A Vision or Two Ago

tHE eARTH SPINS rOUND THE sUN

Cruciform Limbs

We open with re-introductions:

HwttFcknGrrl225: who are you today?

DMsqdMn17: A Masqued Man.

HwttFcknGrrl225: had to ask. i never know who im going to get with you.

DMsqdMn17: Ha! How prescient, I'm lost. Who are you?

HwttFcknGrrl225: just a topheavy girl who likes you

DMsqdMn17: Ah, those earthy charms!

HwttFcknGrrl225: quite right. im not in love with you… only, there are certain things I want to do to you…

DMsqdMn17: Then cast me off tumbledown?

HwttFcknGrrl225: ;) Why are you lost sweetie?

DMsqdMn17: As Wallace Stevens said: 'Behold the nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.'

HwttFcknGrrl225: you should start a social movement

DMsqdMn17: A Bowel Movement would be more effective. All movements get bought out by big business, and then they degenerate into a racket. Everything in American society is so fragmented right now. It's like we have a distinct target audience culture for every cable TV channel. Everyone is so cut off. We can't even talk to each other!

How can you rally together a people under a single banner when they can't even communicate?

HwttFcknGrrl225: rally the lonely and the disaffected.

HwttFcknGrrl225: you're just like everyone man

HwttFcknGrrl225: only you're also a big nobody.

HwttFcknGrrl225: and somehow you are able to pull off both guises convincingly

HwttFcknGrrl225: probably because you don't answer any questions honestly

HwttFcknGrrl225: are you ever going to give me a straight answer?

DMsqdMn17: Just this once: No.

HwttFcknGrrl225: haha! oh cutie i want you.

HwttFcknGrrl225: i like you.

DMsqdMn17: try not to do that

HwttFcknGrrl225: what, like you?

DMsqdMn17: No, want. But, well, yeah that too.

In the small decisions we make under compulsions that are not our own, that's where our characters are defined. Where the bloody tincture of courage can seep through the test paper. Or the black death humiliation of defeat. I wear a mask knowing that every action is futile, but allowing myself the luxurious pleasure of a fiction where some things have meaning, and some things are predestined. See what I did there? I believe love can exist. And Reason. And happiness. I can still get the bills paid and the dishes done. I just need to burn a little brighter than most. Cling to optimism over pragmatism. It's not childish. It's my survival mechanism.

I welcome you to try to replace it with something. I'm open to suggestions. And willing to compromise, if it means not being so lonely anymore.

Her Screen Name: You're living for the fiction

DMsqdMn17: Better than dying without it.

Her Screen Name: Can't you experience things without the safety net?

 

...Tune in next week!

Film, at 11.

Okay, so juxtapose all that with an excerpt from another recent online conversation I held.

 

SuppleSextusCinString: So, um, Hodgdon's say I can get 250 a ton for my car....

DMsqdMn17: nice

DMsqdMn17: that's not a lot, is it?

SuppleSextusCinString: no, not much at all.... I was told I could get 500 from Paul....

SuppleSextusCinString: now I have to figure out how to put all sorts of weight in her....

SuppleSextusCinString: like, a washing machine, and stuff....

DMsqdMn17: concrete lined rustypipes

DMsqdMn17: That's what Aretha Franklin sings with, and she still rakes in the money.  And the R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

SuppleSextusCinString: I don't want to do that....

SuppleSextusCinString: so, no, do you think I should try to go somewhere else worth my time?

DMsqdMn17: First's first... weight:

DMsqdMn17: I think Now is the perfect time for you if you've been considering murdering anyone lately

DMsqdMn17: especially any really fat people. y'know?

SuppleSextusCinString: no, see that is actually a bad idea, because the law and such....

SuppleSextusCinString: that, and I'm fairly sure they will look the car over, and be able to smell the body, I'm not sure if you know this, but even the undecomposed smell...

SuppleSextusCinString: that and flesh is buoyant, I need something that is dense, like, steel

DMsqdMn17: The Undecomposed would be a great Metal Band name

DMsqdMn17: and some people ARE really dense

DMsqdMn17: especially the annoying people one would consider murdering

SuppleSextusCinString: Well, also, I've already gotten rid of the bodies....

We close with a haiku entitled newer model:

inherit my drive
shaft my only ambition
soon I'll be replaced.

-DMM

 

Clean Conservative Karma, with a side of MILF

I once knew a feisty old mama

Who loved my poetical comma

Something 'bout that division

created our only fission

so I fucked her, then voted Obama.

Drame

Indie girls of the world

Ignite!

Don't deny your death in big words and long obfuscate stories.

The days aren't bright enough for you, I think. That's why you called and said you couldn't talk right now. If I didn't love you so much I wouldn't have had the strength to take shit like that but I'm getting a piece on the side lately and so it all just makes me patient. The guilt, that is.

I'm sure they've stopped looking for me now.

Bar walls

Brick.

And art house chick who I'm unworthy of.

Saying that sounds authentic, know what I mean?

Say what you need to say.

There will be Kentucky. And roads to Satan's doorstep South Dakota.

There will be roads leading away from every moment of your life

and its up to you to sit in the car idling and experience the momentary

myth that is neither here nor there.

Honeytone ultrasound.

Herds of nothingness puddle and pool.

The baby was dead and I doubted it was mine until the end.

We don't talk about that anymore.

Your doctor was drunk.

She's got that gas mask filled with spunk

and on her way, she's on her way

saying

we're on our way

Eyes half closed to the world.

Sure I listen to M83 because Spin told me to.

Sure I made sure to buy converse when they came back in for the 4^th time I can remember since the 5^th grade.

Sure I took loud footsteps coming home that afternoon.

WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON IN HERE?

There's a man's ass and it's naked and facing me. And the man is fucking my girlfriend from behind and they don't stop pumping and humping while they turn to look at me they only slow down a little bit and she moans like I haven't seen her do in years like when we first messed around and I didn't have to be drunk to get it up anymore.

Fuck man you can have her.

Just where am I going to sleep now?

Dear ****edit*****,
Don't call me. Don't you ever think to call me. Don't.
Say you're busy. Then this. I'll dream of you and not sleep. I hope I haunt you. I told you I was fucked up and I knew how to handle you better than anyone with a map but whatever. Needs? Fuck you. Fuck our history. Let him fuck you.
Just don't come back.
And I know that sounds cliche. But I mean it.
-DMM

Too young to know what conscience was;
I make these same mistakes. Again and again.

Living in base animal instinct and guilty of nothing but the con of nature. Evolution's little faults and betrayals.

Down to the marrow of my bones I would delight in settling down. One of those Marriages that rust.
I can be noble and my skin can betray me.

I don't need you.

I don't need the panhandle of Michigan.

The smaller island of Hawaii.

The Texas coastline of my past needing to be mopped up off the floor.

By the time I finish mopping up the past the future has spilt all over the fucking place.

Metal on Metal. That's what we are right now.

The crisp aluminum frier of the End Times.  For the pleasure, to connect. There was a time when I couldn't get it up unless I heard your name.

Little bastard gets up and points only to you.

That's love, right?

A big hairy pet follows you around.

Sniffing and making a mess when you'll let him.

Early in the morning.

He's not even ashamed of himself.

He looks fucking proud.

Ignite!

Over!

The

hands of the Receivers.

Smooth and grim you wonderful creature you.
He is contented to drudge about with only one aspiration.

To be.
"To stand in thy affairs, fall by thy side.
No want of conscience hold it that I call
Her 'love' for whose dear love I rise and fall."

Some say life is a swift and terrible race

I say life is long.

Or some such simulacrum of truth which is the assumed color of my absolution.

What was I talking about that night?

Remember when I came over feeling the old desert urge to hurricane across the abyss in one fell Katrinan swoop of mad fucking desperation?

Accept psychic cures. Don't get mad.

Garbage bags full of Russian nesting dolls. Night trucks to Utah.

She said I’ll think of you every night
The vulture, she sang: why’d you wait so long
You're gone. I'm gone.

You're gone. I'm gone.

We've built up this world in our head and the expectation didn't exact its toll on reality, and so I paid for a ticket and paid for a pack of cigarettes I don't smoke and give two to a guy who was talking to me about pianos. Memorized dances. That's all it was.  I was on New York City stoned and neon highlighted binge of war memorials flew past in upturned bottles shouting

I loved her and you hated that.

She was 16.

Call it what you will but she was alive and her hair was knotted and her clothes were patched and her vagina bled her own blood not just the dead kind that you blamed me for with withholding, because she wrote poetry and sold pot one summer and listened to bad music passionately and wrote in many colours and had many men and fell hard and drank harder and drove her car off the road and skinny dipped with complete strangers in the middle of the city at midnight and thought about kissing me but didn't that one time and I loved that girl.

That ruddy lifetime or two ago. How many have we wasted on this lie that we call birdsong?

Baby. Blasphemy. Don't kiss me.

Don't seduce me with your sex. DON'T STAND SO CLOSE!

There's no cure for your disease except release.
I've got a picture of you I can find my release to.

Over the sea.

Jacking off the end of the docks.

Baby's dead in a pool of blood I mop off the hard wood floor crying smoke dangling ugly plot hanging out like a limp dick for all to see and suck on if they wish

Saying that sounds authentic, right? Real enough to ignite the corpse of a story? My life? Know what I mean?

"Where Am I Edison?  Where'd it all go wrong?  Vincent? St.  Thomas!  Barnard, dive into the lakes!  Freeze your little white girl asses off!  Oh a Malay?  So sorry.  Indie chicks of the world, Ignite!  Indie chicks of the world, Goodnight!"

Single Women talking on the phone at 1 AM while Men walk their dogs and I edify unentangled

"People can be cruel," she said into the phone on the doorstep at one AM. "Men! I wish I didn't need the wankers. I think about it long and hard, but it's only ever limp. Just my luck."

How embarrassing to walk past at this intimate detail. In the shit perfumed lightfall of the street I can see that she is tall even though she is sitting, and blond. Her painted toenails turtle out of jelly sandals. Her voice is coldly metallic in the cave of this street, and I wonder if this is just a guard mechanism devised by her larynx because a man in ratty clothes and a mask is pouring heavy footsteps up the sidewalk right in front of her.

Then she laughs.

The night is broken by barking and lonely laughter. Fools whistle and vanish, a breeze flutters open windowdrapes and the impervious tyranny of the night forces all past and present time to seem indistinct. Painfully the same.

The old need slips in at the whisper of pagan shadow gods. I am a low animal. Condoms strewn across the charged and tranquil path that leads to a million hideaway avenues of quick-escape release and despair. Like cherry blossoms, the cast off flowers of a fruit that never was.

Lonely and wanting, men take to the streets dressed for bed because all across this city dogs scratch against doors and beg to go out. "Honey, go," their drowsy females say, and so they go, ripping open the covers into the foggy night air, deluding themselves that when they return a warm body will envelop them in thanks. The dogs race around the roadside, forgetting everything but the onslaught of panic smells, and seeing in every clearing a promise.

If it's empty, you can relieve yourself on it. That's the rule. That's their nature. Ours too. Broken glass and strewn flyers crunch beneath my feet as I march solemn past this spectacle. Grown men in their pajamas shouting "Here Poochy Poochy Poochy! Come here Muffin! Thaassa good boy!" in the middle of the night, picking up plastic handfuls of a lesser beings refuse and slowing dying.

What awaits us at the end of our nights? Women dream of men, careless and dark. Men dream of filling her skin and teasing her body with their hands, and though imperious sometimes this works out. But most of the time it all sinks into disappointment. Twisted, dissolute, and disappearing. That's why I'm out walking tonight.

I put on the mask, telling myself I could vanish into the soundless dark, but the glass crunches beneath my feet and the whole unbroken delusion of the world remains, pressing against my head like an unwanted black conviction of my own malignant misjudgments of the world. And yet I walk on. The future is a bright light around the corner. Soon late night conversations about assholes will diminish. Dogs will empty last bowels, men will acquit themselves to the reality of not getting anything tonight, and then will come dawn. Truth lies in silence, in emptiness, and in isolation. That's where it all begins.

When I get there, maybe then I'll take off my mask.

We all want the new thing

"All alone at the end of the of the evening

And the bright lights have faded to blue

I was thinking bout a woman who might have

Loved me and I never knew"
~Eagles~

Expression. –A Poemtype thingby D.M'd.M.

This morning got up alone.

Took shower. Got dressed.

Put on my mask, and checked my email.

Turns out I have a friend who is an artist and

she is doing an exhibit next week.

Her e-vite included

a picture, painting herself into a corner.

As Gary Doubleday once said:

"Sometimes it seems so hard to be"

I was enchanted and stirred.

But now the sun's gone all to hell.

Drinking away last frantic bursts of youth.

Reading Chaucer and regretting every minute

as they all come to a head.

Why is it so hard to hold on

when everything we know

is swimming away into

a never-ending

need to

sub-

div

id

e

?

Light out of darkness.

Here I am, saying "I am."

Taking off the mask.

Slip back into bed

fetal position and bleeding.

Humming a song I wrote.

You'll like it. It's new.

Evolutions of All Sound & Light

Who wants in?
What is that ringing?

Is that my door or am I dreaming? Caught up in a beautiful lack of reality.
No one is coming to save us. No one should have to. You cry and you cry and you cry out for help so scared. Like so many false alarms no one hears.

He wants to hold her close. He tells her. Lips move but no sound emerges.
She does not hear. She does not come. His heart is still empty.
He walks away.

In crowded burning rooms I see nothing but the convergence of empty airs. Poor delicate ants milling, lifting, bitching, because they can. Wicked medicines swallowed by corpses at the bottom of the sea. It all rests coolly under a starry pacific sky. The masks of god topple down like the gems of springtime rain while a wind chimes along with a quiet soulless song.

What is that ringing?

Where is my door?

Her breasts pressed to his, cold nipples never warmed,
they are farther apart now than ever.

And all the chirping cellphones of the world cry out to each other like little birds echoing the ghost cries of big bang infinity. Explosions large and small. Every decibel represented. Every complex avenue of evolution appears. Every pathway explored. Everything makes sense.

But nothing makes sense.

Beyond the paychecks and the highway, the friends and the city and the TV signal and the frauds of every manner of tangled passions... beyond all these

lies silence.

Now I hear no deathly ringing.

Now the golden door melts into my skin. Who wants in?
Her eyes explode with beauties both large and small, ringing with the light of every dream I've ever lost.

He closes his eyes and the world is gone.
He opens his eyes and the world is gone.

And everything is waiting to ring, waiting to make sense, waiting to be let in.

Alone we are infinite, but don't be scared.

"Alone we are infinite," he says.

Alone we are infinite.

Scs, Mts, Hrs, Days

"I'm sorry I'm late. I was waiting for a phone call." I sit down on the bench next to the dark man and flip open my phone again to check it for emphasis. Only a handful of life’s moments feel anywhere near as good as getting a phone call from a girl. The satisfaction of being wanted.

We sat on the Laguna park bench and since conversation had not taken off by my entrance I thought of all the various runways I could back up and try again from. As a writer I'm full of lines. People are fun to watch. Whores. The ugly art student sketching outside the bistro. The old man dressed up like a lady. The beautiful young mother with a ring the size of my fist. I had that dream again of the pretty girl fingering herself in the surf with two fingers and just as she is about to come a wave crashes over her and carries her away. All the little fishies in the water smile and I wake up sad and dissapointed. I have decided that the fish represent my ex girlfriends and the waves represents something else.

We sat on the Laguna park bench and waited to die.
Apart from telling stories, I enjoy this activity more than most. Waiting to die.
My friend Craig's mother died of cancer when we were boys and before the wake he and his older sister blew up balloons in the dim creepy room that was meant to make sad people feel comfortable in awkward situations. I sat there and popped the balloons. Until an adult told me to stop and I hated him. Everybody around you all the time is just doing things to make themselves happy, and it makes me happy to make happy people unhappy.

I've been happy. Waiting for you with flowers. I could imagine the look on your face. That's when I was really happiest. When I was imagining the idealized version of events unfolding. Like how I'm saddest when I'm thinking of what will make me sad. It's never as bad as I expect. Real experiences never compare to the experiences we can formulate in our minds.

Evolution has equipped us well in this way.
Remember on that forlorn strand of glint-sand beach on the other side of the world? The soothing effects of my mantra were given new provenance by long breezy-strewn legs exploding into view like fireworks as I lay belly flung on the ground getting fucked by eternity. Sparks. Breasts. Ass.

Everything good is always walking away.

"Well what do you think?" I asked her.
"Geek. It's obtuse. I don't know what you're talking about."
"Don't call me a geek."
"You sound like some really depressed person. Do you have any music?"

Memory percolating just below the skin, just inside my ear at night. The stars fell all around. The stars were a great river overhead and all the little fishies fell. Asleep old men still wake up sad confused and sadly horny. Dear God, stop me if you've heard that one.
"Ha! You're so emo."

Remember how Craig's mothers ashes went everywhere? I would have laughed but no one else did. Later we all ate egg salad sandwiches and I thought of asking his older sister out to a movie sometime because even though we were young I was starting to be old enough to realize that she was kind of hot, in her tight black church clothes, carefully applied mascara dripping down her freckled cheeks.

We sat on a Laguna park bench and I searched my backpack for clues. TIME magazine in my backpack. The phone number of a gay man. In my backpack. The memories of days spent watching sunlight draw lines across the wall and nights spent crying on the floor of the shower. In my backpack. Light moves in particles and waves. The waves represent my sudden implacable desire to move to South America and start a new life selling homemade leathergoods with a woman named Phillipa every time I open up the microwave in the break room and take a deep breath. Exhale. It goes away.

As a writer I'm full of lines. Like, "how about I be the needle and you be the thread and we'll weave ourselves a life together." You left the flowers in the bathroom trash next to that lace bra we I accidentally ripped in a moment of passion I hope you've I've been tripping over for two weeks now.

New Music, in my backpack. See? I have music. The music, the music, and you. Things I can't get out of my head backpack. If I was enough you wouldn't need the music. If you didn't have the music I wouldn't be. It's contradictory and I'm not happy resolving any of it any my head because the pleasure of frustration is what makes life worth living.

Waiting to die.

At work today I walked out of a meeting themed "Everybody Wants a Sale". I don't want a sale. Looking around the meeting room all the bright faces glowing in the waves of light off the overhead projector. Whores.
Often I feel like I need to summon up mountains of strength just to get up in the morning, like the sky will come crashing down on me unless I am ready, but this morning wasn't like that. I didn't care if she wasn't going to call.
Some ducks from the bay flew overhead and I suddenly wonder what this office complex must look like as seen from the sky. Boxes. Like when we were little kids and we played in the cardboard and made our refrigerator box into a house, and a spaceship, and a hideaway, and when we fit too many of us in there one of the sides crushed in and then it was just a flat brown pad in the middle of the floor that we fought for the right to sit on.

We had an uncle who used to visit once a year and I can remember thinking he was such a wise and happy person. Now I can see that he was only so talkative because he was lonely, and he visited each year because his life grew steadily more isolated and desperate.

We sat on the Laguna park bench waiting for each other to say something and I made a list in my head of all the people I've known who have died. Craig's Mom. My Uncle. The Woman of my dreams. Craig. Everyone I know at work. The whores all around us.
You.

Me.

"See, there's this girl," I say and the dark man turns and looks up at me. He has the stature of a fire hydrant. The complexion of fine adobe. "There's this girl and for her I am trying to be perfect. Regretting innumerable choices I never made because I lacked conviction and rode the waves." A fly buzzes onto my arm and I am pulled back into reality as if the fly is repeatedly intoning "you're not the first person here. You're not the only person here. You're nobody. Just like everybody else."

As a writer I'm full of characters and they are not real. But she asked for more stories, more characters, and that became our reality. Now I don't tell them anymore. "You can't miss them," I told her, "they don't exist." But by that token neither do I. My make-believe characters gave shape and dimension to her day. And when she doesn't call I don't tell them. That's all I did. Tell stories. And now I no longer exist. I'm just a shell. Waiting to die.

Because it's not my story anymore its her story and I'm merely a player in it.

Because being that character is still better than not being any character at all.

We do better when we have roles to play. Evolution has equipped us well in this way.

The dark man sees his wife and young son and greets them in Spanish from across Laguna park. He hasn't understood a word of it. Walking away, he lifts the son and hugs the wife and they walk off together and I am alone.

Now I realize I should have been looking for someone else. Someone waiting for me.
Unless I am early. Maybe I will wait just a while longer.
I'll count to twenty in my head and then I'll go.
Or maybe I'll count to twenty twenty times.
Maybe I'll count the seconds and the minutes, the hours and the days.
And when you appear I'll say "TWO, ONE!!" as if you came just at the right moment and we couldn't have planned it better if we'd tried.

When the fly goes away all will be silent and I will start counting then. All alone
To twenty.
Any second now.
Okay he's gone.