there is a lantern above.
its light: reflected in his glass of elixir
(imbibed, constantly);

the sick puppy trips over its own
too-big ears, too-big paws
as it hurtles itself towards Love.

(as though It were some end;
as though It held Answers;
as though It would Hold the poor animal)

there are hot gobbets of saltwater
oozing from a place adorned with secrecies;
paroxysms like a viole(n)t fluttering

shudder their way
through the spaces between
rib-bones and brain-stones

and muddled thoughts: trapped and languishing
in the empty space where a life--
where dreams and a childhood and

some misguided Hope for the Future--
once flourished so brazenly;
there is a lantern above.

Not warm, like magic;
but cold, like starlight.

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.

September reminds me of my mortality:
every year, it begins again.

When the Winter months come, I huddle down, ready:
come the gloom, come the solitude--
we wait, we convalesce,

I alone protrude
into some darkness, that
"certain kind of sadness"
to which we've all become addicted;

Call me crazy, call me a loon,
but
all I want is you.
All I want is your joy,
your cavorting, thrott'ling

seizures of metered, allotted
reverence, complacency; your
sanctuary of arms and loving embraces

(understanding)

:

taut, toned, muscled finely and with
purpose,
portent,
and all things manly
(all things sane and clean and lovely)

:

I want to be resolute.
Please love me for a moment

(or two).

for the sweetest time, i thought you'd be mine.
now i pine for beryl-agate eyes.
but i fear the pinfire, the flash, are lies;
my dreams breed falsehood into my life.

I was going to write a letter to you,
but I'm far too inebriated
to even begin to be able to.

Can I come spend some
time with you; are you not so busy
to pay me mind for a minute or two?

I sit here, removed
(lying to myself, loudly filling the room)
from all aspects Human.

There is a dry humor
which I'm inclined to adopt--
to dine upon, to occupy--

but the dryness of this wine
has me thinking of you:
horrorshow: rained-out visions

and the like protrude
from my sulfite-demeanor; the
California in me-- fermented

and bastardized little gob of fruits--
has a thing (or two)
to say: if indeed you choose

to delay these proceedings, these
gay-happy meetings of cerebral mishaps
and neurons firing in the wrong direction;

if indeed we elect to err from truth,
to proceed with such misguided cautions
and caustic fits of normality, banality--

then let's forget we've a single,
jeweled thing between us.
Let's forget the night you propositioned;

let's forget my immediate denial,
and the regret that followed a moment after.
Forget the four drops in an Ocean

of Time and searing Salt
(like electric glass making love to my wounds)
which have brought our spinning frames

no closer.  Forget it all; wobble
on your axis, and perhaps we will
fall into one another, some day;

I'd love you,
I'd love you,
I'd love you.

Underneath; Precious Illusions; Everything; Simple Together; That I Would Be Good; 8 Easy Steps; So Unsexy; Still; Crazy

I can't sleep.  I keep reaching for my phone; it's a lifeline, it's a connection to the outside (it's a distraction).  I have my headphones in, my iPod on (product placement?) and Alanis Morissette is playing over and over and over.  This is the first time I have ***** to try to fall asleep; is the fact that it's not working a good thing, a bad thing, or just a simple matter of fact?

Should I call into work tomorrow?  I don't want to go, but that's nothing new.  If I call in, though, they might suspect that something's wrong.  And though something probably is wrong, I don't like to mix work life and my personal life.

Should I go out running?  Not unless I call in to work.  But why not?  It might tire me out, it might help me sleep.  Sleep, however, may be a lost cause at this point.

*** will not talk to me ("I should have loved a thunderbird instead").  I try to tell myself that my preoccupation with him is unnecessary, and that he is not real, that he is not really there-- because we have never met.  I feel like I have been here before, and I most likely have-- and if I have, then maybe I am living that classic "definition of insanity."  It all feels new, though maybe it's the phenomenal aspect and not the noumenal aspect that seems new; it all certainly feels familiar, though the details and the specifics of this circumstance are different (or are they?  is it a trick?  is it all some kind of illusion?).

I keep hoping *** has contacted me, but what would that do for me?  I keep telling myself that I need to learn to let go of things (certain things, things I obsess over, things which are immaterial or illusory or impermanent; things which cause suffering due to my own personal desire or my ego's expectations of the material world [what the fuck am I even talking about?]), but I think I also have a problem with burning bridges and "letting go" of things in an insincere, self-serving way; as a defense mechanism; as a means of avoidance.  I was hoping not to have to let go of ***, I was hoping to not
have
to let go
of anything;
but here I am again, without an old friend
to comfort me;
I am my own old friend, and I'm getting sick of entertaining myself;
I have overstayed my own goddamn welcome.

I wish someone else would invade my goddamn head.

I still can't sleep, and the **** I've ***** has already escaped my prefrontal cortex and my kidneys, and it looks like I'll go on thinking until my death; sleep is not going to come tonight.  Sleep is not going to be anything but an illusory, momentary, impermanent and false relief.  I don't even dream anymore-- or if I do, I'm not remembering my dreams, unless I am in some way altered when I happen to fall asleep.

This will probably all be erased soon.

Everything Feels Fake (there is blood in nothing)

Not a mean drunk, but
a sad schmuck, and I'm
stuck inside my own head.

I'm not a madman,
but quite a sad man--
longing for timely death.

What lights could hope to
find our rites, and bring
them rightly to the fore

Of your consciousness;
some wandering bliss;
why search when there's no more?

Take me down into
these oceans of blue,
and rend me asunder.

If our lives are true--
if me, then you--let's
echo as the thunder.

In time, we will find
ourselves and our souls--
gone sour, gone crazy, gone

Towards some great end:
we're lonely (maybe
crazy) we're lovely,

We're friends.  Though we can't
claim divinity;
though we can't claim amends--

Let's fall down, now;
let's confound, now;
let's let this be the end.

One of the best birthday presents I've ever received (August 30, 2006)

Lovebirds

For Jiva, on his birthday.

At 10,000 feet you can't breathe.

Daedalus could,

but you are Icarus, trying and failing to fly.

Above your head you saw him

beckoning you to fly and find your home amongst the clouds

and so you built yourself wings, foolishly made of idyll dreams,

climbing to the height of the eagles

Over the sea he kisses your forehead

you can see he wants to keep flying with you

but, too close to the sunlight of his eyes,

your wings begin to melt

and he's taking you into a dive

do you trust him to hold your hand all the way down?

a feather tickles your wrist

your heart stumbles with the sensation of gasping for breath while he holds your life

hostage and precious

absolute lack of oxygen making you desperate--

this is what it's like to drown while soaring

He can't spare you; the world was made to be seen.

but you can't blink, wind stinging your eyes

altitudes and attitudes interfering with your voice cracking as you try to cry out for his

reassurance

it's still a long way down to the treacherous waters

it must be that birds have always lived with love

Fuzzy Hymnals and Myopic Prophecy

my shoes-- and the way i wear them--

will not convince you i'm the one to love.
my shorts-- and the way they frame my lack of an ass--
do nothing to sway you, nor will they ever.

my eyes may belie my intentions, my façade of haberdashery--
though they look away, turn from yours
and the unblemished sight they strive to see--
but when closed, they
always roll inwards, to gaze upon your snowglobe visage:

mirage of gemstone irises and candied lips--
whose partings send forth a turpitudinous beckoning;

how my amaurotic dreams long to
languidly sire
these ideas, these ideas into actuality
as they spring forth

unduly

from your piquant, heightened sensuality.

From the yawning depths of
your chasm'ous innerspaces

(dark to balance the trill of my luminous cacophony
as we ride upon the breath of the night)

comes a watery feeling;

I hope to whatever Gods may be
that Thales was right in his Greek assumptions;

Your tears are all I have left to hold onto.
Mine flow away:

molten silver into molten fissures.

10.06.012 Nameless Still

What syllables could ever hope to form
themselves
with any modicum of true meaning?

And as that liquid ditty floats,
prancing onward down the faces
linéd-- tears like rivers streaming--

the golden moon sets itself
in a hymnal of fuzz.

Fly upward, outward, Ghost--
penny for your thoughts,
treatise to bar the wailings--

ephemeral conjuncts
(a joining of hands, praises rising)

drop to stillness, malquiescence, night's promise:

we will go on forever.

I should have stayed a fantasy.

Thoughts

"You shouldn't be feeling this way at your age" is something I hear repeatedly from people, and it usually comes from people who are older than I am.  This can mean one of two things: either my feelings are the issue, or my age is the issue (or the issue is somehow related to or stems from either of these).  As I see it, this is either a subtle and seemingly innocuous incarnation of ageism (if my age is the issue), or an highly-preferable invalidation of my feelings (albeit unintentional, or largely so).

Ageism-- like racism and sexism and homophobia-- promotes discriminatory feelings based on an uncontrollable and oftentimes unrelated or non-causal factor.  While it is permissible to say that a person of a certain age, race, sex, or sexual preference might be more likely to display certain attributes-- those attributes which have a direct causal relationship with age/race/sex/orientation-- we oftentimes confuse causality with other forms of correlation (i.e. coincidence).  An elderly person, for example, is much more likely than a child to have rheumatoid arthritis; a person of full-blooded African descent is more likely to have a dark complexion (protection against the sun) and dark irises (absorption of intense sunlight, aiding sight), while a person of full-blooded Irish descent is more likely to have light skin (increased absorption of vitamin D in low-level light) and a lighter coloration of the irises (refraction/reflection of sunlight into the pupils, aiding sight); men and women have entirely different reproductive organs as well as correspondingly-different levels of various sexual hormones; and, of course, a homosexual person is more likely to want to engage in sexual acts with a person of his or her own sex.  There are only so many things we can correctly assume based on a person's age (or race, or sex, or sexual orientation).  Feelings are not among these things.

Feelings are what they are and cannot be helped.  Emotions are a part of the human experience and will always arise-- and some may persist.  Problems arise in regards to how we treat our feelings and whether or not we hold onto them desperately or let them run their course as we both experience and observe ourselves experiencing them.  Some of us allow our emotions to dictate the whole of our lives; we sit in the passenger seat (or the back seat-- some of us are tied up in the trunk) and allow our unchecked feelings to take us wherever they will.  I have gone through spells where this has been the case, though I feel like I'm making strides to live harmoniously with my feelings.

Now, after all this splitting of hairs: I understand that most people who tell me "you shouldn't be feeling this way at your age" really mean that the indisputable fact of my feeling a certain way at my ([relatively] young) age is, at best, unfortunate.  Ideally, yes, it would be nice to be more carefree and less jaded (and skeptical, and disenfranchised) at "my [young] age," but the issue is this: I see many problems with how the world works; more specifically: I see many problems with the way the society-into-which-I-was-born works.  I want to fix these problems as they pertain to my own personal life.

Despite my age, I am not naive enough to think that I can freely and immediately change the world; my issues with control are steadily dwindling, and my primary concern is living a life Immanuel Kant might be proud of-- though my imperative is perhaps more hypothetical than categorical (atheistic existentialism with a Kantian twist?).  I will live my life as I see fit; I will live as I would expect anyone else in my situation to live, and I will exercise self-discipline.  It is possible to at once live a model life while living for oneself; it is possible to live for oneself while exercising selflessness, compassion, and empathy.  This is my goal.  It's a high standard to live up to, but only because I let my ego and its desires get in the way.

I do complain a lot.  I complain instead of taking action.  I complain instead of meditating.  I complain instead of creating.

And here we have arrived at something that's much closer to the root of the problem.  The problem is not my age, nor is it my feelings.  The problem is, perhaps, my unchecked ego and its self-preserving habits of avoidance and indulgence.

Winterwalk 12.1.012

Ren + Jiva

Blue nights-- throbbing globule winter lights
'neath the snow:
here we go, we're gonna die.

What an adventure
for our basalt times.

The icecrystals
hit my eyes,
but they formnothing;
punctuation declined, spaces defined.
Meter fucked, I'm dry
(I'm fine, I'm fine).

Perfection refined:
I fly, I'm
about to die.
I know naught, yet I arpeggiate:

I'm fine.
I'm fine.

Punctured sighs
from a soul collapsed:
the refrained echoes
aching, arching my spine;
but I decline your hand.

I'm fine.
I'm fine.

I can't, I
can't: the hairs
(on the bathmat):
they needle, they prance
as basemetal does dance, and
makes a mockery of our fleeting,
conjoinéd death-trance.

We elate, we elate, and--

in pairs (irate),
we elope, to the distaste
of bourgeois Antelope;

they snicker
and scorn, glaring at
the lovelorn (those cold and restless
wanderers in nighttime gloom--
chasers of the "open" neon room
where they might outrun the ice)

and hurry to their sterile sanctuaried traps;
and we clap, we clap, we collapse.

Exhaust;
permafrost;
relapse.

25.05.012 Nightmare Foam

Every toe planted with obsessed precision,
walking the edge of a knife;
rote words spoke in unison:
every voice inside my head, every word
in chorus, in crimson.

I breathe a frenzied life
into every particle of assigned meaning:
phoneme, syllable, word;
every sentence a deadly battle strategy.
Every war, won.

I am Alexander. Your blood seethes
in a nightmare foam between my teeth;
froth I breathe
in and out on the daily;
pink,
bitter metal-tang.

Pupils like black saucers.
Nostrils dilated;
heart beating with alacrity.

One reason is all I need--
your lazy speech enrages me.
Alkaline lightning sears through my veins.

Mine is a fury. Mine makes me free.

Cassiopeia

I have a leak, my head has a leak, my mouth has let slip
so many words, tumbling out of me like water from stone,
like sand through my hand: over fingers, to fill the negatively-charged spaces between;

I have almost no words left. The precious few are recycled, over-used tarnished

garbage,
sea-spewn foam; mermaid-souls throttled and beaten over rock interminably.

Had I the words which fell,
fell out of me
to form pools of wet memories and warm lather for the birds which fly 'round my head
(my brow's feather-beaten, my eyesockets-- pecked clean,
diseased, laced with flies
and caked in rust
[encrusted Nightmare of Hot])----

Had I caught the words
(which poured, poured out of me)
in kitchen saucers, pans or papers
(oysters slickening silty syllables)----

I'd lay my claim to deeper waters,
or to servants indentured forever instead.
O Cassiopeia, beleaguered
for better by Poseidon's worst intentions----

How you hang, how you weep about as you call
your own-- O, Daughter-- back to you
from your captor's watery hovel:

The moon, she tries, but----
there you hang still.

(No ash black enough to antithesize;

from which these pinpoint-lights might rise.)

radiation brain-hum

schlepping, disgusting
indiscriminate self-
promotion.

cancerous, unerring
warmth of spirit;
dimness of intellect;
you have tantrums

and you seek my attention.
and i have nothing but my ignorance to give to you.
nothing to be said; rather, silence.

not a single bit of re-cognition
in my own head,
and on my face. you are

a species to be studied; you are not me;
i see nothing of myself beyond my first fifteen.
and yet, you appear all the happier.

you are protean and languid;
bombastic, maladjusted--
and yet, and yet:
you've no-
one to acquaint with.

And you--
you were sweet, too.
You; you were kind if naive;
a good-hearted soul
(even if you were clingy)
(even if you weren't brave)
(though I thought you ugly)
(I was always afraid)--

I am always afraid.
I'm never there;
I'm far away.

Sirens for your ears, siphons on your eyes

we're fighting danger in the air,
dangers of the heart;
warnings in the sky
of fire and falling stars.

sirens for your ears,
siphons on your eyes--
your lies have come undone, undone;
your words are undisguised.

21.02.012

wine that tastes like vinegar
at two in the morning;
because i am not where i'd hoped i'd be--
though i couldn't tell you where or what--
not for the life of me.

without words and thoughtfully-constructed
proses-- and poetries-- to study:
there is a lack of certainty.

in my writing.
in my speech.
the conviction's been evicted,
the mind and stomach lurch.

through all this
persists
the brain's whirr

whirr
whirr
whirr...

(the kiss of cold steel
forged by tiny foreign hands
does nothing to assuage the ache, the lacking.

and so,
i've no lover either.)

I have never at any point in my life
been greater than the sum of my habits.
Maybe someday; not tonight; I wait for life to find me.

I question the reaffirmation
of firmaments which have born
the hopes and prayers-- and the unwavering convictions--
of countless other specks,
those who've walked my path before me:

What does it matter?
What energy could sustain this?
Is space-time a fabric
stitched and sewn
for the Emperor's eyes alone?

The following was the last journal entry of one Jason S. Wiley-- purported to have gone mad before both he and his dog went missing. The journal entry was not dated, though officials have determined that the entry was written on or around January 17, 2004. Wiley was 27 years old.

* * *

Death waited outside his door.

He'd been feeling more distraught as of late. Simultaneous emotional paralysis and overwhelming discontent. Thinking that maybe They had done this to him.

He was home-- by himself except for the company of his old dog. She was fifteen, half-deaf, and going blind. The night before, she'd peed right in front of him, unashamed, right on the carpet.

Death was calling to her. Death waited outside her door.

He'd been preparing to make dinner-- something he rarely did for himself-- when the tiniest sound found his ear.

Was it the wind?

He got very still, and turned to face the black door.

It was night outside, and the vertical blinds covering the sliding glass door had been pushed aside-- earlier in the day, maybe, to let the sunlight in-- revealing a smooth, monolithic uterine lining of black.

The sound grew as the Door beckoned to him.

Would he see the pinprick light this time? Was the candle flame out there, burning, staring straight through him (as he slept, as he ate and walked)?; in every room of the house he saw the flame as it saw him.

Was it out th---

And then the sound changed form. The call of the wind became the call of a Dying Thing-- a rabbit murderously tortured, mewling in terror like a child.

He drew nearer the Door; fork from the sink grasped in hand; persisting.

Solid.

Solid;

His heart beat faster.

He stared into the gaping womb of awesome and unyielding blackness. Left Foot, trembling, proffered Big Toe. Big Toe slid the wooden stake into the sliding door frame, without Eyes belying a thing to the Thing that bored its own intent and malefice into him.

He jerked the vertical blinds shut, his gaze unwavering (Oh God oh God did it know could it feel him did it know he was lying----), and threw the frozen fish back into the freezer. In a blanched silence he glided, slid across the floor to stand over the old dog. She was panting.

Bless her heart, he thought. She hasn't heard a thing.

The tortured cry outside had ceased. The silence had moved in.  Blackness rippled and writhed at the edge of his vision.

He bent down, stroked her soft fur-- cherishing what were to be his last few moments with the old dog. From his position he watched a car pull up outside. Its driver clearly wasn't from the area; he parked oddly and stepped out of the car, leaving the car still running and the headlights blazing.

The tall man just stood there, staring at the house.

After an indeterminate amount of time, he noticed the man had gone-- how long, or when exactly the man had gone, he wasn't sure. The car's headlights-- which he realized he had been staring into, transfixed (--how long? HOW LONG?!)-- were extinguished.

But for how long they had been extinguished, he couldn't say.

The man had come (They knew) and gone.

* * *

Police have ruled out the possibility of suicide, as no bodies were found at the scene. The only notable pieces of evidence consisted of a puddle of urine in Wiley's front entryway and a hardened pool of candle wax in the back yard. More than a month after Wiley's disappearance, and with no substantial leads or evidence, officials have called off their search.