M) Masquerade

Did you scribble on the back of the test

even though it said n'existe pas?

 

Have you tried to be someone you aren't?

Who hasn't tried to be more than they are—

--but have you endeavored to be less?

 

Do you pull out your hair?

 

Do you smoke and write?

 

Alleviate the ennui by affecting radiant light?

 

Are you feeling brash?

 

Are you feeling in vain?

 

Ingenious, compressed in concealment 'n' pain?

 

Are you comprehensive in your allusions?

 

Find nuance filling vacant lots?

 

Do you strongly resemble polyhedrons?

 

Is that all you've got?

 

Have you told one person one thing about yourself

an another

another?

 

Have you bet the farm, or do you play it straight?

Simultaneously both, 'risit one or the other?

 

Between midterms and finals is it PRESSURE PRESSURE STRESS?

 

Living in sin, with spilled gin and fast meaningless sex?

 

Do you make long litanies of your phantasies

but phail to get a grocery list aligned?

 

Build castles in the sand

by the ocean

in your mind?

 

Gone separate ways now, in a pretty bad mood,

with Descartes' Subtance Dual, and wine on the roof?

 

Like to watch red ants crawl over gray tombstones and green grass?

 

Have you spent years looking through binoculars

into the bright future

only to find it spun end for end,

telescoping the blenched past?

 

Ask NSFAQs for breakfast?

 

Spend your nights building Great Walls of Sound?

 

Don’t you dabble in derision?

Aren’t you saddled in a hatred of horses?

Kennel’d by contempt for dogs?

 

Do you look away from TVs when the mangled body is found?

 

Talk to your reflection in the mirror, disfigured though it may be?

 

Search for titles for...

...I don't know...

...surprise me.

 

Can your closest close friends see through you better than you can see into yourself?

Do you want so bad to wallow in your familiar miseries that you periodically

put your old friends on a shelf?

 

Get a flat tire

on a cold day

on your merry way

to sadness?

 

That secret you won't tell, and the imminent sweet betrayal--

do you like the word inveigled?

the elation of the fall?

 

Were you a communist in grade school?

 

Are you a melancholy mess?

 

Wear your dyed brown hair down to your tie-dyed dress?

 

Want not to be what you once thought you were?

 

Is he still following you?

 

Is there a spider living in your shower?

Have you named her Cthulhu?

 

Keep the ship sailing past where others have wrecked?

 

Plug your ears when someone cites Robert Frost?

That poem, that poem, augured for naught.

 

Miss the innocent talents of youth,

the braided filaments of which have strung you here

a faraway star, unsuitabl'd speck?

 

Have you got you a roomate who's stabbed you with a knife?

 

Have you rubbed the old coin unrequited

so long between the hearty forefingers of your love life

that its worn down past the faces to nickel, copper

or brass?

 

Hate when people shit pure satisfaction from their ass?

 

Are you coherent or in-, simply tragic, in love?

 

Complex, perhaps overly so, wearing gloves

or makeup or bright tennis shoes or a hat?

Or covering up with subtler tasks...

 

Have you had enough?

 

Put on a mask.

 

En fait, c'est la page dont je parlais

The fact is, this is the place I was telling you about.

 

 

“Come by any time you want, you were right

-Wilco

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.