B) brazen overtures With a gilt-edged guarantee

I insist upon myself. Standing on the bridge overlooking where this teaming bay of life falls out into the dead mirror ocean.

“You know the Pacific, it’s always cold,” she said. I wanted to argue. There was nothing to say. Pacific, from passive, right? My grandmother lying dreamless in the shit-smelling ward when I come in to visit, her lone remaining hand as cold as ice. Soon she will have no hands. They will put more tubes in her and speak softly and she will be returned to the womb. Rattled mind replaying events from 40 or 50 years ago, maybe more. Like a baby, cooing sonorous, forgetting all those Jungian archetypes and previous life experiences when they pale in comparison to the warm reality of breast milk, or, later, the cruelty of a pacifier.

Pacify. Long ago she wrote of a “permanent knot” in her stomach “slowly moving on to other organs.” I try to answer this but sense my awkwardness. My lack of analysis and also empathy. “It's also taking over the rest of my life,” she said. And that I can believe. Who hasn’t had their life taken over by a hyperrealistic continuum. The vagaries of social constructs. My dad sent me an email entitled: Male Ego, The Corvette, & The Brass Pole‏. I have not responded in 25 days.

The sun came out today. An improvement over yesterday.

“don't ask me what i'm doing because i don't know.
but i'm thinking i'm pretty lonely.”

-e

The internet is a language that our planet is speaking. I wish plants had web pages. I wish ants had blogs. I would love to read a thread of cactus comments. Get conned on eBay by actual sharks, selling regurgitated license plates. Ok, so an incomplete language yes but… its not large enough sometimes. The day I first hear of the Uncanny Valley, it seems that everyone else has too.

Freud always said we were all the same and now we are all connected on Facebook. My memory is the sea. The internet is a teaming ocean. A friend I had in middle school got arrested and my uncle has some things on his mind that he wants us all to pray about and a girl I should have never touched wants me to touch her again and I know all this as soon as I wake up in the morning. Before my dreams are gone. Before my hunger has come.

So connected and yet I suck at keeping in touch.

I insist upon myself because who else will? One is punished most for one's own virtues. In 100 years priests will be an anomaly. Robotic Gods walking through the uncanny valley of the shadow of death. On the way home I prayed and started questioning righteousness. We are all painful tonalities vaulting across our frets towards the inevitability of death. Occasionally there are harmonies. Uncanny valleys. More often there is an abrasive sound at the edge of your ear, and that’s alright too. Everyone is right, and no one should be sorry. What is right? What is virtue? What is logic? Are not their inverses just as true? What is truth?

My whole body aches from sleeping too much and I am an idiot.

“Drink tequila on a beach with a coke dealer named Jesus.”

-e

Who has time for ambition? Who has ambition for time? I wish I spoke the language of airplanes. Fucking virgin clouds and gloating. Filled with the dreams of dying grandmothers flying. My own grandmother, lay cold and dying in the ocean. Living in my memory. She looks like her granddaughter will look when we are old. Freud encouraged me to jump ahead 40 or 50 years. See Previous entries. View Live Feed. The internet speaks through me.

“The cigarettes smell better than the air,” I say “because everything smells like shit.” But when I returned it was different. Reality had cracked and gone to pieces, smooth cymbal sounds of strings strung tightly with love and snapped. Life gone awry and partly dying. “I sleep in alleys,” I wrote to get a cry or a rise, “hands fall asleep as my pillow and I wake with no hands.”

Swimming in a light that hurts she bucked and reared. Hovering over the Pacific. Beyond the wireless range. Questioned God as half a thought and took a trip into the sea which was mirrord death. A mountain dropt in light. Missed the last horrors and returned cursed and back from the dead. I thought we had talked to each other for the last time.

I have not responded in 14 days. Frozen toes and fog. Wondrous dreams. I smoke and think of wings and things solemn like moons and truth, glaring at the stalwart night near the sea assuming and angry. A bridge was repaired yesterday. Strings and wires humming in the sweet caress of Pacific winds. Even deep within the bay the sun never came out. The music continues.

I have not touched anyone. I insist upon myself.

A) Despair: Get used to it

Daddy loved castles.
with a hairdryer for a gun
and the mountains every one
a charging villain

Blazing through the cobwebs to get to the unused room in the locked up part of the house where they had stacks of pictures of mammograms, someone had been a nurse or something, and yellow page after page was enlarged bulbous breasts in clinical studies. We were too young and then I was too young then and now I’m too old to be looking for you, too old or looking for someone like you. I try to keep myself occupied. Pets are for women too ugly to have babies, or men who can’t get a date. I dress because I am alive, and progress through the hours, sejant receiving my messages in my cabin. There’s a serenity to be found in the woods. Mad disquietude on the dull sky. Ah, now the croaking birds of the California afternoon, once you start to hear them, as with everything, they are everywhere. Unless you get

Used

To them. The breeze also, young and annoying this morning, dancing contrapuntal with the horrible low background pule of the invisible interstate highway behind the trees. Other lives, theoretically, moving forward, pulsing just beyond the speed limit through intersections where the light is mainly green.

I do not have a dog, nor any dates and so there is nothing but clear floor and time. Picasso receiving the vast dimensions of new canvas, sans paint. A cup, inculcating emptiness on the crusty countertop, Mr. Coffeematic still resolutely refusing to concoct any fill. Even my appliances, in their vanity, cannot form working relationships and I think, maybe, its me. A fear always. As fear is the only constant fear.

A fear also, as fear always comes, that there is a story that only I can tell, and it is not being told. Words come, but there is no charge to them. Freely I admit they are without ornament, hung without string, like stars in the sky instead of Christmas lights. Still beautiful, but not unique, imbued with nothing personal. They are none of me. Words like appliance, (to inertly apply pressure) or used (either acceptance, or domination, or BOTH, interchangeably, either way one gets

Used

to it).

“The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time.”

-Abraham Lincoln

Myriadic patterns in the system emerge. Her crooked smile. My obsession with arms, hair in strange places, life in the gutter. Sadly, we are what we frequently discuss. And frequently in my case it remains despair. Alien pen marks, rare ink splotches on my hands, fingers, pants, occasionally face. Language in the mists, ghosts in the forest winds, singing their gone songs, my fingers shaking pink. There are themes that emerge in days past, oh to remove them were they not writ with the permanence of ink. Oh, to start again! Ordo ab chao. All my former lives extinguished with a crash— all grows inky black. Who knows the words? The night filled with a polygamy of stars, and planes rushing off in silent courses. The Breathing and The Breath.

Like freckles in the sky, stars in their highways. Can you see them kissing? Find two stars leaning into each other and watch. "It's romantic," she says and then regrets it because quickly I will be thinking about romance. Now I am. Lying back on the mountaintop, the red glows dabbling across the perseitic night foreground extolling the virtues of feet on brakes. Perhaps you know where this story goes. Think now to when you were young and you counted every one, all the universe a warm-mother’s cold-kiss across our cheeks. Every-thing able to be counted, no such thing as too many voices in a room. Voices, spilling out in shapes and color. Music before there were notes. It’s exasperating how slow it all moves, hours, days, eons and only

under the influence

under the tree

do I see

the seven sisters, deigned to tell me something, but what is the story, and how many times has it been told?

Nothing much happens to me now nor ever will again. There are those who do not believe in goodness or splendor in the world and therefore can not look for or see it. Flesh sinks in a lukewarm bath. History too, melting, and once you start to let it disapear, as with most things, it goes fast. I know all the old songs. Ok, I’m haunted by them. What better company to keep on a candlelit night than ghosts. The songs grows mute when you have heard them enough, and life’s passions slowly erupt all around you with a vividness that no memory can exceed. For a while there were floods here, and I rose above them or waded through, thinking under ill or nil advisement that the land would return as I remembered it, but it never did. So many modest pebbles swept out to sea that now I dream. Humming a song because the tune. Like a lilac flower, I remember lexis long after their ornamental petals have wilted. What did I know before what I learned? Where did this ship come from when everywhere there is only sea? Serenity, still I dream. Of fearful woods. A warm summer’s day censuring itself into a warm summer’s night and you— I wish you were here right now.

Know this. We can only have knowledge of things that we re-create ourselves, through thought, memory or recollection. Truth that is hidden from us in life comes alive only in dreams. I never realized what I had until it was gone. Now. I have nothing, neither dog nor date, but a sea of clear hardwood floors and this too, I can get

Used

To. I used to get used to all sorts of things. Pecuniary benefits notwithstanding. Fill my beak with the finest foods for a few months and you can’t tell me I can’t afford them anymore. Recession! Pah!

“Anyone can see that I have set out on a road along which I shall travel without toil and without ceasing as long as the world has ink and paper”
-Montaigne

Other lives, moving, theoretically, in invisible shafts of darkness, leisurely. Soft tone, round light, open door. Ever notice no matter how many people are in an elevator, there’s always one leaning against the wall? Check it out next time you get the chance. I did. Riding alone, leaning slightly-

She lies flattened with her eyes closed, stars gone out, half naked under a white sheet. Asked how she would describe him lately, she replies “Phlegmatic,” and suffixes the endearing “Dick.” After, we

Used

to talk about our past. Where are we now? Are we what we frequently discussed? Perhaps you know this story. Perhaps the story is within us all. A story is The story, spiderwebs in winter when all the spiders are… where are all the spiders? In our daddy’s castle, under the brown dresserdrawer filled with inkstained plaid pockets. In play, love,

the distant mountains, our darkest foes.

A room without our clothes

At the forest’s edge
Blushing, benignant. We are phonemes. The most basic of sounds, guttural and primitive in a language larger than the earth. But who can translate what it means? Going up? Leaning slightly, aspera ad astra, a song recognizable, the words elude

me.

I know

I know it.
Alone.

There are, some times love doesn’t take flight into the golden clouds. It flounders and falters and dies in a wild shot, a cry of pain and a rusting fall into the fathomless depths.

Trees sway. Soon I’m going away, and you will look for me. Where I’m going you can not come.

Get

Used

To it.