i will give in for this one moment, i will give in to the pain and the sorrow and the cutting blinding light of this life, for this one moment i will allow myself to live outside of it all, i will walk outside of it and drench myself in this madness for once, i will breathe deep and hold it for as long as i can, i will give in because the pain deserves to be married to the joy for just this once, just for this one time only
Category Archives: words
there is no managing it
there is always damage control, only ways of exerting one disaster from happening over another. there are times i look at all this, all these people doing something, talking, dancing, casually passing one another, and i feel such disconnect, such amusement, i wonder, ‘where the fuck are you people coming from?’
where the fuck did you come from?
just that moment too soon, too late, when it’s unavoidable, burst of metal, exploding glass, tossed ten, twenty feet this way, completely out of your way, i was taken completely out of my way. as if you were the impending disaster to avoid, this car wreck made of glimmering shattered bits and sheared metal. of split lips and beaten bruised spines. of oil and gasoline and a smattering of blood. the elegant mosaic before pain sets in.
as if you were the victim and the driver, the passenger and the car.
you can be absolutely mad
and utterly someone else on the liquor.
it’ll make you lost when you already know where you are. it’ll make you say the things that you’ve never wanted to let loose from under your breath. it brings about the old pains and the throbbing and the desire. it makes you want to run into sprinklers in the middle of the night and run red lights until a bleary eyed morning. it can push you to a limit you never knew was there and suddenly find yourself at peace in the void. the liquor is like that. the liquor never lets you forget even when you do the next day.
it’s always only a bottle away.
and there the city
at large, this looming thing with its age and weight and a populace that goes off in all directions. it’s been years driving through the city at night. a slalom course of broken streets, desperate cabbies and workmen just beginning their night. people meandering, lazy drunk walks. every other block is being repaired, under construction. over constructed, the city steals the night, it grows over its people. i feel the urge to dodge and cut across town and say, ‘look here, this was where i was born’ or ‘look, that’s where i saw my first new york apartment: bathtub doubled as kitchen sink, communal bathroom but bring your own toilet paper please’, or say ‘look, this is where i fell in love with the night, this is where i learned to dance alone and not give a fuck about it’ . to see my home as it was, as it never was, as it will always be.
wild joy to be in the heart of this mad beast once again.
how dark you really are
and in the night it all comes back to haunt you, a pressure from within, just below the ribs, at the cusp of the sternum. you wonder how dark you really are, how black your soul. shouldn’t you embrace all fear then, relish in all your insecurities, find such acute pleasure in the banalities of your day-to-day? (hadn’t you even written, ‘evil is banal’?)
instead thoughts sweet and insipid. ebb and flow of murk and whimsy. something clingy and cloyingly tempting, pushing forward, pushing through. you are deathly afraid because you wonder, when will i stop thinking this way, when will the evil pass? as if it was a virus, a stomach flu, instead of the cancer that it is. this fountain of malaise with you, this well-spring.
to keep them from it, to protect them, when you really want to pass it on. to spread the wealth of the dark, to teach how to be evil because the fucking world really is this way, without code, without order, without color. all skin and wounds, all jagged mouths and smeared lips.
if we were not the clowns, then all this would be some hell of a circus.
monster
i am a monster. i want it all, no matter the cost. i want the fury and the peace, i want the love and the hate. i want the clarity of utter self-destruction and the banality of suburban boredom. i want to be domesticated and out of control. i want to love and to beat out of anyone any love they have for me. i want the appearance of civility while digging a knife into my thigh. i want to thrash about the room and toss everything asunder. i want everything spotless, immaculate and in its place. i want nothing to change but i cannot continue with the way things are. i want a violent end, i want a slow beginning. i am monster who wants no bounds.
we run amok
we run amok in the world. we portray who we are and make portrayals of what we see. we carry them around. they are never what they are. loose and rabid, the roam, they jostle, they grow. words, scents, gestures get tacked on. who are you? you have to ask, who are you?
everything is just a shell, some inner thing hardening and softening the exterior in turn. never clear as glass, only enough to see the shape, the shade of a color. you can even point to yourself and say, “this is it, what you see is what you get.” but we have no real idea what they see. we have no fucking clue how they are looking.
maybe it’s a vying for a certain kind of attention, a certain attenuation, a common frequency where the outside meets the inside, the context fits the place, the present settles its debt with the past. maybe its the vying from all sides, the push and pull, and the accumulation of experience that dictates this has all been done before and we know better: there is only fear and disappointment, only the chasm, the gap, the distance is real, nothing else.
for the briefest moment i think i’ve tuned into her and i see something clearly. something pure.
it is, of course, still a matter of debate, after all this time, what i actually see.
you,not-you
it’s hard to imagine. like this, like something you could never have imagined. to write the impossible. it was once easy like lying. like taking the words from one set of places and putting them over here instead. making them stick. believing in the picture they make. fractured mosaic.
and they do. they do. but it’s the sticky bits that make it all confusing. that make the stomach churn. it was once so easy to write stories right out of your head about power and drugs and sex and betrayal and the insane little moments that add up to a young life.
the key is, you’re not young anymore. and to write now of a you,not-you comes off as an accusation, as cause for accusation, as cause for upheaval and betrayal. there is no question i feel more acutely now the pressure of the decisions i have made in my life. but i do not regret not one of them. i simply want to write and make shit up without fear of being read.
i can only write to wonder, wander with the you,not-you of me to where ever he goes, where ever he can still take me.
some assembly required
some assembly required of this. what you said, a doorway, your foot turning on its toes, the feel of my hand along your arm, a bulb of dried paint, an uneven blind, the biting of your lip.
some of this needs to be put together. frozen icicles sharp, dust racing the floor, my breathing, the small of your back, stuck door jamb, loose moldings, saying ‘please’ too quickly, too soon.
here is something interesting too: the idea of telling something in complete scattershot, almost kaleidoscope, the idea being that the mundane details of the room add to whatever is happening to these two people, where it looks like one of them is leaving the other and the other wants them to stay. so the ‘assembly required’ is both the narrative and them, obviously.
paper sex
the page always beckons but pushes away. Like a twat, like a pussy denying being denied. The page is like a pussy that doesn’t want to be open or folded, neither torn nor cut. but you can push on it, leaves marks across it. let it everyone know you’ve been there.
And stroking the keyboard is like her hand on your cock, sliding palm up along your balls, the fingers dancing along the tips, making words out of your dick, making your dick say things. making it difficult to understand the difference between the idea and the grammar.