Either I just missed a great opportunity or I just opened a whole new chapter. If I'm basing my current outlook on the track record, though, it's both. Problem is, the new chapter sucks and it's a big letdown from the previous ones. It's hard to really explain how dumbfounded I am by the current situation, but also how excited. My timidity and hesitation may have left me fucked again, but maybe not. That's how it always is with me: diametrically opposed, extremeties poised to polarize and tear each other apart, leaving static in the wake of schism.

I can't keep on like this, conflicted within all the time, never knowing if I made the right decision, regretting the wrong ones, imagining what could have been, over and over again. It seems I get comfortable in this stagnant existence sometimes, like I want to stay under contrived pressure all the time. For who, for what? What is worse than self-torture over external irrelevances?

As much as I want to stay inside, doors locked, music loud and unceasing as to not allow empty thinking space in my mind, full of drugs, full of food, numb to the outside world, no connection, no pain to be caused, I want to stay out, embrace the world and find people to cherish, no thoughts, just living, a continuous spontaneity, discovering unknown wonders, seeking a lover who is true, and never come home again. Sometimes this all seems one big triviality, grossly pondering every insignificant detail. I'll get so wrapped up in trains of snowballing thought. Not even a bystander, just a bypasser, head down, interested but going to exert the effort to involve myself in this world teeming with experience.

As stated, if this new chapter turns out to be fulfilling, perhaps this neurosis will dissipate. Over and over I have proven Uncertainty to myself: the more I try to manipulate an event, the more it mutates, the further away it gets. Now, I must be the event itself, become the experience. This world ebbs and flows, fight the currents and exhaust your perceptions and will, or ride the waves of progression, stability in perpetual chaos.

Don't Costanza this one.

not of knives but of spiritual surgery

It's been awhile. New names, same stories.

Far too often it seems I fall prey to one lying temptress or another. Funny how evil usually has such a beautiful smile, charming my heart, but it's only been filled with emptiness. I don't really want to get into specifics, but the past year or so has been one woman after the other, consistently reducing my faith in humanity which I've been trying to maintain for years. I'm not blameless; I have set myself up for disappointment several times. But it takes two, and how much better the world (not just mine) would be if some of you WOULD JUST OPEN YOUR FUCKING MOUTH AND LET YOUR TRUTH BE KNOWN. That's all on this subject.

This continuous erosion of my faith, however, has cleared the path so to speak. How often my life comes back to some nihilistic transition. All this loss/failure has left me downtrodden surely, but I see so much clearer now. Splinters have been removed now, but I still occasionally feel where they stuck in me. Instead of wallowing in such pain now, I have them as reminders to not ever give myself up in hopes for someone else. I've said it before: if you hope for another to act a certain way, feel a certain way, to be something they arent , you will never EVER be satisfied; you're just fucking yourself. To hell with all that, I'm still here. That you can remember your despair is the best reason to forget it. My bitterness is faint, but I will forever want nothing but misery for some of you. I'm human, so be it. I will enjoy your downfall. I have no compassion as a witness to your demise.

there's fresh meat in the club tonight.........

Now I can't stop spinning. Been hesitant on amphetamines all my life; we should have made friends ages ago! The words are racing like chariots in battle around that fabled Colosseum where so many were butchered and forced to feast on dust for the delight of plebs and nobility alike, all sharing a good laugh for the blood and misery of others, those unlucky enough to get snared by the system, guilty of getting caught, nothing else.

when the woooooorrrlllldddd is sick

When? When is it not? Has it ever been well or the people inside it?

Money makes the world spin. Money causes avarice, hubris, divisions, prejudice, brings out the absolute worst in humans. If money is the principle operating factor of our world, what does that say about us? Rhetorical.

It's been a few years, but I'm still sharing some strains of Horselover Fat's mental anguish. Our gOD is sick, our gOD is jealous, our gOD will never be well. But that's all right, that's ok, because what we have in us already is greater than any god, any pantheon of the Divine. Every one of us is carrying Eternity. For some it's a stagnant pool in our bowels, for some it's nearing the boiling point at the highest point of the brain. Either way, it's there, with unbelievable potential to explode and flood the animal body with perfect Consciousness. It could bind all of us perfectly, create the unerring union.

OUR UNITED MINDS ARE EQUAL TO OUR CONCEPT OF GOD. That's all hE is: the immense power of our combined consciousnesses. Yet we're so far from completing a Universal Being. And there's no guarantee it's a reality. We could all fail and perish before ever coming close, that is, if we keep on the same path of global economy, senseless war, currency worship, self-imposed ignorance, comfort-seeking, apathy to the valid and imminent, and love for stupid, pointless trivialities (like the E! Network).

Whose world, or mine or theirs
or is it of none?
First came the seen, then thus the palpable
Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell,
What thou lovest well is thy true heritage
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee


Despite my indifferent and sometimes callous demeanor, ultimately I'm hopeful for this world that I hate so fervently so often. There is a way out of the great trash mountain that we've built. But just as a single cell cannot repair its inhabited organism's wounds, no one person can go it alone to cease this downfall.

future beef

Spit this out in the workvan yesterday morning. Like most of them nowadays.


vision of reason

I want to occupy your mind,
Make you crawl to me on the ground.
Let's not be stupid and waste time,
It'll always be the other way around.

I'm lost in my thoughts of beautiful music,
where everything has that big carnival sound,
swept up in the dust of friendly faces
and like-minded enemies.
It's been only 17 years,
can we do 16 more?
For a head so full of ferocious intent,
growing bigger and unbalanced.
I don't want your folksy approximations,
names and numbers, please,
to ease my worried mind.
Driving alone again,
again and again, these suburban streets,
have been my only home,
nauseate my haunted dreams,
shaped me into this mediocrity,
where toil goes no further than acceptance.
I love how you live right down the street,
yet you act like we've never met;
duly noted, I'll get lost alone in the snow.
My heavy head looms to the precipice,
like some deranged Kilroy, staggering
to the threshold,
clouding every
vision of reason.

Love the snow,
the way it suffocates
this scent of delusion and hope,
and binds the telling of the tale,
paying the highest cost of being safe and free.
I can't take the sun anymore,
flagged down by boundless stupidity.
Don't give me your vague generalities;
give me the incision nearing my heart.
It's been only 17 years,
give me another 16,
to sweat you out of my system.

falling off the shoulders of giants

It's sad what has happened to poetry in the last 50 years or so. Where before, it was a select few who outshined all others, now the artform has lapsed into the hands of the masses. This is not to say elitism should be the rule, but the anti-elitism mentality that has swept the genre has, in turn, cut itself loose from the foundation upon which it was built. This not in favor of stagnation; one must always progress, but lacking a proper base, collapse is inevitable. It was in the Reader, I believe, that I read an article on this very subject. The author of said piece, however, was praising the transformation poetry has undertaken where now anyone and everyone is a poet. But are they really? I love music, but I lack any formidable musical talent, so I don't pretend to be a musician. It's more difficult, with a written genre, as we all use language, and thus, anyone can poeticize, right? The market is saturated. There is no point in the idea of being a poet anymore. It's become a pasttime rather than an artform, just some odd antiquated activity with which people occasionally consort.

But what's the point of poetry in the first place. I've always seen it as contradictory: utilizing language to transcend language into a much more profound yet sublime substantiation. It has to move beyond the trappings of the mind and break through into consciousness, and more importantly, to communicate between subject and object in a way inexpressable to the simple mind and concurrent words. Who else in history could have a better, more exhaustingly exacting view, however, than Ezra Pound?

'Good art however "immoral" is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.'

"True witness" is what gets me here. It conjures up that sense of progress to the profoundly experiential out of the mere referential. This is what all true art aspires to, toils for, is suffered over.

'Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.'

It is not simply a matter of writing in verse, it is a discipline. But I understand that things change. I'm trying not to lament a forgotten era or anything of the sort. It's unfortunate that poetry had to dwindle in stature and relevance so much. It's no longer about the passion and transcendence, now it's about "expression" and acceptance. The aim is altered now. No one strives for such a glorious vision anymore.

It took Pound more than 70 years to finally achieve this, after thousands of poems, countless translations, and the inimicable Cantos, standing monolithic in the vast field of modern art and thought. If you (whoever's still actually reading) ever read the Cantos, it will take time, more than most could ever have patience for, you will see the exemplification of this movement from a barren, anachronistic mentality into the precision of a mind unbound by time, into a pleroma of consciousness. One must sift through a dozen languages, 10,000 years of history and myth, and countless names and places that have lived and existed, some only in idea. But after pushing through the density, one arrives possibly the most beautiful verses ever written, none so unabashed and raw, the essence of language he sought for all these decades.

—‘The hells move in cycles, / No man can see his own end’

-‘A blown husk that is finished / but the light sings eternal / a pale flare over marshes’

‘And as to who will copy this palimpsest? / al poco giorno / ed al gran cerchio d’ombra [in the small hours, with the darkness describing a huge circle] / But to affirm the gold thread in the pattern / . . . / To confess wrong without losing rightness: / Charity I have had sometimes, / I cannot make it flow thru. / A little light, like a rushlight / to lead back to splendour’

(palimpsest = A manuscript, typically of papyrus or parchment, that has been written on more than once, with the earlier writing incompletely erased and often legible.)

It's doubtful anyone will truly grasp the magnitude of his work, or that he even did. Clearly he thought himself a failure at the end, a miserable old incapable bastard. Let's face it, the man himself was not an easy one. Genius like that, more often than not, creates fractures in the personality, making it difficult to differentiate between said genius and other, more ignoble thoughts. He's often cited as a notorious anti-Semite, but it's just not that simple. It's not that he hated Jews themselves, moreso the Judeo-Christian outlook that had seized Western civilization for almost two millennia. He saw the advent these religions as the downfall of the traditional, heroic and mystical way, as the world delved deeper into materialism and money. He wrote a lot on economics, namely how credit is a dangerous thing on such a large scale. But credit couldn't wreck an economy could it?

Pound stated that "maldistribution of wealth due to insufficient purchasing power is the cause of economic depressions. Pound had come to believe that a misunderstanding of money and banking by governments and the public, as well as the manipulation of money by international bankers, had led the world into a long series of wars." (Encyclopedia Britannica)

While his demeanor certainly lent him to be a rather bizarre and sometimes incoherent man, it doesn't get much more prophetic than this. There is only thing that modern civilization operates on: money, moreso the control of the distribution of wealth. It seems to be the primary focus of Americans especially. Your entire childhood is controlled by other people setting you up to be controlled by the dollar. 20 years of school, of pointless "extra-curricular" bullshit, of meaningless structure just to make sure you fit into the scheme of the money-making machine.

And it's all those who find this system insane that are cast out into ignorance, deemed as lone nuts, madmen, fascists, commies, etc. It's so very easy to demarcate someone outside the system in simple terms, simply because they're incompatible. Of course, some people simply are fucking crazy, but how could you know unless you tried to understand? That's one thing this world really needs more of: empathy. Not sympathy, not guilt for situations beyond your control, but basic understanding of others. Everyone's perspective is different, and a universal worldview will never cohere. We lack so much real communication between us.

I've learned, however (the hard way), that if you want others to act a certain way, to think, be a certain way, you will never EVER be satisfied. You can't control your environment, only your perception thereof. And some people will grow more selfish, some become more distant, and some just keep getting lovelier, while some forget you unfortunately, and some you fortunately forget about, your worst enemy might become your best friend again, vice versa, and love is only what you can piece together out of the chaotic hearts and minds of others and what you can connect with, to the ends of your short lives that nothing could ever last longer than in your eyes, or for only a few moments, when all other time, past, present, and future, is spurious at best.

"Enlightenment is a dodgy proposition. It all depends on how much you want to risk. Not money so much as personal safety, precious time, against a very remote long shot coming in. It happens, of course. Out of the dust, the clouds of sweat and breath, the drumming of hooves, the animal rises up behind the field, the last you'd've expected, tall, shining, inevitable, and passes through them all like a beam of morning sunlight through the spectral residue of a dream. But it's still a fool's bet and a mug's game, and you might not have the will or the patience."
-Grand Cohen Nookshaft
Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon
p. 239


One has to wonder if a life of total failure as a possible outcome is worth the most important search in the world: enlightenment, to create a profound brevity of consciousness, imperceptible to those not there. I guess most people just carry on, indifferent to this sort of thing, but my outlook doesn't allow for that. As long as life is seemingly absurd and irrational, my mind will focus accordingly. This viewpoint itself eventually becomes ridiculous and in line with the madness of the world. You fall right into the trappings of these subtle mindgames. Fall right in and become object to your subject. In other words, you're far more fucked than when you started.

Hope certainly isn't lost, though. In fact, hope always dies last. There are companions to be found on this road. D-lysergic acid diethylamide-25, for instance. I certainly wouldn't recommend LSD to anyone, but it certainly worked for me, in the sense of freeing my mind, or rather me being freed from my mind. For the first time, I felt in control of my mind. Before (and since) the first time, my mind was always ahead of me, dictating and deciding before I could even get there, ruining groundwork and souring possible relationships. On LSD, though, I felt completely in the moment; it was me, and only me, living my life, a unity of mind, consciousness and body. I had no fear, no anxiety of all the situations that, in a "normal" mindset, would've made me uncomfortable or bored. All those stresses dissolved over the course of the day. Of course this is just my subjective opinion here, but I believe that for that day, I finally knew what it was like to be mentally clear, unburdened of any sort of neurosis. I could make profound decisions that before seemed so distant and impossible, like ending a very unhealthy relationship that became my worst addiction and my greatest waste of time. Not that I'm bitter toward anyone (well over a couple things, but that's being human), but I just realize that I could've been doing so much more with my life years ago. Let's take a trip back, let's try to figure out what's been tearing me apart all this time.

The earliest matter of pertinent information began, I think, when I skipped first grade. This was at St. Walter's Catholic School, an extremely secular private school. What I mean is that, in religion class, we were taught the metaphorical validity of the Bible. The stories were never meant to be taken literally; they're just guides for life. They even taught us evolution. Anyhow, even before 1st grade, in kindergarten, when it came time to read a story together, I was set aside to read my own story then write a report on it. Already standing apart, the first steps of being "different." Apparently someone higher up believed me to be smart back then, and seeing how old St. Walter's didn't have a gifted program, I was displaced into second grade after two weeks in the first, away from people I had just sort of made a connection with. Ostracizing was instantaneous, as you could imagine. I did not fit, at all. And it certainly didn't seem like I was wanted to fit in, and for all the right reasons, surely: because I'm younger than you, and smarter than you. Thanks, class of the ought, for exposing your insecurities to me repeatedly over 7 years. I learned a lot. Well, to be fair, a couple people were all right (even if I still feel you had adequate desk space), and I have resolved issues over the years, but, overall, I was never a part of you. That has been the pattern: not fitting in with any group.

I think it rather safe to say that this displacement from a somewhat normal standing to being the obvious outsider profoundly affected my outlook on life.

(to be continued, at some point)

purpose

The pattern is beyond apparent. This exasperated poetical progress of the past couple years or so has been interesting. It has the followed the journey of attempting to bring some sort of understanding to a troubled mind (mine, I guess), and the struggle that has occurred. Is there a more difficult journey than the search for mental clarity? There are only two tools one has on this adventure: mind and consciousness. Both are omnipresent, but we are overwhelmingly aware and influenced by our mind, while the consciousness, the truest part of our selves, seemingly slumbers, awake when we dream. On occasion, consciousness permeates the unsteady mind, and in various moments things appear clear and right; they actually make sense! In a world that has almost none!

And I've been trying so hard to bring that world of abstraction out of my head and into the real, onto the page, to create some sort of lasting connection, to make some things truly matter, to make life count, to know what vitality is, to have a world worth living in, people worth dying for.

Will I ever succeed? No one can say. But goddamn it I'll try, for as long as I can write, type, speak, think, I'll carry out these thoughts to whomever will listen, if only for a second. I will find my way, I'll get over all these crippling and crippled obsessions, all these needless attachments that drain and drag on, all these hateful people and faithless ingrates I will overcome and cast them into the past that doesn't change. I will make it. Do it and see it done.