प्रेत

smoked myself so high that suddenly i was sitting next to myself. there was no chair beneath me. i hovered somehow. staring at myself. surprised to hear a familiar song. i & me reached out to touch it as it hung in the air. the front door opened and let someone into the house. my bedroom door was locked, i didn't care. the chill of the air sent my skin into minuscule undulations, all over the map of my body. or else there was a ghost in the room with i & me. possible, that. i reassured me like a child afraid of the lightning-storm. "sometimes people just get stuck," i said. i combed my hair back with my fingers. the words came out like a murmur, though i'd intended them to be louder.

later: the sun, just under the trees. snarling through the lacunae of their branches, frothy pink and red. our shadows fled us in fear. walking sidewalks until they ran out. i heard the sound of a drum, something wild - and growing wilder. the sky, folding & unfolding above us. we were side-by-side but not hand-in-hand.

the cemetery, then, newly manicured, each gravestone nervous with its exposure. the old tombs backed into the hillside. their names: Sawyer, Haggett, Longfellow, Hillborn. the darkness hung low between the trees like a trap. clouds assumed the guises of mountains on the long-away horizon. our shadows leapt into each other and stayed there.

i have discovered this new dark, this non-light, this thing i am a sun of.

and something inside of me (after) is newly mazed, is tightening its corridors like veins, constricts & contracts and then dilates with the all-too-short duration of each breath. and there is something running the maze, something i am terrified for. something that lied too much & too often and was imprisoned there as punishment. there is no solution to the maze.

and i woke up this morning thinking about how my left arm is laddered with scars, tiny scars. and i fell back asleep with my glasses on, leaning against the wall. face tilted north. the chill in the air made a sheet of itself and wrapped me in it. i re-woke, imagining adding rungs to the ladder. stared at myself for time immemorial and woke up again. maybe i was the ghost. the difference between ghosts & us is that they know when they dream.

and later i will hear that an old friend of mine has changed his name to Only, which will make me laugh so hard i fall to the floor. only, (from ME, from OE, 'having the form of (ly) one (on(e))). slide a labial in there. (l)only. he always was so lonly. overcompensated for it. grew another shadow. grew three. they died like unwatered hanging plants. crisped on the vine and flaked away from him until Only he was left. then paired off again, with a living shadow. trekked. used their feet and their mouths. used wild pantomime to speak and laughed silently, like devils, into the night-hours. and of course the past had put microphones in the trees. and of course he knew it and so they stayed silent.

the unavoidable. the inescapable. find a bottle and cause it to become empty. become devoured by an urge to empty every bottle you see. drink the oceans. in the morning, vomit hurricanes.

first person

there is a goal. a tentative goal. better than nothing.

burning out, burned out. the dog days. i am positively canine. sweat constantly. thirst like a maniac. can't drink enough water. or beer. or water. committed a terrible deed but didn't realize til post hoc that it was a terrible thing. shooting off at the mouth. every day before i go to work or before i go to the bar i think to myself "this is going to be the time when i rein myself in." when i'm not such an asshole. when customers at tables tell me i'm a good man. or when they thank me for something effusively. i want to yell at them. that's not my hallmark. someone said the other day (the other week) "that's what i like about you. you don't care. you do what you want." how can they be so blind to the 304.80 that i so clearly exhibit? my polysubstance dependence.

quit my therapist. she wasn't helping. none of them do. you get what you pay for. you pay as you go. more about mindfulness. more pema chodron, more thich nat hanh. more about breathing. always questions about "do you think about suicide?" who doesn't. it's life. it has an opposite. how can you not think about the opposite? turn over every rock, investigate every cranny. shine a light on where light could be found.

working on writing. it's something largely continuous yet with no discernable plot. as always. as nauseam. the same character, unnamed. a slice of me. some turbulent idiot who goes around collecting observations that mean nothing, yet observations that i as the creator imbue with some sort of meaning. seems like an inverted attempt to get God to say "HI THIS IS WHAT THIS MEANS" in a booming voice. even through dream. c'mon. i'm waiting.

taken to bloody marys. ozzies call a virgin mary a bloody shame. so now do i. make my little jokes to the people at the tables. keep my jaw wired shut around the people i work with. still not over the shockwave of what my idiot mouth said, so i try to keep it shut. booze corrodes the wires. my jaw hangs open and stupid comes out. i used to be all about forward motion. but my mind is always running everything that happened over again. i live in dual-layered time. my left ear hears the present, my right ear hears only the past. i mix it up in the studio of my skull. sometimes things overlap. what did you just say a second from now? oh - you've just now said it. there's a third ear like a mutation in the folds of my brain. it hears the future. or thinks it does.

there are dependencies and then there are dependencies. who among us isn't dependent on something. rueful choice that my selection is poison. so many others have it so much worse. sometimes i feel like i'm watching myself through a spyglass. drowning in the ocean. i tell people i don't know how to swim like i tell people i've never had sex. it's become integral to my mythology. i can understand the irritation from those who've heard it before. do you think a monk ever gets tired of reading the Bible? (anecdote: in Spring Harbor, there was a bearded kid who shuffled the hallways, endlessly peripateic, in socks that wore through after a week, murmuring the Bible to himself. upon asking a nurse what happened when he reached the end, she shrugged and said "he starts all over again.")

trying to shake the habit. if you want to change your life, you have to start by changing the days. the hours. the seconds. you have to learn how to set up roadblocks in your brain. my thought is a careening, drunk driver who gets blasted & swerves over rain-slick roads. crashing from one tree to the next and somehow keeps going. scot-free. maybe a little bruised. sometimes it's a big tree. sometimes it's someone else's car. this is how anxiety works. pressing the brake pedal before you even see headlights. 300.02.

quit my therapist because i hated her. didn't give her much of a chance. they say that if you realize everyone else is just as scared as you are you could love just about anyone. she said i should focus on what i was doing. what the now was. jesus woman i said jesus woman now's already gone. stupid words from someone who knows all about the Importance of the Now.

hamartia, hubris, anagnorisis, nemesis. peripateia. catharsis. where on the weird list of the tragic scale am i now? have i jumped scales? should i begin a new hagiography? it's about time i did. that means a new language. or a new phonetics.

i will begin to watch objectively the motions of my mouth