a hypnic jerk

"stay. stay. the night is cold."

"i'm a beast, my dear. why do you not understand?"

"it's so cold."

"but you're so bright. your skin. like the moon."

"where is your bathroom?"

"it is there, my dear. at the end of the Euphrades. do you see it?"

"i cannot swim. what am i to do?"

"i'll give you a push and you can float to it."

"it burns, it burns. please make it stop."

"just focus on this. my touch."

"why is this echoing? i'm not in a cave."

"what color is the grass?"

"the grass is black."

"you sacrilegious filth. you have no faith."

"rome. london. berlin. amsterdam."

"you are forgetting one. there is one more. what is it?"

"i might have to crawl on my knees to get there."

"you certainly can't afford a ticket. not with libya like it is."

"maybe i wouldn't have left if you didn't call me by her name."

"but i'm a beast, my dear. why don't you understand?"

"I can't hear you. the wind is screaming tonight."

"hurry up, we have no time."

"why is my telephone ringing? no no no no..."

"all i have is coal. but i can feed it to you slowly."

"not this again. not you again."

"please. leave me alone."

"just for tonight."

Phantom Pains

I sawed it off in the middle of the night. Abruptly, because I didn't know what else to do.

Abruptly, because it was hurting my shoulder, and my head, and my chest.

All it took was one swift cut, one smooth motion.

And maybe when I wake up tomorrow, I'll stop trying to use it, stop trying to reach with it,

stop trying to eat with it, stop trying to dry my eyes on the back of a missing arm.

I'm holding an empty shoulder socket and rocking it to sleep,

cigarettes to take the place of painkillers,

cigarettes to take me to Lethe.

Martyrs for Nothing

People like us are everywhere, just in different forms.

There are those who are half-orphaned and dripping in wealth, soaking the wounds of deep, psychological scars in painkillers and pricey gin in European bars, while absent guardians neither inquire of their whereabouts nor their existence.

And there are the others who are caged misfits, knitted woolen gloves worn in the desert. Stuffed hurriedly into small towns and ordinary suburbs here and there, chained to duty at a young age and stifled by company for their entire lives. Those for whom the ordinary cannot satiate, but can find no easy way out.

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." There are those who are accepting of their desperation. There are those do not know of their desperation.

And there are those who are desperate enough to self-destruct.

Desperate for that dreamlike sort of parallel existence they've slowly crafted for themselves, but now cannot access. They see it every second of every day, like a reflection in a long, endless mirror that follows their every step.

It's behind the glass door they're gripping at, on which their fingertips leave oily streaks.

They sit on one side of the door gazing into the other, imagining, going mad with their delusions, the delirium their inventions have caused them. Going mad because they cannot get through.

So they throw to break the glass. First everything around them, then everyone around them, and then, when what is in the real world is left in pieces of shattered glass and debris and the wall stands unmoved and resolute,

they throw themselves.

Scratching, then pounding, then kicking, then slamming. Until they're nothing but pulped flesh and liquified bone.

And it's only then, if they're conscious enough to be aware of it, that they can seep under the cracks to the other side.

But in most cases, they're not conscious enough. Because at that point, they've already lost sight of what is real and what is not.

At that point, their imaginations are the only reality left, the reality they're left to die in.

At that point, they've succeeded,

succeeded in living a transcendant life that few others can fathom, succeeded in fulfilling some grandiose idea of the ultimate end result of passion, of insanity.

Martyrs. Society gives them all sorts of names and then locks them up, maybe medicates them, maybe ostracizes them.

Suicidal, schizophrenic, depressed, crazy, strange.

But perhaps they are the only ones left who know how to fight.

Perhaps, ironically, they are the only ones left who know how to live.

Awakenings

Snow White. Sleeping beauty.

Rip van Winkle.

Juliet.

Why do they get it, cold, still repose? My body aches for deep sleep. My mind is throbbing. It's been about five days.

What I wouldn't give for just a few hours of death-like slumber.

To not see pictures in my eyelids every time I close them, unsettling dreams rattling my bones, jolting my brain waves from REM.

Up, down, up, down. Like a seismograph in an earthquake, the shaking ground after an explosion.

I must find a bomb shelter soon.

Maybe it's a week for a disturbed subconscious. Or maybe it's because it's the beginning of a month.

Maybe I read too much or think too much or indulge too much in Scriabin. Maybe this is the result of spending too much time in an alternate universe.

Maybe this is what happens when you shirk reality. It seeks revenge.

Or maybe it's just because the weather's getting warmer, because all that died in the winter is coming back to life.

Green-eyed monsters

They always come at night, silently,

silently.

Slipping effortlessly into your skin,

oil down the sides of a glass bowl,

until it sets. Sharp fingers sinking between your ribs

digging into your closed eyes, scraping into the soft walls of your stomach.

And that's when you feel it clawing slowly down your spine, when you lose control of your consciousness and surrender it to the latent desire,

to the coldest, darkest corner of the night.

And you feel it. Slender hands gripped carefully around her neck. And all you really want to do is to tear it off

the flaxen ocean on her scalp,

the pale, freckled skin as bright as the full moon. And all you want to do is

strip flesh to bone and bone to ash and ash to dust

sinking to the bottom of the Marianas,

until there's nothing left for his breath to graze night after night

except your own, of course.

Nothing left for his hands to slide over, nothing left to satiate the hunger of an animal

that you want more than anything to cage up, to make suffer.

Until you wake up in a violent jolt,

all the anger, desire, bitter rain that no longer falls from grieving skies

mixed in with the cold sweat seeping from your pores.

3 o'clock

There's only one time of day when the sun is brightest.

Blooming vines creep slowly up cold stone steps. Neighbors lay in grotty flats tangled in bedsheets, motionless, sleeping, sundust dancing lazily across their tired skin.

There's one time of day when it's too late to be asleep, too early to dance or paint

or sit alone by glassy ponds. When reading philosophy feels wrong, and Tolstoy has no flavor. When love lies dormant in the cracks of a dried, old oil painting, hung on a wall of peeling paper.

It must be the sun at 3 o'clock, a burning, laughing sphere, bleaching the life out of everything it touches. It must be its fiery tongues that drive me to the coffeeshop, in search of a sort of calm,

a way to contain the frightening rays in a cup, and swallow the fear sip by sip in a bitter french brew

until nighttime falls again, bringing with it a sigh of relief.

Motel musings

I spend a lot of time in strange places with strange people I don't know very well doing strange things. My writing this at this time of night sitting on a motel bed a few hundred miles away from my home exemplifies this tendency. Though there is a particular reason for why I am here in this instance, I've realized that more often, I find myself seeking all that is bizarre and abnormal and out of my comfort zone.

I find myself valuing the company of vague acquaintances more than that of people who are closer to me. They don't know my life; I don't know theirs and have no desire to learn more about it.

We connect on no complex grounds of the past, on no hazy expectations for the future. We connect in the present. In the now.

It is simple. It is becomingly carefree.

**********************

There's something too comfortable about closeness, security. Something unfulfilling in its fulfilling nature.

There's always something that overpowers that desire for a routine, the concept of having a niche in the world: a desire to be lost.

Lost in what? Lost where?

They always ask me, those who don't understand it. But there's no point in explaining, because there are only two types of people in the world: Those who don't mind being lost every once in a while and those who deeply fear it.

And of course there are those who are not aware of whether they have ever been lost or not. But those are hardly people at all.

*******************

Perhaps it's because sometimes, the world seems too vast and we are possessed by a desire to not just understand it or see it, but to be it.

Sometimes, we want it so badly that we are willing to break our flesh up into infinite grains of dust to coat every molecule of land and air that make up the planet. Maybe this is why people want to be cremated after death. It's one last attempt to embody the world.

*******************

Being lost is a sensory engagement.

We don't notice the dirt of the worn paths we tread under our feet every day. We don't notice the doorframe of our own house, the color of our curtains or how the carpet in the bedroom feels under our feet. Those things become a part of our mind that is caged off.

Our senses shut down to things we are too familiar with.

But if you walk into a neighbor's house, you will notice the feel of the carpet and the color of the curtains.

Walk onto the streets of a foreign city, and you'll notice that you have five senses again. Everything becomes sharp. The wind feels colder on your fingertips, colors are brighter, smells are stronger. Sounds are louder. They're louder because subconsciously, you're listening harder. Because you have no idea where you are or what to expect. Your senses are on fire.

Everybody is more aware when they're lost.

******************

Russian literature comparatists came up with a qualification for writing to be literature, that is in order to produce true literature, one had to defamiliarize. In essence, take everyday, common events that one experiences and paint them in a different light, a unique perspective.

But in order to paint the banality of daily life in a different light, one must first view it in a different lens. And to do so, one must adjust his or her mind to accomodate it. It takes a conscious effort at first to view things in a different light, but if done correctly and constantly, it becomes intuitive, habitual.

I no longer see roads as roads or people as people when I walk by them in passing. They are characters in a book, subjects of a painting.

Rain is not rain, but a mood. Music is not sound, but emotion.

It is in this way that I am able to write, to paint, to think in poetry and walk in metered time. It is in this way that I am no longer like any of those around me. It is in this way that I can no longer connect with others in the same way, not even many of those with whom I've shared long years of friendship.

Defamiliarization. It has shaped me. Some would say it has destroyed me.

And some would say if it hasn't now, it will later.

**********************

What is it to be lost?

It is to be pitched into a void. To have no idea where you are or how to get where you want to go. Sometimes it means not even knowing where you're going at all.

To be lost is to throw yourself in this void for the sake of knowledge, for the sake of experience, for the sake of defamiliarizing. To be lost is to actively and consciously search for the lens that will provide you with that different perspective, even if you do not know what you are going to do with it.

To be lost is to climb out of your warm bed, your dark room, your den of friends, and embrace the senses that you have long since lost contact with. It is to embrace your deepest, greatest fear: The fear of not knowing. The fear of being insignificant.

The fear of being alone.

It is only through embracing this sort of terrifying unknown that you may also embrace that part of your mind, buried amidst the tangled neurons of trivial everyday interactions and mundane tasks, that will allow you to see and feel in a way that transcends how everyone else sees and feels.

It is only through embracing this unknown that will also take you a few steps closer to embodying the world.