◄◄◄◄◄◄◄◄◄◄◄Fragments

Waterfalls
Snakes
Sand
Crowds
Static
Stochastic
Rain
Whispers
Normal
Leaves
Frying
Distortion
Spinning fast enough
Falling long enough
An always
Laundry
Dishwasher
Fan
Hairdryer
Wind
Highway
Refrigerator
Breath
Paper
Curtains
Shaving
Vacuum
Subways
Lobbys
Carpet
Rope
Oceans
Stopping.

I feel like a normal person. My parents are dying-
Not all at once or today: In piece and restless, over months and hours, worn sea glass to
perfect opaque ovals and I wonder at their interior, whether that murk dim shimmer- I wonder that they must be looking back at me through that filter, at the world, at their own reflections and it's no wonder at all
how each time we break we
expose a new sur face for
The World to chew

My Mother mourns forever: her youngest child an unbearable loss that, nonetheless, is born every morning. Whenever we're alone together she weeps and grasps my hand and relives her trauma for
both of us
and always asks me the same question: "How do you do it?"
It- I don't understand how you do it. How do you do it?
I feel like a normal person and I pretend that
I don't know what she means or
what It is
and through this lie
this performative ignorance
I elide myself and maybe that's
the best answer I have

When I was a wee lad, seven or eight years I told a girl
on the bus that I was a robot
She didn't believe me and insisted on testing the claim by
pinching my arm as hard as she could
face red and knuckle twisting
I cried out a-and recoiled and she said
Aha! Human after all! I shrugged and
nursed my wound with a secret smile at my first
captcha

My Father mourns himself: a Stranger to his own life- it must have happened gradually, a line crossed some random night, some August 14th, some January 21st, an arbitrary event horizon of self awareness and now I only hear
confusion and
pleading
Where there used to be faith.
I tell him stories about absurd minutia
kafkaesque tales from my bureaucratic life and
I can still make him laugh and
maybe that's enough, or at least not
nothing

I feel like a normal person. I haven't been invincible for a long time- but there's a gap between the heroic follies of youth and this sudden recognition that background characters disappear unceremoniously, or fall off cliffs, or drink themselves to death, have unfulfilled dreams, suffer for no fucking reason except that That's Just the World, lose hope, find solace in Something, self sabotage, get broken, get bent, get nothing but this stupid t-shirt and I've always
known this
obviously
I'm not an utter lamp shade but
there's knowing and
knowing
y'know?

 The World betrays you and professes no inclination to reconcile. 

Hello,

The year is 2022.

There is a hole in everything. You bail with netted buckets, held in swiss cheese hands, behold a patchwork moment! Dream memories. But pressed, oh-no, p-pressed and you puff up to assure! These are real hands, Herr Doktor, these are real fears! I am justified! I am true!

You, there, on the gallows. Admiring the knotwork? Amusing the Honorable Mr. Ketch with your banter?
Look closer.

The Honorable Mr. Ketch is not amused, in fact Mr. Ketch is Quite Bored With This Whole Thing, You Know, and would just as soon disabuse you of any fraternal notions except that it's less effort to nod and wink and pull the lever. The Honorable Mr. Ketch has his own existential crises, surely, not one of them mitigated by years spent literally killing people, people like you, and people not like you, too. Dignified folk, even, wealthy and respected, people with manners, people with class, people who don't come up full of asking What Was This All About, Anyway, or Dear Lord Why Me, or, worse, far worse, the winkers and nudgers, the in-crowd, the unrepentant ironists! The Honorable Mr. Ketch, weighed down by his own infinite sin, toils in quiet grace, doing his work as well as he can, all things considered and thank you very much, no really, it's a horrifying occupation, yes, and great work if you can get it! But ones like you, please, he'd rather have a sobber, a screamer, a rabid anarchist, anything but Someone Who Gets Him And Really Appreciates His Role Here.

I was raised on a trajectory toward contradiction, and if that seems normal to you, then, yes, exactly. If it doesn't, then maybe you're a future historian and you don't speak the language well enough, yet, or you've solved me, already. In either case, congratulations. On the off chance that you're still somewhere in between (you liminal few), I apologize. I knew it was wrong and I did it anyway and also fuck you, you're doing it too, probably, and if not you wish you were, which is just as bad, worse, even!

The problem isn't new in the sense that it's only just now been recognized- no, it's an old one. You've known it since Dandelion Wine. Since that fruit started fermenting in your belly. After you learned to be afraid of the dark. When you learned why you should be. Luckily, some Very Smart People have been Thinking about this problem for A Long Time, which is nice™, but unluckily they all seem as stumped as you, though, to their credit, poetic confusion still gets you laid, and various strands or flavours of confusion can band together and, be wrong about things, together. Being wrong about things together can get you all kinds of things that being wrong alone won't, like staying alive, and refrigerators, and buildings. But if you're wrong enough, with the right people, with some great stuff, you forget. You all forget that you're wrong. I mean, you're right, of course. One plus one equals two, and this wall bars passage, despite any protests. It's that you'll remember, eventually. That this is unsustainable, that nothing lasts, that the inevitable is inevitable, and that, it's not so much just just that you'll die-

it's that there will be an experience which is unfollowed. It's that there is something, there is an experience, that is, it is like something, to be the last thing, which is to say, there will be an experience that is your last experience. And when you really remember you remember it could be the most banal, or even taken liberally, your entire life whole. And the Wise, those knuckleheads, those absolute tea pots, spent the last few hundred years poisoning the exits! Religion? Hah! Psychiatry? Hah! Hedonism? You're not brave enough, you never were, and being reminded of that is surely just another weapon in your arsenal of shame.

Critical failure is the normative equilibrium, here, everything is broken and it works fine that way. The unresolved crisis remains unresolved. Forever. This is my hot take on some-thousands of years of so called western thought, such as it is, as it were, so to speak, in a sense, to be clear, in closing, et cetera, and so on.

THAT SAID

Maybe there are some better questions to ask?

Muscles in my back. In my legs. Were sore. The day after. I noticed it less, the day after that. And I thought,
lamentation is not an acute sense of loss. It's not pain. Lamentation is the slow demise of memory, the erasure of evidence, the subtle, discrete awareness of parts of myself as they fade away. As they fade away.

We hardly know each other. And it's always been, and always will be, too late.

And I forgive you, and I forgive me,
but.

But.

Forever is a long time: If you braided
your hair and measured every single strand and laid them end to end to end and made a braid that long, then counted every single grain of sand on the beach, and every single missed phone call, and every single star in the sky, and all the grains of sand in the universe, every ladybug, cicada, thimble, smell of grass and ocean, trampoline bounce, dirty sock, and every time I forgot your birthday, and every time I didn't save you from the World it
wouldn't rate
a blink.

Our mother slept on the couch that night. After she kissed you on the forehead. After they left with you. After she asked them to cut a lock of your hair for her. After I made the phone calls, after, after. After you left, after everyone else left. I went upstairs and
cleaned the bedroom floor
pieces of plastic
syringe caps
gauze and little drops of
blood
bits of hair that
didn't make it into
the zip lock bag.
So that she wouldn't have to see it.
You're welcome.

But I forgive you, and I forgive me,
and.
It doesn't matter because, but
we're all failures and I forgive all of us,
but. Our failures are communal, and it wasn't my fault, and it was everyone's fault, and we're all guilty,
but.

But I'm the one here
Beating your heart.
Counting.
Breathing.
Beating your heart.
Counting.
Breathing.
Beating your heart.
Counting.
Breathing.
Beating your heart.

I promise I'd dispense with melodrama if there were anything else, dear reader, but without soaking observations in some carnal marinade (no matter how arid, to certain noses, how exhausting, to you asthetes and connoisseurs burdened with an overabundance of awareness, you know who you are!) veering a bit to the precious, overcompensating, vulgarity of self hatred- and yes, carnal! If self mortification doesn't get you wet, at least existentially, then you're an alien, a time traveler, or, or, so supremely self absorbed that you transcend all this (or pretend to, or convince yourself, or try not to think, or wallow in trying, or wallow in wallowing, or cry yourself to sleep, or cut furrows in your thigh, or nurse a garden of grudges, or any number of stimulating escapes, whirlwind thought loops, ever the acrobat and tumbler, ever the mime and the invisible wall) and we none of us believe that, though, to be sure, our lack of belief would never lessen our affections...

Realize that I am not inside you,
as much as we invert and collide,
as much as we stare and
strain, bend, thrust
flushed like maniacs at a wake,
chasing some essential ghost,
sprinting lips and
eyelash hurricanes shredding
butterflies to
lukewarm entrail confetti.

Realize that it is not enough
taking razor to skin
to thin my boundaries with the World,
to bring the light close
under translucent finger webbing
in search of secret pearls,
hungry nymphs burrowed and feasting
on pilgrimage to a hidden
heart (a hidden heart that
beats the space between
us) that beats the
space between
us, the space
between us,
beaten.

And oh! Mirabile dictu!
What rainbow bruise adorns this tender passage!
How the beetles dance in carrion glee!

Realize that I have waged war!
flesh against chitin for a thousand years,
until, finally, armored in foe carapace
wielding the severed limbs of a million dead,
until, finally, song of woeful chittering
and gnashing mandibles,
until, finally, I join you
inside your timeless hive,
subsumed by pheromone caress,
funneled through the eye of your terrible purpose.

A last prayer then,
for the last children of Men:
May your transformation
be as painful
as your touch.

An asterisk in a frying pan. Dissolute peddlers of morning sickness, pregnant only with reptilian hunger. What does the dead eye see? If the sun set asymptotically, if the gun recoiled forever, if the crash never ended, I'd tell you a story about sad people with antlers dancing round a fire for the last time. I'd tell you how they sang, and how that song broke me over its knee, how it murdered my pretensions at humanity. Don't misunderstand, I was never unironic, or, God's Teeth!, saccharine. Please. But even amidst youth's orgies of irony I at least felt something! An eventual offense at my vicious self mockery, a betrayal at that offense, a fascination with infinite regress and so on. Ah, to be young again, eh Herr Doktor? To be vital with such acridity! But, as they say, decay is wasted on the old. A real taste for blood combined with a certainty of impending doom? Ha, you'd be a God- I suspect these are the old souls among us, the ones too mad even for death to completely erase. Me? Oh no no, I unveiled the mysteries of the universe just now. I was a lamb before, a real treat, see? That's what I'm trying to tell you. I heard the song and my heart stopped bleating. I forgot my name- not the sound, but the meaning, and joined them round the fire, twin points of pain blossoming from bone, my head heavy with new branch, two lines of blood crossing my eyes, streaking down cheeks, mixing with the churned ash of the dance floor.

The stars gave up when the fire went out. We rose as smoke to a dream ended.

-

I resist retelling this tale, of course, not because, like in so much else, I fear misunderstanding- but the opposite. I retell it incessantly, of course, because it's the only well in town.

And we're still thirsty.

The Lord, the Lord!
What’s he building, what’s he building?
A hammer, a hammer to
beat us like a drum!

The Lord, the Lord!
What’s he building, what’s he building?
A gallows, a gallows we’ll
Bloat in the sun!

Swing with me
My brother in bondage
Oh swing with me
My sweet sister fair!
Swing with me
My butcher my savior
Oh swing with me
We’ll have not a care!

The Lord, the Lord!
What’s he building, what’s he building?
The Lord! The Lord!
Strike true and despair!

We don't do what we believe; we believe what we do.