His eyes sagging in their corners, he rubbed the back of his wrist across them and blinked into the smearing traffic lights. Silent car ride, she next to him, no music on the radio. He dreamed lazily about the silent car rides of his life, memories that came from that fount that tugged at the edge of pain and loneliness, the dull toothache of nostalgia and memory that he could not help but prod with the tip of his tongue. Silent car rides with angry parents on frost-bitten mornings, or with angry girlfriends on cool teenage autumn evenings, or he the angry one, strangling the steering wheel with one hand and massaging his grimace with the other. There were sounds within these silent car rides; the rustling and cracking of vinyl or leather jacket sleeves being bent by their silent wearers, a nauseating sound, or the exaggerated nasal exhalation with chainsmoking billow lungs. The turn signal was obnoxious, a smug metronome.
Sometime in the midst of all of these infuriating tactile memories, smells of the hollow past and its forgotten sins, he had driven into their driveway, and he sighed, the silent car ride finally over.
Wednesday, December 3, 2014
Monday, December 1, 2014
My Pyramid
It is the king's laughter, here and now,
it is the king's holy gizzards by which I clamber
so clumsy and so loudly mute,
stumbling upon feet of miles of sentence;
the last mile
the HOLY mile.
I miss my challengers,
I miss the dust between us
of which we are too busy to speak.
And so I wait,
wait wait
with darkened pencil and sharpened room
and capture all of the deep fates
with looms a-spinnin' and wrapped
to beg some grace to come lurching to my bedside.
Naught else to do;
wrapped in papyrus,
brain ajar,
heart preserved.
Ah, my pyramid, my unfair,
my long journey to be unhurt and unafraid
ends here,
and I am left
October sometime, 2014
it is the king's holy gizzards by which I clamber
so clumsy and so loudly mute,
stumbling upon feet of miles of sentence;
the last mile
the HOLY mile.
I miss my challengers,
I miss the dust between us
of which we are too busy to speak.
And so I wait,
wait wait
with darkened pencil and sharpened room
and capture all of the deep fates
with looms a-spinnin' and wrapped
to beg some grace to come lurching to my bedside.
Naught else to do;
wrapped in papyrus,
brain ajar,
heart preserved.
Ah, my pyramid, my unfair,
my long journey to be unhurt and unafraid
ends here,
and I am left
October sometime, 2014
bad vibes, last month or so
10/31/14, 7:30 am
If I were to be asked
to be lashed to the tracks
in the name of you and your eyes,
my hesitation would naught,
only welcoming knot
to be bound wrist and ankle to morning,
and sung through the night,
sung as bards sing their knights,
I who lay down my bone to stone,
hot blood splash cold steel,
I make known the deal
forever dreaming I die
in you and your eyes.
Verde, te quiero verde,
Te quiero en la noche verde
y la mañana ya verde,
y sí comprendo que estas palabras
son ya en los canciones
de los muertos.
------------------------------------------------------------
Halloween morning blows smokey blue, a gentle rapping of skeletons in all the gutters and leaves trickling down Campbell Avenue. No rest for the wicked, weary, nor Wiccan, and here me still nursing a bottle of red (red?) and all three; a vampiric thirst for blood and breastmilk moistens my lips and dries my throat. Imagine toads, trampled beneath hooves. Imagine dolphins and chimps, both dirty rapists, their skull-meat dripping from the end of my pirate's rapier. Imagine there's no Heaven. It's easy if you try. Certainly a Hell. Certainly more than sky above. John Lennon was an asshole and a wife-beater. George is the way-2-go.
Had I known this marker yet (ya) held such vitality, long would I have been abusing it, long would it have since ran dry! I mistook it another limp cock drained for my Dylan Thomas portraits yet here it goes a-scratchin' and a-bleedin' 'cross the fucking page. Dylan Thomas, I will draw you this morning!
[here I draw a terrible sketch of Dylan Thomas, and then proceed to spit wine all over it, purposely]
11/3/14, etc
Sooner or later, all luck runs out, and when you've been as fortuitous as I, have slipped by for thirty years generally unfazed and largely indignant, never wholly without a jangle in my pocket nor a teat in my mouth, that final fall from grace is a steep one, that straw-broken plummet bound to be screaming and bloody.
I remember leaving the bar, or so I tell myself, and I remember coming home, making it home I should say, in what felt like twenty long, cold minutes. But this is too easy, and not the case at all. There are at least three hours missing, and at a little past 4 K found me standing in her doorway, swaying. "Your room is beautiful," I apparently was able to mutter, and she bolted out of bed in time for me to crumple into her arms, my face a mess of blood and swollen flesh.
Sleep was blessedly without dreaming, and I awoke at 9:30 (by the grace of Daylight Savings) to make it to work only about eight minutes late. There were panicked calls to my mother the night before, K wondering if I should need an ambulance, she and my mother not understanding the full story, wondering if I had fallen or maybe beaten the shit out of myself, but the knuckles on my right hand are swollen, and the tell-tale marks of where someone else's teeth broke my skin riddle the back of my hand in a soft semicircle.
But none of this occurred to me while walking to work, and I did not remember speaking to my mother, certainly did not remember her telling me to "Fuck off", believing as she did that it was but the latest Fuck-Up in a long series of Fuck-Ups from her eldest and prodigal son. Instead, I am distracted, you could say, by my left eye swollen completely shut, by the purple bruises turning both temples into a Quasimodo brow, the long deep scrape from right eye to right ear that was surely my head hitting and then dragging across rough sidewalks, the blood matting my eyelashes like goth makeup, the blood oozing in my mouth where the inside of my lip broke against sharp teeth.
Sharp teeth, I am nothing but sharp teeth, a golem of sharp teeth. The world owes me a living, doo-doodle-doo-doodle-doo. I've learned nothing. Fuck this.
_-_-_--------_-___-__-_-_-__-_-_-_-_-------_----_-_-_---___-_-___-_-__-
Went for one of my evening walks, face swollen and discolored, found myself staring at a beer-and-a-shot on the cool patio of a local alcholic's haunt. Got beef jerky, pack o' smokes, my trusty notepad and trusted pen, and a crippling affliction with motherfucking devil-ass cunt-mouth alcohol. Help?
Haven't really eaten in two days; my mouth hurts too bad. This beef jerky ("Sweet n Hot") is a godsend, sweet protein and sodium.
My bones move by the grace of grudge and guilt alone. It's a lonely way to be. Someday, I'll be rid of both. Not today.
And now I can control my phone without touching the touch-screen. Am I psychic, telekinetic? Am I dead, a ghost? Can ghosts operate Android smartphones?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I don't know much,
but I know the sound
of bone knocking bone,
chiming wooden in the breathless wind.
I am routinely surprised and impressed
with the strides I take upon this stale earth,
at the path of fire behind me
which explains with great shudderings my guilt,
which does nothing to assuage fears,
which bolsters my inability to admit defeat.
~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-
Goat's breast,
who says?
Cock-cup,
a chalice
to suck,
stroke vein
with
tender tip
and
tooth'd lip
--------------_____________-------------------____________---
Dream about Nyquil.
Dream about storage,
dream about chortling
with chunks of spent amoeba
running our assholes ragged
on some alien planet
costa rica
Dream you are who she wants you to be
for once be
who she wants you to be.
(He, shaking hand, extinguishes another cigarette and laments the evening's follies)
"This is horseshit.
I want to go to bed, early rise, impress my benefactors
and nullify my contrarians.
I, myself, am not a contrarian.
Yes I am, of course I am,
no I am not."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''_______________________----------
He took one final drag from his cigarette,
and proceeded to slip backwards upon his heels.
The wife had dripped butter on the floor earlier
and had neglected to give much of a rat's ass
when it came to mopping it up, the greasy spot.
He had meant to quit, that day, finally quit smoking.
Walking to the bank, he had his second-to-last.
Upon arriving home that gently late afternoon,
he had his last, and enjoyed it.
If I were to be asked
to be lashed to the tracks
in the name of you and your eyes,
my hesitation would naught,
only welcoming knot
to be bound wrist and ankle to morning,
and sung through the night,
sung as bards sing their knights,
I who lay down my bone to stone,
hot blood splash cold steel,
I make known the deal
forever dreaming I die
in you and your eyes.
Verde, te quiero verde,
Te quiero en la noche verde
y la mañana ya verde,
y sí comprendo que estas palabras
son ya en los canciones
de los muertos.
------------------------------------------------------------
Halloween morning blows smokey blue, a gentle rapping of skeletons in all the gutters and leaves trickling down Campbell Avenue. No rest for the wicked, weary, nor Wiccan, and here me still nursing a bottle of red (red?) and all three; a vampiric thirst for blood and breastmilk moistens my lips and dries my throat. Imagine toads, trampled beneath hooves. Imagine dolphins and chimps, both dirty rapists, their skull-meat dripping from the end of my pirate's rapier. Imagine there's no Heaven. It's easy if you try. Certainly a Hell. Certainly more than sky above. John Lennon was an asshole and a wife-beater. George is the way-2-go.
Had I known this marker yet (ya) held such vitality, long would I have been abusing it, long would it have since ran dry! I mistook it another limp cock drained for my Dylan Thomas portraits yet here it goes a-scratchin' and a-bleedin' 'cross the fucking page. Dylan Thomas, I will draw you this morning!
[here I draw a terrible sketch of Dylan Thomas, and then proceed to spit wine all over it, purposely]
11/3/14, etc
Sooner or later, all luck runs out, and when you've been as fortuitous as I, have slipped by for thirty years generally unfazed and largely indignant, never wholly without a jangle in my pocket nor a teat in my mouth, that final fall from grace is a steep one, that straw-broken plummet bound to be screaming and bloody.
I remember leaving the bar, or so I tell myself, and I remember coming home, making it home I should say, in what felt like twenty long, cold minutes. But this is too easy, and not the case at all. There are at least three hours missing, and at a little past 4 K found me standing in her doorway, swaying. "Your room is beautiful," I apparently was able to mutter, and she bolted out of bed in time for me to crumple into her arms, my face a mess of blood and swollen flesh.
Sleep was blessedly without dreaming, and I awoke at 9:30 (by the grace of Daylight Savings) to make it to work only about eight minutes late. There were panicked calls to my mother the night before, K wondering if I should need an ambulance, she and my mother not understanding the full story, wondering if I had fallen or maybe beaten the shit out of myself, but the knuckles on my right hand are swollen, and the tell-tale marks of where someone else's teeth broke my skin riddle the back of my hand in a soft semicircle.
But none of this occurred to me while walking to work, and I did not remember speaking to my mother, certainly did not remember her telling me to "Fuck off", believing as she did that it was but the latest Fuck-Up in a long series of Fuck-Ups from her eldest and prodigal son. Instead, I am distracted, you could say, by my left eye swollen completely shut, by the purple bruises turning both temples into a Quasimodo brow, the long deep scrape from right eye to right ear that was surely my head hitting and then dragging across rough sidewalks, the blood matting my eyelashes like goth makeup, the blood oozing in my mouth where the inside of my lip broke against sharp teeth.
Sharp teeth, I am nothing but sharp teeth, a golem of sharp teeth. The world owes me a living, doo-doodle-doo-doodle-doo. I've learned nothing. Fuck this.
_-_-_--------_-___-__-_-_-__-_-_-_-_-------_----_-_-_---___-_-___-_-__-
Went for one of my evening walks, face swollen and discolored, found myself staring at a beer-and-a-shot on the cool patio of a local alcholic's haunt. Got beef jerky, pack o' smokes, my trusty notepad and trusted pen, and a crippling affliction with motherfucking devil-ass cunt-mouth alcohol. Help?
Haven't really eaten in two days; my mouth hurts too bad. This beef jerky ("Sweet n Hot") is a godsend, sweet protein and sodium.
My bones move by the grace of grudge and guilt alone. It's a lonely way to be. Someday, I'll be rid of both. Not today.
And now I can control my phone without touching the touch-screen. Am I psychic, telekinetic? Am I dead, a ghost? Can ghosts operate Android smartphones?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I don't know much,
but I know the sound
of bone knocking bone,
chiming wooden in the breathless wind.
I am routinely surprised and impressed
with the strides I take upon this stale earth,
at the path of fire behind me
which explains with great shudderings my guilt,
which does nothing to assuage fears,
which bolsters my inability to admit defeat.
~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-
Goat's breast,
who says?
Cock-cup,
a chalice
to suck,
stroke vein
with
tender tip
and
tooth'd lip
--------------_____________-------------------____________---
Dream about Nyquil.
Dream about storage,
dream about chortling
with chunks of spent amoeba
running our assholes ragged
on some alien planet
costa rica
Dream you are who she wants you to be
for once be
who she wants you to be.
(He, shaking hand, extinguishes another cigarette and laments the evening's follies)
"This is horseshit.
I want to go to bed, early rise, impress my benefactors
and nullify my contrarians.
I, myself, am not a contrarian.
Yes I am, of course I am,
no I am not."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''_______________________----------
He took one final drag from his cigarette,
and proceeded to slip backwards upon his heels.
The wife had dripped butter on the floor earlier
and had neglected to give much of a rat's ass
when it came to mopping it up, the greasy spot.
He had meant to quit, that day, finally quit smoking.
Walking to the bank, he had his second-to-last.
Upon arriving home that gently late afternoon,
he had his last, and enjoyed it.
Friday, October 31, 2014
October: various poems, epitaphs, and apologies
So
Laudly do these claims doth emit,
though nothing more than paper spit...
Loudly do I remind thee often
no rest I'll find 'til pauper's coffin
I know, now,
that there exists no cage to burden me,
no clipper's clippers may touch my soul,
here I am flinging hands about miserably
Two words: blue eyes, never loved.
Ha!
Bitter churning tongue and nail
the cap'tal dome; upset, a grail.
Obama stole from me my youth,
and wrapped my guts 'round velvet spoons.
butter, but, her
boilin' burning
one more chair to no one there,
offered towards a churly churning
one spoke trench
disposed midair
pair o' shits,
dismaimed in number
angels 'pon such silken clouds
hand in hand the towers fell then,
all past borne present aloud
Slipping faces crane towards feeling,
something blonde to laugh alive,
forgetting that such final feelings
oft to lend a laugh to die
For all things end 'pon brutal summit
and all things die 'pon flowers fair.
Be fair to him who'll quench your numbered
pains thrust towards a heart unpaired
for it is he and he alone
who may yet be your saving stone
for he who loves you left alone
finds naught within which to atone
a fault nor fracture nary sees,
he who smells only the flowers
bending branch on brutal tree,
not the hate of waning hour
ice crack towards a sprinkling fall,
and still they grin and stand aside you.
I would not share a mask at all
If I never were to rot inside you
She slips in shit and lands in gold,
and triumphant sez, "Look what I'm worth!"
You fool, you've only married stone
and asked a cactus for your worth.
---------------------------------------------------
Even at my most doveful lows and quietudes am I so consumed with an anger,
with vicissitudes
with venom and with teeth
grinding mailboxes and murdering mailmen
Cool as a cucumber do I slide
along the weekenders
Weekend drunks shouting into their palms
Weak brutes, brutish
and so I ain't takin my boots off tonight
I find myself deadfully
thinking
Let her screw up
To splay upon a lathe
the pen rendered sick with plastic tips
toxin radiante from radiator gaskets
and hatching grasslets
shimmering shimmering steam
when my words mean nothing
but my stare it all
The way my eyelids dance
across the air
speaking these tongues,
foreign tongues
of guilt?
"Epitaph" (10/19/14)
Andrew T Dietz
was drunk when he slipped.
Shaving in the shower,
his own throat did he slit.
Andrew T Dietz
was drunk, so they wrote.
Shaving in the shower,
slipped and slit his own throat.
-------------------------------------------
*living the definition of self, definition-of-self dictating who-you-are, choices-you-make, who-you-become and are forced-to-be
Don't Worry-
I am a vampire
drinking guilt only!
Relax,
relax relax
I drink gouts,
I do what I want.
10/22/14
I don't want to kill myself, John.
John, I don't want to kill myself.
Lofty Jew-breezes,
the same recycled words,
I build nothing upon nothing,
I listen to Campbell but
can only imagine myself the hero.
And how foolish!
how unhealthy is this!
For what will I learn?
Challenge, challenge,
I lay blushed and nude
with soft cock
and weeping arms,
for only you to see.
An elephant I am!
a mammoth, a cyclops!
For these secrets we curdle
and sour our smiles.
10/28/14
Assemblies of God girls
with their fat asses,
Me with drunken blood
and sharp-toothed smile,
a mercenary mouth
and time to kill.
10/29/14
My blood sounds, heartbeat
pushing stone waves
upon heavy ears, each
a wave a wane
a-wavin',
the ants go marching in.
A psychedelic holocaust
did I once subject
my brain to,
such unfair pairings
and gleanings
and knowledge sought
without deserve.
So here I lie I lay
and lie
and feel atomic waves
of blood against
my stony eardrums
and I excuse myself;
"Excuse me."
---------------------------------
Public exposure
intoxication
pubic
urination
I hope you got a good look at my dick
Because you'll probably never see it again
-the Smiths
(DEATH TO YUPPIES AND COPS)
Laudly do these claims doth emit,
though nothing more than paper spit...
Loudly do I remind thee often
no rest I'll find 'til pauper's coffin
I know, now,
that there exists no cage to burden me,
no clipper's clippers may touch my soul,
here I am flinging hands about miserably
Two words: blue eyes, never loved.
Ha!
Bitter churning tongue and nail
the cap'tal dome; upset, a grail.
Obama stole from me my youth,
and wrapped my guts 'round velvet spoons.
butter, but, her
boilin' burning
one more chair to no one there,
offered towards a churly churning
one spoke trench
disposed midair
pair o' shits,
dismaimed in number
angels 'pon such silken clouds
hand in hand the towers fell then,
all past borne present aloud
Slipping faces crane towards feeling,
something blonde to laugh alive,
forgetting that such final feelings
oft to lend a laugh to die
For all things end 'pon brutal summit
and all things die 'pon flowers fair.
Be fair to him who'll quench your numbered
pains thrust towards a heart unpaired
for it is he and he alone
who may yet be your saving stone
for he who loves you left alone
finds naught within which to atone
a fault nor fracture nary sees,
he who smells only the flowers
bending branch on brutal tree,
not the hate of waning hour
ice crack towards a sprinkling fall,
and still they grin and stand aside you.
I would not share a mask at all
If I never were to rot inside you
She slips in shit and lands in gold,
and triumphant sez, "Look what I'm worth!"
You fool, you've only married stone
and asked a cactus for your worth.
---------------------------------------------------
Even at my most doveful lows and quietudes am I so consumed with an anger,
with vicissitudes
with venom and with teeth
grinding mailboxes and murdering mailmen
Cool as a cucumber do I slide
along the weekenders
Weekend drunks shouting into their palms
Weak brutes, brutish
and so I ain't takin my boots off tonight
I find myself deadfully
thinking
Let her screw up
To splay upon a lathe
the pen rendered sick with plastic tips
toxin radiante from radiator gaskets
and hatching grasslets
shimmering shimmering steam
when my words mean nothing
but my stare it all
The way my eyelids dance
across the air
speaking these tongues,
foreign tongues
of guilt?
"Epitaph" (10/19/14)
Andrew T Dietz
was drunk when he slipped.
Shaving in the shower,
his own throat did he slit.
Andrew T Dietz
was drunk, so they wrote.
Shaving in the shower,
slipped and slit his own throat.
-------------------------------------------
*living the definition of self, definition-of-self dictating who-you-are, choices-you-make, who-you-become and are forced-to-be
Don't Worry-
I am a vampire
drinking guilt only!
Relax,
relax relax
I drink gouts,
I do what I want.
10/22/14
I don't want to kill myself, John.
John, I don't want to kill myself.
Lofty Jew-breezes,
the same recycled words,
I build nothing upon nothing,
I listen to Campbell but
can only imagine myself the hero.
And how foolish!
how unhealthy is this!
For what will I learn?
Challenge, challenge,
I lay blushed and nude
with soft cock
and weeping arms,
for only you to see.
An elephant I am!
a mammoth, a cyclops!
For these secrets we curdle
and sour our smiles.
10/28/14
Assemblies of God girls
with their fat asses,
Me with drunken blood
and sharp-toothed smile,
a mercenary mouth
and time to kill.
10/29/14
My blood sounds, heartbeat
pushing stone waves
upon heavy ears, each
a wave a wane
a-wavin',
the ants go marching in.
A psychedelic holocaust
did I once subject
my brain to,
such unfair pairings
and gleanings
and knowledge sought
without deserve.
So here I lie I lay
and lie
and feel atomic waves
of blood against
my stony eardrums
and I excuse myself;
"Excuse me."
---------------------------------
Public exposure
intoxication
pubic
urination
I hope you got a good look at my dick
Because you'll probably never see it again
-the Smiths
(DEATH TO YUPPIES AND COPS)
Saturday, October 18, 2014
tiny blue notebook (this one is yellow)
9/25/14
hallucination: flying saucers above Cherry + Nat'l
9/26/14
Day-drunk:
*stole 2 ashtrays
*bottle of vodka in my pocket
*I can conquer the world.
Why "drugs & alcohol"? Why not "drugs, alcohol?"
family: in Audi: Texas plates: kill em all
---------------------------------------------------------
All-day sirens
a shriek of memory
too much lost to start anew
Why not build
a life from memory?
Instead why not
built a life anew
with you
with you?
At least
At least the sky is
beautiful
at least
the corn grows tall
you
and you and you
drive me to drink
to drink
impossible things
and fly upon
impossible wings
-----------------------------
"Toying on Page"
Toying on page,
dancing dancing,
messing about.
Free as to be,
to be as free.
I'm shitting,
shitting!
and toying about
with a little book
and a tiny mind.
9/26 (27)/14
Sitting in I's house, on a cinder block. Listening to Talking Heads (I think?). Might be a no-wave compilation. Head a pickle jar at this point, difficult to discern details. I showers. I smoke. I smoke and drink water, warm water. And I drink beer, I drink warm beer. I drink warm beer.
Correction: it's the Police. I shrug. I do like the band, however. However, this ulcer is back on my tongue, and I will find no peace in 2014.
-------------------------------------------------------
...Here is my heart! It is warm, still, and it is violent! It has a purpose, and it would be a disservice to have it beneath wicker, fear, and selfsame pride! Take it, chew it, if only that I may feel and Live.
9/27/10
Mosh moves
in the peach pit
at the applecore
show
rap:
Staying home tonight to give myself a haircut
A rough-shod chop-job
perched upon a tea cup
Pinky finger out straight
Dreamin' 'bout the D-cups
In need of a tug job, settle for a...?
With clarity comes...
-not liberation
-am I more suspicious?
-actual joy in re: the mundane?
-am I more suspicious?
-improving critical thinking
-less muscle ache (unrelated to actual clarity, but same causation)
-am I more suspicious?
Pig-strobes illumine my yard and flicker through the house; unlucky speeder caught on Campbell at my doorstep. Glad I don't own a car. Also, though, wouldn't mind owning a car.
So happy at home, phone service cut off, bought a tall boy, plenty of paper n pens, in bed asleep by 2, these joys.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The social media-fostered notion of definition thru public statement: rendered moot by my compulsive note-taking, or enforced as a technocratic alternative? For surely I know somone will read this, someday, and it will further my self-invention at least in their perception of who-I-am. Good thing I'm generally honest, cordial. Like Twain said, and I paraphrase, it's much more difficult to remember the lies you've told than to keep up on the Truth you-are. (That is an absolute bungling of the aforementioned Twain's original quote, and selfishly reinterpreted.)
My handwriting seems to have gotten worse, but this notebook is so fucking compact and I am forced to write in it at obnoxious goddamn cramped angles. Lends it some mystery, I suppose, as it appears a shorthand legible only to me, a cipher. Good thing, as I apparently left my tiny blue notebook (this one is yellow) at D's, and mefears he may have flipped thru it and read some crazy shit, but methinks it unreadable due to the very limitations in indecipherable cleanliness of verbosity-upon-page.
half-remembered lyrics I wrote 2 or 3 years ago:
"The cattle are wasted,
all slaughtered in pasture,
and somebody somewhere
is falling in love."
--------------------------------------------------
Why not be still, my errant joy? O these constructs I rely upon, based on nothing, are honest and complete nothing, but still I imagine how she smells and our wedding, and still I don't think she knows my name. Even so, these things, errant erect delusions, give me cause to live and look forward to another day. And she will never know! Romanticism lives after all, safe and healthy within my compulsive crushing!
"future widows"
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Awaken suddenly at the buttcrack of 6 am, convinced by my so jealous mind that I hear... what? moans n groans and hidden voices slicing through the shrinking walls. Surely the product of a guilty conscience.
9/28/14
"Forsake me not when my wild hours come;
grant me sleep nightly, grace soften my dreams;
achieve in me patience till the thing be done,
a careful view of my achievement come.
Make me from time to time the gift of the shoulder.
When all hurt nerves whine shut away the whiskey.
Empty my heart towards Thee.
Let me pace without fear the common path of death."
- from "Eleven Addresses to the Lord (#3)", J. Berryman
Kant's "categorical imperatives", inc. "Act as if the maxim of your actions were to become through your will a general natural law,"; dubious at best? Fascist at worst? Or maybe I'm being pessimistic; must there always be an "at best/worst" range of value? Kant could have been using hyperbole to suggest nothing more than the immutable and blessed strength of human will... but to claim a re-/writing of natural law? Seems... unnatural.
I'm misreading/misinterpreting this, overlooking the fact that he says "Act as if," an improvable notion, then.
9/29/14
M gave me a lovely new pen (already lost. - ed.). Gel ink, all that. Flows like a ghost.
Had folks over last night. The boys got high as hell at the dining room table, the girls sat on the porch and drank beer with too-long names (I prefer the monosyllabic myself; Bud, Coors, Busch, Stag) and stressed out the too-high boys.
Anxious for the First Frost to creep into our lives. Kill the bugs (at least send them into hiding), and also the weirdos (sent into hiding, that is, not killing them for chrissakes). Sounds a little misanthropic (duh!), but living in this neighborhood one tires of the constant threat of weirdo ("boogan") activity. Last night there was a shirtless young man with a tire iron pacing between the apartment buildings and muttering aggressively to himself. No thank you!
"And still my heart sweats!" (-Japandroids, - ed.)
9/30/14
I pray to grow old
and tired and mean,
but O! never to be fat.
Noticing the cashier's nametag:
"Your name is Tesla?"
She, sheepishly, avoiding eye contact: "Yeah."
"That's your first name?"
Again, same, "Yeah."
"That's wonderful. Are you named after the inventor?"
"No, I'm named after the band."
"Well, the band is named after the inventor, so... Do you know of the inventor?"
"Yeah, I looked him up. He was a smart man."
Me, nearly bursting now, so much to say: "He was incredible." All I say.
She: "Yeah... he was a smart man."
Selah.
My (awful though loved) neighborhood today smells strongly of human feces.
-------------------------------------------------
Imagine
being thoroughly threshed
at 30.
Shit, imagine again
to be so thoroughly threshed
at 25
or 20
or 15!
4:54 am, mouth
brimming with spit
and ulcers;
I have no idea where I am.
Raise a fist
in adulation
While we piss upon
the ground
10/5/14 (4:35 am)
Why do I write? Because nothing haunts me as much as a thoughtful and affecting sentence, and because I wish to harness this energy.
Finished story #2 tonight. Pretty good, I guess. Made K cry, but I thought it was funny. And maybe a little heavy-handedly moralistic. No, cautionary. To whom? To me?
Learning to love reading my own stuff. Reading, writing; can't decide which I enjoy more.
Ailments, head-to-toe (massively incomplete list - .ed)
*earache in right ear after pouring too-hot Neti pot water through my sinuses; probably an ear infection, need to look into folk remedies (pour piss into it?)
*small scratch on right eyebrow, inflicted by a cat who didn't appreciate my tormenting him
*deep burn on right index finger, blister finally popped and now just a wet, stinging hole
---------------------------------------------------------
"But this is an old and never-ending story: what formerly happened with the Stoics still happens today as soon as a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image, it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power, to 'creation of the world', to causa prima." - nietszche somewhere
------------------------------------------------------------
First words spoken aloud, 10/7/14, 6:19 am:
"Oh my god. What a fuckin' asshole."
When my voice becomes ash
becomes ashen and tall
tall and corpsely
a vampire
asking to drain the venom
from the blue veins
of transparent tits
10/10/14
Sick and tired of this beatnik shit.
("Framed picture of the Sun" - new idolatry, godhead, infrared)
---------------------------------------------
If I must be real and honest, Lord let my interim be meek and kind. Let me be good.
Throw a tower;
I can bend.
--------------------------------
10/14/14
Beautiful redheads,
I come to hear her speak,
I come to find she is idiotic,
no matter what I lay before her.
All kinds of me;
here are our men...
dyin' over here
Goddamn,
maybe I should have listened
to that story you were to tell.
Here I am aloft and asunder,
such wonderful words come across paper,
listening with pounding heart
to the words between tongue.
Daring a vam--
no
daring a hand--
no
daring me
All-man
Cracked and
able to wound
and be wounded.
Please, get off of him.
I wait for sunrise.
hallucination: flying saucers above Cherry + Nat'l
9/26/14
Day-drunk:
*stole 2 ashtrays
*bottle of vodka in my pocket
*I can conquer the world.
Why "drugs & alcohol"? Why not "drugs, alcohol?"
family: in Audi: Texas plates: kill em all
---------------------------------------------------------
All-day sirens
a shriek of memory
too much lost to start anew
Why not build
a life from memory?
Instead why not
built a life anew
with you
with you?
At least
At least the sky is
beautiful
at least
the corn grows tall
you
and you and you
drive me to drink
to drink
impossible things
and fly upon
impossible wings
-----------------------------
"Toying on Page"
Toying on page,
dancing dancing,
messing about.
Free as to be,
to be as free.
I'm shitting,
shitting!
and toying about
with a little book
and a tiny mind.
9/26 (27)/14
Sitting in I's house, on a cinder block. Listening to Talking Heads (I think?). Might be a no-wave compilation. Head a pickle jar at this point, difficult to discern details. I showers. I smoke. I smoke and drink water, warm water. And I drink beer, I drink warm beer. I drink warm beer.
Correction: it's the Police. I shrug. I do like the band, however. However, this ulcer is back on my tongue, and I will find no peace in 2014.
-------------------------------------------------------
...Here is my heart! It is warm, still, and it is violent! It has a purpose, and it would be a disservice to have it beneath wicker, fear, and selfsame pride! Take it, chew it, if only that I may feel and Live.
9/27/10
Mosh moves
in the peach pit
at the applecore
show
rap:
Staying home tonight to give myself a haircut
A rough-shod chop-job
perched upon a tea cup
Pinky finger out straight
Dreamin' 'bout the D-cups
In need of a tug job, settle for a...?
With clarity comes...
-not liberation
-am I more suspicious?
-actual joy in re: the mundane?
-am I more suspicious?
-improving critical thinking
-less muscle ache (unrelated to actual clarity, but same causation)
-am I more suspicious?
Pig-strobes illumine my yard and flicker through the house; unlucky speeder caught on Campbell at my doorstep. Glad I don't own a car. Also, though, wouldn't mind owning a car.
So happy at home, phone service cut off, bought a tall boy, plenty of paper n pens, in bed asleep by 2, these joys.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The social media-fostered notion of definition thru public statement: rendered moot by my compulsive note-taking, or enforced as a technocratic alternative? For surely I know somone will read this, someday, and it will further my self-invention at least in their perception of who-I-am. Good thing I'm generally honest, cordial. Like Twain said, and I paraphrase, it's much more difficult to remember the lies you've told than to keep up on the Truth you-are. (That is an absolute bungling of the aforementioned Twain's original quote, and selfishly reinterpreted.)
My handwriting seems to have gotten worse, but this notebook is so fucking compact and I am forced to write in it at obnoxious goddamn cramped angles. Lends it some mystery, I suppose, as it appears a shorthand legible only to me, a cipher. Good thing, as I apparently left my tiny blue notebook (this one is yellow) at D's, and mefears he may have flipped thru it and read some crazy shit, but methinks it unreadable due to the very limitations in indecipherable cleanliness of verbosity-upon-page.
half-remembered lyrics I wrote 2 or 3 years ago:
"The cattle are wasted,
all slaughtered in pasture,
and somebody somewhere
is falling in love."
--------------------------------------------------
Why not be still, my errant joy? O these constructs I rely upon, based on nothing, are honest and complete nothing, but still I imagine how she smells and our wedding, and still I don't think she knows my name. Even so, these things, errant erect delusions, give me cause to live and look forward to another day. And she will never know! Romanticism lives after all, safe and healthy within my compulsive crushing!
"future widows"
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Awaken suddenly at the buttcrack of 6 am, convinced by my so jealous mind that I hear... what? moans n groans and hidden voices slicing through the shrinking walls. Surely the product of a guilty conscience.
9/28/14
"Forsake me not when my wild hours come;
grant me sleep nightly, grace soften my dreams;
achieve in me patience till the thing be done,
a careful view of my achievement come.
Make me from time to time the gift of the shoulder.
When all hurt nerves whine shut away the whiskey.
Empty my heart towards Thee.
Let me pace without fear the common path of death."
- from "Eleven Addresses to the Lord (#3)", J. Berryman
Kant's "categorical imperatives", inc. "Act as if the maxim of your actions were to become through your will a general natural law,"; dubious at best? Fascist at worst? Or maybe I'm being pessimistic; must there always be an "at best/worst" range of value? Kant could have been using hyperbole to suggest nothing more than the immutable and blessed strength of human will... but to claim a re-/writing of natural law? Seems... unnatural.
I'm misreading/misinterpreting this, overlooking the fact that he says "Act as if," an improvable notion, then.
9/29/14
M gave me a lovely new pen (already lost. - ed.). Gel ink, all that. Flows like a ghost.
Had folks over last night. The boys got high as hell at the dining room table, the girls sat on the porch and drank beer with too-long names (I prefer the monosyllabic myself; Bud, Coors, Busch, Stag) and stressed out the too-high boys.
Anxious for the First Frost to creep into our lives. Kill the bugs (at least send them into hiding), and also the weirdos (sent into hiding, that is, not killing them for chrissakes). Sounds a little misanthropic (duh!), but living in this neighborhood one tires of the constant threat of weirdo ("boogan") activity. Last night there was a shirtless young man with a tire iron pacing between the apartment buildings and muttering aggressively to himself. No thank you!
"And still my heart sweats!" (-Japandroids, - ed.)
9/30/14
I pray to grow old
and tired and mean,
but O! never to be fat.
Noticing the cashier's nametag:
"Your name is Tesla?"
She, sheepishly, avoiding eye contact: "Yeah."
"That's your first name?"
Again, same, "Yeah."
"That's wonderful. Are you named after the inventor?"
"No, I'm named after the band."
"Well, the band is named after the inventor, so... Do you know of the inventor?"
"Yeah, I looked him up. He was a smart man."
Me, nearly bursting now, so much to say: "He was incredible." All I say.
She: "Yeah... he was a smart man."
Selah.
My (awful though loved) neighborhood today smells strongly of human feces.
-------------------------------------------------
Imagine
being thoroughly threshed
at 30.
Shit, imagine again
to be so thoroughly threshed
at 25
or 20
or 15!
4:54 am, mouth
brimming with spit
and ulcers;
I have no idea where I am.
Raise a fist
in adulation
While we piss upon
the ground
10/5/14 (4:35 am)
Why do I write? Because nothing haunts me as much as a thoughtful and affecting sentence, and because I wish to harness this energy.
Finished story #2 tonight. Pretty good, I guess. Made K cry, but I thought it was funny. And maybe a little heavy-handedly moralistic. No, cautionary. To whom? To me?
Learning to love reading my own stuff. Reading, writing; can't decide which I enjoy more.
Ailments, head-to-toe (massively incomplete list - .ed)
*earache in right ear after pouring too-hot Neti pot water through my sinuses; probably an ear infection, need to look into folk remedies (pour piss into it?)
*small scratch on right eyebrow, inflicted by a cat who didn't appreciate my tormenting him
*deep burn on right index finger, blister finally popped and now just a wet, stinging hole
---------------------------------------------------------
"But this is an old and never-ending story: what formerly happened with the Stoics still happens today as soon as a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image, it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power, to 'creation of the world', to causa prima." - nietszche somewhere
------------------------------------------------------------
First words spoken aloud, 10/7/14, 6:19 am:
"Oh my god. What a fuckin' asshole."
When my voice becomes ash
becomes ashen and tall
tall and corpsely
a vampire
asking to drain the venom
from the blue veins
of transparent tits
10/10/14
Sick and tired of this beatnik shit.
("Framed picture of the Sun" - new idolatry, godhead, infrared)
---------------------------------------------
If I must be real and honest, Lord let my interim be meek and kind. Let me be good.
Throw a tower;
I can bend.
--------------------------------
10/14/14
Beautiful redheads,
I come to hear her speak,
I come to find she is idiotic,
no matter what I lay before her.
All kinds of me;
here are our men...
dyin' over here
Goddamn,
maybe I should have listened
to that story you were to tell.
Here I am aloft and asunder,
such wonderful words come across paper,
listening with pounding heart
to the words between tongue.
Daring a vam--
no
daring a hand--
no
daring me
All-man
Cracked and
able to wound
and be wounded.
Please, get off of him.
I wait for sunrise.
Thursday, October 9, 2014
Grey Hound. (05/2005)
I wrote this while on a 36-hour Greyhound trip in May, 2005. I was twenty years old, and returning from Florida to Missouri to attend my sister's high school graduation, not knowing at the time that the trip would precipitate my moving back to Missouri, visiting Panama City Beach again only once, in early June, to cram as many of my possessions as I could into the back of Tim Eisenhauer's two-door Honda, and leaving the rest, including (idiot!) my collection of 40+ shot glasses, to an unknown fate, lonely and abandoned on the Emerald Coast.
I'd like to note that at this point of my life, I was as fascinated by amateurish chemical stimulation as I was by Alan Watts and amateurish Zen fancies.
I've been looking through lots of old notebooks, and would like to start transcribing some of this old shit, and with as little amending as possible, but sometimes it's just too tempting to exchange a good word for a better one, or just trimming an unnecessary word if that be the case, especially as I was then just a grubby little knucklehead, and have now matured into an an older and slightly more experienced shithead.
Also, I'm currently eating saltine crackers with anchovies, olives, slices of onion, pepper jack cheese, horseradish, kimchi, and hot sauce. It is wonderful, and I have the salted breath of a sea dragon.
The bus rolls out of Panama City at 11:10 Tuesday morning. The ocean and sky are the same dusty blue. Fishing boats plow oily wedges through the bay, the still pines stand tall and aromatic.
Not much sleep last night. Lots of last minute rustling, packing, saying farewell to friends too late met. I awoke only due to the grace of legal stimulatory drugs taken shortly before sleep. Legal or not, moderation is key, and of late the dependence on such capsules of tightly-wound energy has made me weary, though with boundless energy. They deprive the body of the need for sleep until, the next day, after the effects have begun to wear off, when sleep is not possible due to employment responsibilities, and we have no choice but to eat a few more Zoloft or Adderall or concentrated caffeine-and-ephedra pills. And the next day, the same, cyclical. It takes a toll on body and mind, but we are fully stimulated. Stimulation is key.
I see from the window a fenced-in area containing an entire herd of grey Triceratops.
After two or more days of this wide-eyed sleep-deprivation, one becomes a sort of hyper-stimulated zombie. The feeling is such as looking down at oneself, mind and body completely independent of one another. Tasks are completed without thought while the brain reels and soars and considers.
Sleep during these spells is fitful. Spastic dreams of grey nudes with lidless eyes, limbs quivering with a seizure heartbeat, rushing about and scream-muttering terrible things. Black fish with glowing eyes swimming through blood rivers, open-air markets in which the fruit pulsate almost erotically in tandem with that same seizure heartbeat. Awake immediately, forget it all, sit up straight, drink some water and eat a few dry crackers to soothe the nausea, try to stop your skinny calloused hands from shaking. It will only scare and cause guilt.
Old contact lenses, covered in protein scum, steal a bottle of Visine to squirt into your eyes until they swim in their sockets. Temporary relief. Months pass in a matter of hours, feel the seizure heartbeat slow, eyes become heavy, still an entire day of work ahead, steal a bottle of No-Doz, eat a few. Everything is looking up now. No sleep again tonight, perhaps a few glasses of whiskey will coerce your stuttering brain into compliance.
Backhoes uproot layers of topsoil, making cuts into which more transplanted palm trees will be inserted, the illusion of Eden, the Fountain of Youth, for the degenerate old fat and ignorant. Florida, with flowers.
Bus transfer in Ft. Walton. New passengers. A white man with plastic pants and a Ziploc bag full of prescription pill bottles, a Hispanic man with two laundry baskets full of clothes. An amorphous crowd of filthy undershirts, the smell of peanuts, patriotic sunglasses, dragons airbrushed upon polyester, bad teeth, thinning hair, shark-tooth necklaces (me), infants, pillowcases, shrunken heads, wind chimes. Family members and loved ones, or those indebted to the passengers through hate, semen, marriage, stand outside looking sunken and lonely, watching us leave.
A couple has brought aboard a baby that looks like a pale Giger painting of the Buddha, yet somehow still endearing. It sleeps like an amoeba.
Faceless suburbs. Vacant lots much more appealing. Learn to embrace the empty, the open, too often cluttered. The sky looks much bigger here, given epic proportions when accompanied by the ocean. Same out West, with the seas of sand and leviathan mountains.
We get pulled over in a corporate facsimile of a town called Navare. Policemen come on board, give us all a good look. They are looking for someone, a man (women are exempt). As they search the restroom, examine our forearms for distinguishing tattoos, take our licenses (I am one of four suspects), I look at the blue sky and for a maddening moment I think it is an organic membrane, thinking I see a branching network of vessels and veins. I realize with a little disappointment that it is only a gnarled pine tree being reflected in the window.
The stainless steel chamber pot is filled with a thick black pot liquor that sloshes about as the great whale banks the waves. I brace myself against a slimy stainless steel handle to ride the turbulence and avoid pissing all over myself.
Continuing, I watch out the window. I imagine the landscape exploding, nuclear blossoms in time with the drumbeat, the silent poetry of a fireball engulfing house upon house, trees splintering, billboards being twisted and blowing apart in graceful slow motion, a global holocaust as I watch from the safety of a Greyhound bus. The beauty in such ideas.
No soil, just sand; creamy, bloody.
For some reason the reappearance of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker comes to mind.
Wake up in Alabama. No more sand, we see farmland. Deciduous trees. After a brief stop at a gas station, the air is filled with the smell of Cheetos.
I meet a young rapper named Marques, though his MC name is "Smoke". Both being young musicians, we hit it off and enjoy Steak Night at Shoney's during a six hour layover in Birmingham.
The South begins to melt slowly towards the Midwest. Limestone bluffs, cedar trees, pastures. Montgomery greets us with the smell of hay, Nashville with a gorgeous sunrise.
I wake up, find myself seated next to a large man leafing through a Hustler.
"Is this Indiana?" I ask drowsily.
"Nah, Kentucky," he says.
I haven't been to Kentucky in years, and tell him so.
A man got on the bus sometime during the night. Short, balding, with a grey ponytail. He stinks of sweat, cheap cigarettes, rot. His teeth are rotting and angled, and his eyes twitch and glisten behind huge maroon-framed spectacles. Oversized grey shirt, stonewashed jeans, a wallet chain slapping his leg like an inert chrome cock as he limps slowly along.
Taking a five-minute break somewhere in Tennessee, he wanders into a Hardee's against the bus driver's wishes. Time to go, he's still buying his cola, he gets left behind. All around me, the bus erupts in men slapping the backs of seats and hooting and clapping like gibbons, watching the man chase after the bus, little legs pumping, Hardee's cola splashing, wallet chain suddenly electric and alive, a charmed cobra.
Once he has convinced the bus driver to let him back on the bus, he is greeted by chiding.
"We knew you could move fast if you wanted to..."
"Haw haw, you're sick..."
"Only a five-minute break, haw haw..."
"Think twice next time, ain't ya..."
In Evansville, he speaks to me while sucking on a cigarette, spittle flecking his thin lips.
"Been in jail four months. Gotta get home to Springfield, Missouri. I tell my girl, be there with open arms, y'know? Get a motel room 'cross the motherfucking street, cuz I'm gonna tear you up, y'know? Down in Florida, I was in this corn field doin' stuff. Not so much a corn field as a forest..."
I tune him out. He is a fool, and from time to time ejects a viscous liquid from his mouth, ejaculated upon the ground with a disgusting squelch from between his reptilian tongue and decomposing teeth.
Demonbreun
There's a demon brewin' inside of me
Down in Nashville, TN
Goddamn girl, I'm so lonely
Down in Nashville, TN
The sunrise looks alright to me
Down in Nashville, TN
There's no place I'd rather be
Than down in Nashville, TN
No idea where I went to sleep
But now I'm in Nashville, TN
Sunlight, purge the dark from me
Down in Nashville, TN
I'd like to note that at this point of my life, I was as fascinated by amateurish chemical stimulation as I was by Alan Watts and amateurish Zen fancies.
I've been looking through lots of old notebooks, and would like to start transcribing some of this old shit, and with as little amending as possible, but sometimes it's just too tempting to exchange a good word for a better one, or just trimming an unnecessary word if that be the case, especially as I was then just a grubby little knucklehead, and have now matured into an an older and slightly more experienced shithead.
Also, I'm currently eating saltine crackers with anchovies, olives, slices of onion, pepper jack cheese, horseradish, kimchi, and hot sauce. It is wonderful, and I have the salted breath of a sea dragon.
The bus rolls out of Panama City at 11:10 Tuesday morning. The ocean and sky are the same dusty blue. Fishing boats plow oily wedges through the bay, the still pines stand tall and aromatic.
Not much sleep last night. Lots of last minute rustling, packing, saying farewell to friends too late met. I awoke only due to the grace of legal stimulatory drugs taken shortly before sleep. Legal or not, moderation is key, and of late the dependence on such capsules of tightly-wound energy has made me weary, though with boundless energy. They deprive the body of the need for sleep until, the next day, after the effects have begun to wear off, when sleep is not possible due to employment responsibilities, and we have no choice but to eat a few more Zoloft or Adderall or concentrated caffeine-and-ephedra pills. And the next day, the same, cyclical. It takes a toll on body and mind, but we are fully stimulated. Stimulation is key.
I see from the window a fenced-in area containing an entire herd of grey Triceratops.
After two or more days of this wide-eyed sleep-deprivation, one becomes a sort of hyper-stimulated zombie. The feeling is such as looking down at oneself, mind and body completely independent of one another. Tasks are completed without thought while the brain reels and soars and considers.
Sleep during these spells is fitful. Spastic dreams of grey nudes with lidless eyes, limbs quivering with a seizure heartbeat, rushing about and scream-muttering terrible things. Black fish with glowing eyes swimming through blood rivers, open-air markets in which the fruit pulsate almost erotically in tandem with that same seizure heartbeat. Awake immediately, forget it all, sit up straight, drink some water and eat a few dry crackers to soothe the nausea, try to stop your skinny calloused hands from shaking. It will only scare and cause guilt.
Old contact lenses, covered in protein scum, steal a bottle of Visine to squirt into your eyes until they swim in their sockets. Temporary relief. Months pass in a matter of hours, feel the seizure heartbeat slow, eyes become heavy, still an entire day of work ahead, steal a bottle of No-Doz, eat a few. Everything is looking up now. No sleep again tonight, perhaps a few glasses of whiskey will coerce your stuttering brain into compliance.
Backhoes uproot layers of topsoil, making cuts into which more transplanted palm trees will be inserted, the illusion of Eden, the Fountain of Youth, for the degenerate old fat and ignorant. Florida, with flowers.
Bus transfer in Ft. Walton. New passengers. A white man with plastic pants and a Ziploc bag full of prescription pill bottles, a Hispanic man with two laundry baskets full of clothes. An amorphous crowd of filthy undershirts, the smell of peanuts, patriotic sunglasses, dragons airbrushed upon polyester, bad teeth, thinning hair, shark-tooth necklaces (me), infants, pillowcases, shrunken heads, wind chimes. Family members and loved ones, or those indebted to the passengers through hate, semen, marriage, stand outside looking sunken and lonely, watching us leave.
A couple has brought aboard a baby that looks like a pale Giger painting of the Buddha, yet somehow still endearing. It sleeps like an amoeba.
Faceless suburbs. Vacant lots much more appealing. Learn to embrace the empty, the open, too often cluttered. The sky looks much bigger here, given epic proportions when accompanied by the ocean. Same out West, with the seas of sand and leviathan mountains.
We get pulled over in a corporate facsimile of a town called Navare. Policemen come on board, give us all a good look. They are looking for someone, a man (women are exempt). As they search the restroom, examine our forearms for distinguishing tattoos, take our licenses (I am one of four suspects), I look at the blue sky and for a maddening moment I think it is an organic membrane, thinking I see a branching network of vessels and veins. I realize with a little disappointment that it is only a gnarled pine tree being reflected in the window.
The stainless steel chamber pot is filled with a thick black pot liquor that sloshes about as the great whale banks the waves. I brace myself against a slimy stainless steel handle to ride the turbulence and avoid pissing all over myself.
Continuing, I watch out the window. I imagine the landscape exploding, nuclear blossoms in time with the drumbeat, the silent poetry of a fireball engulfing house upon house, trees splintering, billboards being twisted and blowing apart in graceful slow motion, a global holocaust as I watch from the safety of a Greyhound bus. The beauty in such ideas.
No soil, just sand; creamy, bloody.
For some reason the reappearance of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker comes to mind.
Wake up in Alabama. No more sand, we see farmland. Deciduous trees. After a brief stop at a gas station, the air is filled with the smell of Cheetos.
I meet a young rapper named Marques, though his MC name is "Smoke". Both being young musicians, we hit it off and enjoy Steak Night at Shoney's during a six hour layover in Birmingham.
The South begins to melt slowly towards the Midwest. Limestone bluffs, cedar trees, pastures. Montgomery greets us with the smell of hay, Nashville with a gorgeous sunrise.
I wake up, find myself seated next to a large man leafing through a Hustler.
"Is this Indiana?" I ask drowsily.
"Nah, Kentucky," he says.
I haven't been to Kentucky in years, and tell him so.
A man got on the bus sometime during the night. Short, balding, with a grey ponytail. He stinks of sweat, cheap cigarettes, rot. His teeth are rotting and angled, and his eyes twitch and glisten behind huge maroon-framed spectacles. Oversized grey shirt, stonewashed jeans, a wallet chain slapping his leg like an inert chrome cock as he limps slowly along.
Taking a five-minute break somewhere in Tennessee, he wanders into a Hardee's against the bus driver's wishes. Time to go, he's still buying his cola, he gets left behind. All around me, the bus erupts in men slapping the backs of seats and hooting and clapping like gibbons, watching the man chase after the bus, little legs pumping, Hardee's cola splashing, wallet chain suddenly electric and alive, a charmed cobra.
Once he has convinced the bus driver to let him back on the bus, he is greeted by chiding.
"We knew you could move fast if you wanted to..."
"Haw haw, you're sick..."
"Only a five-minute break, haw haw..."
"Think twice next time, ain't ya..."
In Evansville, he speaks to me while sucking on a cigarette, spittle flecking his thin lips.
"Been in jail four months. Gotta get home to Springfield, Missouri. I tell my girl, be there with open arms, y'know? Get a motel room 'cross the motherfucking street, cuz I'm gonna tear you up, y'know? Down in Florida, I was in this corn field doin' stuff. Not so much a corn field as a forest..."
I tune him out. He is a fool, and from time to time ejects a viscous liquid from his mouth, ejaculated upon the ground with a disgusting squelch from between his reptilian tongue and decomposing teeth.
Demonbreun
There's a demon brewin' inside of me
Down in Nashville, TN
Goddamn girl, I'm so lonely
Down in Nashville, TN
The sunrise looks alright to me
Down in Nashville, TN
There's no place I'd rather be
Than down in Nashville, TN
No idea where I went to sleep
But now I'm in Nashville, TN
Sunlight, purge the dark from me
Down in Nashville, TN
Tuesday, September 30, 2014
blue notebooks (II)
Buried none too deep
with eyes mouth singing
"Green, to be green"
----------------------------------------
"I'm done!" His Royal Highness bleats
and goes to bed on rubber sheets
-----------------------------------------------------
9/12/14, after midnight
How foolish was I to assume this specter-of-a-little-book I began in May and finished in July were to be done with me, all its speculations on art/addiction/self-definition still so unclear and nonsensical, abridged, me living more and doing more and maybe learning in the meantime. Meantime, maybe learning.
Deactivating facebook tonight. Too creepy. We'll see how long it lasts.
Wanna continue my Dylan Thomas portraiture. It feels good to draw, even so seemingly random or arbitrary a subject.
Summation:
Been a real dumbass at work. Feel like shit all the time. Lonely. Horny. Sleepy. Sore back. Need/miss to be playing music. Writing no new songs. Got a few stories left to write, but I'm scared. Haven't threatened to kill myself in about two weeks but did drive off seeking retribution/flagellation one night, spitting drunk and pissed. Slept in G's yard instead of getting arrested ["proving a point"].Went a whole weekend without making an awful fool of myself, but turned around and did it on Monday (see above) instead.
-------------------------------------------------------
9/14/14
...Smooch smooch, yeah, see ya later friend, my personal context of sobriety...
Tomorrow, I will sleep until the world ends.
"WOULD GLADLY SUCKLE"
Literal head through literal wall, all because of an ostensibly literal clown-fuck. Death to clown fuckers.
If I was ever distant, I apologize. However, if I were ever unpleasant in regard to/because of honesty, I pledge my innocence.
-----------------------------------------
(Funny how so much of my life is in the hope/wish. These things I want no part of in my active, sober life become "impulse buys", more more more. They continue to rule me, and I continue to succumb. Selah. Taking a puke, worthy shot of whiskey now. Need to find shields, be evil.)
Good for It,
Good for me!
9/17/14
Such a rain this morning. Walked to work early (can't stand being in the house sometimes, woke after 2 hours of sleep and just left) and was soaked to the bone despite my spiteful umbrella. The rain came sideways and was thrown at me in big lashing obligatory waves from passing cars. Soaked to the bone!, I say. And of course I left my bedroom window open and now have a chilly wet mattress. Can't think of a good way to dry it off aside from cranking the AC, and now my room is cold as a tomb, but drier I suppose.
Lots of anxiety in re: K and last night's "heartbreak". Not sure why I wait until after damage is done to proceed to care.
"I used to pretend that I gave a fuck
now I do give a fuck
a little too much" [Atmosphere, "Suicide Girls" - ed.]
Also thoughts of my guilt throughout this whole months-long affair, and how that guilt was
A. The best I could muster in lieu of emotional attachment
B. Perhaps the only thing keeping my behavior as close to "the straight n narrow" as I could be (i.e. fidelity generally despite our shared lapse of same)
C. All for naught, as now I've been "wronged" in such a way that my own guilt prevents me from ever doing the same. Ah, so I'm not always the shitty abuser of power and loin! The tables have turned, and it hurts. But I'm free now, at least of this particular guilt. No interest in dating anyone, as I believe my anarchism renders me inert towards acceptance of such a structure/bastard-of-a-system; two people forced to be a singular item/device/"system" again, and for one of those two to be me? Forget it. I'm unworthy of affection until I learn to be less prideful and burdensome, regardless of how the lass may insist.
9/19/14
Upstairs, downstairs, and
where are the men?
The men I know
you've been holding
and folding?
A strike upon
the perilous pen,
with dreams I slept
long yet longing
and scolding.
Every displaced atom of her, I want her.
Thoughts walking along and at 2:30 am and passing others:
if you have a gun or a knife, I will give you my wallet. Otherwise, I will eat your flesh. Even if I die, I will die a victor with your blood on my lips.
9/21/14
I used to entertain such jubilance, not in joy but in zealous passion, a prophet and pariah for impossibilities, for Love.
9/22/14
great title of a Berryman poem: "Have a Genuine American Horror-&-Mist on the Rocks". Great poem, too. Political, in an admirably horrified way, as he doesn't tend to be.
"The problem is urgent, yes, for this hot light
we so love may not last.
Man seems to be darkening himself;
you must still for some reason & the others depend on him,
but perhaps essentially now it is your turn." - from, "To a Woman", J. Berryman, Love & Fame
-----------------------------------------------------------
things what amazed me on my walk tonight:
- basso profundo of my feet pounding on iron grating above storm drain
- cats
- my silhouette as projected by strobing police lights
- a baby rabbit, and my wish to turn suddenly into a cat and chase and kill and eat it
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Wow, stayed up until 6 am, drinking wine and chain-smoking and drawing Dylan Thomas again and finally writing a letter to S that needed so badly to be writ, though my tongue gets choked on fingered words and I still can't say everything I need to say, but a start at least. One day at a time, no sense in swan-diving into this romanticism that you've only recently rediscovered, me boy (the real shit, the ponderous slow-as-syrup-shit, stretching for years rather than shrieking lies told amongst orgasmic minutes).
Getting better at "the drinking" (slowly, slowly), certainly better at general positivity, my demeanor could use some work though I'm quite fond of the curmudgeon I've become, nay! the curmudgeon I am! No need to be cruel, I must remind myself hourly. Take no shit, aye, but fer chrissakes also give no shit. Be true, but be good, or at least good-er.
tomorrow: food stamp nonsense (pay stubs to social service office, appear well-dressed and prepared yet impoverished), laundry, Dungeons + Dragons in the evening.
Broke, so broke. A will understand, begrudgingly. K will understand, begrudgingly. What, then, am I so worried about? As per usual, lots of nothings.
. . . .The type of woman who once excited me now drives me further into seclusion. They frighten me. I am not of their game. Quick-witted with sex, slippery fresh out of the shower, drying themselves upon me, I so soon forget that the shower was only to wash away-----------
No, I am no gorilla. But I am. And I suppose gorilla must play as gorilla play. Looking forward to being a human being again.
STORIES:
- "Cloud of Ticks"
- "Cockroach Bait"
- "Monsters are Real"
- "Scabs" or "The Scabs" or something less obvious but the story is obv. about scabs
Lovely titles/subject matter all. Maybe I'm doomed/destined/blessed to be a macabre fiction writer. Rather reach for the stars; for "Dandelion Wine" or "Great Jones Street" or just "Cockpit" or even just "Geek Love" (macabre again!).
Took a shit that stopped me in my tracks when I turned to flush. Impressive (disgusting!), monumental (foul!). I hope there's nothing seriously wrong with me (physically, I mean).
I am a chameleon trapped in the poor-kid's body. None will know the difference.
K, on my way out the door for a 12:40 am stroll: "Are you ok? Are you normal?"
Me, laughing, "No, I'm not normal."
(after napping away a post-practice marijuana stupor interrupted only by intense sleep-terrors [D-as-Rasputin, some sort of weird post-modern stormtrooper come to accuse and arrest?!])
Can't stop smoking tonight. Still enough time to read and fall asleep before sunrise, so one more won't hurt much.
with eyes mouth singing
"Green, to be green"
----------------------------------------
"I'm done!" His Royal Highness bleats
and goes to bed on rubber sheets
-----------------------------------------------------
9/12/14, after midnight
How foolish was I to assume this specter-of-a-little-book I began in May and finished in July were to be done with me, all its speculations on art/addiction/self-definition still so unclear and nonsensical, abridged, me living more and doing more and maybe learning in the meantime. Meantime, maybe learning.
Deactivating facebook tonight. Too creepy. We'll see how long it lasts.
Wanna continue my Dylan Thomas portraiture. It feels good to draw, even so seemingly random or arbitrary a subject.
Summation:
Been a real dumbass at work. Feel like shit all the time. Lonely. Horny. Sleepy. Sore back. Need/miss to be playing music. Writing no new songs. Got a few stories left to write, but I'm scared. Haven't threatened to kill myself in about two weeks but did drive off seeking retribution/flagellation one night, spitting drunk and pissed. Slept in G's yard instead of getting arrested ["proving a point"].Went a whole weekend without making an awful fool of myself, but turned around and did it on Monday (see above) instead.
-------------------------------------------------------
9/14/14
...Smooch smooch, yeah, see ya later friend, my personal context of sobriety...
Tomorrow, I will sleep until the world ends.
"WOULD GLADLY SUCKLE"
Literal head through literal wall, all because of an ostensibly literal clown-fuck. Death to clown fuckers.
If I was ever distant, I apologize. However, if I were ever unpleasant in regard to/because of honesty, I pledge my innocence.
-----------------------------------------
(Funny how so much of my life is in the hope/wish. These things I want no part of in my active, sober life become "impulse buys", more more more. They continue to rule me, and I continue to succumb. Selah. Taking a puke, worthy shot of whiskey now. Need to find shields, be evil.)
Good for It,
Good for me!
9/17/14
Such a rain this morning. Walked to work early (can't stand being in the house sometimes, woke after 2 hours of sleep and just left) and was soaked to the bone despite my spiteful umbrella. The rain came sideways and was thrown at me in big lashing obligatory waves from passing cars. Soaked to the bone!, I say. And of course I left my bedroom window open and now have a chilly wet mattress. Can't think of a good way to dry it off aside from cranking the AC, and now my room is cold as a tomb, but drier I suppose.
Lots of anxiety in re: K and last night's "heartbreak". Not sure why I wait until after damage is done to proceed to care.
"I used to pretend that I gave a fuck
now I do give a fuck
a little too much" [Atmosphere, "Suicide Girls" - ed.]
Also thoughts of my guilt throughout this whole months-long affair, and how that guilt was
A. The best I could muster in lieu of emotional attachment
B. Perhaps the only thing keeping my behavior as close to "the straight n narrow" as I could be (i.e. fidelity generally despite our shared lapse of same)
C. All for naught, as now I've been "wronged" in such a way that my own guilt prevents me from ever doing the same. Ah, so I'm not always the shitty abuser of power and loin! The tables have turned, and it hurts. But I'm free now, at least of this particular guilt. No interest in dating anyone, as I believe my anarchism renders me inert towards acceptance of such a structure/bastard-of-a-system; two people forced to be a singular item/device/"system" again, and for one of those two to be me? Forget it. I'm unworthy of affection until I learn to be less prideful and burdensome, regardless of how the lass may insist.
9/19/14
Upstairs, downstairs, and
where are the men?
The men I know
you've been holding
and folding?
A strike upon
the perilous pen,
with dreams I slept
long yet longing
and scolding.
Every displaced atom of her, I want her.
Thoughts walking along and at 2:30 am and passing others:
if you have a gun or a knife, I will give you my wallet. Otherwise, I will eat your flesh. Even if I die, I will die a victor with your blood on my lips.
9/21/14
I used to entertain such jubilance, not in joy but in zealous passion, a prophet and pariah for impossibilities, for Love.
9/22/14
great title of a Berryman poem: "Have a Genuine American Horror-&-Mist on the Rocks". Great poem, too. Political, in an admirably horrified way, as he doesn't tend to be.
"The problem is urgent, yes, for this hot light
we so love may not last.
Man seems to be darkening himself;
you must still for some reason & the others depend on him,
but perhaps essentially now it is your turn." - from, "To a Woman", J. Berryman, Love & Fame
-----------------------------------------------------------
things what amazed me on my walk tonight:
- basso profundo of my feet pounding on iron grating above storm drain
- cats
- my silhouette as projected by strobing police lights
- a baby rabbit, and my wish to turn suddenly into a cat and chase and kill and eat it
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Wow, stayed up until 6 am, drinking wine and chain-smoking and drawing Dylan Thomas again and finally writing a letter to S that needed so badly to be writ, though my tongue gets choked on fingered words and I still can't say everything I need to say, but a start at least. One day at a time, no sense in swan-diving into this romanticism that you've only recently rediscovered, me boy (the real shit, the ponderous slow-as-syrup-shit, stretching for years rather than shrieking lies told amongst orgasmic minutes).
Getting better at "the drinking" (slowly, slowly), certainly better at general positivity, my demeanor could use some work though I'm quite fond of the curmudgeon I've become, nay! the curmudgeon I am! No need to be cruel, I must remind myself hourly. Take no shit, aye, but fer chrissakes also give no shit. Be true, but be good, or at least good-er.
tomorrow: food stamp nonsense (pay stubs to social service office, appear well-dressed and prepared yet impoverished), laundry, Dungeons + Dragons in the evening.
Broke, so broke. A will understand, begrudgingly. K will understand, begrudgingly. What, then, am I so worried about? As per usual, lots of nothings.
. . . .The type of woman who once excited me now drives me further into seclusion. They frighten me. I am not of their game. Quick-witted with sex, slippery fresh out of the shower, drying themselves upon me, I so soon forget that the shower was only to wash away-----------
No, I am no gorilla. But I am. And I suppose gorilla must play as gorilla play. Looking forward to being a human being again.
STORIES:
- "Cloud of Ticks"
- "Cockroach Bait"
- "Monsters are Real"
- "Scabs" or "The Scabs" or something less obvious but the story is obv. about scabs
Lovely titles/subject matter all. Maybe I'm doomed/destined/blessed to be a macabre fiction writer. Rather reach for the stars; for "Dandelion Wine" or "Great Jones Street" or just "Cockpit" or even just "Geek Love" (macabre again!).
Took a shit that stopped me in my tracks when I turned to flush. Impressive (disgusting!), monumental (foul!). I hope there's nothing seriously wrong with me (physically, I mean).
I am a chameleon trapped in the poor-kid's body. None will know the difference.
K, on my way out the door for a 12:40 am stroll: "Are you ok? Are you normal?"
Me, laughing, "No, I'm not normal."
(after napping away a post-practice marijuana stupor interrupted only by intense sleep-terrors [D-as-Rasputin, some sort of weird post-modern stormtrooper come to accuse and arrest?!])
Can't stop smoking tonight. Still enough time to read and fall asleep before sunrise, so one more won't hurt much.
blue notebooks (I)
9/2/14
Dream:
my hands searching her body, finding bandages over each part I am longing to grope
love:
two corpses found entertwined
a comic character
for each of my moods and demons
actors/actresses to play each
directed by me
I playing none
"Radioactive" she called me
as I glowed and exploded
threatening to wipe my guts
in a courtyard
on South Avenue
to-buy
litebulbs
bandages for my ass
------------------------------------------------------------
My hwy
lover,
goin'
thru the
hwy of
my mind.
- Stan Fick
-----------------------------------------------------
[early draft for "most influential books" nonsense horseshit, oy, I take this one so serious.- ed.]
Ed Abbey- Monkey Wrench Gang
Michael Crichton - Jurassic Park
Michael Azerrad - Our Band...
Don Delillo - White Noise
William Faulkner - Sound and the Fury
Lawrence Ferlinghetti - Coney Island...
Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet
Allen Ginsberg - Howl
Knut Hamsun - Pan
Herman Hesse - Steppenwolf
Charles Jackson - The Lost Weekend
Stephen King - The Stand
Mikhail Lermontov - Hero of Our Time
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years...
Henry Miller - Tropic of Cancer
Alan Moore - V for Vendetta
Pablo Neruda - Sea and the Bells
Flannery O'Conner - Wise Blood
Neil Stephenson - Snow Crash
Hunter S Thompson - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Lao Tzu - Tao Teh Ching
Tim O'Brien - The Things They Carried
Philip K Dick - ...Androids...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Whether wither
with refusal
a constant sigh
to pain pariahs
a sticky mess
no more'n usual
a lot must die
for lone reprisal
-----------------------------------------------
A certain fog
addressed
assigned
to those tragically
immobile
Leave me alone
I want to roar
and write poetry
Leave me alone
I want to burn
and write poems
And who's to
say I am
not an
archangel?
-----------------------------------------
9/9/14
Tragic white boy at the laundromat; pubescent, maybe, feet too big for chicken legs, too-big feet shoved in designer sneakers, fool weasel parents bitch bitch, I nearly passed out here, earlier, from heat and hangover and anxiety, but now am on drugs and halfway drunk and my disgust has been replaced with "happy" indifference.
Coke machine has hand-written note, sez "See attendant for Diet Coke", but I know the secret, that is, the Diet Coke button works just fine, but if you press it Twice it gives you two cans for the 75 cent price of one. O Dietz, you rascal! You shrew! I am now two Diet Cokes richer, and add to that a beautiful girl has come into my life (joking; she has simply come into the same laundromat as I) and to watch her for the next forty minutes while my clothes dry am I truly blessed.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Will I never be free from this loving tug in my loins, my compass needle dick spinning at the cunt's magnetic pole and the nipples' cardinal pull?
-----------------------------------------------------------
I am an addict with no willingness to cease being so. It affects every relationship I deign to pursue, and at great cost. I have no idea how to stop. I am going to kill myself, but the horror is in my complacency towards dying. Consequences are no longer of consequence. Too proud to seek help, too weak, too stupid, too stubborn, too defined by addiction.
Dream:
my hands searching her body, finding bandages over each part I am longing to grope
love:
two corpses found entertwined
a comic character
for each of my moods and demons
actors/actresses to play each
directed by me
I playing none
"Radioactive" she called me
as I glowed and exploded
threatening to wipe my guts
in a courtyard
on South Avenue
to-buy
litebulbs
bandages for my ass
------------------------------------------------------------
My hwy
lover,
goin'
thru the
hwy of
my mind.
- Stan Fick
-----------------------------------------------------
[early draft for "most influential books" nonsense horseshit, oy, I take this one so serious.- ed.]
Ed Abbey- Monkey Wrench Gang
Michael Crichton - Jurassic Park
Michael Azerrad - Our Band...
Don Delillo - White Noise
William Faulkner - Sound and the Fury
Lawrence Ferlinghetti - Coney Island...
Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet
Allen Ginsberg - Howl
Knut Hamsun - Pan
Herman Hesse - Steppenwolf
Charles Jackson - The Lost Weekend
Stephen King - The Stand
Mikhail Lermontov - Hero of Our Time
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years...
Henry Miller - Tropic of Cancer
Alan Moore - V for Vendetta
Pablo Neruda - Sea and the Bells
Flannery O'Conner - Wise Blood
Neil Stephenson - Snow Crash
Hunter S Thompson - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Lao Tzu - Tao Teh Ching
Tim O'Brien - The Things They Carried
Philip K Dick - ...Androids...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Whether wither
with refusal
a constant sigh
to pain pariahs
a sticky mess
no more'n usual
a lot must die
for lone reprisal
-----------------------------------------------
A certain fog
addressed
assigned
to those tragically
immobile
Leave me alone
I want to roar
and write poetry
Leave me alone
I want to burn
and write poems
And who's to
say I am
not an
archangel?
-----------------------------------------
9/9/14
Tragic white boy at the laundromat; pubescent, maybe, feet too big for chicken legs, too-big feet shoved in designer sneakers, fool weasel parents bitch bitch, I nearly passed out here, earlier, from heat and hangover and anxiety, but now am on drugs and halfway drunk and my disgust has been replaced with "happy" indifference.
Coke machine has hand-written note, sez "See attendant for Diet Coke", but I know the secret, that is, the Diet Coke button works just fine, but if you press it Twice it gives you two cans for the 75 cent price of one. O Dietz, you rascal! You shrew! I am now two Diet Cokes richer, and add to that a beautiful girl has come into my life (joking; she has simply come into the same laundromat as I) and to watch her for the next forty minutes while my clothes dry am I truly blessed.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Will I never be free from this loving tug in my loins, my compass needle dick spinning at the cunt's magnetic pole and the nipples' cardinal pull?
-----------------------------------------------------------
I am an addict with no willingness to cease being so. It affects every relationship I deign to pursue, and at great cost. I have no idea how to stop. I am going to kill myself, but the horror is in my complacency towards dying. Consequences are no longer of consequence. Too proud to seek help, too weak, too stupid, too stubborn, too defined by addiction.
Monday, September 22, 2014
The I-I-Was
from my notebook last night:
"I used to entertain such jubilance, not in joy but in zealous passion, a prophet and pariah for im/possibilities, for Love."
How far from that person I was am I. How far and miserable. Yet I, the I-I-was, used to be so unbelievably miserable, just as prone to violent rages and violent addictions and threats of suicide, though to be sure never as physically tending to actually make good on such threats. But the difference now? The parts of this which frighten me when compared to the I-I-was? The inspiration for my misery, the frustration which so shattered and tightened me. For then, so long ago, the base of it all was Love, was Possibility, was Believing In That Which Others Would Not.
"By God, I've loved!" I once wrote in a poem. "Why are no one else as interested in these fabulous failures of the heart?" I wrote in another.
That was it, I feel. I was balling my fists and standing so resolutely goddamn pissed because of the Love and Wonder and Awe that flowed through me and about me, and others' refusals to see all of the liberating power in these things. I was being spurned by friends, lovers, and the world-at-large, and it was depressing and nigh-defeating, but instead I only Loved more fiercely, Felt more fiercely, Believed more fiercely, raising myself to some sort of immolative frenzy of DOING IT ALL, IN SPITE, though never spitefully. Yet to be so Loving of Love and Others and Life that you wish you destroy yourself, is it worth it? I believed so, and maybe still do. But I didn't destroy myself, except
except I really, truly did. I smothered that I-I-was with selfishness, indifference, and a fatalist resolve to not put any such stock into Love/Compassion, as all things must end, and instead began worshiping at the altar of Self, of Death, and here is where the I-I-am has me so spooked, for a life lived, and ending, for naught but selfish compulsion and an identification with only Pain and Darkness and that bastard Self with the cold cold eyes and chilly atrophied heart (that heart! which once was so swollen near-bursting with LOVING LOVE UNTIL/IN SPITE OF/AND BECAUSE IT HURT SO FUCKING BAD) proves no-thing to no-one, especially my prideful self, shrugging and indifferent.
There are these weird mortification-of-the-flesh Jesuit-flagellation tendencies in my willingness to fill my shoes with glass and wrap my torso in barbed wire, but once it was to have a pain upon which to compare Wonder and Glory, to prevent the cultivation of a truly evil pride, though now I fear it is simply to remind myself that none are innocent, least of all I, and that Pain and Death are truly our only constant companions.
BUT
I do believe in the im/possibilities of Love, Wonder, Gawd, Life, and Glory. "To move towards beauty, and from pain". Yes, I believe that. Somewhere, deep in my cowardly guts and watery marrow, I believe it. Not a road exists which may not be retraced, retreated from, and it is up to I, and alone I, I now, to make that choice. The rope I climb back towards the realm of Idealism and Positivity will be rife with the briars of cynicism to which I have become so accustomed, but let this be my new frustration. For I cannot live without Pain and Anger, and if I may I will certainly retain some lessons from the past three or so years of Misanthropy/Cynicism/Fatalism, and especially this recent deadly Nihilism, for I understand now their inherent strengths, applicable in dealing with a cruel cold vicious world, but for Gawd's sake I no longer wish to be cruel, cold, or vicious. The world is not a reflection of Myself, it cannot be, for I know I can do better than this. I know I can kick against these pricks with all of my zeal for both the Real and Unreal, for there is no room for simply Darkness or simply Light.
The I-I-was now contains the past three years, all 27 years before that, and actually everything leading up to the I-I-am-and-will-be right fuckin now. Time to make changes. And if I'm going to be so fucking pissed and upset, I had better a damn good reason besides a selfish obsession with how I've been spurned by the shitworld we live in, and I had better be prepared to change that shitworld as willingly as I am to change myself. We can do it better. I don't want to throw up my hands and totter off a building howling about the atom bomb; I want to dismantle the entire system of thought which bore that atom bomb.
There is a loss of innocence as we age, as cruel realities creep upon us, but to consider this a Defeat is absolutely wrong. I'm only as defeated as I accept, and once upon a time I would never have even considered such acceptance. Surrender proves nothing, but putting up a fierce fight in the name of im/possibilities means everything, even in the face of Armageddon (to paraphrase Rorschach, natch).
I've lost some innocence. I have been spurned and damaged, yes. But I am bent, not broken. I will never again be the I-I-was, and to so wrongly be upset by this nearly destroyed me these last few years, and particularly these last few months.
But I will remember fondly how much the fulla-love I-I-was felt about things, and how fiercely and angrily the darkly-cold I-I-was didn't feel about things, and I will learn from both. The I-I-was is dead, long live the I-I-was.
post-script/epilogue:
besides, think of the ecstasies! the ecstasy of lovemaking while actually In Love, of being Loved, the ecstasy of crossing the California border, of catching bugs and looking at toads, the ecstasy I find in righteous political indignation (death to the pigs! to the warmongers! to the charlatan holy men and the greedy shitsuckers!), the ecstasies of reading reading reading and writing writing writing, of a stinking hot smoking tube amp, of Midnight Mass high as shit on marijuana and pondering the birth of ol' Jeezus Cristo, the stubborn ecstasy of not kissing ass but yes of kissing the moles on your beautiful butt. Here's to smiling at strangers.
"I used to entertain such jubilance, not in joy but in zealous passion, a prophet and pariah for im/possibilities, for Love."
How far from that person I was am I. How far and miserable. Yet I, the I-I-was, used to be so unbelievably miserable, just as prone to violent rages and violent addictions and threats of suicide, though to be sure never as physically tending to actually make good on such threats. But the difference now? The parts of this which frighten me when compared to the I-I-was? The inspiration for my misery, the frustration which so shattered and tightened me. For then, so long ago, the base of it all was Love, was Possibility, was Believing In That Which Others Would Not.
"By God, I've loved!" I once wrote in a poem. "Why are no one else as interested in these fabulous failures of the heart?" I wrote in another.
That was it, I feel. I was balling my fists and standing so resolutely goddamn pissed because of the Love and Wonder and Awe that flowed through me and about me, and others' refusals to see all of the liberating power in these things. I was being spurned by friends, lovers, and the world-at-large, and it was depressing and nigh-defeating, but instead I only Loved more fiercely, Felt more fiercely, Believed more fiercely, raising myself to some sort of immolative frenzy of DOING IT ALL, IN SPITE, though never spitefully. Yet to be so Loving of Love and Others and Life that you wish you destroy yourself, is it worth it? I believed so, and maybe still do. But I didn't destroy myself, except
except I really, truly did. I smothered that I-I-was with selfishness, indifference, and a fatalist resolve to not put any such stock into Love/Compassion, as all things must end, and instead began worshiping at the altar of Self, of Death, and here is where the I-I-am has me so spooked, for a life lived, and ending, for naught but selfish compulsion and an identification with only Pain and Darkness and that bastard Self with the cold cold eyes and chilly atrophied heart (that heart! which once was so swollen near-bursting with LOVING LOVE UNTIL/IN SPITE OF/AND BECAUSE IT HURT SO FUCKING BAD) proves no-thing to no-one, especially my prideful self, shrugging and indifferent.
There are these weird mortification-of-the-flesh Jesuit-flagellation tendencies in my willingness to fill my shoes with glass and wrap my torso in barbed wire, but once it was to have a pain upon which to compare Wonder and Glory, to prevent the cultivation of a truly evil pride, though now I fear it is simply to remind myself that none are innocent, least of all I, and that Pain and Death are truly our only constant companions.
BUT
I do believe in the im/possibilities of Love, Wonder, Gawd, Life, and Glory. "To move towards beauty, and from pain". Yes, I believe that. Somewhere, deep in my cowardly guts and watery marrow, I believe it. Not a road exists which may not be retraced, retreated from, and it is up to I, and alone I, I now, to make that choice. The rope I climb back towards the realm of Idealism and Positivity will be rife with the briars of cynicism to which I have become so accustomed, but let this be my new frustration. For I cannot live without Pain and Anger, and if I may I will certainly retain some lessons from the past three or so years of Misanthropy/Cynicism/Fatalism, and especially this recent deadly Nihilism, for I understand now their inherent strengths, applicable in dealing with a cruel cold vicious world, but for Gawd's sake I no longer wish to be cruel, cold, or vicious. The world is not a reflection of Myself, it cannot be, for I know I can do better than this. I know I can kick against these pricks with all of my zeal for both the Real and Unreal, for there is no room for simply Darkness or simply Light.
The I-I-was now contains the past three years, all 27 years before that, and actually everything leading up to the I-I-am-and-will-be right fuckin now. Time to make changes. And if I'm going to be so fucking pissed and upset, I had better a damn good reason besides a selfish obsession with how I've been spurned by the shitworld we live in, and I had better be prepared to change that shitworld as willingly as I am to change myself. We can do it better. I don't want to throw up my hands and totter off a building howling about the atom bomb; I want to dismantle the entire system of thought which bore that atom bomb.
There is a loss of innocence as we age, as cruel realities creep upon us, but to consider this a Defeat is absolutely wrong. I'm only as defeated as I accept, and once upon a time I would never have even considered such acceptance. Surrender proves nothing, but putting up a fierce fight in the name of im/possibilities means everything, even in the face of Armageddon (to paraphrase Rorschach, natch).
I've lost some innocence. I have been spurned and damaged, yes. But I am bent, not broken. I will never again be the I-I-was, and to so wrongly be upset by this nearly destroyed me these last few years, and particularly these last few months.
But I will remember fondly how much the fulla-love I-I-was felt about things, and how fiercely and angrily the darkly-cold I-I-was didn't feel about things, and I will learn from both. The I-I-was is dead, long live the I-I-was.
post-script/epilogue:
besides, think of the ecstasies! the ecstasy of lovemaking while actually In Love, of being Loved, the ecstasy of crossing the California border, of catching bugs and looking at toads, the ecstasy I find in righteous political indignation (death to the pigs! to the warmongers! to the charlatan holy men and the greedy shitsuckers!), the ecstasies of reading reading reading and writing writing writing, of a stinking hot smoking tube amp, of Midnight Mass high as shit on marijuana and pondering the birth of ol' Jeezus Cristo, the stubborn ecstasy of not kissing ass but yes of kissing the moles on your beautiful butt. Here's to smiling at strangers.
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
real talk
9/16/14
Maybe my "amoral" animal justification is unfounded/unjust, or maybe it's the only factor keeping me alive and safe. Is there really any reason for an "or" in that statement? Is it not extraneous? I have cloaked myself in such monsterhood, and yet I react as I have been preprogrammed to do. Do I believe it, my pain and sorrow? No. But I believe in my guilt, and I believe in my fancy. I will die proud and unbroken, yet friendless and unloved. Priorities, what surge from awful pits, me so far from who I was once so proud to be.
Maybe my "amoral" animal justification is unfounded/unjust, or maybe it's the only factor keeping me alive and safe. Is there really any reason for an "or" in that statement? Is it not extraneous? I have cloaked myself in such monsterhood, and yet I react as I have been preprogrammed to do. Do I believe it, my pain and sorrow? No. But I believe in my guilt, and I believe in my fancy. I will die proud and unbroken, yet friendless and unloved. Priorities, what surge from awful pits, me so far from who I was once so proud to be.
Friday, September 12, 2014
notes: end of tiny yellow notebook (August)
Wow so easy to be v---------
Wow, so easy to be Violent.
------------------------------------------
I fucking hate that I retain the burden of charm and gregariousness at my depraved and devout lows. Wish I looked/spoke as miserable as I fucking feel. Want to be left alone.
So much to do, so much to do, so much to do, so much to do, so much to do, so much to do, so much to do, so much to do, so much to do.
------------------------------------------------------
If everyone on my Facebook friends-list would just give me $10, I could easily go away and not bother anyone anymore.
Dark time to be a "writer".
I would rather read/write than be intimate with another human being. The things I've turned away, boys, the things I've turned away.
---------------------------------------------------
As far as dating and being subsequently intimate with someone, reading good books is tantamount to fidelity. I absolutely cannot imagine sharing my heart and life with someone who doesn't willingly read read READ. You want me to get naked? Shit, you want me to pledge myself emotionally to another sick stupid lost soul? You better be ready to talk Faulkner or Hamsun, or at least Steinbeck or Delillo.
Can't wait to drop that line on someone. "You're so sweet, and such a babe, but you've never even heard of Delillo? Sorry, honey. You can keep your family money. We just ain't gettin' hitched."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Race to the finish line, who can be the more dramatic shitty lover; me or the junkie? Holding a strong second, at least.
---------------------------------------------
Life is what feels good/what feels right, and choosing between the two as per situation.
Stole a shot of rum, barfed all over the backyard. Empty stomach. Boys telling fight stories now. Dumb.
---------------------------------------
Tore apart the greasy linen from the bottom of my couch to find change for smokes. Worked!
Very nice to see A last night, though she had yet to read any of the three books I had given her. I took my William Carlos Williams book back from her. I lose more books that way, I swear.
--------------------------------------------------------
You who would choose to be my king, not considering I consider myself to be king myself, to be King of Myself.
Laws, written by those who plan to break them
*fingerbang: smell, before guilt
*schoolmates, now realtors, dealing in property, unaware they deal in blood
-------------------------------------------------------------
Long I've been carving at my angel face, swearing beneath lies who you seek, wanting to show you without doubt I am not he without but he within, the one you seek true with word and flash of eye, the one you will not want, the one the one who will not care as your tears dry on cheek the one who wishes to be far from you and all you offer.
I choose a lazy suicide, a coward's death, but I'd hate for you to mop up my mess.
Fear not for my oaths until I have a bottle of sleep, for the temptation would be too much to keep.
Gladly would I choose this end, on my terms, all to prove how much I mean it. Deadly serious.
-----------------------------------------------------
I've given you
what you've been churning for,
my greedy guts,
I've given you
that which we both crave,
so why do you still complain?
------------------------------------------------------
Thanks for the donut, haircut.
You don't play chicken with an alcoholic.
Songs for warriors with flasks under their driver's seat.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
What have I made
of myself,
death of shame
of accountability,
I so proud
and your finding myself
in their company,
staring at this soul-
sucking abyss, knowing
exactly what it is
blinking towards.
I daydream
of nothing healthy,
I seek not
that which water appeases.
--------------------------------------------------------
I think, often and sincerely, of the peace that may finally come when I admit I am an evil man.
Two nights ago, I stripped naked and took to the roofs to announce my intention to the world and my wish to leave it. As horrified onlookers watched, I really nearly fell to a gruesome maims, instead only sliding down shingles, rough as shark-skin and leaving long sticky scrapes on my arms, back, and buttocks, flesh left upon the roof and blood soaking into yet another woman's bedsheets. I'm upset about police and the atom bomb.
Wow, so easy to be Violent.
------------------------------------------
I fucking hate that I retain the burden of charm and gregariousness at my depraved and devout lows. Wish I looked/spoke as miserable as I fucking feel. Want to be left alone.
So much to do, so much to do, so much to do, so much to do, so much to do, so much to do, so much to do, so much to do, so much to do.
------------------------------------------------------
If everyone on my Facebook friends-list would just give me $10, I could easily go away and not bother anyone anymore.
Dark time to be a "writer".
I would rather read/write than be intimate with another human being. The things I've turned away, boys, the things I've turned away.
---------------------------------------------------
As far as dating and being subsequently intimate with someone, reading good books is tantamount to fidelity. I absolutely cannot imagine sharing my heart and life with someone who doesn't willingly read read READ. You want me to get naked? Shit, you want me to pledge myself emotionally to another sick stupid lost soul? You better be ready to talk Faulkner or Hamsun, or at least Steinbeck or Delillo.
Can't wait to drop that line on someone. "You're so sweet, and such a babe, but you've never even heard of Delillo? Sorry, honey. You can keep your family money. We just ain't gettin' hitched."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Race to the finish line, who can be the more dramatic shitty lover; me or the junkie? Holding a strong second, at least.
---------------------------------------------
Life is what feels good/what feels right, and choosing between the two as per situation.
Stole a shot of rum, barfed all over the backyard. Empty stomach. Boys telling fight stories now. Dumb.
---------------------------------------
Tore apart the greasy linen from the bottom of my couch to find change for smokes. Worked!
Very nice to see A last night, though she had yet to read any of the three books I had given her. I took my William Carlos Williams book back from her. I lose more books that way, I swear.
--------------------------------------------------------
You who would choose to be my king, not considering I consider myself to be king myself, to be King of Myself.
Laws, written by those who plan to break them
*fingerbang: smell, before guilt
*schoolmates, now realtors, dealing in property, unaware they deal in blood
-------------------------------------------------------------
Long I've been carving at my angel face, swearing beneath lies who you seek, wanting to show you without doubt I am not he without but he within, the one you seek true with word and flash of eye, the one you will not want, the one the one who will not care as your tears dry on cheek the one who wishes to be far from you and all you offer.
I choose a lazy suicide, a coward's death, but I'd hate for you to mop up my mess.
Fear not for my oaths until I have a bottle of sleep, for the temptation would be too much to keep.
Gladly would I choose this end, on my terms, all to prove how much I mean it. Deadly serious.
-----------------------------------------------------
I've given you
what you've been churning for,
my greedy guts,
I've given you
that which we both crave,
so why do you still complain?
------------------------------------------------------
Thanks for the donut, haircut.
You don't play chicken with an alcoholic.
Songs for warriors with flasks under their driver's seat.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
What have I made
of myself,
death of shame
of accountability,
I so proud
and your finding myself
in their company,
staring at this soul-
sucking abyss, knowing
exactly what it is
blinking towards.
I daydream
of nothing healthy,
I seek not
that which water appeases.
--------------------------------------------------------
I think, often and sincerely, of the peace that may finally come when I admit I am an evil man.
Two nights ago, I stripped naked and took to the roofs to announce my intention to the world and my wish to leave it. As horrified onlookers watched, I really nearly fell to a gruesome maims, instead only sliding down shingles, rough as shark-skin and leaving long sticky scrapes on my arms, back, and buttocks, flesh left upon the roof and blood soaking into yet another woman's bedsheets. I'm upset about police and the atom bomb.
notes
~holds the weird distinction of being, as far as I can remember for a long long time, the first "notes" (that is, blog post culled directly from my personal notebook/journal) of which I have had to drastically snip-snip and leave some things mummy-mum and paperbound for the sake and sensibilities of all un/involved, to be read upon my death maybe, but also a good sign that I'm becoming more gruesomely sexily honest to myself, at least insofar as 'writing' goes~
8/9/14
"Ma, ma,
Look what I did, ma.
Look what I did to my hands,
I broke em." [sage francis -ed.]
. . . . o pitiful me as if, head hung on stoop, so goddamn wine-drunk, stole a potted plant from the Baptist church across the street, but that was earlier, with P, finally fell asleep on shitty fly-ridden concrete in M's backyard.
I am sought-after by women but haven't the slightest how to cherish and am bad at sex unless I am truly loving her.
I am happy ["modes of happiness"] when:
1. drunk (long-lasting, renewable resource)
2. post-orgasm (fleeting, personal)
--------------------------------------------------------------------
This is my town; the vibration of nightlife to my back, white trash mommas discussing where to find 'bars' (colloquial for Xanax, obv) while pushing babes in strollers, all alive and dying, South Ave, no lights, is all is, SAFO.
"What you once were isn't what you wanna be anymore" - Cory King/Wilco
Barfin a lot tonight. Thinking about Bukowski though I'm not that huge a fan. . . . Need water.
I hate wristbands. Stick to your hair, relegations, regulations. Fuck Nazi Sympathy.
[here I draw a swastika-buster and a Star of David]
Every waking moment I am uncomfortable and displeased.
Post-Jung, post-Hiroshima.
The atom bomb is
IMPORTANT.
Look at the mouth on that pig.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
I know where my phone was left, I know if she did.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
parameters, system logic: Spyro, internal logic
"fly your balls off"
DREAM:
killed a bunch of people with a hatchet. Great closing scene with old man in woods.
"We're livin' the same life, just tryin' to keep to ourselves, be left alone."
Monsters are real.
---------------------------------------------
Is it perpetual, Fall on Florence now? How has the summer gone so fast? Time is so fluid, always quickening, I am losing.
Smells like Halloween, the leaves all rattle yet green.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
I am utterly defined by the people I miss, whom I hold so dearly in my heart and whom my eyes ache to hold.
Country night is outer space.
poetic justice
impotence
emotional impotence
-----------------------------------------
1. Be good.
2. Be helpful.
3. Be honest.
4. Read.
5. Write.
Coffee is ok. Don't over-do it.
Melatonin gave me hallucinations.
Weed makes me paranoid.
-----------------------------------------
teat holler
I am lucky at life,
sucky at life,
and I suck at life.
cat slide as oil slick
Jung Cancer
-------------------------------
If given the choice between smoking a cigarette butt at the end of day or dawn of day, I will almost always choose the end. Tomorrow is magnificent. Fuck tomorrow.
This thing done,
that thing done,
we're burning hairs excuse us,
we cling to tunnel walls,
excuse us.
---------------------------------------------
I'm really not racist. I don't consider my honest self to be racist. Problem is these Chinese exchange students and my bad habit to refer to their befuddled asses as "Asians".
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you didn't cause the car wreck, and weren't in the car wreck, why worry about the car wreck?
First words spoken aloud, 1:53 pm, 8/18/14:
"Where's this shit even come from? Goddammit!"
----------------------------------------------------------------
8/19/14
"None can know the man but they who've seen the monster." - me
MONSTER: Ate some of K's melatonin gummies just to see what it tasted like? Ended up fighting drowsiness with coffee and felt crazy. Screamed and howled into an empty house. Punched a chair, pounded the table.
MONSTER: Monster want vodka.
Maybe K's schizophrenic friend was right about me, maybe she could see the
MONSTER.
-------------------------------------
Drinking a bottle of guilt,
I'm drinking a bottle of guilt.
Some prefer milk
But I'd rather drink silt.
I'm drinking a bottle of guilt.
Ferguson is burning.
Kill cops.
My tomb contains thunder.
-----------------------------------------
themes for the writings of Andrew Dietz, 2014. -----> Who am I, I who create? I create who I am? Am I who create who I am, I who create?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The book is far from finished, me boy. Ye are far from the end.
8/9/14
"Ma, ma,
Look what I did, ma.
Look what I did to my hands,
I broke em." [sage francis -ed.]
. . . . o pitiful me as if, head hung on stoop, so goddamn wine-drunk, stole a potted plant from the Baptist church across the street, but that was earlier, with P, finally fell asleep on shitty fly-ridden concrete in M's backyard.
I am sought-after by women but haven't the slightest how to cherish and am bad at sex unless I am truly loving her.
I am happy ["modes of happiness"] when:
1. drunk (long-lasting, renewable resource)
2. post-orgasm (fleeting, personal)
--------------------------------------------------------------------
This is my town; the vibration of nightlife to my back, white trash mommas discussing where to find 'bars' (colloquial for Xanax, obv) while pushing babes in strollers, all alive and dying, South Ave, no lights, is all is, SAFO.
"What you once were isn't what you wanna be anymore" - Cory King/Wilco
Barfin a lot tonight. Thinking about Bukowski though I'm not that huge a fan. . . . Need water.
I hate wristbands. Stick to your hair, relegations, regulations. Fuck Nazi Sympathy.
[here I draw a swastika-buster and a Star of David]
Every waking moment I am uncomfortable and displeased.
Post-Jung, post-Hiroshima.
The atom bomb is
IMPORTANT.
Look at the mouth on that pig.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
I know where my phone was left, I know if she did.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
parameters, system logic: Spyro, internal logic
"fly your balls off"
DREAM:
killed a bunch of people with a hatchet. Great closing scene with old man in woods.
"We're livin' the same life, just tryin' to keep to ourselves, be left alone."
Monsters are real.
---------------------------------------------
Is it perpetual, Fall on Florence now? How has the summer gone so fast? Time is so fluid, always quickening, I am losing.
Smells like Halloween, the leaves all rattle yet green.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
I am utterly defined by the people I miss, whom I hold so dearly in my heart and whom my eyes ache to hold.
Country night is outer space.
poetic justice
impotence
emotional impotence
-----------------------------------------
1. Be good.
2. Be helpful.
3. Be honest.
4. Read.
5. Write.
Coffee is ok. Don't over-do it.
Melatonin gave me hallucinations.
Weed makes me paranoid.
-----------------------------------------
teat holler
I am lucky at life,
sucky at life,
and I suck at life.
cat slide as oil slick
Jung Cancer
-------------------------------
If given the choice between smoking a cigarette butt at the end of day or dawn of day, I will almost always choose the end. Tomorrow is magnificent. Fuck tomorrow.
This thing done,
that thing done,
we're burning hairs excuse us,
we cling to tunnel walls,
excuse us.
---------------------------------------------
I'm really not racist. I don't consider my honest self to be racist. Problem is these Chinese exchange students and my bad habit to refer to their befuddled asses as "Asians".
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you didn't cause the car wreck, and weren't in the car wreck, why worry about the car wreck?
First words spoken aloud, 1:53 pm, 8/18/14:
"Where's this shit even come from? Goddammit!"
----------------------------------------------------------------
8/19/14
"None can know the man but they who've seen the monster." - me
MONSTER: Ate some of K's melatonin gummies just to see what it tasted like? Ended up fighting drowsiness with coffee and felt crazy. Screamed and howled into an empty house. Punched a chair, pounded the table.
MONSTER: Monster want vodka.
Maybe K's schizophrenic friend was right about me, maybe she could see the
MONSTER.
-------------------------------------
Drinking a bottle of guilt,
I'm drinking a bottle of guilt.
Some prefer milk
But I'd rather drink silt.
I'm drinking a bottle of guilt.
Ferguson is burning.
Kill cops.
My tomb contains thunder.
-----------------------------------------
themes for the writings of Andrew Dietz, 2014. -----> Who am I, I who create? I create who I am? Am I who create who I am, I who create?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The book is far from finished, me boy. Ye are far from the end.
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
maxim: "Love"
To Love, and to expect Love: a self-imposed construct in defense of the fear of aloneness; a systemic selfishness asking for another to act selfless in deferral to your own fearful selfishness, in defense of the universal fear of aloneness, i.e., we are somehow singularly more deserving, and thus create our own Love/in-Love construct to attract the devotion of another just as alone yet not as deserving.
Gnats
swallowing gnats with bile rising
a tomb of sleep
I hear the day
I fear its heat
and swing away
humming gnats o things of beauty
a tomb of life
I know the smell
I love the night
and blissful hell
rhythm rhythm count on fingers
clever here now
stupid there
they ask me how
I could not care
fingers blunted vodka singing
a week of me
of me and I
I hope this week
is not to die
Anarchist Come Poems
This evening I drove about Branson
marveling at the destruction wrought,
at the shyster bankruptcy
upon the pavement I once commanded
from atop a Santa Cruz skateboard deck,
when we smelled vagina upon our fingers
and marveled at the ocean before us,
an ocean of carrying these dreams of possible dreams,
that now when I smell vagina upon my fingers
I am ashamed
and feel I've left some part of myself inside of her,
something drowned in that ocean
now abyss
now brimming
swimming sharks,
and I a shark among sharks,
monster upon men,
seeing schoolmates grin from realtor billboards
wanting to scream at them that they peddle only blood
but not the blood that I crave and thusly seek
but a blood sterile and devoid of the immortality
I deserve.
----------------------------------
"Mean-Fingered Cops"
mean-fingered cops
laws made by those who plan to break them
assert their kinghood
while I need no king
while I am my own king
death to the kings
and the mean-fingered cops
a burning I crave
a burning and a subsequent raving
a raving I crave
long into endless nights
preluding endless days
which do not prepare
for night nor war
but do our war in stock of paper
and dance
in string and in song
in dreams of dead priests
and effigies stuffed
with legalese
a day that will not turn to night
and yinyang
a night that serves day
a changing lady
our lady
of the sun which never rises
but to which we turn
and carve poems from pain
and pleasure from alone
to know that as we die
in this night, our night
the someday sun
will illumine our dances and poems
our sculptures and songs
scriptures lectures all waiting
waiting for your day,
your someday sun,
we do this in silence
not for ourselves
but knowing that as we die
and someday there will be no I
so someday all cops will die
all presidents will die
all lawyers and priests
and money-changers and warmongers
all pigs will be slaughtered
by the marching night of time
and this time is why I carve and carve
sometimes from bits of my own skeleton
and with ink of my own bile
that these poems will remain
and be read and heard
in a day without cops,
saved as an historical record
of the pain
in a night with cops.
kill em all
-----------------------------------------------
I write
anarchist come poetry
obsessed with my cock
and terrified to use it
gunshots echo Kirbyville night
but the dogs have stopped barkingwhat had I done?
and when the pigs kneeled so heavy upon me
and named me a homosexual
and bloodied me
for what had I done?
drank drinks marvelous drinks
sucked some joint of spice
with Sugar my tranny neighbor
ran howling off into down
Missouri
while someone shattered windows
someone's shattered window
and maybe a drain pipe here
a drain pipe there
and I laughed in my leather
breathing a new october
until then kneeled upon so heavy
and when, then,
what did you say to me?
and when I left my bullets sown upon my floor
and upon my bed
and upon my tables
and balanced my guns on chairs
and had these dreams of feeling for them
in the dark
finding a tiny body
not a barrel in my mouth
nor a job to go back to
waking bloodied
for what I had done?
fallen down stairs
broken my nose
and bled oozing clotted snot
blackened my eyes so bright
what did you say to me?
ah, for I kept it all a secret
I slept as a ghost
ashamed to have friends
worried in their anger
and angry in their worry
but I kept it all a secret
for what had I done?
alienated, my own fault
due course
lawless drunk marvelous drunk
I expect things from my friends
which I will never give to them
and I expect love of lovers
whom I will never love
what did you ever say to me
I do not ask nor indict
but instead am straining to recall
what have you said
for what I had done?
where could I have
fashioned my rudder from bone and board
the resolute bones
of those who would laugh apart my victories
my victory of waking
my victory of sleeping
always a surprise
when one follows the other
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
skulls of Shakespeares, for now we are Shakespeare
Spin the cap, spread notebook spun hard, no sympathy with this my hard lust for words touching words, I'm screaming to tell someone, screaming at anyone, I want only to share this, what I do so late at night left alone with pen powerful pen and clean lined notebook paper, I love it and am crying, this is all I know to love besides her who would share it with me, no quirk and as no laboratory exercise but a thing my hand does just as it wipes shit from my ass and jerks myself off and signs-of-the-Cross and fingers guitar strings and fingers strange cunts, and O Lord how my hands hand me these bottles and fingers promises into my faggot gasping mouth, my tongue fucks my palate in a waterfall of-- a Niagara of welling welling emotive spill some oil spill I leave behind me, some disaster I am always walking from, shredding without sympathy yet I the most sympathetic raking coals across my pock-marked abdomen, but still, enough of all that, I choke back tears and here is the new nest, I mastering a fat new handwriting, a truce between my drank violence and the peace I find in love-letters of words the words so looming but it's the letters I kiss, it's the words I submit yet the letters are charged with my dick-violence, with my tongue-dick tongue-prick, if I had the chance I would prick the world fuck the world with this venom 'til naught was left but she and I, she she she, I want she so bad across the flaming world above the bodies we dance we always dance in our Hell, I nearly wrote "purgatory" but Blake or Dante or someone claimed the damned walked among flames that the angels with their screwed eyes saw as hellfire and we so happy amongst them, imagine, if tomorrow the coasts would fall and creep inward while we dance and dance upon Hiroshima upon Trail of Tears upon Auschwitz upon Rwanda, we you and I could be Adam and her Eve, we more than I imagined you and me was, all those pitiful gorgons of past/passed sense memory and memory and sensibility I now see them gorgons so boring and mute and lame and pale and deathly and resigned and weak and empty and empty and weak and mean and screwed and drift drift drift no "Melville" Jungian big-name big-name big-name big-name archetypes and so unconfused and sterile in their unconfusion, but you you! finally you broke those chains and now-- ah gawd weeping again! weeping again, I put such long long years lost behind such hospitals, but you alone, rose, rose me from defeat to defeat, a new defeat I gladly resign to which I gladly resign, I can taste your olive skin and I can taste your footprints and I can taste your smile never screwed nor squinted, always a spring a fall to which to whom I bleed I bleed I bleed ah the cunt I bleed for, kill all cunt but the cunt I bleed for, a perfect Georgian flower of tomorrow and yesterday, who knew she existed, who knew I could bend my back in these new and splendid ways which remind me, lost me for so long, lost me me me, there is still a beacon from far offshore and I chickenshit faggot pussy bitch stand gibbering and fucking these people, there she is, you fool, I fool, I sank so far this summer, I sank so far and welcomed the sighing and the sunk, the witchy shadows tracing nipple to jaw, such delicious tits but no war is won with witchy twitchy nipples, lucky guy when all luck runs out, who is this guy, lost last guy, I dream and dream, I dream of another dance in a crematorium, I dream upon dancing upon ashes and ashes of skulls of Shakespeares, for now we are Shakespeare.
notes
8/6/14
Did I just shit myself? Are sweat and shit running tandem down my leg, organic miasma Me-Me-Me?
Timed this right, I think. 1-2 drinks @ bar (double tall vodka, 2 or 3 ice cubes), transcribe "Prey" to internet, leave, buy smokes, home, finish home stash, sleep sleep. I'm not paying for liquor-in-public, I'm paying for wifi-in-public.
It all depends on whether or not there is anyone worth speaking to on the mezzanine.
Goddammit, every step of the way sneaking through shadows, I piss as I write this.
Knowing you can always be drunker, herein is my freedom.
A little chrysanthemum
with your pillow arsenic,
pillowed pill
and vote away
away against
O christ, here defeat looms!
A race against
dying batteries last call
caffeine's tug
water's float
interest's wane
moon's moment
caloric impulse
general freeze-eyed frustration
and nausea now!
because all of it
will never be enough.
When do I draw my line
and dead-eye that bead
through
a skull most familiar?
(what's a) six-pack of snow in a borrowed town?
Goddamn hiccups
Gross, one of those gross nights wherein I spit gross shit on the floor.
8/7/14
Let's clock it at 9:47 pm when I finally left my house today. The cashier who usually irritates the hell out of me with inane jokes and other assorted jibber-jabbers has apparently finally taken my mute impatience to heart and no longer wastes my time with frivolities, but now I am burdened with shame at the thought of how much of my own time I waste so self-righteously, and how I've won this skirmish, the sole spoils of which are the denying of consistent and well-intentioned interactions with another lost person so unfairly judged. I feel like a monster.
My ideal mate would be an absentee landlord. I want to marry an absentee landlord.
Tried to light my pen with my cigarette. No, the other way around, pen of fire, pen is fire, penis fire. Why are the pen or pencil never discussed as phallic symbols? I've been toying with the image/idea for a while now; writing as masturbatory, also as a powerful virility. Paper a come rag, or a fertilized womb, the difference being (to paraphrase an earlier thought) that ink achieves and retains vitality when dry, while sperm does not.
-------------------------------------
Going out for "a beer" with M shortly. Worried. Worried I may get The Thirst, knowing what happens to my mood(s) afterwards, with the 2 options being:
1. Buy more. Drink drink drink. "Seek oblivion". Oblivion? Nay, liberation! I can already feel its caress.
2. Quarantine. Evil pacing. Shake in sheets. Scream.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
New obvious idea: bring this tiny pad of paper to the porch/bathroom with me while I smoke/shit, instead of that damn phone. [The Smartphone Revolution is another nail in the coffin.] Even if I write nothing, nothing, nothing at all, I will have been more productive and have stimulated more neuronic wiring than if I had stared feverishly at my phone and bathed in the perverse light of social media's intense worry and self-obsession. Funny that as a self-aware (in each way including the admittedly narcissistic and meta-narcissistic) "writer", lots of stream-dream I I me me stuff, I react with such nausea and violence to others doing pretty much the same shit as I albeit in the social media medium. Am I any better, really, when all is said and done, I the prideful and aware and self-critical artiste? Doubt it.
8/8/14
Long discussion with M tonight in re: heroes, super- and supra-, ourselves and close friends and lovers, the way others' expectations become like radiation upon our backs, we mutate these illusions, holograms projected, respond weirdly and am/are not to be trusted. Everything I write comes with hidden manipulation, a military tactic, offense and defense entrenched in idiosyncrasies.
Earlier I sez to myself, Andrew, I sez, you should post on Facebook a plea asking your friends to never again [------] you. Can't remember what it was now, but please, friends, don't [------] me. I'm not worthy of your [------].
In my house tonight
there is a buzzing throughout
the eaves. I think it is
the ghosts of flies.
I'm horny.
Did I just shit myself? Are sweat and shit running tandem down my leg, organic miasma Me-Me-Me?
Timed this right, I think. 1-2 drinks @ bar (double tall vodka, 2 or 3 ice cubes), transcribe "Prey" to internet, leave, buy smokes, home, finish home stash, sleep sleep. I'm not paying for liquor-in-public, I'm paying for wifi-in-public.
It all depends on whether or not there is anyone worth speaking to on the mezzanine.
Goddammit, every step of the way sneaking through shadows, I piss as I write this.
Knowing you can always be drunker, herein is my freedom.
A little chrysanthemum
with your pillow arsenic,
pillowed pill
and vote away
away against
O christ, here defeat looms!
A race against
dying batteries last call
caffeine's tug
water's float
interest's wane
moon's moment
caloric impulse
general freeze-eyed frustration
and nausea now!
because all of it
will never be enough.
When do I draw my line
and dead-eye that bead
through
a skull most familiar?
(what's a) six-pack of snow in a borrowed town?
Goddamn hiccups
Gross, one of those gross nights wherein I spit gross shit on the floor.
8/7/14
Let's clock it at 9:47 pm when I finally left my house today. The cashier who usually irritates the hell out of me with inane jokes and other assorted jibber-jabbers has apparently finally taken my mute impatience to heart and no longer wastes my time with frivolities, but now I am burdened with shame at the thought of how much of my own time I waste so self-righteously, and how I've won this skirmish, the sole spoils of which are the denying of consistent and well-intentioned interactions with another lost person so unfairly judged. I feel like a monster.
My ideal mate would be an absentee landlord. I want to marry an absentee landlord.
Tried to light my pen with my cigarette. No, the other way around, pen of fire, pen is fire, penis fire. Why are the pen or pencil never discussed as phallic symbols? I've been toying with the image/idea for a while now; writing as masturbatory, also as a powerful virility. Paper a come rag, or a fertilized womb, the difference being (to paraphrase an earlier thought) that ink achieves and retains vitality when dry, while sperm does not.
-------------------------------------
Going out for "a beer" with M shortly. Worried. Worried I may get The Thirst, knowing what happens to my mood(s) afterwards, with the 2 options being:
1. Buy more. Drink drink drink. "Seek oblivion". Oblivion? Nay, liberation! I can already feel its caress.
2. Quarantine. Evil pacing. Shake in sheets. Scream.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
New obvious idea: bring this tiny pad of paper to the porch/bathroom with me while I smoke/shit, instead of that damn phone. [The Smartphone Revolution is another nail in the coffin.] Even if I write nothing, nothing, nothing at all, I will have been more productive and have stimulated more neuronic wiring than if I had stared feverishly at my phone and bathed in the perverse light of social media's intense worry and self-obsession. Funny that as a self-aware (in each way including the admittedly narcissistic and meta-narcissistic) "writer", lots of stream-dream I I me me stuff, I react with such nausea and violence to others doing pretty much the same shit as I albeit in the social media medium. Am I any better, really, when all is said and done, I the prideful and aware and self-critical artiste? Doubt it.
8/8/14
Long discussion with M tonight in re: heroes, super- and supra-, ourselves and close friends and lovers, the way others' expectations become like radiation upon our backs, we mutate these illusions, holograms projected, respond weirdly and am/are not to be trusted. Everything I write comes with hidden manipulation, a military tactic, offense and defense entrenched in idiosyncrasies.
Earlier I sez to myself, Andrew, I sez, you should post on Facebook a plea asking your friends to never again [------] you. Can't remember what it was now, but please, friends, don't [------] me. I'm not worthy of your [------].
In my house tonight
there is a buzzing throughout
the eaves. I think it is
the ghosts of flies.
I'm horny.
Saturday, August 9, 2014
New Notebook (July, pre-meltdown poems)
"New Notebook, pt. I"
So are ye taunting me now, boy?
Where'd ye get that fine new pen,
and where'd ye stash the last?
Remember that sorrow's secrets
bear somber children,
and ye will yet answer to me, boy,
to me ye will yet answer.
"New Notebook, pt. II"
A new day,
a new vista to be poached!
Line the lions,
and let us mow.
"An Ogre Laments"
An ogre laments;
Watch my lumbering shoulders,
each arch of bone
is a cramp to be mourned.
There is no savior;
Align yourself therefore
with Leviathan
and the dragons.
I am so fucking tightly wound,
trusting no one.
Furious, furious
let swing,
swing and sway
hung by my beautiful handwriting
and heavy breathing.
Storming rain
and still I without a name,
and still I without a ghost to hold.
Left alone,
always alone by choice
though offers have been made
to alleviate this gaping hole
this slit throat
at the heart of my conflict.
Shall I wail, what
shall I wail?
Should I wail, what
should I wail?
O that this thunder
sound as footsteps
of the comfort that never comes.
O that each aching shadow
I take as a companion
never to hold in my bruised hands.
Gather it all so near,
if only to have it at hand
when it comes time
to shove it all away
Out of booze again, goddammit!
Out of booze again.
Never will you know
how easy it is
to fade into the wall of white,
the sheet of lines,
never to return;
this is my gift,
and someday I swear I will not come back.
Wednesday, August 6, 2014
Prey.
7/20/14
"If it wasn't one thing, it was another, and it never mattered which. Always something to run away from, no matter what, no matter why, as though you'd been born with a consciousness of guilt and would find that thing to feel guilty about regardless. Feel? Be." - The Lost Weekend, C. Jackson, p. 84
Too terrified to cross the street
To all those I've let down,
be brave in my admonishment.
To all those I've showered with scorn,
be proud that I so fear you.
Each day upon our earth
is harder than our last,
Remember.
I will never trust a woman who doesn't like to kiss during sex.
[cthonic]
O how that blow would smart if my axe were to be swung sober.
My dry eyes click like billiard balls, a membrane of dust between the sphere and the lens. Each blink is a guillotine shutter, capturing all I take in in the basket of blood below.
7/21/14
Today, I feel like prey, stalked about my house by anxieties unseen, I creep past my windows while eyes slither through blinds, I remain silent afraid that I might wake what lies in wait.
Pout in the mirror, then,
you knot-headed fool,
if even from light you must hide.
The reflection reflects tension
so smooth and cool,
and besides, there's people outside.
Shudder at each crack, then,
appliance and porch,
the sounds of the house as it settles.
Your nerves are ropes of flies
now buzzing in hordes,
your blood shrieks in a curdling kettle.
---------------------------------------------------
My little lover
wakes as an animal,
blue eyes wide
as wide as only blue eyes
can know to be,
staring not through the air,
but at the air
and the dreams of dreams
yet painted there
upon the canvas
of motes in sun.
Weird marijuana nostalgia; Cocteau Twins. Sewing patches onto my shorts: Spoke Pants of the Flowering Skillet. Still can't draw a pot leaf.
Can't leave my house unless I'm leaving the county. Sirens, alarming.
7/22/14
"My love confused confused with after loves
not even over time did I outgrow." - from "Images of Elspeth", J, Berryman, Love & Fame
If each word writ
is a shell being loaded.
or if each word wrought
be a shell fired,
should I let heart
or brain
choose the target?
"'The art of poetry
is amply distinguished from the manufacture of verse
by the animating presence in the poetry
of a fresh idiom: language
so twisted + posed in form
that it not only expresses the matter in hand
but adds to the stock of available reality.'
I was never altogether the same man after that." - from "Olympus", J. Berryman, Love & Fame
DREAM:
Game of Thrones' Jon Snow-as-cowboy, with a murderous dog, hiding in limestone outcrops of Arkansas. "Hold... hold... hold... get 'em!" Dog kills four bounty hunters, also GoT actors.
Dog kills two boys, one turns out to be brother (?) or boyfriend (?) of Jon's old fiancee. [ink running from spilt sweat, words unintelligible]
Jon sighs, says, "He's killed a lot of my friends over the years." Then he gives her a small plastic ring.
DREAM:
I start a fire in the basement of a house during a house show. Fire is put out, but damage is done. None suspect me, assuming accident, except for Kyle K., who will not tell. He understands.
DREAM:
Brian Cummings handing out matzo at a Pantera concert. Jon Snow has replaced Dimebag. Pantera covers "May the Circle Be Unbroken".
-----------------------------------------------------
One week in, I'm still blowing bloody snot and picking bloody boogers out of my nose. I wonder if maybe I broke it.
Downtown, I look at a trail of broken glass on the ground with sentimental detachment. How many times was this spoor my own, with nary rhyme nor reason, but me hyena cackling and enraged and erotically charged that my blood should spill, hallowed and hollow, with none to see and grant action the witness which raises violence and sacrifice from the profane to the legendary, worthy of mindless devotion?
"a mat of flesh a bed of down where I'd bed down and roll you over once again with your corona round your head and who's the one that fitted you with that when all should know to deify is to betray in a failure of love in some sort of transaction with myself." - L. Ferlinghetti, Her, p. 147
[here there is a second Ferlinghetti quote in re: God/galaxies, unfortunately likewise rendered hereforthwith inert by the power of buttsweat]
7/23/14
coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee
coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee
$3.67
I want to stop everyone I walk past and tell them everything I know, and all that I've seen. This is my new art, their faces my canvas.
7/25/14
It is 1:25 am. Somewhere, someone is still able to buy liquor, and goddamn them. Fuck your sympathy. I feel like shit.
[unintelligible] can relating your past [unintelligible. . . . ] deep in my iron [unintelligible. . . . ] needles, staggering anxiety [unintelligible. . . . ] leaking tears and so tightly wound I feel entirely made of screaming horn is now the goddamn fucking time to tell me that, as if it in some way equates us as brother and sister in our pain, and besides who doesn't dream of a sex addiction every now and then, me of course considering how many wasted years I spent not being promiscuous, but hell shit I know every motherfucker in this town and now can only picture them inside of you, and christ I'd like to write more but this bastard cunt of a right hand of mine is cramping and I have to fucking stop whether I want to or not.
-------------------------
And while each girl makes sounds her own during sex, I expect in Heaven they will all sound alike, and Heaven will be a bore.
When first she held me,
but then my head,
but then my hair
in her hand,
when first we touched
and spoke our hello,
'round fire
and ashen october fell,
she loosed a gnat
and I swallowed it
and carried it
for two years hence.
*******************
"I want to feel all there is to feel, he thought. Let me feel tired, now, let me feel tired. I mustn't forget, I'm alive, I know I'm alive, I mustn't forget it tonight or tomorrow or the day after that."
- R. Bradbury, Dandelion Wine, p. 11
*********************************
DREAM:
He came to the bathroom and reached to the light switch, then started as he realized she was on the floor, laying on a hurried pile of blankets between the toilet and the sink. She began to sheepishly rise, sheepish in her solitude and facing only herself with guilt, as she had yet to notice his presence.
"Christ," he said finally, her seeming the barest surprised at his voice. [ed. note - "Swan Lake" screams sexceptionally triumphant here] "Are you alright?"
Hardly raising her eyes, then, she spoke, the words tumbling freely. "Friends come home, and are so helpful, he took me to eat and listened, he hadn't listened like that before. And back here, you gone for so long, we drank and I felt him grow, he in me and holding me, we both fucking in my bed until I came, arching, then he came, inside me, as friendly as they who are where they are needed when they are needed, and I was stupid to think only you would make me come from now on."
He stood, silent, anger warming his cheeks. His vision blurred, doubled, cleared, then blurred again as he bent and put his hand beneath her chin, pulling her face upwards to the relative light of the still-dark bathroom.
"Gone? So long? It was only three days! And I saw how much you drank..." His anger now gained proportions which seemed immediately to betray the early comfort of his self-righteous rage.
"And nothing happened, those three days?" she asked. "You lay with no one?"
He was silent again, still holding her chin, and his vision blurred once more. He remembered the girl's shoes, tangled beside his own in the salted sun-bleached morning, and the pillowcase he had drug home still damp with her sweat and still blossoming with the smell of perfume.
DREAM:
He wandered about in front of the museum, wary of the officers stroking their mustaches, who though speaking in code ("the wolf...", "the egg laid...") he knew to be discussing the break-in and murder the night before.
"There's no reason for them to suspect me," he reassured himself, "Save perhaps my guilty constitution, some thing I don't realize I wear upon my face."
---------------------------------------------------------------
Words,
gouts of blood,
drowning in dreams,
I lift them
and spin
a rearrangement,
jerrymander-upon-juxtapose
Strafford-upon-Ava.
What then the knocking when finally sleep may come?
I jerk off ferociously to foreign porn stars whose names I never learn to pronounce.
My house is ghostlight
blue ghostlight
Will I ignore my phone?
Will I get anything done?
No, yes,
say it and let it lie true!
8/5/14
Men have been trimming trees in my neighborhood since sometime this morning (it being about half-past 6 pm now). I cannot bear to watch; they are idiots, and I fear I will be witness to one losing a limb. Even without watching, though, they intensify my anxiety, the frantic cicada of their two-stroke saws only letting up long enough for them to gripe and shout at each other in the wearily angry, thickly impatient grey tone of fools.
Such anxiety today! Tony being put on "96 hour hold" at Cox South was only a tipping domino to some sort of walking-catatonia, handymen showing up not helping, too much coffee. Drinking a beer now, bad boy, but it was screaming and I don't know how else to shut them up.
**********************
Find myself with plastic bottle clenched tight in hand, find myself no fault of mine. Here we, weary. Here we only I and I, such miserable company, such dust-mote poetry and private fancy. Ah goddammit my sister now what twenty-eight this weekend? And I miserable coward shuffle-shuffle, little crab-man too afraid to touch his phone, and the terror of auditory hallucinations, I hear knocking at night, and now I swear someone is screaming every name I own across my alley-drive, surely real? and surely in jest? not knowing my state has but utter terror, here! Do you see? This is why I draw my shades and want only drinks and a clean house and my guns, all to scare the rest of 'em. Locking all my doors. No one's allowed.
Lackadaisical charisma has obscured the fact that I constantly consider myself at war with everything and everyone around me. I deserve none of the gratitude I am shown.
"If it wasn't one thing, it was another, and it never mattered which. Always something to run away from, no matter what, no matter why, as though you'd been born with a consciousness of guilt and would find that thing to feel guilty about regardless. Feel? Be." - The Lost Weekend, C. Jackson, p. 84
Too terrified to cross the street
To all those I've let down,
be brave in my admonishment.
To all those I've showered with scorn,
be proud that I so fear you.
Each day upon our earth
is harder than our last,
Remember.
I will never trust a woman who doesn't like to kiss during sex.
[cthonic]
O how that blow would smart if my axe were to be swung sober.
My dry eyes click like billiard balls, a membrane of dust between the sphere and the lens. Each blink is a guillotine shutter, capturing all I take in in the basket of blood below.
7/21/14
Today, I feel like prey, stalked about my house by anxieties unseen, I creep past my windows while eyes slither through blinds, I remain silent afraid that I might wake what lies in wait.
Pout in the mirror, then,
you knot-headed fool,
if even from light you must hide.
The reflection reflects tension
so smooth and cool,
and besides, there's people outside.
Shudder at each crack, then,
appliance and porch,
the sounds of the house as it settles.
Your nerves are ropes of flies
now buzzing in hordes,
your blood shrieks in a curdling kettle.
---------------------------------------------------
My little lover
wakes as an animal,
blue eyes wide
as wide as only blue eyes
can know to be,
staring not through the air,
but at the air
and the dreams of dreams
yet painted there
upon the canvas
of motes in sun.
Weird marijuana nostalgia; Cocteau Twins. Sewing patches onto my shorts: Spoke Pants of the Flowering Skillet. Still can't draw a pot leaf.
Can't leave my house unless I'm leaving the county. Sirens, alarming.
7/22/14
"My love confused confused with after loves
not even over time did I outgrow." - from "Images of Elspeth", J, Berryman, Love & Fame
If each word writ
is a shell being loaded.
or if each word wrought
be a shell fired,
should I let heart
or brain
choose the target?
"'The art of poetry
is amply distinguished from the manufacture of verse
by the animating presence in the poetry
of a fresh idiom: language
so twisted + posed in form
that it not only expresses the matter in hand
but adds to the stock of available reality.'
I was never altogether the same man after that." - from "Olympus", J. Berryman, Love & Fame
DREAM:
Game of Thrones' Jon Snow-as-cowboy, with a murderous dog, hiding in limestone outcrops of Arkansas. "Hold... hold... hold... get 'em!" Dog kills four bounty hunters, also GoT actors.
Dog kills two boys, one turns out to be brother (?) or boyfriend (?) of Jon's old fiancee. [ink running from spilt sweat, words unintelligible]
Jon sighs, says, "He's killed a lot of my friends over the years." Then he gives her a small plastic ring.
DREAM:
I start a fire in the basement of a house during a house show. Fire is put out, but damage is done. None suspect me, assuming accident, except for Kyle K., who will not tell. He understands.
DREAM:
Brian Cummings handing out matzo at a Pantera concert. Jon Snow has replaced Dimebag. Pantera covers "May the Circle Be Unbroken".
-----------------------------------------------------
One week in, I'm still blowing bloody snot and picking bloody boogers out of my nose. I wonder if maybe I broke it.
Downtown, I look at a trail of broken glass on the ground with sentimental detachment. How many times was this spoor my own, with nary rhyme nor reason, but me hyena cackling and enraged and erotically charged that my blood should spill, hallowed and hollow, with none to see and grant action the witness which raises violence and sacrifice from the profane to the legendary, worthy of mindless devotion?
"a mat of flesh a bed of down where I'd bed down and roll you over once again with your corona round your head and who's the one that fitted you with that when all should know to deify is to betray in a failure of love in some sort of transaction with myself." - L. Ferlinghetti, Her, p. 147
[here there is a second Ferlinghetti quote in re: God/galaxies, unfortunately likewise rendered hereforthwith inert by the power of buttsweat]
7/23/14
coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee
coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee
$3.67
I want to stop everyone I walk past and tell them everything I know, and all that I've seen. This is my new art, their faces my canvas.
7/25/14
It is 1:25 am. Somewhere, someone is still able to buy liquor, and goddamn them. Fuck your sympathy. I feel like shit.
[unintelligible] can relating your past [unintelligible. . . . ] deep in my iron [unintelligible. . . . ] needles, staggering anxiety [unintelligible. . . . ] leaking tears and so tightly wound I feel entirely made of screaming horn is now the goddamn fucking time to tell me that, as if it in some way equates us as brother and sister in our pain, and besides who doesn't dream of a sex addiction every now and then, me of course considering how many wasted years I spent not being promiscuous, but hell shit I know every motherfucker in this town and now can only picture them inside of you, and christ I'd like to write more but this bastard cunt of a right hand of mine is cramping and I have to fucking stop whether I want to or not.
-------------------------
And while each girl makes sounds her own during sex, I expect in Heaven they will all sound alike, and Heaven will be a bore.
When first she held me,
but then my head,
but then my hair
in her hand,
when first we touched
and spoke our hello,
'round fire
and ashen october fell,
she loosed a gnat
and I swallowed it
and carried it
for two years hence.
*******************
"I want to feel all there is to feel, he thought. Let me feel tired, now, let me feel tired. I mustn't forget, I'm alive, I know I'm alive, I mustn't forget it tonight or tomorrow or the day after that."
- R. Bradbury, Dandelion Wine, p. 11
*********************************
DREAM:
He came to the bathroom and reached to the light switch, then started as he realized she was on the floor, laying on a hurried pile of blankets between the toilet and the sink. She began to sheepishly rise, sheepish in her solitude and facing only herself with guilt, as she had yet to notice his presence.
"Christ," he said finally, her seeming the barest surprised at his voice. [ed. note - "Swan Lake" screams sexceptionally triumphant here] "Are you alright?"
Hardly raising her eyes, then, she spoke, the words tumbling freely. "Friends come home, and are so helpful, he took me to eat and listened, he hadn't listened like that before. And back here, you gone for so long, we drank and I felt him grow, he in me and holding me, we both fucking in my bed until I came, arching, then he came, inside me, as friendly as they who are where they are needed when they are needed, and I was stupid to think only you would make me come from now on."
He stood, silent, anger warming his cheeks. His vision blurred, doubled, cleared, then blurred again as he bent and put his hand beneath her chin, pulling her face upwards to the relative light of the still-dark bathroom.
"Gone? So long? It was only three days! And I saw how much you drank..." His anger now gained proportions which seemed immediately to betray the early comfort of his self-righteous rage.
"And nothing happened, those three days?" she asked. "You lay with no one?"
He was silent again, still holding her chin, and his vision blurred once more. He remembered the girl's shoes, tangled beside his own in the salted sun-bleached morning, and the pillowcase he had drug home still damp with her sweat and still blossoming with the smell of perfume.
DREAM:
He wandered about in front of the museum, wary of the officers stroking their mustaches, who though speaking in code ("the wolf...", "the egg laid...") he knew to be discussing the break-in and murder the night before.
"There's no reason for them to suspect me," he reassured himself, "Save perhaps my guilty constitution, some thing I don't realize I wear upon my face."
---------------------------------------------------------------
Words,
gouts of blood,
drowning in dreams,
I lift them
and spin
a rearrangement,
jerrymander-upon-juxtapose
Strafford-upon-Ava.
What then the knocking when finally sleep may come?
I jerk off ferociously to foreign porn stars whose names I never learn to pronounce.
My house is ghostlight
blue ghostlight
Will I ignore my phone?
Will I get anything done?
No, yes,
say it and let it lie true!
8/5/14
Men have been trimming trees in my neighborhood since sometime this morning (it being about half-past 6 pm now). I cannot bear to watch; they are idiots, and I fear I will be witness to one losing a limb. Even without watching, though, they intensify my anxiety, the frantic cicada of their two-stroke saws only letting up long enough for them to gripe and shout at each other in the wearily angry, thickly impatient grey tone of fools.
Such anxiety today! Tony being put on "96 hour hold" at Cox South was only a tipping domino to some sort of walking-catatonia, handymen showing up not helping, too much coffee. Drinking a beer now, bad boy, but it was screaming and I don't know how else to shut them up.
**********************
Find myself with plastic bottle clenched tight in hand, find myself no fault of mine. Here we, weary. Here we only I and I, such miserable company, such dust-mote poetry and private fancy. Ah goddammit my sister now what twenty-eight this weekend? And I miserable coward shuffle-shuffle, little crab-man too afraid to touch his phone, and the terror of auditory hallucinations, I hear knocking at night, and now I swear someone is screaming every name I own across my alley-drive, surely real? and surely in jest? not knowing my state has but utter terror, here! Do you see? This is why I draw my shades and want only drinks and a clean house and my guns, all to scare the rest of 'em. Locking all my doors. No one's allowed.
Lackadaisical charisma has obscured the fact that I constantly consider myself at war with everything and everyone around me. I deserve none of the gratitude I am shown.
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