"What is the difference between worse and worst?"

"I used to tell you that things may get more worse between us.
But at this time this is the absolute worst that can be.
Got it?"

The back of necks.

Do I use too many words?
 I’m not the best person to ask
 So
 No
 No what?
 No I don’t think so
 What’s this about?


 Hey
 Emotional break down
 Those suck
 Mm
 You alright?
 Sure
 Sure?
 Mm
 Wanna talk about it
 No
 Feel like crying?
 Yeah
 Do it
 Naaaa
 Do it
 No
 Wanna tell me to fuck off?
 That usually makes you feel better
 Fuck off, then
 Say it with feeling at least
 Fucker!
 That’s more like it


 Why do you get off on me swearing at you?
 Dunno
 Weirdo
 Yeah
 Feeling bad?
 Yeah
 The worst?
 Probably
 Shit Whatcha gonna do?
 Dunno really
 Gotta picture in your head?
 What do you mean?
 Do you have a picture in your head?
 Always

 You’re alright then
 Okay
 I mean it
 Okay Now you’re a fucker

 I’m alright
 I know
 I love you
 I know
 I miss you
 I know

 You don’t use too many words with me, but I already know all your stories. They’re my stories, now. And I like that. I need that. I need you. There’s not much that could shake you out of my pocket. Not miles. Not relationships. Not sin or misdirection. There will always be you and me and those memories are mostly filled with silences. You know how to use silences. Like rain, ya know? Like what’s missing sometimes. Then you know it’s hitting the window and you can sleep better at night. 

Mmmmm I always feel like I mess things up.
I’m toxic rain.
Toxic Avenger
 Right
Quite
I always tell you it’s the image in your own mind that’s important. Not what other people say about that image and not what other people try to do with it. But you never listen.


I do listen And I hear all of it
So
So I’m like Hamlet, ya know?
That’s great. Hamlet waited too long and died and stuff.
Well, not exactly. Othello.
Now there’s a man of action.
 Oh good comparison.
 What?
 He was manipulated by all of his strongest characteristics into killing his wife. Then he offed himself.
Yeah, they both ended up dead, ennit?
Yeah Both men, too Yeah guess we shouldn’t mess with Shakespeare Indeed

Dont inspire yourself with cliches!

They tell you to find yourself as if you are missing.

People say life’s all about finding yourself, and that therein lies some sort of cathartic enlightenment- and not only this, but that there is an existential methodology behind it all. life is made out to be some holy journey that only comes to ‘true’ fruition when we travel to an X amount of places, when we ‘let go’ of X amount of things, and when we fulfill a set of abstract criteria like ‘letting love become us’ or ‘dispersing light’ or something similarly esoteric (and beautiful, in principle).

One would think this modern credo would yield a greater quantity of happier youth, seeing as how positive psychology and an ascended phenomenology would, apparently, equip us with a better understanding of how to live a little better. ‘that’s what it’s about’, they say. but what is ‘that’, and what is ‘it’? happiness? peace? life itself, as a spiritual awakening of sorts?

The thing is if we do take certain life-formulas to be true, such as positively-imbued semantic postulations like ‘see the glass as half full, not empty’ or something equally as mystic, then of course the good life seems a pretty simple task (as long as we think we understand how to live it). but this too is as false and detrimental as the cynic’s fatalistic view (perhaps) that anything bad which can happen will happen.

The deceit in all of this Hope is not that it is wrong to hope, or dream, or to strive and journey for things that we want which are yet out of our reach; it is that this Hope mutates beyond a simple guiding goal into a kind of panic-struck phenomenon, an added pressure to embody that hope without bumps. take travel, for example.

 Augustine of hippo once said ‘the world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page’. travel is associated with open-mindedness, that to travel far equates to widening the horizons of the mind, and henceforth manifesting in the individual who partakes in this activity. however there is a difference between the normative suggestion for travel as an activity which might benefit the traveler, and the righteous advocacy of travel as the ONLY activity which might benefit the traveler (in terms of open-mindedness, or something similar). One does not have to ‘go big’ or travel far to learn about the inner workings of their given community and make a difference (so to speak). Travel may be a consequence of certain good intentions, but they are not a predicate to the actions of every well-meaning intention.

It is easy to do something big, that is all.
It’s more romantic, more obvious, more of a big fat Duh when it comes to realizing the purposes of oneself.
It achieves the same thing that we might achieve by repeating positive mantras as ‘I am beautiful no matter what’ as an allegedly strong fight against the narrow trends of beauty that make the forerunners of public media and other platforms.
That means- yes, by all means utilize strength to feel strong in face of adversity, to counteract self-diminishing obstacles, etc. but no- one does not need to do what everybody says is most obvious to, you know, live well. well-being, purpose, and all these alchemical life-goals have no need to be standardized or institutionalized into little modern cults of the privileged soul-seekers.

When we constantly try to PROVE to the world (maybe to ourselves) that we are on the ‘right path’, via displays of calculated deeds, ‘cool’ ‘nice’ actions, and whatnot, we are only creating more anxiety.

 The truth is no matter how with it we make ourselves out to be, fighting against ignorance, bigotry, patriarchy, racism, homophobia, etc etc. we will also always suffer from lapses of judgment (some more frequent or less frequent), and this does not make us failed people. Attaching success to a hypothetical principle is what makes us feel that we have failed, it is not failure itself that rips open our hearts and sits itself there which makes us ‘fail’.

That my life is simple and unremarkable, for example, does not mean I don’t have goals, or that there aren’t good things I want to do. 

For the last two years my life mostly consisted of eating and writing and socializing and reading sometimes and lots of sex and not much else, quite frankly. and many, many, many times, i have felt the guilt, I have felt demonized and looked down upon for how not obvious my achievements are. and this has left me in a state of stasis- this has left me with thoughts of ‘I’m good for nothing’ ‘I don’t have what it takes’ etc. and this is completely useless.

 I suppose what I’m trying to say is that, to make something pragmatic of life, it might do to just, treat mistakes and unfulfilled goals as just that- mistakes and unfulfilled goals. they are not fatal blows to some goldmine of wisdom which are inaccessible without some perfect following of behaviour that make us the flashiest candidates for the ‘lived life’.

If you can’t travel, then do the next best thing. don’t get caught up in the fact that you can’t do something which you think you are meant to do. just do the next best thing. do what you CAN do, which is the next best thing.

 You don’t have to love all people. you don’t have to make your life exciting in the way books and tv and films make of ‘exciting’.

You don’t have to look like anything specific to be valuable. you don’t have to follow any of your peers’ or community’s counsel on how to ‘find yourself’.

You are already found because you are yourself. this is not a matter which need be complicated through extraneous rituals. you do not need to find anything more about yourself than what you already know of yourself. explore, learn, experiment, do whatever you want to do, but realize that regardless of how well you can do any of the aforementioned, it is not like you are any less of yourself because you didn’t do certain things. of course when one is constantly told to ‘find oneself’ one will feel that there is something missing which must be attained. but there isn’t. everything is there, everything is here. ordinary or unremarkable as it is (or beyond), it’s there.

Reminders.

Had a real long conversation with my favorite senior from college,  she was an ideal mix of everything. topper. tom boy, geeky, beautiful. everything.

I speak to her once a year or 8 months, when I want to be reminded of how I really was, where I am coming from and what are the things that kept me apart from everyone. She is one of those few people I take seriously.

she reminded me how in the first year I came with a bang and how everyone thought I am the next big thing but how everyone warned me that I will change alot in 5 years.

she told me how when good things happen in life, all the negative elements start walking away. How if you are standing on someone elses feet you never have a base and you can fall anytime.
How she had tears in her eyes when she was in the U.S last month because the campus life for a post graduate is so overwhelming that she is happy that I have got admissions at the best places.

we talked about how 5 years of law school shrinked our brains, how our perpective was limited to the course material, how we stopped reading books, stopped indulging in conversations with people, talked about the same things with the same people everyday, how we were never valued.

she told me how in the last 3 years her life has become what she wanted it to be, that new sense of freedom, the undying passion to learn more, that passion is back .

That its ok that in the last 5 years I felt lost, because I never really belonged there.

it wasnt just an ego boosting conversation with someone 3 years older than me trying to tell me life is all good ahead and how she understands that 5 years around miniscule level intellgence only did more bad than good. But it was also a reality check of what I wanted.

she reminded me I have that same warmth and that I am the only person she knows who would never hurt anyone. 

but most of all she reminded me

that I dont learn from books
I dont learn from movies
or people
or my own mistakes

I just learn from life, from things people do and I will never do. 
that its time I build my foundation and stand on it, because thats the only thing that will always be mine.

spinning. words.

sometimes I can make thoughts move
like people do
with my words across wires
perhaps not to quench
but to sustain until those moments come
when lips and hands and eyelashes
can fall down amongst us like rain.

If I said that I know the way
you can make thoughts move
or that mine haven't stopped since
the first time
you touched my hand
touched like our voices do
through these wires
letting everything else disappear:
this might be the first time in my life
that I wished I could write poetry.

But I'm thinking about daisy chains
how I'd like to make a crown of them
and words
for your head
or mine
both
run through tall grass
our holding hands
touching
 
Right now
I think it might rain
and if so -- under those drops
like soft silent fingertips
dancing on my skin 
I'll go
close my eyes
and wait.

...

He won't understand just like he never understands that I write in patterns like the female orgasm that my logic builds on itself turning and turning in ever increasing circles often requiring pressure and attention to bring the whole act to fruition and even though the journey takes slightly over 40 pages.

I have to use my hands and lips eyes and tongue to get to the point where you can finish.

 I get you there building and building until you want to scream into my ear your satisfaction at the spiral I wrapped you up in to some sweet release.

There's nothing left to say or do.
 Roll your name over again on my tongue like wringing hands of a prayer.
Palms pressing teeth.
Lips silent open.
Wrapping myself in the flesh of your name like sheets of skin.
 The sting of pain dulled by this collection of letters hiding held like a lemon drop under the tongue. The new name of you intersecting the chords of my throat.
Tucked like the pressure of a palm in the bend of the knee. Like lips caught in the shadow of a collar bone. Auricle tongue.

The static of you plaits my hair. Reduces my mouth phonetic--your name pressed out.


I come home
clutch my coffee mug
sip and sip my way back
instead .

Reverberations

March brought my voice for the first time
something written on a cold day while waiting for him and then later read into a recorder with deliberation – without thought to recompense
numb fingers gripping a pen
to save those words that just wouldn’t stop
like the smile
from listening to his song
the way every note taught different pieces of my body yet undiscovered words for combustion
captured onto any stray scrap of paper to be found
the margins of a schedule.

Maybe he never knew that what it really meant was that I’d never recover from the moment  that deep inhalation of breath in a space between chords maybe he never knew that i wouldn’t stop listening.

Something happens in the span of time between making music and hearing music
the laws of space and time that allow one hand striking a chord—even a million miles away—to produce an actual physical response in the body of someone else. touching without touching.

These moments when we hear.
When we listen long enough.

What he said
from me:

maybe it’s a conversation
two voices saying
 
i don’t want you to go.
but I have to go.
 
over and over again
until the disjunction reforms
mixing into a unification.

and he breathes at just the right spot
when the dissonance between
metal and metal
metal and flesh
culminates
becomes clear
and the separateness returns
the plucking of chords
into words
into sounds that need no other name

conversations with Superman

yesterday, with my head pressed firmly against the far left cushion, close to sleep, still following the moving pictures on the television with my eyes, sounds filtering, nonsensical into my ears, i realized the fabric of my couch is hero blue. god, damn, i muttered to no one in particular.
I've always loved Superman.

"I am there" he whispered.

 "sitting on the far right back seat that you just quite but almost can't see. I'm in your right front pants pocket. At that spot on the inside of your left wrist where the blood might have been pumping under a watch face, if you wore one. I am the sound of compression breaks., The slow dull voice over-head calling out stops. all the way home. I am the familiar scent you always find at the same time foreign and familiar when you fold back the sheets and climb into bed. I am--each and every-- morning"
I told him how I'm folding in on myself. these days. trying to lose significance between the crisp holy pages of books. unsatisfied with the attempt -- unable to break the surfaces. Head empty or perhaps too full up. I sit for long moments and think about the smell of the ocean just after a rain. or my grandfather's  garage filled with the scent of car oils and perpetually decaying wood. I wander around this city in which i live. searching for something that i just can't quite remember. all the corners have lost their edges. and i'm numb to the sound.

and I just told him how I want to be his hippie dream.

All long haired twin braids and just the right amount of too many hemp necklaces and bracelets. Peasant blouses with skirts. The perfectly broken in pair of sandals. I'd always smell something like incense and tapioca pudding. And I'd be lovely without any makeup. Memories of me would make him think of daisies and sunshine and the smell of new rain.

 Not kitsch. Just right.

But then....

I am so in love with you. 
My head spins and the world shifts.
And there is nothing but wrinkled sheets and bare feet and the aftermath of long quiet afternoons. 

Only now there are cats crying. Plumbing problems. Interventions (of all sort).

 I've started losing my accent and using punctuation. Ignoring the constant longing for small letters. Things left unsaid. When I was so in love with you you were a window that I always opened and closed. Found at the ends of my fingertips. When I wanted. It's how things go. Now you are here and there and the cat cries and eats and wants to come in and go out and we are closing all the windows up tight, on the house. I can see my breath, sometimes, in the early mornings. When you are real and I am too.

i'm looking for the ins and outs. the ways that words used to feel streaming and alive from my fingertips. this might be the end of them. for days. and days. and days. of waiting. the doldrums. the fantastical ways that the days can. really. end up being the rhythm that you were looking for to begin with when you first started this whole thing. all that fucking stuff that you can't even see now. for looking.

oh my god

he says

and she says

nothing

rolls her eyes in the way that annoying teenagers do in movies and in real life when they know that someone is watching.

it's a real important question

she protests

about something that probably doesn't matter anyway

it's like trying to swallow my own tongue. thoughts of the memory of your hair ring my insides dumb. like an unstruck bell. and if i could, reduce the life we lead into pocket-sized picture postcards. i would. shrink you into something more manageable. less loud. and i could fill us up with nonsense words. mail them off to foreign lovers. and strangers. 

cherry bowls and nightmare hummingbird kitchens and radiator death cab rides.