luckier or hardier. They're just chosen because someone up there is toying around, playing a game.
SuppleSextusCinString: speak for yourself....
SuppleSextusCinString: everybody is playing a game

DMsqdMn17: A man walks into a room.
DMsqdMn17: Says "ow."
DMsqdMn17: "Door's over there, idiot," says God.
SuppleSextusCinString: I thought he did tha twhen he walked into a bar...
DMsqdMn17: "K-Clunk," said the bar.

DMsqdMn17: Orrrr...
DMsqdMn17: A lawyer walks into the bar and passes.
SuppleSextusCinString: oh, very nice

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

I am Jack's Eating his Words

DMsqdMn17: Hey why did you use that quote?
OneSwellGuy: Hey.
OneSwellGuy: What quote?
DMsqdMn17: In your IM profile.
OneSwellGuy: Oh the "If you sleep alone you sleep with Hitler"?
DMsqdMn17: ya that one. What's the deal?
OneSwellGuy: what? ur the one that said it.
DMsqdMn17: But why did you put it on your profile?
OneSwellGuy: I have a hard time keeping my mind off of things I hate to think about.
DMsqdMn17: Well, the thing is Elizagerth, I've said much cooler stuff than that
DMsqdMn17: So you should put some of that in your profile. Like: "I am an Unhappy Island."
DMsqdMn17:
Something like that.
DMsqdMn17:
Otherwise people are going to think
DMsqdMn17: I'm a dumbass.
OneSwellGuy: We are the words we say. Even every little bit.
OneSwellGuy: Aren't you proud of who you are man?
OneSwellGuy: Who are you, anyway?
DMsqdMn17: Hey! You just updated your profile!
DMsqdMn17:
"DMsqdMn17: I'm a dumbass. " !!!!!!
DMsqdMn17:
Take that down!

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Cuz even Cold loneliness Can it Kill



It would be my goal to really go further and I've never even come close to achieving it.
We're still on that road that isn't even on the map and it's difficult to go down
and it's at night
and there's no lights
-Gord


There are rows and rows of houses churning smoke into the shrouds of morning
Into which are flowing the recidivous electricity of cable TV basketball games
Dark Guys Bouncing Balls over a smooth and newly-waxed surface
And there are millions of men out there with it all on mute
about to come, tilting their heads skyward out of the misty dream
either arched in a full court press over someone nubile and
faking expectation or
maybe they are alone.
I know I am. Stroking myself in the shadow cauldron of wonderful pleasures unsatisfying.
Pleasure: that great gateway drug. If we were sharper
we wouldn't settle for such secondary passions, in fear,
charred and still needy Time and Time Again.


30-Second Time-Out to Bring It All In
Huddle in the low notes of night and unify in Love.
Love: that warm fire in the basement. Thrusting up one single phallus of pollutive smoke.
Plunge deep into her
aaanndd break!
Ensconced I lust to ascend your Elysium heights.
Caress your tendermost branches out quivering in the sun
Where Joyfully Bowed on a million Bedsheets, pulsing toward the dire diadem at the end
All Humanity becomes a great pewter spew of compulsions
into the cosmic void at the buzzer
and gone!

Saturday, March 01, 2008

Condyles and Haiku on How Even Concrete can Crumble

Ask me what I think of
When I'm not with you
-
Big Kid


Ever hear about the old comedian who just finished his set on how corporate business meetings are a lot like funerals, then to the applauding audience said, "Thank you. I'm here all week," and died?


I lost my new kite

and found something else to do

That's foreshadowing
-
A Haiku by DMM


Why write anymore? What is it about NEW that so thoroughly fascinates us? When everyone gets 15 minutes, no-one gets 16. A real shame 'cause, kudos to democracy and all, some people truly are more deserving than others. Namely, me.


Catch up lost child


In a time when Old stories told New ways sell out multiplexes, when you can lose your job to a kid because the company won't have to pay him as much. In an environment like this blog. Where 'you complete me' meets 'let's have sex'.

Where writers'
identities take shape like icicles, glacial-drip slowly and
someday lethal. Let's use 'unappreciated' just for effect. Smart stupid vivisections of humanity and words that don't make any sense in hindsight like tergiversation or stupefaction.


Jobs are lost, love is lost, fame is never found. Sure, I'm not the first to identify and harbor fears of not finding fame until I die. Weird monumental ideas by could-be artists who could-have-been, but weren't.


Don't worry. There's no one there.


SuppleSextusCinString: remember how you said: "Don't ever fall in love in March"

DMsqdMn17: I don't think like that anymore
SuppleSextusCinString:
don't fall in love on saturdays?

DMsqdMn17: No. Don't love.



Why hold on to anything old when y'all can have something new?
Isn't that how society tells us we should think? ISN'T IT?!?


SuppleSextusCinString: i always look for the same woman
SuppleSextusCinString:
she's beautiful, way up tight and in need of a moral holiday, wearing a black beret, a black mini skirt, white blouse, and a black leather jacket. the woman who is standing alone, new to the group and detached from everyone else just like Me.


Just some beautiful people finding life's meaning in the
weather


DMsqdMn17:
Your quixotic quest is painfully familiar and I want to discuss unlikelihood of an attractive girl sitting alone and other flaws in your canvas at length, but also, don't, because its such a beautiful dream that I'd hate to have any part in crushing it with crestfallen reality.


Ignorance and thinking absence. Absence, that's what I thought. Night lessons, hunger, the myth of the female orgasm and
El Dorado, Coors Light, live chicken, dead chicken, airshows and no stars


What if I told you insane was working fifty hours a week
in some office for fifty years
at the end of which they tell you to piss off;
ending up in some retirement village hoping to die before
suffering the indignity of trying to make it to the toilet on time?
Wouldn't you consider that to be insane?

-Garland Greene, Con Air


Why go to work? I used to work in a factory with a blue enamel bordered meeting room where everyone wore uncomfortable clothes and wished they could be doing something else and the head honcho said unsettling things like, "I thought I ordered a shipment of 200 million [things] to be made," and I used to sit there fidgety thinking "you can't just order something made. We're only made
when we want to be."


SuppleSextusCinString: i used to work in a factory too
DMsqdMn17: The burnt petroleum story?
SuppleSextusCinString:
life is nothing but burnt petroleum.


Bags of old paper

blowing in the sighing winds

as fiery sun sets

-Another Haiku by DMM


Why fall in love? We hang out together all the time and then call with nothing to say. Will it be like this in a week? In five years? When I draw into myself, take off on that trail to my innermost soul and curl into a fetal position, I want you to be there wrapped up in me. When I'm alone, I want to be with you. You who could own anyone in your sweatpants in the morning before your makeup, but no one could own you because they wanted you. Once they said please they were gone.
I'll remember in the last rays of light your eyes flickering, hands cupping a cellphone, trying a smother a smile, until the end of time.


Thoughtful decay. Decay that thinks. Sawdust, crowbar, Gnostic souls, rubies, condom, shame, blue hospitals, alliteration


maybe i'll explode into a color
that has never been seen,
and what then. who would clean it up.
-e