XXX.10.008 : Pan's the name. Petering out's my game.

"I'm so sick of tests.  Go ahead and flunk my ass."

I'd really like to get away from it all-- there's something about the closed door that tells me 'The decision's been made.  You have no part in this.'

I feel like I need to pack up and take off.  I want a clean slate.  No ties; I want to take the raw materials and tie them together myself.  I want to do it my own way and I don't care anymore what others think.  I don't care to be flexible; I don't care to be a good boy.

I don't need college to make me smarter-- I'd thought I'd proven myself already through twelve years of litany; I don't get this.  I don't want to be doing this.  I want to be alone; I want to hovel and hermit away and build my own metropolis, my own Utopia.  I think I just might.

Here I am again-- trying to defy the indefiable.  Writing in the EXACT SAME notebook I gave up on a year ago.

A ghost of my past sits to my right-- and yet, it was I who chose to sit here.  I left the present, and found myself again in the past.  It seems I can not run forward if I am constantly denying the present; this leaves nowhere to flee but into the past-- and therein lies dementia, schizophrenia, and cyclical, self-fulfilling prophecies of impending doom.

The ghost in my play has spoken.  He says he thought I'd left town.  I did.  I've never been in this world.  He says school's not supposed to be fun.  He says he procrastinated until the last weekend, like me-- and he pulled it off with a 99%-- like I could have.

'Good luck to you.'

This your last year here?

Yes.  No.  Maybe.  I don't know.

He is gone now-- should I be sitting where he was just moments ago?

All that is left is the dissipating warmth.

I want to run away again, and
(Burned out, turned off)
I say I don't know why, again.

'I thought you were a pretty good student-- that you couldn't have left for that reason.'

I don't like this world.  I don't like my role in it, I don't like for the path to be so heavily-tread.

He's going to Chicago-- living with his parents is a joke.  Work will be full-time.  School is part-time.

Can we be the Film Noir anti-hero and anti-heroine together?
Can we be the drifters, the ghosts, the unseen?
I want to run away again;
I say I don't know why again.
I'm rememb'ring and forgetting again.
I'm lying and slowly dying again.

But ah, oh-- flight of fancy!:
to be lying and slowly dying--
this is the dream I live.
These are the worlds I create.

My cloak, my dagger, my doomsday
clock, ticking away--
this is the day to thrive.

Yet I choose to hide away.
A long distance to run, today.

Burned out; turned off--
no place is secret or sacred.

Ribs plied open-- empty space bare;
feast for starving eyes.

And I:
chained, immobile-- I:
witty specimen.
Pick my brain apart again.

Leave me to seep and evacuate;
shuck off oldskin--
rise from the carpet of dead leaves and ashes
all cloaked in loam and permafrost.

Frightful, speeding
flight to the North--

to dens and caves of watery ice.

Here is Home for now--
until I'm found alive again.

We artists must slyly craft our guise
to fool unfettered, probing eyes--

until we're found alive, again.
Breathing and thriving outside, again.

Until we're found alive.

There's a voice inside my head
(liar; flick'ring, sliver-tongued serpent)
which tells me to pursue, pursue--
capture, intrude, defeat--
but I ignore him.

Instead, I choose
to lavish upon you--
instead, I elect
to lock gazes with you,
communicate some torrid message
of communicable autocorruption
(sparks betwixt irises brown, blue--)
I want to share experience with you.

Nothing left to extrude.