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

ab morpheum

1. philip glass - opening (from "glassworks")

2. the album leaf - the light (from "into the blue again")

3. kate simko - welcome to fermilab (from "music from the atom smashers")

4. glowworm - periphescence (from "the coachlight woods")

5. cliff martinez - we don't have to think like that anymore (from the solaris (soderbergh) OST)

6. ulrich schnauss - gone forever (from "a strangely distant place")

7. khale - working... (from "sleepworks")

8. the low anthem - charlie darwin (from "oh my god charlie darwin")

9. max richter - on the nature of daylight (from "the blue notebooks")

10. whitetree - koepenik (from "cloudland")

11. grizzly bear - colorado (from "yellow house")

12. steve reich - pulses (from "music for 18 musicians" (track 1))

13. whitetree - mercury sands (from "cloudland")

14. gregor samsa - abutting, dismantling (from "rest")

15. kings of convenience - singing softly to me (from "quiet is the new loud")

16. whitetree - other nature (from "cloudland")

17. kings of convenience - the weight of my words (from "quiet is the new loud")

sketch

X & A & R & J, sprawled on the couches as though a bomb had gone off in the center of the room and they lay there, dizzily, stunned. the walls pulse with the reflected colors of the television, a noisy ghost shouting useless things. outside, the trees bend and quiver in obeisance to an invisible menace. it has rained for three days now and the city is beginning to feel it in their spines, right around the third vertebra, an aching that gets worse and worse as their shoulders sag, day after day, rising to see the sun and finding only that eldritch white-gray sky staring balefully back down at them. the clouds drop the rain as though unravelling themselves, like dispirited yarn-skeins.

eight hours earlier, X had curiously poked his index finger in the air, expecting it to tear through some sort of seam. everything sagged. they each ate a handful of psilocybe cubensis and chased them with miller lite. they'd gone through their ascent together, yet apart, each in a different quadrant of the room, gone through the period of hysterical laughter at anything anyone said, gone through the melting process, stared wildly into space, lost inside their heads as though in a vast cavern, staring, staring -

in the skinny hour before dawn, A falls asleep, his breath rasping against the back of his throat. the pre-cursor to some later-life apnea. R is bug-eyed, his long-fingered right hand clutching the armrest. the TV has taken on some form of life for him. J is in the process of calmly rolling a small joint, though he won't admit to having some difficulty. the small white pinner has developed an unfortunate twitch, a tail which flicks around and evades his fingers. he considers taking the lighter in his left hand and burning it as it lays on the table, but the thought is an ephemeral one, a fish in the muddy murk of his brain, a fish breaking the surface and then retreating again. his thoughts unravel like a burlesque reel, or a vaudeville. he is thinking of his various paraphilias. X finds his jaw clenching, feels the layers of his stomach writhing over the remnants of the mushrooms. he wonders: (is it still raining outside?) the curtains over the windows are thick and would not move easily. he has not smoked a cigarette in entirely too long, though sometimes when he trips he just doesn't. forgets to.

apostrophos

i used to be good
at understanding this
mysterious language,
the alphabet of every day,
each hour
descending inevitably
towards Z,

but lately i slur,
trip over the consonants
& fall into the holes
of the vowels,
phrases tumbling
out of my pockets

(re) capitulation

and so today was a
slow itemization of things
that turned against me:

i woke from a dreamless sleep
into a pellucid morning,

fear dripped into my veins
from the invisible machine
of nightmare,
had to turn the light on
and stare at the shadows
until they melted back,

then
the necessary cigarette
left me
as always
unsatisfied

and doing nothing
(a lot easier
than it sounds)
was justified by
reducing it to
small somethings,
like reshuffling the books
because the height of The Idiot
is smaller than that of
The Devils,
and i don't know
maybe i felt something
a little like sympathy,

and then
the cat hissed at me
though i had done nothing,
and i saw my fear
reflected in her eyes,
a weird shimmer
like the lake of heat
you might see
over summer asphalt,

for a damned second
heart pulpy in my mouth
like a bitter fruit
i stood staring at
the ridges of her palate,
thought how they looked like
the marks the waves make
in the sand at the beach.

i rubbed my tongue over my teeth
and prepared to hiss back,
but the rumble and mutter of a truck
shoving by importantly
on the street outside
sent her fleeing
for the nearest couch.

the sun went behind a cloud
and didn't come back.

then,
now,
this,

a shaky column of words,
a half of a pillar
in the rubble of the
ruins of the day

complaint

& i am so
motherfucking
tired,

so tired i can feel
fissures developing
in my bones,
the bigger ones,
the one in my thigh and
the one in my chest
quaking like california
under tectonic duress -

and this is boring,
so motherfucking
boring,

so boring that i have
canned myself like
cling peaches,
filled up my insides
with syrup & even my brain
is yellowed,
sickly with it

and they say
no man is an island
and i'm calling bullshit
from my roof
howling at the dawn
every man
is islanded,
surrounded by the pelagic
nothingness,
the whirl & whorl of sea
& wind
the sound of a seagull
that i take to be mourning
but is actually
hunger