The Battle of the Bereft

Last weekend a friend was visiting, and of course I began discussing my students, because what else do I have to talk about now? I talked about their problems, their behaviors, their tough home lives. So he challenged me to say what they were good at. And in that moment I realized just how bereft my understanding of them is. I couldn’t think of anything. Not one thing. I wanted to weep.

When the entire world tells you you are worthless, in what place do you claw to find succor?

I watch them clutch empty-hearted at the manufactured dreams of the complacent, and shit on the very fabric of their own existence.

Dreams of graduation into comfort seem to be the defining tunnel vision of my own survival. All I can envision are green trees, rolling hills, an empty swatch of air and bird ringed silence across my bedroom window. A river, somewhere, without the brown slogs of industry.

Already, I have abandoned them. To leave them to their trash strewn streets, the steps of apartment buildings that serve as the template for passing the time. To their endlessly working, endlessly shopping mothers, who give them whatever they want whenever they can.

In this ghetto of the soul, it’s all about power. You take it any way you can, you drag down those who might love you and beat them into submission.

This is the game we play, whether in the streets or in the classroom. Who is the powerful? Who is the one who will lead by the blood on his hands?

I am too battered right now to step away from the battle. I see only red before me. I am angry. I am filled with despair. And this is when I know that this is the only fight worth

losing.

Gaining the Loss

The rule of the cosmos: you can’t ask for anything. You’ve got to just take what you need and give what you have. Seems to be the way things work, more or less. Like, if I get a little bit too screechy, needy, desperate for love and attention, then all I can hear is the veritable waves on the shore in the shell held up to the ear. So I have to regroup, sit down in the empty night space and meditate on my nothingness. How I have nothing, I am nothing, I will gain nothing. I’ve got to keep it all in perspective, somehow. Clam up, button the hole, and just observe, just watch the way the world works. The way that light seems to be generated not by light but by some other order of power. How all of the good things in life are really just a residue of extreme evisceration. The trickling out of beauty from the suffering awareness of despair.

So how to live life in this full declaration of madness? The masses recline before the injection of beauty. So dawn it upon them in full, without shame or fear or denial. There is nothing to lose. There is nothing to gain. There is just what you allow yourself to be, here, in this place of moment.

Hallowed Lives

To possess something of depth, there must be a relevant soul-searching ream of pain, as what has built up and calcified is scooped out, cleared out, cut out. Leaving the space for the blueprint of something new. In the erection of new life structures, you think of the manner in which windows will capture light, the space needed to sustain love. Policies are put into place, expectations are clearly set. From out of the hollows of your aching heart are formed crystals, that when dug up form the diamond terrace of your realized dreams.

The people in our lives are designed to mold us into who we want to be. To support, construct, motivate. If we are not here to enact something better, than what would be the point? Together, pressing the clay of our vision into higher planes.

All that exists is a matter of process, timing, development. We must wait, patiently, for the universe to unfold into itself, riding the waves of our suffering as we hollow our lives in preparation for the future.

How could I write this?

How could I possibly sing into this despair, this thin air of the void between distant strangers? What could I create to withstand my own insecurity, that could remain standing apart from listless self-concern in the overwrought perception of the wind from others eyes? I look into myself and see mostly fear, a defensive readiness, a reflection of my environment. This is not an excuse. I need to speak of what is within me, this bottled up genie of anger, petulance, and routinely denied divinity. Is it that I am getting afraid to die? That the more patiently I stock up for the future, the more loss of presence I incur? Enough questioning. This is not an inquisition. This is the attempted cultivation of understanding. Between estranged parties. The tentative negotiated establishment of dialogue.

It’s hard, sometimes, to empathize with strangers when they seem to ask something of you that you can’t imagine. Yet that much harder to ask yourself to begin to articulate your own emotions. Because you are so estranged from yourself that you fear a stranger may yet somehow know you better. May see into you directly for what you are. A human. A somewhat pitiful collection of experiences determined by circumstance and placement. How can you transcend this? How can you transcend this? How can we?

You can’t. You suffer from this realization. You shake, you cry, you wail. You stand silently with hands in pockets, overwhelmed, underheld, simply shelled. You can’t be any more or less than what you are. Until something within you is shed. Until you jettison the weight of your dreams, the afterbirth of your desire. Leaving a hollow form waiting to be filled. Leaving the space of a song that is waiting to be sung, in fullness of pain, to fill the voiceless silence in every person that they may or may not have known that they had.

We must cling to each other, like life rafts in the fearsome storm of the unknown. We must watch each other, drink each other, live each other. I am aching to tell this to myself, so that I remember when I am with you. That I love you, everyone, that I love to live, that I am willing to suffer to know this again everyday. Because this will soon be forgotten. This will be misunderstood. This will need to be reiterated, revoiced, rebirthed tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

Is and Should Be

Life is and should be hard. To compete for the sun, establish one’s space in which to grow, to harmonize with what already exists, and develop continuously for deeper rootedness is a struggle. To be able to propogate only love, without bitterness, without anger—this is the pinnacle of existence. How many people do you know, whether rich or poor, who can smile at any stranger and fill their momentary solitary space with light? It is rare indeed to be able to penetrate the inner sanctums of alien awareness. You think you got something? Whatever it is that you hold is a barrier to divinity. Your own mind. Your own body. Your own desire to be something greater than this situation in which you find yourself, to be someone better than the people you are surrounded with. This moment, this day, this everyday mundanity. You are of this. You are this, with no delineation, no distinction. This, you, bounded, distorted, disarrayed.

And then just when you despair: the light. The tomorrow making of vision. A higher-ness of determination. Your potential succor staggers your stasis into omega futurity. You are of what you are, bounded only by what you aren’t, which is ultimately or predeterminately of what you are.

Simply put, the light, the love, the making of our interrelated creation: this is exactly and precisely the manner and whey in which it should be. A separation of layers, a diminishing and ascending relation of solidity. As I shed my past, shed my reluctance to be more or less than my own imagining, I find out who I am meant to be. This parcel of exact and apportioned reckoning. This complex version of what is and always will be simple in a single vision.

Song for Tomorrow

What is there left to say when every day of existence is the grayscale of a wall that can only be chiseled away piece by steady piece? Where is that beauty so quietly hidden, by what means can it become manifest? Is it enough, this promise of a brighter day that comes in vacation segments, this savings accumulation that is someday to be spent carefully and considerately on future investments?

But there is no easy way to develop. This chiseling, this restrained practice of focused everyday yearning for the distant sky, is perhaps the only way to truly know how to feel the sun on one’s skin when it finally breaks through, momentarily, at an angle sweeping out through the morning chill. Everyone is sleeping in various states of shuttered despair, afraid to open themselves up to the effort required to grow. There is no easy way to get what we need. We fight each other, we fight ourselves, what is the difference?

I know that I had been hiding, tucked away in my sheltered enclave, where I could save and then spend, surrounded by my comforting stuff and people who comforted me to be comfortable themselves. Now the only shelter I’ve got lies within my skin, a formation of my bones, the portals of my eyes the sole conveyers of the world so reversibly different from what is captured without. That doesn’t make any sense, but it sounds good, so I’ll leave it be. There is no easy retreat from the challenges of the everyday world anymore. Escape has become recognizable now as what it is: a distant metaphor for death. Life consists in confrontation, struggle, adaptation, mitigation. The diplomatic conveyers of my heart are my hands and my feet. Words fail me, they fall far short of capturing anything but a residual complaint. As I await some space of inspiration to befall me, my body becomes that chiseled wall against the world. Peace by steady peace, the struggle is ever ongoing. To struggle against myself, or to struggle within the world, what is the difference? The inner regalia of bereft desire is seeded carefully into the sewn pockets of each moment, barely acknowledged, the dropping drip flooding of particulate divinity parseled into the lines that encode a face, turned so swiftly into a smile upon another’s reckoning. Smile for me, strange face of the day, that I may sleepingly move into tomorrow.

Trivial Mundanities, aka TMs

Trivial Mundanities. Such is the stuff of life. I am beginning to think that underlying much of Thomas Pynchon’s works is an attempt to demonstrate just how much of history is formulated by the forces of completely officially ignored and hidden aspects of existence—strange sexual encounters, anarchist theorems, pot smoke enshrouded pontificating into the night, etc.

Just to give you an example of the current T.M.s of my daily life: I left for work Friday at 12:06 midday in order to begin work at 2 in the afternoon. I then worked til 2:30 at night. I arrived at home, due to some mistakes in getting off at the wrong stations due to construction, etc, at 5:30 Saturday morning. I then again left for work that morning at 12:07, after waking up at 11:30. Blah blah blah. The point of this enumerating on timeliness is that work, in this (a)typical example of another crazy night in my life, can consume—inclusive of the transit time involved in getting to it—a grand total of 17 hours of a day in my life. That particular scenario left me with 6 hours of sleep, though in actuality it was more like 4-5, given the time I spent showering when I got home and the fitful type of sleep that was to be had.

That’s not much of a life outside of work, now, is it?

Just to give a few more T.M. laden tidbits subsequent to aforementioned Hell Night: I woke up, sort of, in the morning, stumbled creakingly into my clothes, fed my screaming parrot, ate a granola bar, brushed my teeth and washed my face, and made my way out to the street, hence towards 1) the shuttle bus to 2) the A train to 3) the E train to 4) the Q53 bus. It being a Saturday, the place wherein I work was slam packed with frantic consumers, and due to some problems we’d had with a fire at our frozen warehouse, our intranet ordering system failing, etc, the day was even crazier and more stressful than usual—and as always, compounded by the fact that I am still new and “learning the ropes” as a manager there. So I didn’t get a break to eat and sit down and drink water until 8 at night.

So I’m sitting here and it’s past 3 am in the quiet of the witching hours and I’m beyond exhausted. It’s my “Friday” however, meaning that I’m now into my weekend, which will consist mainly of sleep and attempts to pretend that I’m not going back to work again soon, very, very soon.

It’s funny that I have been for so long wishing to put the “car culture” of California behind me, and here I am, fulfilling my ambition, logging in my plentiful hours within the New York MTA system, breathing in its subterannean fumes. I spend most of that time reading my library books while listening to my MP3 player—which may have just died actually (I haven’t had to time to analyze the situation: does it just need to be hit, recharged, taken apart, plugged in, re-re-booted, etc? Or is it really, finally, after so many years, Dead?)—closing my eyes and attempting to relax/nap in the hard plastic seats of the subway while my head nods to and fro, or staring at a single point at the ground and trying to pretend that I don’t notice the weird dude who insists upon starting blatantly at me as if I’m some kind of anomaly that does not compute.

The trains late night can really lead to existential crises; you will find yourself sitting in a murky, decaying waterlogged station, the tiles splotched with grime, a vomit spill projecting on the ground in front of the puritanically designed hard wood row of seats, a midget with a black cap and a dragon embroidered denim jacket asking you if you speak Spanish and then saying something completely nonsensical to you in any language, a number of high pitched alarms ringing just slightly off time from each other for some reason that is unknown and obviously unimportant. You sit and wait, and wait, and wait. This could be hell. Trains in other tunnels rumble unseen on their way to somewhere else. Men in hardhats, doo-rags, and florescent vests walk about the station and wave flashlights. A rat mama and her baby scuttle across the tracks. Trash scatters everywhere, so ubiquitous it is unseen.

You get onto a train, finally, and random people of the night settle and are settled into states of disarray, disheveled post party/event states, bodies splayed at awkward ankles, heads nodding, a besotted woman guffawing at her partner’s slurred unfunny statements, an old man across from you pressing his head into the corner of the wall—you think at first that he is crying, and then you grasp the darker truth—his nose is pouring—literally pouring—out snot, and it is dripping down onto the seat, and he is embarrassed, attempting to hide it, trying to flick it over as it pools onto the seat with his finger into the crevice on the side. You pretend that you do not see what is transpiring.

Another man hacks up sputum and spits loudly onto the floor of the train. He stares belligerently at a man wearing an MTA uniform and hat. He spits a number of times more, to make it clear that he is spitting to make a point. He shakes, perhaps with delirium tremens, or in some state of spiritual dishevelment. He is dirty, he has bags of probably useless objects. He is talking to himself, complaining incessantly. Apparently, he has fallen asleep and missed his stop long ago, and blames the MTA system for making him miss his stop. He stares at the man across from him in MTA clothes and shakes, and spits audibly, and then continues to complain. To whom? Is it the Train Gods that he rails against? The forces of the ominous sounding Metropolitan Authority? People in the train pretend that this is not occurring, that they notice nothing, though they see everything.

Ah, the trivial mundanities of my existence.

Dirty Hands, Clean Mind

You’ve formulated these full, glossy lit pictures of perfection in your mind. You’ve established how you believe the world should be. You’ve determined how you want those you love to be. And now you find yourself putting up walls between yourself and reality, constantly on retreat, the ebbing colors of your idealism flowing into the eroding moat outside your acceptance. You hold on tight to your imagined versions of who you love, as they slip away invisibly from between your bestowed masks and costumes like a greased pig. You clutch at ghosts, you cherish empty husks, you bed with demons. You dig yourself in deeper, unaware of how alone you have become, how lonely, how lost, how stranded.

Those who love you become your enemies. They talk about you behind your back, unable to confront you with a reality that you can’t accept. There is no possibility of change, no potential for a different outcome, until you’ve come to the end of your own rope. Until you are ready to reach out from behind the walls of your idealism and step back into the world that exists beyond your limited desires. Until you drop your selfish ego and accept your diminutive status within the world. Until you drop the burden that you have created and free yourself to become involved.

To become involved in the nurturing and growing of living things, you must get dirty. You have to struggle, get down onto the ground on your hands and knees, work at the earth, sweat into your clothes. There is no easy way to create beauty that will survive apart from you.

There is nothing wrong with being a perfectionist, with being an idealist, with wanting the world to change, with being angry and bitter with the way things are. But if this idealism is preventing you from becoming effectively involved in your own life, then it is just as dangerous as greed, just as dark as blood shed by warfare. In order to act, a thousand other potentialities must be destroyed. The question is: is this action the right action? Is this involvement the right involvement? These are the things that frighten you. These are the things that hold you back. While your plants are withering. While reality grows ever more desperate, more detached, more inclined towards despair. The real question is not right or wrong; the real questions are: how selflessly can you act? How fully involved can you be?

If you can give yourself completely, then there are no questions.

Dirty your hands in the challenge of your world. It is best, of course, to think and choose the best course of action. But how many times have the options only become apparent after you have already committed yourself? In the streamline of successive moments, the right way will become manifest. You must believe this. You must have faith in what is beyond yourself of which you are but a part. You can’t out-think the physical manifestations of the universe. You can’t formulate a perfect philosophy to encompass each and every moment. You can only open yourself to learning, like a child. In response to reality, you will know what is the right way to act.

Open yourself to the suffering transparency of the light. Break down your walls to the invading hordes of the world.

It is only your mind that misleads you.

Integrity in the Street

Flat surfaces superimposed in 3D alignments against the horizon, hard edges, challenges unsought for that must be met at every seeming second. On the street level, your illusions stand for nothing but what you’ve truly bought into. You sense shame, a fundamental smotheredness. Aspects of yourself that you cannot defend are attacked by glances that you have left unmet. You yearn for an openness that is only earned through pain. The sense of being incomplete surrounds you—the dissonant shards of failure due to negligence are strewn across the surface of the streets. Are you beautiful enough to join in its din? Are you pure enough? Are you enough of steel, enough of integrity, enough of acceptance? This is the challenge of the street. You must deliberately shed, sufferingly, your protective mundanity, the blinders that allow your days to fast forward into oblivion. Can you feel it, fully, the force of the untouched, the anguished power of the unsaid?

To walk, balanced, swaying in fecundity, through the broken corridors of the streets. The beat that drops assuredly through crooked time. Your flow is rapture, your channeling deliberate, your connections run deep. Integrity. Spirit. Vulnerable as the stars, naked in the frigid night, shaking out the past.

A Drop of what was once Passion

There comes a point when you can no longer forfeit what you feel for what is the more comfortable compliance, without some serious loss of presence. All of this time that you once spent in development can so easily be lost, and you are left with a shallow shell of what once was, and all of your capability is a memory. Achievable, you know, with disciplined time, but the window recedes further with each passing day, with each fleeting moment spent unfocused, unbalanced, untuned.

There must be some way to way to reconcile the need for introspective stillness with the needs of nurturing others. Some way to find concentration in the act of complacency. Some manner of extreme cognition in the shelter of what is acceptable. I don’t even know what I’m talking about.

There is a certain unreachable distant loneliness that resides within us all, and how to understand this, cherish it, embrace it, while harboring the movement of the wider world? To be an oyster with the pearls around your neck? To move ever inward, ever deeper, while fostering acceptance and even love in the face of mediocrity?

It is easy to mock the hungry passion of the misaligned, but not so easy to mock yourself in your dry stasis of daily existence. Where is the key that would unlock this door? Where the wind that would rustle skirts? Where the tiniest tip of real blood that would give credence to your emptiness?

Patience, patience, patience is the rhythm of your future dreams. It remains to be seen, the fruits that might fall from beyond your reckoning. Can you measure up to your potential? Will the secret corridors whose shapes are suggested in the profile of your silences open up one day to the masses, tickets sold out?

All remains to be seen. In the meantime, there is only our imagination.

Stillness in the Eye of the Beheld

At every stage in the evolution of the human species, when we develop tools with greater and greater capabilities of empowerment, we also gain the capability of greater destruction, and vice versa. Every sword is double-sided, every tool a weapon. An airplane as the most accurate of guided missiles. Misguided youth and passion strapped with shrapnel, the stealthiest of dirty bombs. Every versatile development of intelligence bends alternately to creation or destruction—the greater the power, the greater the atrocity.

Yet in order to develop, we must chance our ultimate demise. There is no advancement without struggle. There is no progress upward without the danger of falling. This applies to all of mankind, as well as to the individual existence. The alternate threat and promise of extinction is what drives us to create. To distinguish ourselves from inconscient matter, to approach the flame of divinity, to grasp at it with groveling, greedy fingers of competing awarenesses, until we discover, the hard way, that we are all of each other, all of the light that we seek, all of the matter that we shed.

So on the way to this discovery we slaughter, we suffer, we sear our desperate imperfections across the face of the earth, spreading the disease of despair and hollow complacency with a missionary zeal that results only in complementary rage and anger, in blind lashing-outs by voices bound by their own inarticulate tongues of selfishness. This sickening beauty of humanity, the terrible power of our destiny. Killing ourselves to know of ourselves, so that we may better live alongside of our silences. The way Miles Davis kills everything around him for that solid punch of harmony in the midst of chaos. Creating the space for momentary beauty to shine out of its darkened backdrop of everything.

Not every flower will find the outward sun. But every form of life, whether fallen to the earth for sustenance to the hunger of the future, or rooted into the highest of heights, holds within the seed of bliss, the joyful dance of incomplete perfection. For not any one thing could ever exist without the other.

Evil as Good

In my brief encounter with San Pedro in Cuzco 2 years ago, one of the insights I gained from that little glimpse into the hallucinogenic beyond was that there is nothing to fear in all of the vast, seemingly demonic forces arrayed beyond our understanding in the cosmos. That all is of the light, a part of the entire. I’ve been kind of sleeping on that window of intuition, but I re-remembered it the other day as I was reading a section in The Life Divine, wherein Aurobindo is grappling with the question of the existence of evil and suffering in the world. And I then realized that this little insight I had was perhaps deeper in significance than I had originally thought. For me, personally, the recognition that everything in existence is a part of a greater whole, including the “bad” and evil things, was a stepping beyond my upbringing. I was raised as a Protestant Christian, and as everyone knows, the Christian theology, in a nutshell, is arranged around the concepts of good and evil as represented by God and Satan. The presence of evil and suffering is explained as the meddlings of the fallen angel in our material world, allowed by a distant God to challenge and torture us in our den of sin. But there is, of course, a strange paradox in such an explanation of evil, for it renders a supposedly omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient God as suddenly reticent and detached from humanity and their suffering. This means either that this God is cruel, or that he is not in fact all-powerful, or both.

I’m quite certain that Christian scholars and mystics have grappled with this question throughout the ages, and have more than likely come up with some insightful answers based within the Christian dogma. As I no longer adhere to any religion myself, I am not all that interested in theological answers, but rather in a unitary spiritual, metaphysical vision. The deeper mystic, in any religion, recognizes the unity of all existences as an extension of God. For if God is omni-everything, if it is Brahman, if it is all-powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing, then it must necessarily include all of what we perceive as bad, in addition to all of the good.

This has led me to the idea that the very concept of “evil” is a necessarily human construct. After all, animals and plants do not create religions, laws, and codes of ethics for their behavior. If you agree with the principle of evolution, then you necessarily regard human life as an evolved form of life with a level of consciousness which goes beyond that which it has evolved from. As such, we have evolved into this perception of suffering and evil, and it is thus a mental construct, a product of our evolved mentality. And therefore, our conceptions of evil, though formed from fear and ignorance, are in fact an essential recognition of that which we must defend ourselves against, and ultimately transcend, in the effort to evolve. What we perceive and regard as evil are in fact powers beyond ourselves that threaten to overwhelm or lead us astray in our aspiration towards divinity. But in the bigger picture, these forces, so seemingly arrayed against us, are in fact a form of cosmic devil’s advocates that push us and nudge us and batter us towards perfection, honing us, challenging us. And when we recognize this greater truth, when we overcome our fear and ignorance, we get that much closer to transcending the existence and persistence of evil in our lives. In the light of this greater awareness, what was once perceived as evil and in opposition to ourselves transmutes into something with broader implication and potential, even a deeper good. All of this suffering, all of this evil, could be seen as teachers, bearers of painful lessons that we must learn. We must answer and overcome their challenges, and realize them as a part of the whole of existence. Both negative and positive, united, represent the entire picture. There is, therefore, nothing to fear. All is of the light, for all comes from the light and returns to the light, and has always been and will always be the light within itself, and of itself, and beyond itself. This is not to explain away your suffering. This is to say that perhaps you suffer because how else will you recognize delight? And this is not to explain away evil, and give it reason to perpetuate, but instead to say, for what other cause and purpose will we battle for what is right, and thus find our eventual, stumbling way into higher modes of existence, where evil is no longer what it was to our fractured, self-embattled minds?

To Live

(written in 1996)

I

The drip, drip, dripping of time runs in rivulets down
the gaping wound on the side of the eternal boy.
The scabs continuously rub against themselves,
pouring forth new pain from the deep caverns within,
from the hungry depths of resentment and anger,
cutting away at the corpse of the man,
eating away at the decaying walls of the man,
the pain possesses, the snake entwines the host.

His bloody eye, ever roving for release,
settles upon a passing child, a little girl
who reminds him of a forgotten part of himself–
and the storm of suppressed feelings
rages into his mind, the winds blowing past
into his hands–beating, beating, remembering now
the anger, the hatred released upon his head–
he feeds upon the pain–hers–his. To make
another feel this pain, to release, to fill
the hollowness inside with another’s heart
stolen, ripped out with his bare hands–
he flies away crying hoarsely, a dying boy,
a living man.

II

I brush my hands–lightly
against my bruises,
feeling the vestiges
of another’s hurt–I
have always believed
in god until now–now
it is a hollow steel image
nailed above my bed.
I hate him.
I see strange things–
in my dreams–
barren landscapes,
charred by the fires
of wars, ruined
by the havoc of storms.
I hate myself.
Why do people turn
against themselves?
I rub my hands together,
feeling a warmth
only outside.

III

Time, the eternal lacerater, flows forever,
washing the wounds of the injured
in the blind waves of deceitful memory,
leaving restless scars in the belly
that must be stoked with the fiery touch of hope.

But what is the world without hope, where
does one fall to be saved, what is the world
without hope but emptiness and death
and pain and pain and endless pain?
Cut off from herself in the past,
she tries to reunite the shards, the pieces–
blood seeps out the cracks formed
by the forced union–never to be whole again.
There is no hope for one who has already died.
She casts her hands out into the dark space,
groping, and feels the cold rigidity of the crucifix
above her head–the hollow steel image that is him–her–
sparks fly and she wonders if there is a chance–
tobe reborn?.canI. canwe. . .
No–there is Nothing.
But a fire once started cannot be stopped
except by time and time and death.
She looks in the mirror and sees nothing–
and that is the world–everything, anything–
beautiful, the world is horrifyingly beautiful
and it was there all along, before and after
the snake–it takes death to know life–
a shattered image, broken to emptiness,
is life itself in truest form: piercingly aware
of death and its encompassing futility.

IV

I am nothing, nothing,
but part of everything;
I am nothing, nothing,
but the world, the universe;
I am nothing, nothing,
but life and death–
I have tasted the blindness
and now I can see;
I have touched the judgment
and now I can sing–

I am nothing–
nothing–
and I am beautiful.

Fitting

Words have not been coming to me easily, which speaks itself of some disconnection between within and without. So in struggling for reparation of these unseen scars, I know that the only way to heal is to hurt, to allow myself to feel some pain that has not been expressed, but easily, so easily repressed. It could and can be something as abstract as the disconnection between sublimity and mundanity, between possibility and actuality. Or something so small as a moment’s ignorance, a shadow’s fall across that page in time. Locating the exact pinpoint of dislocation is not so important, I don’t think.  I think it more critical to address this very moment’s division, in which I would attempt to pretend that I have nothing to say, that there is nothing to say, that there is silence within, nothing worth writing about, that I am incapable of writing effectively about what I might happen to think of, etc.

So this is an incantation, a spell, a charm of words wreaked to heal, words woven to address a lack of words. Sometimes I begin to think that everything that is written must be deep, must be good, must be pure, must be whole. And so the imperfect, unchosen words slip away, disappear, hide fragmented into the folds of silence, and I am left with nothing at all to speak, because nothing, in the beginning, is good enough of itself, no word on its own can embody completeness. All of these imperfect pieces must be strung together, stitched and woven together, until something beyond themselves, something beyond myself, begins to make itself known. And how can I know what this complete vision will be until I plunge into the shrapnel storm of potentiality, and begin to pick and choose fragment by fragment, brick by brick, carefully placing and replacing and deleting, until a stairway to something has been made?

And so here it is, this beginning entry into renewal, rediscoverance, rebirth. It must be done again, again, everyday, this remembrance of what can never be captured. I must start anew at every step, forgetting momentarily what has come before and concentrating only on what is to come, and what will be formed. And then it fits.

Speech From the Void

There are words, fathomless, unbound, scratching out from the core of you, burning to be formed into knowing. There is hidden, silent violence working itself within you, unknown even to you except as you lay awake in the night, the moonlight filtering through the slits in the blinds like starlit screams. What is it that so desperately needs to be spoken? Is it that your days have fallen like marbles to the ocean floor of mundanity, and you seek the overwhelming force of suffering, the cleansing purge of pain, to remind you of what it is that is beauty, to stir you back into remembrance of passion?

Ah, yes, you are tired. Your body is sore, your immune system is battling some invading horde, and your mind is sick with work and worry. But what kind of excuse is this to the sleepless void within you? What does the god within you know of such pettiness?

To speak, finally, of that which bubbles upward through subterranean fissures of your being, is like drilling down into the earth, and striking oil. Stored reserves of energy manifest themselves suddenly in outward movement. That which is pressurized will eventually find its outlet into another waiting form of containment. The cells branch forward into the light, forming bodies, minds, universes of dancing mirrors struggling to mimic infinitude on the tongue of a moment. Nothing can truly be said that has not already been formed in the deepest essential core of you. What you speak is of a process, of a stream, of a movement that is always circular, but never the same, for it is spinning ever toward itself into a future that is unknown.

You need this, this struggle, these imperfect structures of desire and transcendence.
Without the awakening in the night to see the world as it sleeps, you would not know yourself.

Giving All

I think that culturally, through movies, advertisements, and the like, we have been taught that love is about receiving things. Like Valentine’s Day. It’s about getting what you desire. For girls, it proceeds from getting the bouquet of flowers, to getting the diamond ring. For men, it proceeds from getting the poonanny, to getting the trophy. As if all you really had to do was go out there and succeed. Conquer, divide, and rule. Get a nice house, acquire some kids, and there you are. All tied into the American Dream.

As if you just put yourself out there, and worked hard enough, and were good looking enough, then all your dreams would be fulfilled. Some perfect person would walk through the door and everything would suddenly fall into place.

But love isn’t about comfort, ease, and mere fulfillment of desire. It’s about giving. Unconditionally. How many people, besides truly loving parents, really know about unconditional love? We have been taught that the world should center about us (and all the things that will make us feel bigger, better, and more complete). But when you truly love someone, the world centers about them. No matter if they are perfect or not. No matter if they fulfill some adolescent fantasy or not. Simply because they are them.

The things that make us beautiful are the most natural aspects of ourselves, that we would consciously hide if we knew that it was showing. The flaws, the silliness, the shy craziness waiting to be unleashed by adoration. The beauty that we see in the marketplace, the airbrushed glossy masks, are manufactured to fit into some collective fantasy of perfection. But they are not beautiful. They are desirable, simply because they are unattainable. Yes, unattainable. Just like advertisements for products try to sell you some simulation of happiness, contentment, and eternal well-being, if you just had that one thing. But the very idea that you could find nirvana through a product shows just how unattainable such a state of happiness really is. Did it ever occur to you that perhaps it is not in your nature to always be happy? To be perfect? To be desired by everyone?

This reminds me when I was in college, when ‘E’ was making its journey from hippy new age raver desert parties to mainstream clubs and consumer groups. I knew people who were taking E every weekend, and taking more and more of it, attempting to prolong their sense of belonging and connection to other people, the feeling in music, the beauty of dance and touch and scent. These people became ‘E-tards’, and you could visibly see the effects of taking way too much of the drug in their faces, the draining of nuance and groundedness, the flattening and glossy extension into disassociated fantasy. They totally missed the whole point of the experience, just as most people miss the whole point of all ecstatic experiences. It’s not about always being high, happy, and united with all the world. That in fact to prolong such experiences is to flatten out reality, at the expense of yours—and other’s—feelings.

We have to feel everything. We have to feel not only happiness and beauty but also pain and loneliness. And when you truly love someone, you lift up the barriers that separate you from them by accepting everything that they make you feel. You open yourself not only to their kisses and hugs, but their insecurities and pettiness. This is all part of the deal. You can’t have one without the other. Well, you could, but then it wouldn’t be love. It would be a conditional relationship based on your desires.

Some people are happier to flit from one person to the next like a hummingbird, sucking nectar from each one and then moving on before they run into emptiness. It takes a lot of work to hide what you feel from other people. It takes even more work to constantly hide what you feel from yourself.

Try loving someone for more than what you want from them. Just for them. Not only for the beauty in their eyes that first drew you in like flames in the night, but for the complexity and human nature and stark, bare, raw beauty in their hearts. Root yourself down into them deep. Because down here, in this other person, in the darkness of the unknown, in the ripping wind of the void and formless ancient beginnings, you may just find yourself. Complete. Beyond desire. Beyond suffering. Drenched in love. Immersed in love. Drowned in love.

Dropping Out The Sky

Do you feel sometimes as though you were waiting to fly, and that you are simply awaiting the proper environment, the correct medium, the right chance, that somehow you will sense just as it occurs? And yet somehow this perfect runway never shows up—or maybe it even does, but the lighting just isn’t good enough so that you can recognize it, or people were getting in the way so you could never get up to speed, or . . . something. Something just is never right.

Well, the fact is that most of us need a good solid kick in the ass to go beyond what we are accustomed to. We can get used to anything, even getting abused on a daily basis, even mortar shell fragments whizzing by our ears, even junkies outside on our doorstep shooting up, even being the junkies ourselves, dependent on the next small change to get us to the next fix to get us by, just to get by. We need to be booted out of the nest to find ourselves falling, with only our god given instinct to save us from gravity. We need to be hurt, we need to be pushed, we need to be upset, we need to cry, we need to come to limits beyond ourselves and stand there in that cold and airless night and feel the vacuum beyond the impetus of everything that we thought held us into ourselves and understand just where we stand in the grand scheme of things. And realize that we are really nothing. And to realize that in the midst of this nothingness we act as anchors and stars to everything else that is also nothing. Like the cold stars in the dark sky, shining mindlessly through space to you to call to you in a language beyond understanding.

To fall from the nest, to be pushed into the wide open heartless sea, with nothing but yourself to save you. Your body knows what it needs to do. Your mind is there to revel in the mystery. Your spirit can only be drunk in the awareness of itself.

Everything in our lives acts to push us beyond ourselves, beyond our comfort zones, beyond our knowledge, beyond what feeds us, beyond what clothes us, beyond what defines us. So why fight this movement into the wide blue yonder? Delve, dive, fly, experience, hunger, desire, reach, pull, cry. The only thing holding us back is ourselves and our fear. Well, you’re always going to be scared. Every single time you have to leave what is known and what is safe and what is secure, every single time you will be scared. And every single time this fear and adrenaline will turn into exhilaration and bliss in a heartbeat once you have stepped out the door and onto the stage and into the light. This is what it is to have faith and surrender and to love. To let go of yourself to give yourself to something beyond yourself. To find yourself, to truly know yourself.

A kick in the arse. A drop in the water. A fall from heaven.

Lullaby

Flip sides o’ the same coin, ecstasy and suffering–like in the way when you cook a pancake and the first side is cooked deeply til it bubbles through, and then when you flip it, the second side cooks swiftly and lightly: a dark, covered burning and grappled scrambling, and a fleeting, golden cumulative few moments of divinity. The ecstasy comes in the throes of union, in the dissipation of boundaries accompanied by a visceral sense of unity, fulfillment, and flying light exploding bliss. Suffering comes when habitual patterns and perceptions fall back into place like confining walls, and separation, individual isolation, and anxious insecurity again take their status as the norm of daily existence. But the renewal of distinct, opposing forms is the essence of life and love. It is essentially impossible to maintain a blissful sense of unity and infinite harmony with all the Kosmos or simply with your beloved. Simply put, without the valleys there would be no peaks. The peaks are pushed into the stratosphere from the deep inner workings of years of slow burning flames, of frictive forces pushing against each other until the victorious simultaneous movement upward, far beyond the territory so painfully fought for.

What is commonly known as “suffering” is what paves the path to a deeper and lasting inner experience of love. Suffering is to work, traverse the pointed rock strewn wildernesses of the heart and mind, to be alone within yourself, to come close to the silence, the stillness of a concentrated listening and observation, when all the sounds and shapes form together slowly like jigsawed pieces of each other, to know the outward signs of mundanity as intimately as inner hidden wellsprings of divine light, to know humanity beyond words, to know love beyond touch, to know god beyond faith, to know everyday as struggle, to know every night as searching, to scrape the lowest dirty depths of the earth to know the wildest dances of lunar madness.

There is no having one without the other. There is no faith without an accompanying contact of skin, no peace without a tumultuous, bloody birth, no healing without protective, irritating scabs, no light reflectant beauty without brooding darkness.

We fight each other to know ourselves. The universe is cut up into words and diagrams to chart its unity into understanding. The heart is pockmarked with despair to know divinity. The moon is deadened rock reflecting the sun exerting its silent night pull on seedlings struggling to uplift their tendrils to the future. The pull is there in everything, up and down, earth and sky, light and dark–all one wave of one voice making its song to itself to sing itself into awareness of its beauty.

Anxiety as an Inability to Voice What is Within

A man is programmed to hold his suffering within. And when this becomes too great to bear, his body turns on him, his throat constricts, his arteries strangle his own blood flow, his mind takes control of his lungs and subverts the most basic and essential of functions–breathing. How can this lonely, inexplicable impotence in the face of oneself be shared, voiced, exorcised?

The rush of adrenaline that comes in the face of danger, the so-called fight-or-flight response, is a residue of our evolutionary past, the reptilean brain survival mechanism. When the adrenaline fires without any visible signs of danger, without any immediate reason, how can this be explicated to anyone else? The fight and the flight is activated by oneself, against oneself, almost like an act of spite, an act of contrition, as if you are making yourself suffer for things that you are unable to define. It is not in the vernacular of our society to voice such things. How can one say, I am hurting, I am bleeding, watching people I care about destroying themselves, watching my nation destroy its future? How can one say, I cannot ignore this death around me, I cannot ignore all of the hidden suffering of everyone around me, I cannot pretend to be OK, I cannot pretend that everything is as it appears? How can one say, I am an open wound, I am not healing, I am scared that everyone else is also suffering alone, and there is nothing I can do, and nothing I can say to reach them?

So it is held within, to the point of bursting. It pushes away everyone you love. It expands a gigantic void within yourself, and you stumble through the day like a hollow husk, not knowing what is wrong, fearing the coming of the night, where you will toss and turn despite utter exhaustion, where you will feel like a track runner right before the gun goes off, where you will gasp like a fish at air seemingly devoid of oxygen, no matter how much you take into your lungs.

And how sweet, and how bitter, is the release when the tears suddenly well up in your eyes and your heart springs open to this hidden, inarticulate world of suffering that we smooth over so well everyday. This world of death, and pain, and suicide, and addiction. These are things we do not discuss. These are the things we fear.

Everytime someone you know passes from life, you sense the rupture in the barrier that you had put up between yourself and them. You feel guilty, as if you were involved in their death. Because you pretended that death did not exist, that they could never die, that you could never die. And now what is there to say, when you know how everyone is suffering, alone, hiding it, smiling, working through the day? How can you possibly reach one another across this void that keeps you apart even from yourself? How can you say anything to heal this, when you know that there is no healing of this wound?

To Suffer, To Heal

Something I thought of while feeling my heart cracking open and tears streaming out–I could feel how in some strange way, pain is the only way in which to heal, grow, and expand. It is the numbing of emotion that is the greatest of danger. Human beings numb themselves with alcohol, drugs, TV, dead-end jobs, abusive relationships, destructive gossip, religion–you name it. The only way for us to keep moving is by opening ourselves to what we know will cause us suffering.

When you are addicted to something, then you seek to alleviate the suffering of withdrawal by continuously getting more and more of what you are addicted to. You seek to numb yourself into normality, just so you can get by. This is not a disease or abnormal behavior. Everyone in this society is addicted to something, whether it is money or weed or sex or wanting other people to think of you as good looking. We look down on those who shoot up heroin or smoke crack, and then we turn around and purchase the latest video game system, or we pretend to laugh at someone else’s stupid joke just because we want them to like us.

The point being that all of us, in some way, seek to numb ourselves so that we don’t have to suffer. To suffer is to lay open your heart, surrender your illusions, and look fully at reality. And once you do that, then you have to change, you have to evolve, you have to accept responsibility for your life.

There is no more pain then when you see someone you know and respect and love destroy themselves. There is no denying suffering in the face of that. It overwhelms you, it overcomes you, it plows you into the emptiness beyond yourself, it rips your soul out of your body. And in this storm of emotion, you begin to see the light of love. How you are not only yourself–you are everyone connected to you. Because you can feel the hole torn from you where that person once was. There is no denying, in the face of such pain, that for someone to tear themself from life prematurely is like pulling a full grown tree from the earth. All of the roots extend into the same soil that nurtures you. All of the limbs and leaves reached out into the same light that bathes your days. That tree was you, is you, and will always be you. There is no isolated, separated, detached individual here in this world.

So to know of this man’s suffering . . . this is to know of my own suffering.

And then it comes

I guess I was just in shock. I was standing in the middle of the room drinking wine when the pain hit me, the soul-ripping emptiness that collapses everything in your life into pure suffering. Beyond words, beyond logic, beyond anything but what it is. I think it was when I had to tell someone who didn’t know yet what had happened that brought it home to me. There’s no avoiding it when it comes. It hits you like a truck and runs you over. It seems like it was a long time ago that it happened but it was just yesterday afternoon. Still trying to associate the body with the man that I knew and connect the pieces. I just realized that it is actually more healing for the grieving to see the body, to visually and viscerally know that that person is indeed gone, that it is real. Then you can’t pretend or dissociate things with your mind.

I feel like an old man, tired and depleted. I feel like I’m living in a warzone. There’s really no words for this.

Tear Drops

A thousand teardrops
are worth every moment
you hold me close.

A thousand nights
of solitude
I would gladly surrender for every drop
of suffering from your long black lashes.

We hurt each other to remind ourselves
why we are inseparable.

Two faces, each portending to be one,
draw away from each other,
crafting a mirrored distinction,
all the while tied to the same nurturing root–
the picture of a heart.

The heart is not simply a bloody vessel,
working to sustain our motion.
The heart is a symbol
of life’s struggle for unity:
two spheres at the top–one point at the bottom;
a metaphor for emotion.

Our love is beyond
anything.

In the approach to this open understanding–
this terrifying, beautiful unknown–
we fight,
we dance,
we crash our unshaped differences–
until a shore is formed,
and the waves are freed,
and what was once turbulent pain
is seen for what it always was:

playful, wonderful
bliss.

A thousand tear
drops are worth
every moment
you hold me
close.

Forgiveness

To give up your pride, your ego, your enkindled bitterness–this is far easier, far more healing and preventative of further damage, than holding yourself apart and waiting for some unachievable perfection from another human being. Why are we so attached to our suffering? When someone causes us pain, even unintentionally, we will hold it against them long past the fleeting suffering it has caused us, even re-inflicting the pain, re-enacting the scenario in our minds just so that we can continue to harden our hearts against them. Why? All it takes is to let it go and forgive the other person for being imperfect. All it takes is for you to get over yourself. It is that hard. It is that easy. Try it. Every single day.

Anger, violence, and bitterness perpetuate in an endless feedback loop, drunken fathers beating their children just like their daddies beat them; embittered, righteous bigots murdering others under the banner of god and religion; angry young men used as pawns murdering others under the banner of patriotism and freedom. Angry men on radio talk shows, calling for hatred and warfare. Academic fools with their heads stuck up their assholes on the news on the TV, pretending to be “experts” on issues they have no life experience with.

There is only one way to break this endless chain of idiocy, lunacy, and anger when someone has done you wrong. Let it go. Let it fucking go. Get over yourself. Even if you know that you are right. Forgive them. Talk to them, apologize, open your heart to them and understand them in their imperfection. Love them. Don’t hold their faults against them, talking shit about them to other people. Because you are only hurting yourself. You are hurting your heart, increasing your stress, giving yourself headaches, tensing your muscles, weakening your immune system. What is the point in holding onto bad things inside of yourself?

It is that easy. It is that hard.

Burning

Love is an everchanging,
up and down sine wave ride–
sometimes I push you away
just so I can find the space
to breathe–
only to find that I am suffocating
to think that I could lose you
so easily.

I know when I’m being unfair,
when I’m being mean–
which is as much to say
that some part of me
hurts you deliberately.

I watch myself doing it,
loathing myself.
I can only theorize
that I do it because I am scared
and I am looking to make something up
against you, so that I can run away.

Don’t let me run away, beloved.
Fight me, be aflame with righteous anger,
put me in my place–
which is next to you, with you, for you.
Be strong in yourself.
Don’t let me wallow in my fears
by digging into your insecurities.

I can be so cold to myself–
and now that you are in me, in my life,
in my every movement and thought,
I have to learn to be better
to myself, to all of the life
which resides within.

Don’t leave me alone.
Keep me burning, love.

Every Thing

Every woman is your sister, your daughter, your mother, your friend, your nemesis.
Ever man is your brother, your son, your father, your friend, your nemesis.

How can such unseeming things be so deeply interwoven, complementing,
contrasting,
ever struggling,
strong?

Yet it is so, and you know it is so. It is so because everything which lives, and has passed, and is to come–one can’t exist without everything else, –all, all one, I and I, there are ten million ways to say this, and they will never mean a thing until you have seen it, the millions of eyes inhabiting your very deepest self–the millions of arms and mouths and skins that would seem to separate you from all the world–all working for you, through you, against you.

We put ourselves through such suffering to understand that we are not alone, have never been alone–in fact, we are struggling so hard just to be alone, just to pretend that we are alone, just to maintain these illusions every single day–and it takes a lot of work, a lot of selfishly inflicted pain. It’s somewhat ridiculous and overly dramatic, our daily attempts to convince ourselves and each other that we are isolated and innocent of what another may feel. All along knowing the pain we are causing in this continuation of detachment from ourselves and others.

But there is, everymoment, at all times, the possibility of moving beyond the bullshit onto the next level, and this is offered, everymoment, by love, by the selfless love offered by others, by the love found in giving yourself, by the love which always awaits just outside of the door you are so frightened of passing through. And when you pass through, you look into another’s eyes–you do not see a friend, an enemy, a lover, a sibling–you see yourself. And then you see that person for what they are:
Everything.

Wind Chimes

Listening to the sound of the high sierra wind gusting through the pines, I am reminded again of the absence of Toby. He has been on my mind much recently now that it is summer, because we would hang out a lot more during this time, banding together against the summer invasion of families, tourists, and students. The wind plays in the windchimes my girlfriend got for our deck, and I realized the strange juxtaposition and harmony of past and future, of love and loneliness. Simultaneous happiness and sadness. Life teaches its lessons in painful ways. There is no love without suffering. I understand that Toby’s death and the love I now have in my heart are not two unrelated events. The desolate wind moving through the windchimes.

Timeshape

I had a revelation today of the interrelatedness of the past and the present and the future, of how they form together a shape, a changing formation of time. Of how the past is not some dead, determined thing, forever captured and unchangeable. I was thinking of our lives, of how in our human existence we begin often making many mistakes, many growing pained expressions of angst and anguish that become understood and fully grown in our later lives, when we bloom, and the struggle of our tendrils to catch the light, the fight of our roots to grasp down deep are validated and given meaning, even if at the time they caused us incredible suffering and isolation. Or sometimes events in the past or the way we manifested our personalities becomes darkened by our future actions (he was always such a quiet boy. . .).

I thought of this because a friend who I had looked up to and had many good times with a few years ago has now gone through some hardship in his life and made some bad decisions, and the aspects of him that before were quirky or passable as being weird have taken over the aspects of him that were positive and fun, and he has become, for lack of better words, extremely sketchy. And I was remembering today the good times that I had shared with him, and I realized how much they had been tainted by the negative image of him I now held. This is how the past becomes changed.

Everything that we were shifts in the light or shade of who we are becoming.

Because we make important decisions, along our individual paths, that determine whether we are growing or whether we are allowing ourselves to be blinded by our weaknesses. And of course we go both ways, struggling in our humanity to find our way. But eventually some people run into something within themselves they just can’t get their way around, and they give up and stop growing. They stop growing and then just hold on, they hold on and wither away and everyone pretends not to see what is happening to them, because what can you say?

Only a true friend will tell you when you have blinded yourself to suffering and have decided to stop growing. All the rest of the world will smile and nod their heads when you lie to them and allow you to die slowly. Only a true friend will make the effort to break through your carefully constructed walls of illusion, even if it might mean losing your friendship.

Your enemies are the ones who coddle you, who tell you what you want to hear, who comfort you to your death. Like advertisements on TV, they have no interest in seeing you grow. They want you to shut up and fit in so that they don’t have to be disturbed by you any longer.

It is those who challenge us to grow that are our friends.

But this is a tangent from what I began with. I was speaking of the intertwinement of past and future, of how time is a stream, not a disconnected progression of points. This is why it is so great to keep up with childhood friends, and with all the people that you have run into along the way to now. Who can predict what is to come? The picture that we all collectively form, with all of our varying pasts and personalities, is amazing to behold. We shift-shape, we change, we grow, we diminish, we move, we stay. And hopefully, we all are helping each other along the path to beauty, along the path to finding within ourselves the key to unlock the flow of divinity from our minds, our powerful, creative minds, our powerful, interconnected hearts.

Roses for the Stone

I sunk into your love like a stone, diving to the darkest pressure-filled depths of what might become. Inside of this place I discovered the space of what we are, of what life is–all of everything a form sheltering stillness–all of everything a construction pointing to the heart of silence–all of everything a song sung to express what can never be said.
Entry into your love was like entry into the earth´s atmosphere, burning away all of what I couldn’t shield. You burnt away everything that you could, razing parts of my heart, my mind–but you could not take away my future.
Love is a like a game in which you try to take away everything that the other person is so that you have something to keep, something to hold onto. Except when you approach the end with their pieces in your heart, you find that you’ve taken everything of yourself and thrown it out the window. As if you were sitting before a mirror, steadily and exactly destroying yourself. When you get to the peak you realize that you have been looking at yourself the whole time–and that you knew all along. Are you some kind of monster, tearing the world to pieces to find your existence?
The circles circling toward themselves can never find completion. Coming to where they think they once were, they find instead the space of the future.
Is it monstruous to seek love, and not simply to seek it, but to seek it in its fullest expression? Because love in its deepest incarnations necesitates a form of death, a scraping of the insides to mold out a hollowness that could cradle divinity.
We create fantasies to shield our minds from the burning that comes from our hearts.
I knew all of the fantasies that you created in me, and I led you through them knowing that I was leading you to your disillusion. It was in suffering that I loved you. I knew it then, and you will know it now. My heart was filled by your presence. Now you are far away, and I am empty again. I knew that I could never keep you. I gave you everything that I could in the moments that we were together. That was true, that was real. That is all that we can ever really hold onto. This knowledge of what we once had, the faith that it can and will come again. Not me, not you. What passed between us. What is passing from the base of my navel through my wind-pipe on the disposition of my tongue through the arrangement of my lips. What is flowing from the tip of my spine across the spaces of nerve endings to my fingers.
I loved you. And when I see you again,
I will love her too.

Rompiendo

Illusions built within the mind swaying, lulling ourselves into an incurable belief in infinity. There is within us an amazing capacity for suffering, for love. Intricately linked, there is no excluding either Huascarán or las pampas. It is not either one or the other. It is not life or death. It is all, every little thing carved from the void, separately pieced into a spiral necklace of the earth.
In our shame we are naked before the judgment of a god, the dreams covering our eyes lifted to reveal solely vulnerable soft skin, nothing more, nothing less. We are pathetically beautiful. When the illusions inevitably crumple the world sweeps within to pick apart the ruins of our hearts. We follow our inner narratives to the end, until we fall from beyond the edges of what we allow ourselves to imagine and inevitably hit the ground to return to the earth. Each time that we are broken a piece of light shines out from the space where we once were. How many times must we be broken before there is nothing left to break? You must be broken from your blindness to see. Broken again, again and again until there is nothing left of yourself to be taken or to be held. The world will carry away your pieces to build other dreams no longer yours.
What is it to dream? What is it to be awoken to another world in which the dream has no application?
What is it to love with one’s eyes wide open?
To live is to suffer. Anything else would be an illusion.

Relapse

I thought all of it was gone, I had dealt with it, I was ok. I had said goodbye, I had felt intense pain, I had done everything I needed to do. But then suddenly it keeps coming back and hurting.

I remember when I had a dream I had hung myself in my bathroom at home, and my tongue was hanging out and I was hanging there bloated in the mirror.

The image of a hanging is an accusation, it is a sentence carried out, it is suffering confined to a rope around the neck, it is horrible and ugly and people used to watch this?

Because the breathing is stopped. The neck is not broken unless it’s of the officially sanctioned kind, you are hanging there for minutes with your breath taken from you and your body struggles inadvertently, there is nothing you can do once you’ve made that choice and you’re swinging. You are committed to death. Your body flails but death is coming because the mind already chose and now everything else must pay.

You son of a bitch. I thought I was past the anger. I am not past anything. I am so angry this son of a bitch just decides on a whim that it’s ok to hang himself because he’s so fucking down and out and this and that. You poor fucking son of a bitch. You sick fucker. You actually did it. You actually stepped out and swung in the air and struggled against yourself and felt maybe some kind of release? You achieved nothing but death and despair and spread it throughout all of the outer world. We must all eventually come to death, yes, but to take all of our unresolved problems out on everyone who we barely made an attempt to befriend. You sick lonely motherfucker. To vent all of your self-pity and insecurity just like that. Like, ok, I give up. Take this.

Well, now we have to. Now I have to go through the rest of my life dealing with your self-destruction and rejection of all that I know is good. You said, this isn’t good enough. You said, you aren’t good enough. You said, I’m not good enough.

So fuck you, fuck you fuck you.

I have to keep on living with your cop out. I have to keep on living with this big fucking hole shot out of inside of me. I have to keep dealing with this pain and suffering that you just could not work past, that you just were too fucking prideful to come to me or to anyone who cared about you for help. You fucking son of a bitch. You were so fucking full of your goddam self that you could only kill yourself instead of just moving on and sucking it up and living like a human fucking being like all the rest of us.

You think I don’t feel sad and depressed and hate myself and insecure and all that stupid shit that everyone who isn’t a magazine model snorting cocaine feels?

Why couldn’t you just fucking deal with it? Now I have to deal with your stupid shit and it’s tearing me up. I’m sick of crying. I’m sick of having to walk around this place acting like I’m ok when I’m a fucking zombie, and people are looking at me and asking me to make sure I’m ok, and I’m like, I’m ok, I’m fine, and I even feel fine, I feel ok, and then I remember that you are no longer here and then I remember why.

There is nothing to say about what you did. You did it and it fucking sucks. You did it and that’s fucking great, you’re off in heaven or some reincarnation or some kind of fucking place where those go who have no other place. And all the rest of us have to keep moving on and dealing with our own shit and now your shit too.

I’m tired. I’m tired and I’m drunk and I’m scared. I’m scared that I won’t ever be the same person that I was 10 days ago. I know I won’t be that person. And I’m scared. And I’m alone. And I’m angry that all it takes is some self-pitying, selfish motherfucker to make me feel that way. And yes, I can hear myself saying that and know that it’s me. It’s me and it’s me and it’s me and then it’s you.

You ruined everything around you to escape yourself.

You

I keep remembering our last night,

the way we struggled to create

chains that would bind us through eternity,

knowing that nothing would last.

The way we finally fell asleep,

til the alarm on my phone

came buzzing like a call

that someone had just died,

3:45,

and you immediately

began mourning

as I set about being practical,

like a puppet

hollowly enacting higher commands.

Our love was amputated, no matter what long distance conversations filled with silence we gave. Hopeless seances, groping longingly for something no longer there except in memory. And here you live still in my heart, an apparition of what could have been.

Being with you was like constructing an intricate pyre of our desire, carving out all of our deepest dreams in each other and setting it on fire. It was desperate, it was everything that reality could not be. I don’t regret a minute of it. I don’t regret breaking our hearts. Because it was the right thing to do, there was never a question in my mind that creating a window of beauty only to be broken was worth it. I finally understood, with you, that true love is always worth the sacrifice of long periods of lonely suffering. Even if it might mean a lifetime of sadness. There is never a reason to hold back when love is near. We must give all, we must give everything for something that can never be possessed.

So yeah, I miss you. More perhaps now than I ever did, missing the very idea of you, the place in imagination that allowed you to exist within me.

It’s amazing how something so fleeting can be worth all of my life. One must, of course, always look back down at the ground and climb back from the mountain top and return home. I walked in the front door and everything was the same but everything was different, and would never be as it was. Every time something in me dies, another world opens up before me and it is like being born again, shuddering in the light with only pain to wake me.

I walk through the world with your emptiness before me. And I will remember you when my heart is filled with love again.

Complacency is the Enemy of All that Lives

I am seated in my room, a candle lit on the table, the scent of nag champa settled into the furniture, my books stacked about like replicas of ancient rubble. I have been reading all afternoon, all evening, my concentration enwrapped within imaginary vistas of a soul’s spiraling journey. There is a quiet in the room, edged with loneliness. A good book brings back the moment of despair rooted in my life’s greatest depths. It is out of insecurity that I create. It is out of fear that I clutch carefully to the rock as I climb. It is out of hunger that I throw myself into the wind to live.

The mind is a delicate reed, easily obstructed, easily obscured, rarely honed to the purity of perception it was evolved to produce. This occasional glimmer of deeper darkness within, this seemingly unanswerable pain, seems to be the only way to sustain development. Such as in the way a muscle is strengthened–torn apart so that it will restructure itself in a manner more adaptable to the stress which tore it apart in the first place.

It reminds me of my teenage years, the length and scope of depression that I felt then–surely this was part of “growing pains,” the rush of body and mind reeling with the birth of awareness of individuality? After college, I have never again felt what I can rightly term “depressed.” But I have reminders of emptiness, lapses of loneliness. And I now almost welcome the feeling, that gift of knowledge of myself. Even as I feel like a child, raw and helpless against the void, unsure if the shadows of futurity looming are ghosts or demons or angels, or nothing but my desires and fears projected into emptiness. Because this loneliness, this despair, this acknowledgment that there is no one I can rely on but myself to pull me out–this strengthens me to continue.

I observe myself and others flailing in the waters and clutching to things and people to stay breathing. But in the emptiness right now in this moment of thought, I know that anything I grasp onto I will only take down with me, and it will take me down farther. I must be calm, I must allow myself to slip under the dark waters gracefully, even as the shock of cold numbs the heart, and give myself to the indifferent forces beyond me, even savor it as it becomes me, even rejoice as it spits me back out into the light trembling with suffering.

Complacency is the enemy of all that lives.

I Still Clear

are we gonna step up and dance, or are we gonna watch ourselves stumble into despair? the beat is there, you can feel it in your lips when words form like waterdroplets to fall into meaning. why should we be frightened of what might come out when we release our body to a greater rhythm than our mind? how good do you have to be to move? is freedom learned?
no. freedom is earned by letting go of all the bullshit accumulated by years of bullying, freedom is there for those who choose to not police themselves, who choose not to fear each other, who choose to love, love, love everything that touches their heart, and leave behind everything for that moment of connection, for that spark of rapture in the glowing eyes of their beloved.
the only thing that is learned is how to better hide ourselves from suffering. but this suffering is the only thing that leads us to feel, to free ourselves of inattention, to focus on what truly matters. freedom is not necessarily happiness. but it provides the ability to gain happiness, to reach across seemingly insurmountable boundaries, to talk to that beautiful queen whose eyes met yours and flashed with the future, to vault your insecurity and touch what you know is there even if you can’t believe it, to press your lips to her honeyed sweetness and taste ecstasy. what could have prepared you for this?
we have everything we need. we have eyes to see, ears to hear, mouths to breathe. everything else is a shroud hiding us from each other.

Janused Coin of Suffering, Which is the Side to Land Cat Down?

connecting to someone is a sad thing. it is a sad thing because when you
finally share with this person your heart, and they have the power and the
ability to look into you and see you as you really might be, then when they
turn away into themselves, they leave you feeling the falling down into
infinite darkness. you fall down, and down. because you begin to believe
that this person could love you. and they do. and you are still
not good
enough.
not good enough to be everything. not good enough to be nothing. not good
enough to be anything but the mundane human child crying out to be cradled
mindlessly into oblivion.
because you want. because you create out of reality a world which does not
exist anywhere except in your mind. because you are not willing to
sacrifice your wants
for another’s needs.

connecting to someone is a happy thing. it is a happy thing because when
someone finally shares with you their heart, and you have the power and the
ability to look into them and see them as they really are, then when you
turn into yourself in wonder, you discover that you are flying, that you are
floating on the wings of god. and you believe that you can love this
person. and you do. and you love them so much
that you can let them go.
you love them so much that you can let them be themselves. you love them so
much that you don’t need to keep pieces of them for yourself. you love them
so much that you can give them as much as they truly require.
because you know. because you accept. because you relinquish your power.
because you devote yourself to something which is higher than any one person
could ever be.

A Last Touch Of Earth

i watch the flame eating wet and circular into the wax, a descending well, dripping solidified heat. soon there will be no wick left to burn, and the flame will fizzle, smoking dissipating into the darkness. tonight i let you go; i wrote you goodbye and sealed my heart of our history.
i had contemplated war. i was bloodthirsty with distance, yearning to break apart the boundaries of our worlds, to penetrate your space and wash my wounds in your river. i wanted reparations for all those moments of emptiness when i reached for you and you weren’t there. for all the words i wanted to speak and couldn’t because i knew you didn’t want to hear them. for feeling like what i feel needs to be hidden.
there was a sacred space once where we would meet. i look for it now and it seems to have been a dream. or perhaps it was a reality we sullied by our pretending. sharing an intimacy requires honesty. anything else and it shutters the world into a box, into a room with no light, struggling for freedom. i cannot claim innocence.
i’d been holding it in and lying to myself for so long that when it finally broke out of me i couldn’t understand what it was. here they were, my emotions, staring me in the face, and all i could see was red. after i let them bleed and scream for a little while, i began to see their true colors.
this is what happens when you stop communicating. your words clot together and then you can’t breathe and you have to explode, you have to break down and spew them out like they were nothing, like they were everything. so i did. i sat down and i wrote a letter to you and strung up the words like a declaration of cold war, like a manifesto of love lost. for the first time in a long time i was personal, i was honest, i was pure. and i decided to never show you that letter, because it would only be fodder for your distance, a little piece of me. i don’t want to struggle with myself against you any longer. i am sick of killing, and i am tired of dying. so now i write this for myself. you will never know. you will never understand how i feel. and now you can go.

The Story Of Being Alone

the shot of a glance. kurtle decided that to be was to not exist knowably. and to hold it in, until the dreams were destroyed completely, brutally. he took in the hit of inspiration and died honorably, soaring into the mud in pieces. this is what happens when you have nothing and want everything.
kurtle created fantasies which turned into nightmares. and then they were nothing but awakening pain, full of watching, full of someone else’s eyes watching distantly, shutting off the understanding. skin. stranger. at the wrong place at the wrong time.
‘nothingness produces snow; quiescence produces yellow sprouts (Chang Po-Tuan)’
the silent bearing will lead to spring. kurtle sees that now the sails have sunken beneath the weight of their own production, waiting for wind that will be strong enough to lift them. thirsty in the sun, there is nothing panic will do. this is something of survival, not of triumph, not of victory, bringing home the spoils. i am lost, kurtle exclaims, looking
into the horizon, i am pointless, dying in my ignorance. the only thing that will save me now is not myself. the only hope i do not possess. i may die here, and i creep forward heavy still, never knowing.
and suddenly the rain comes, part of the season, part of the wind, part of the time. kurtle finds himself alive, growing into himself.

the other is an illusion. it was his desert. his jungle. his mind. his desire.
and what is left? who is kurtle? what shell shade under which he hides?

there is only the point at which he departed, and the point at which he arrived. there he is, sand steps painted on the dunes.

now where are you? where do you fit in?

Thing

this is about time, and how to let it break against, sculpt, caress.
do not deny the shape once were. the limbs can still feel moving, ghosts in dreams.
slowly change. different surfaces in different light.
every day a kind of violence. every day an acceptance.
you

you broke me yesterday

and today i took you in my eyes
and made you whole.

and tomorrow
i will see you nothing.

pieces of myself yearn unreachable in the night.
a phone call to a machine in a distant room, playback.
time, the water tears away brittle,
smooths sharp,
my hollows defined.
time breaks the shore of bodies
to the form that years shaped
that is language, now, speaking
in the barreling baby hurting lungs
of ancient alien timeless meeting.