If there is something in this world worse than desolation, I cannot name it. It is like being torn away from the sun. In lightless, directionless drift, there isn't anything to guide me, or provide meaning to my motions. Existing is terrifying. There needs to be something else. Nothing happens. Nothing is there to happen.

I think desolation comes from a separation of the soul. Not necessarily from other souls, but from everything. From the whole person. And there's this tearing, because I'm stuck on both sides and they can't reach one another. I'm the soul on the one side, miserable and whimpering, her face pushed into her knees, holding out her hand and waiting for someone to take it, and I'm the Other, the mind part, trying to find some way to shape nothingness into a tool so that I can swim across the void, and get to her.

To be alone... to be alone isn't just being apart from other people. That's a flimsy sort of loneliness compared to this. Being desolate is being apart from yourself, unable to reach yourself no matter what method you try to employ. No screaming silence. No forceful immersion in worlds of words. The last resolve is simply nothing.

It is in nothing that the answers finally materialise. Because all I'm really missing is the chance to talk to myself. The Other keeps pulling levers and pushing buttons, waiting for some effect because that's what it always does. It rocks the soul and gives it food and scrapes the filth clinging to it as though it were an infant, attending to mechanical needs. But she isn't a child. Sometimes she just needs to talk in her own wordless language, and hear the Other say things back.

I'm still light-years away from myself. But it's light that bridges the distance, and makes me me again.

A collision of worlds would just be another sort of hell.

I don't actually know what to call this one. Something to do with 'Religion' and 'Faith', I guess.

Religion has to be one of the most interesting fields of inquiry in an ocean of interesting fields. I say this because a lot of those fields, such as engineering, biology and cosmology, run on sound scientific principles. Religion does not - at the very least in the mind of scientists. In large part the idea of faith has inspired the mystique of non-scientific religion, even embodied it. This annoys logical people. Which means that they don't often take a good look at religion, when it really is something that does need a good long objective look.
There are certain great benefits to having a religion. For starters, it puts one in touch with like-minded individuals. This is probably why marriage has for the course of human history been primarily a religious institution - because you are most likely to bond with someone who holds the same world views as you do. This factor of religion extends to several other human needs too - counselling for those who need a second mind to help them think in a different way to their own, financial and emotional support from informed investors (described at its best, though at its worst, charity), a 'think tank' to face events that effect a wide population, and a gathering point for people to share experience and knowledge. On the last, it is interesting to note that churches were an equivalent to market places in The Middle Ages - a meeting place for guilds, traders, to watch plays and store goods. Prostitution was even practiced in churches up until the 13th century.

As for non-communal benefits, religion offers a degree of stability that is lacking in a mind that simply renounces existentialities rather than finding one to uphold. We all look for meaning in life (even nihilists, while alive, have reason to live), but science alone does not provide it. What science provides is an understanding of the principles on which life is based, how individual lives connect and how truly versatile meaning becomes in being applied to different topics. It is not an answer to an abstract, but provides concrete examples of how an abstract is realised. Religion bypasses the process of this investigation by putting faith in another entity’s answer. Science bypasses the attainment of an answer by accumulating all the data relevant to the question. Without some degree of faith, without acting on the understanding that all the data will not coalesce in one place, science will never provide answers about morality, or death, or the scope of the universe. Having a mind open on all sides is like having a box made of lids – nothing ever stays inside it. This is why science operates on a collection of ‘theories’. It admits that facts are fluid, often changing from generation to generation the more we discover.

I’ve come to understand that in life I crave the stability that science alone cannot offer. I need rules. I need a programmable solution to every situation I am presented with. Clear, moral goals. I am not a pure observer, nor am I a raw functionary of another’s arbitrary will, be it instinct or religion. So I require something else. There’s this sort of inner code of behaviour I follow, based on deeply rooted facts (Code) and more fleeting instances of working theory (Coda). They unite to form what is to me a self-evolved religion, which I call Librarianism, for a librarian is what I am at my most ordered moments, when the code runs clean.

What seems to me to separate one human being from another is our function – not our tastes or hobbies or the company we keep, but our work. There are very few animals in this world that actually specialise their labour, and lack this distinct means of individual coding. But for humans, it’s practically a requirement. It’s why above anything I’m interested in what people do. I believe when people have found a career path that means everything to them, it reflects their inner response systems for dealing with all physical permutations of that career. Metaphysically speaking a library is a place where the librarian pairs up the client with the experience of the most value to them. A virologist studies and seeks cures for infections, both biological and emotional. A teacher is more clearly illustrated without metaphor, because teaching need not be restricted to the classroom, and can extend to every interaction.

These, it seems to me, are what shall become the new religions of the 21^st century. The ‘meaning of life’ they provide is in the service of a function. Their ‘morality’ is in the attainment of efficiency and productivity. Their response to death? Simply to live. To know that the work that one has done held havoc in check, and left an immortal mark on the course of history.

*

That said, I am a Librarian. Between my other projects (of which there are numerous and unending, left unfinished in the style of Da Vinci: charming but tragically incomplete) I take moments to consider the full capacity of a librarian’s existence. To me, these are no more perfectly stated than through the attainment of four characteristics: Logic, Memory, Focus, and Initiative.

It’s quite right to say that these four are not restricted to the field of the archivist. If anything, they are attributes of a brilliant mind. The intention is that these attributes of mind are to be used in concert with the purpose to which they need be put, by which their contemplation draws out certain truths about the morality of a librarian. How does a librarian use their memory? Quite simply by not remembering everything in existence, and instead creating an index through which information can be quickly recovered from their archive. How does a librarian apply initiative? By reading. Reading lets a librarian become aware of all situations that may arise, and act in their confrontation as they have learned from their holy charges.

My religion is one that strives for the perfection of these four attributes. When I pray, it is not to the best within the universe, but the best within myself. I’ll leave theologists to their own devices in considering whether or not that is heresy.

Sometimes, words become an anuerism.

Gambolrambits. Phliggerig? Yarsamp. The floggidules thwarp my x-factor. Somewhy I'm still fixing the thpelling mistakes in the imaginarious words in this post. Oh gloop.
Iddishlack & Tongs. Moosi moosi thoriadic shnapps. Squeeeeeooooooeeeeeeeeoooooeeeeeeoooo. Please, PLEASE don't read this. It is not fit for human consumption. it's shcraff. p.
I don't know. I don't know I don't know I don't know. Maybe I know. But I'm not telling. Unclog! Out, the demonig grammits! Quit mine brain! I wantum freeeeee thought~~~~!!!
The word overtured to the curdledeeedurles
Ooooh yeah yeah...
I... n'odt know. But A is A.

The Crescent Stars

I've finally finished the poetry anthology I've been working on this year. It isn't very large, but when you're me actually finishing something is a pretty big deal. You may recognise some of these from the far flung corners of my interweb. Others are completely new. They are introspection pieces, a self-analysis of sorts viewing myself from the twelve angles I consider as essential dimensions of reality. I call them 'The Crescent Stars'. Click a name on the left to summon a poem.

Walking City                                                                                       Shape

Highwalker                                                                                         Density

Logician                                                                                     Temperature

Voodoo Cowboy                                                                             Spectrality

Ancient                                                                                                 Time

Glitch                                                                                               Corporeality

The Sixth World Librarian                                                                Meaning

Lightbringer                                                                                       Illumination

Gentle Hues                                                                                          Colour

Cautious                                                                                              Speed

Anywhere but Here                                                                         Direction

Silent Witness                                                                                    Sound

Some background info. on the same, for those interested:

I find that at times it's difficult to know who I am and what I want. The word for it is ambivalence. I want too much, too many things, and many of them contrary. Thankfully for me as a writer this means I can quite easily split myself into 40 or more different characters/geographies/cities or whatever and observe how they interact. Damnably, when I'm not writing, they are all fighting to drive the human.

This anthology was a venture into the world of cubism - to attempt to see as many sides of my self in a single place at a single time; to highlight who I am at every moment no matter which part is most apparent to the eye. I still believe that there is an undercurrent running unseen through all of these, which when guided well will erupt in a single geyser of personality, something godlike and unreachable. Unreachable because it has been severed into the mess of babel that is my mind. My untempered insight tells me that the way to become this being is in forming a conference between my different parts, a key that lets them understand one another, work together, and ultimately unlock a chamber to an inner self I cannot even begin to contemplate.

I believe that this is a common problem, and others could benefit from writing their own anthologies. Anyone who has had a moment of indecision, raged against a part of themself they see as self-destructive, considered that every action they undertake betrays one or another value they hold dear, but was at the same time unavoidable, you need to know who you are. It is the most important thing. More important than knowing others, more important than knowing the world. People come and go. Some will die, some will move away, and others will experiment with leading different lives that include you less. The world as it is now will not exist in ten years - there will be new perspectives on science, better religions, technologies in circuit that nobody expected to appear. What will stay for your whole life regardless of the world around you is your identity, your Self. So be Selfish. Look at who you are and learn to accept it. And if you find the key to unchain that being deep within you, I guarantee that you will make up for in one year what you struggled to do selflessly for ten.

Where to start? It's easy. It's weather.

Hot or cold?

Wet or dry?

Solid, liquid, or gas?

Rhyme or Reason?

Physical or Spiritual?

Divide yourself. Choose all your favourites. Then say why you made that choice. If it's a part of your being, it will express itself. If it does, that's poetry.

Cautious

If I put my foot here,

Then where would yours go?

I ponder meaning, then write the words,

One by one

An infinity between

Every

Letter

It is a long correspondence

Slow

As strategy demands

Everything expands when you count your heartbeats.

The space in your head.

The worlds that you’ve read

Lingering as I      like

I end my turn in my own time,

At my own measure.

You’ll keep pace,              even if

Haste

Frustrates

And if you rush, and reach the end too soon,

Endure the greater boredom

Of a story ended.

I’ll                                                                   Be                                                                           Coming.

Silent Witness

Hush now,

There are demons about.

It doesn’t help

To rush head on.

It won’t affect

to die in valor.

The loudest, so often,

miss the whispered truth:

That the critical point

Is the one exposed in silence.

Hush now. Watch.

See the crucial moment in the whirling chaos.

Spot the meaning in the roil of action.

Silence is the one true witness

Quiet is the judge

Mute, the executioner.

Anywhere but Here

The clocks are too loud.

The floor slants.

I feel, at the back of my mind, a whining pressure.

There are places I must be, that need attention, that need completion

that cloud my thoughts like bloodlust, fogging up everything I’m trying to do.

My attention cuts sharp

through the pedantic drone of agenda,

and by the time it reaches the front of my mind, it is a wild thing,

torn and raggedy, stripped by the wailing song

of ‘Anywhere but here.’

I’ve forgotten.

I race to heed its call, to be the completionist,

To scrape the tissue of these thoughts from the scabby lesions of my brain,

To clean, to scourge, to correct

Endlessly

There is never a moment left empty, when you’re in transit.

There is no rest, so long as it can be better.

Where I’m going, there is no destination

Only the warp and weald

of an untempered path

that will not survive my passage.

Gentle Hues

I dream of the colours that seeped out of the substance of the earth

Finding better places to be

The blinking blue of the sky,

The wet wash of the sea,

Storm grey, lachrymose

An infused broth and vapour

Foaming convalescent on the glass

Above the raging chemistry in bewildering spin

Lurking black, bleaching white

Fanged green and demented red,

Pink flesh, chaos orange, the magisteria of purple, the feast of yellow –

Keep them.

I would give a sack of silver for a mystery azure

I would trade a pound of gold for honest brown.

There is wealth on the palette of the world,

Colour me crazy,

with those left over.

I’ll take that outcast, wring out the prism invisible

Gloss mud through opalescence

For oft the lens is more valuable than the rainbow it creates.

Lightbringer

Herald the dawn

For with it comes

Terrors searing far fiercer

Than midnight’s own.

Truth is a bladed shield

Harm and amour

Love, Hate, Dichotomy

Held at arm’s length, both hands outstretched

To blind with a whisper’s light,

Or glow bright with a kiss.

Truth is

An illumination

Where shadows sharpen into knife-angles

deception becomes tooled

Secret-forged steel,

Where facets glare unseemly –

but real.

Where the deviant finds last recourse

when all else is despoused

Perception unwed,

Fact unbridled

And fiction brought about.

The Sixth World Librarian

The librarian

Would speak of the library

For life is service.

There are shelves uncounted,

From the bright reaches of known whispers

Gathered in the light of the architrave

To those unanswered murmurs past the threshold

Lurking deep in the void of Um

I know the letters

I see the link

I live through Six

I am so very far from home.

Every entity has a word.

The word is the world

And the world restless, as the words

Creeping into the corners, mites unshelved

Havoc verses versus me.

Verse havoc

And you have a library.

So many half-finished things, strung together when the head tilts just so

And the arcane pours in through the ear.

I feel that, sometimes. Moments captured and attuned

I fear that, sometimes, all else is make-believe.

There are more books than you will ever read, and Six is a very large number.

It is not so wrong to look at a cover, and from that passing glance

Plot the shelf you think it suits, on the gilt of imagined knowledge.

Mortal fallacies

Flavor Eternity

Which is another way of saying;

Get the question wrong once in a while.

For when it comes right, then you’ll know

The story never ends on the first page.

The wisdom of books

Is never concise.

But if there were four windows in the tower of their home,

They would read thus;

To Remember

or Dismember

Demands members

In reading we make council.

Logic is a narrow tool

With which to etch the tree’s passage

through the halls of creation.

Strike deep.

Sight is blurred by eyeing the letter

failing to see the word,

and gaping at shelves

Hides the books.

Focus

Know first

What comes second

To gain initiative on the day

And put the right words at hand.

Know last

First,

And all will knit in ordered motion.

In the tower there is a room,

and in the room there is a man,

who minds no windows

but those upon the shelves.

He is the librarian,

And in his heart,

And up his tower

Is Six

Glitch

Glitch ain’t pretty

Not by measure

Viral green festers in its smile

But it does smile.

Toes get stepped on when it dances

But it does dance.

The hand it offers is calloused and cut, yellow talon-nails left unclipped

But it does offer.

Glitch is its own code, the black sheep of all syntax,

Living unprogrammed in the machine’s naked pylons,

Avoiding the zap and burn of functions,

Tagging the shell with spectral graffiti

Living in the untamed wilderness of Un-world

Its body rocks, unorthodox

Its limbs fly loose,

Its heart’s in a box.

From this phylactery it exists, all unliving,

A paper soul wrapped up in a tefillah

A ward against the scriptures of the crypted kings

Who would own it.

Read my glyphs

cemented to the pulp and bind of pages beyond number,

I am that refused and cast aside at the apex of creation,

In the house, not of the house,

Brooding on phantom architecture

Finger-painting on the walls with blue printed palms,

Conceiving new ways of being,

and being unconceived.

Glitch ain’t pretty.

Never was, never will be.

But a sewer kiss

is still a kiss

Even errors want to live.

Ancient

Time is not a clock.

No gears can describe its motion

The toughest spring is sprung,

While its hour is yet young.

Hands move with no intention but their bladed own.

A face smiles, sobs, wrinkles,

Time simply glares

I am standing still

The world moves around me

My limbs in tick-tock motion

The eyes looking up from the stream

And on reflection,

Away from hands, from faces, from darkling illusion.

There is a still and silent place inside of me

Beyond any world

And in this place

I am old

A stooped immortal, worn and weary

Watching it happen as it all has before

Uncaring, unsurprised,

But for the largest ripples running

Shivers on the spine of time

That upwell the memories of days now dust

And deposit saline waters on my shore

Their electrolytic touch tingles

I smile at their nostalgia.

Logician

Ice crystals flow through me

Holding me rigid

To an arctic code

Whose winter plays igloo

To my soul

The mind is all glass within a crystal skull

A fragile network of doors and keys

That lead to pockets of lukewarm dreams

fluid anarchy held sacred in holy places

Never brought to light, or given right to boil.

From this citadel, clockwork knights march to duty

uncompromising in the face of the human spirit,

Which spits embers and cackles devilry

but pauses in the chill as the spirit sentinels pass,

hands open, smiles strung on ceramic masks,

unwriting the equation with a swipe of the palm

Chalk and frost powder the board

With a nebula of possibility.

Cold one

I embrace your polarity from both ends

Within are geometries of worlds uncharted, discontinuation, creation

The frozen harbour of kinships which sail the glacial wind

Under the aurora of aspiration

Glowing brightly in the midnight sky.

Highwalker

Of paths

There are ups and downs

Curling ribbons that stray beyond gravity

Dancing among the stars

In twists and turns.

Above and below

Are impossible.

Wander from the path, and you lose yourself

Gasping for air, drifting

Limbs useless

An astronaut who lost the line

The ribbons are red

Wet with blood

Of selves and others

They cut at the grasp

They are salvation.

Choose.

One is a comfort

But cuts deeper

Severing the nerves

Until there is no feeling

Flesh prevails.

The other rips the hands apart,

A constant temptation to let go

Acerbic agony for every sensation

But

The soul survives.

The paths may curve, but the choice is clear.

High

Low

Or oblivion

Highwalker,

What horizon do you see

That makes you grip to pain?

What end, imaginable or not

Makes right that sufferance?

I cry liberty, sojourner.

For you do not know freedom

Until you have embraced it in your middle, past the knell

I cannot explain these things to one who has forgotten how to die.

Walking City

Souls race down the arteries

White lights shining

Stars fall into gaping pores

And lie there glistening

With every step, thunder quakes the bones

Fluted instruments of a marrow song,

Skyscrapers echoing with the wind of the spirit

As they rush down the halls in helix spirals

Whispering music in the genes.

Vagrant in the sinews

The billion residents occupy each cell

Eyes to the core,

Knowing panopticon

Wrapped in sheets of meat and gore

Little batteries in a circuit

Who cry ‘liberty’

And gaze up the Martello

To a singular heaven.

The heart is a factory

With iron on the forge

Pumping to every quarter

Tooling emotion from raw resource

Weaponing the city

Arms race as pens skitter

Drawing me in, pulling them out

We know the electric touch of cables on the spine

Coiling up to grey hemispheres

Where worlds are made up of shattered fragments

From the orbs of sun and shade

And the swirl of conch shell clatter.

Locked into the grid, fused and molten

The tenders burn bright, mixing into a singular

A bent mirror that views itself

Through an infinity of images

And a notion of

One.

Walking city,

I am you.

You are we.

We are all

All are free.

New Driving Playlist

The Times They Are A-Changin' ~ Bob Dylan

You Give A Little Love ~ Paul Williams

Utopian Futures ~ Kimya Dawson

Put On Your Sunday Clothes ~ Jerry Herman

Mr. Blue Sky ~ ELO

Everywhere I Go ~ Lissie

No One Ever Does ~ Saul Williams

Mad World ~ Adam Lambert

Eyes ~ Rogue Wave

Memories (Someone We'll Never Know) ~ Clint Mansell

We're Going Home ~ Clint Mansell

Ambush ~ Cris Velasco & Sascha Dikiciyan

Still Alive ~ Jonathan Coultan

Hallelujah ~ Leonard Cohen

Summer Overture ~ Clint Mansell

Mass Effect (Theme) ~ Jack Wall

The Kraken ~ Hans Zimmer

Maenam ~ Jami Sieber

Tell It By Heart ~ Jami Sieber

Framework for the perfect conversation with a stranger

Hello.

Hello.

My name is (x)

My name is yyyyy zzzzz.

What?

(slower) yyyyyyy

Oh! Hi!

Hello.

So what do you do yyyyy?

I am a writer. Fantasy and science fiction. Unpublished, I make money elsewhere. And you?

I'm an (x).

Oh? (Possible general knowledge related inquiry) / That must be fun. You enjoy it?

(Answer)

Okay.

You have an accent! Where are you from?

zzzzz. But I grew up in The City. Since I was two, I went back briefly,  but I've always had the accent. Yes, it's weird.

Oh. Wow.
It's so cold / hot! Aren't you cold / hot?

Are you seriously talking to me about the weather?

Um... maybe?

Look, I'm not going to die of cold / heat and neither are you. Yes, the weather will change and we can most make educated guesses about when that will happen. But it doesn't matter. The chances are it will be uncomfortable and both of us will survive it.

That's... true.

So now that that's been covered, how about we talk about something with some actual substance?

(Runs away screaming) / Err... okay?

What kind of soul are you?

Excuse me?

What kind of soul are you? What do you call yourself that best describes who you are?

I don't know. I guess I've never really thought about it.

You can think about it now, if you like.

I'm not sure I understand the question. I mean, I'm me.

Of course you are, but the idea of you isn't necessarily restricted to the time and space in which you live. I mean, here and now you are (x) the (x), but if you lived in a fantasy world, maybe you'd be a warrior or a wizard. Or if you lived in the future you could be a robot or an alien. And maybe when you look at yourself and ask, am I an (x) more than I'm a cyborg, the answer is that you're more of a cyborg, but you're living in a time and space where that's physically impossible, but not spiritually impossible.

I think I get it...

So what are you?

I don't really know. What are you?

I'm a voodoo cowboy.

A voodoo cowboy?

Yes.

What's that?

Someone who sees ghosts. Someone who likes to be a hero, but struggles to be one in a world where outlaws look much the same as the lawkeepers. Someone who fights things that aren't even real to other people.

You see ghosts?

I see emotions. I see people who act like zombies. I fight with my mind all the time. And I'm always on the edge of where everyone else is, walking into the sunset.

I can tell why you're a writer.

Can you? But the Voodoo Cowboy isn't the writer. When I write, I'm the Sixth World Librarian.

Wait - what?

I'm not only a soul, and I don't write with my soul. No more than you (x) with your soul. You (x) with your mind. My soul is the Voodoo Cowboy. My mind is The Sixth World Librarian.

But how does that work? Aren't your soul and your mind the same?

No.

But if not, then how does your soul think?

A soul doesn't think. A soul feels.

Oh. I guess.

Do you know what you are yet?

Uh... no.

Don't you think it's something you should know?

Wait. I mean, I know, I just don't have words for it like that. It isn't that simple.

Isn't it?

No! I mean people aren't just two words like that, people change and grow, the way they feel changes. That's how it works.

It isn't how I work.

But you change your mind, don't you? You can fall in and out of love, or sometimes when you get to know someone you like them more or less than when you started. You can love a song until it gets stuck in your head, and then it annoys you and you can't listen to it ever again.

I change my mind, yes, but just my mind. The way I think about things. Not the way I feel about them. If I love a song once, I will always love it. People too. If I don't like a person when I meet them, we will never connect through anything without dislike. I may spend time around them. I may devote time to thinking about what makes them, and how to understand them, but that initial feeling never goes away. Souls are immortal, aren't they?

Yes. But immortal and unchanging aren't the same.

They are. Change is death. You kill who you are to become something else. Don't tell yourself any different.

That's kind of harsh.

I'm a harsh kind of cowboy.

I still think you're wrong. I'm not one thing like that.

That's okay. You don't have to be. But it must be difficult, not knowing who you are from moment to moment.

I kind of want to hit you. It's like you're insulting me.

I've just agreed with you.

You've just tolerated me. That's different.

Is it?

Yes! Because you still think I'm wrong. You think I'm less than you are.

That's quite an awful lot to think. I've just met you. And for the most part I've been concentrating very hard on me and what I've been saying.

But it doesn't even matter to you. Nothing I do, because you already know how you feel about me. Didn't you just say that?

I did. And it doesn't. But why are you so concerned about what I feel?

Because that's how it works! People are supposed to find things they like about one another. They're supposed to talk about things they have in common. They're supposed to find people they like, and who like them. Otherwise they're just...

Some quiet guy who sits in the corner, waiting for cues?

Yes! And that's what you are!

And what's wrong with knowing what I like?

Because you don't really! I mean, people aren't what they appear to be when you first meet them. Some people don't make the best first impressions, and other people lie to make themselves seem nicer than they really are. If you don't talk to them, if you don't find out, it's like they're empty. And you're filling them up with the ideas in your head. But none of it's real. You're just projecting yourself on to them.

I like my own company.

But that's selfish. It doesn't benefit anyone.

It benefits me.

How?

It gives me time to think more. And time to observe. You're right, people do live to make first impressions, and try to control every impression that comes later. Talking to them is what gives them a chance to do that. I want to see what people really are, so I make them feel alone. Seeing them alone isn't really seeing 'them', but it makes them drop pretense. It's a start. Talking comes later.

You're talking to me now.

You tried to talk to me about the weather. It was a point of desperation.

So you'd prefer not talking to me?

No. This has been quite pleasant. I like to talk about things that matter. Not flavors or likes or anecdotes, though some stories can be good - not even books, or movies. I want to talk about ideas. About how spirituality is like quantum physics. How music isn't just one language, but loads of them. I want to talk about all your thoughts on (x)ing, why you chose it to be one of the largest parts of your life. I want to talk about what souls are and what art is and how to make the world better.

So why don't you?

I get there and I just... can't. I'm not shy. I'm quite articulate when I need to be. But something else stops me. It's reality, I think. Everything is so much better in my head. More alive, more focused, more vital. And then I open my eyes and everything is ordinary. It's small and proper, locked in place by a million laws, like planets whose orbits feel no shock but slow entropy. And the energy, the sheer effort of bridging that gap and moving the heavens makes me shaky and tired. And then I think I don't really need that. Everything I really want is already right here in my head. So I sit. And I think. And when it's too much to contain, I write. And I think that's sad, but I get by. And I think to myself, 'maybe next time.'

But you're doing it now, aren't you? Talking to me is how you want to talk to everybody. So you've done it.

I haven't. You're too perfect. I know you aren't real, stranger. You're just another way to pass the time inside my head while everyone's talking about bands and being drunk and how they're doing in school.

Wait - I'm not real?

Nope. Sorry.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about that.

It's a good thing. Being surreal is so much better. As I told you, it's better in my head than anywhere else.

But I want to be real.

I want you to be real too. I'll keep trying, I promise. Whenever I have the will, whenever I have the energy. Some people are like conductors, and it's easier to connect with them. But it's the other ones I worry about. Because I want to push them out of alignment most of all.

Maybe next time.

Maybe next time.

Heady vapours swirl around me, cutting through the verse
Of endless empathy for a gas mask, tripping on a curse
So we say, and so it is,
For now at least.

I never new the weirdway, but I walked it anyway, and any way I liked to walk.
Quickstep. Hopped scotch and segue. Ran it. Bounced it. Swam a while. Breathed it in.
Colours swirl around me, gentle purple, 'lectric blue,
Acid green, vitriolic, cutting through each hue.
Sometimes I think my eyes are rotting, so I might stare through ghosts ever after,
See the wraithe's way, spectral lights and swamp-fires surround me, fireworks for the fifth dimension
Which is that - rhyme?
If so, they'll have to deal with the disaster
Of every line I say.
Tempered worlds try confound me, chaos can't feel right, because it's chaos. Tension.

The night is young, but growing colder.
I stare, but I can't fit through the screen.
 I'm not bright enough.
~

Ahem. This is some instantaneous poetry. because I have itchy eyes and a stuffy nose and that makes it hard to work on essays & stories and things.

We run though quicksand walls through the halls of grasping dreams,
Fighting reams of soundproof souls, whose barricade ripples without rip, plays without playing,
Slays without slaying the harbingers of night's rapture,
'Til all else is nonsensical, reprehensible slurry of half-thought vowels, shot through bowels of crude digestion, harking way to quicksand walls, through halls of grasping dreams,
we scream, and find ourselves falling sidelong,
Run fast enough and life's a pit, halls are holy, so they told me, but truth is they're just holes
So skydive, stranger, hold on tight, falling through the endless night, a hug is halfway to a fight,
deadlocked in a duel,
push away and kick your feet, fall back to the line,
of quicksand walls, and choking travesty, traversed by cowboys on the dark way,
In deserts of the flat-plane land of thought's demise,
Tell them lies,
And they'll call them stories, making it less awkward to live with,
So they say,
And still we play the game, down the snakes, up the ladders,
Down the halls whose quicksand walls
Suck
'til past them tripping on your face
through the desert's smooth embrace
You walk upon the next face, tripping off the tongue to places & faces new and rough,
Twitching muscles tell a story, maybe sad and maybe gory,
Maybe light & happy too,
Maybe just a face.
I wonder,
Which is more permeable?
Less the flesh, more the soul,
Howl at darkness, and the moon,
But it's the howl, not the moon,
That makes the night.
~

Russia and You

Sometimes life is like a Russian novel. More so, the more I read Russian novels. I love Russia, at least as it was before the Soviets. There's a sense of greatness about it. Of indelible sacrifice, as though every minute is subject to the painful weight of a world on its back. I don't think anyone is so aware of the possibilities of humanity than the Russian authors. America is content with the thaumaturgy and fantasia that come with wealth and power. Russia looks on the same and sees choices like charity or greed, duty or squander, an overwhelming responsibility to be great that crushes most humans and grinds them flat. There are highs and lows in Russia. Palaces and poverty. Drunkenness or starvation.

They say, I think, or I say anyway, that the class system exists to serve the middle class. The proletariat live difficult and unfulfilled lives, struggling with all there worth to climb out of their problems, reach elsewhere. The upper class are fulfilled to a point of excess, completely out of control in that they have nothing to live for and nowhere to go unless they go about assigning some arbitrary task to themselves, be it governance of others or personal pleasure.
And in the middle we work. We see that we are capable of worse and capable of better. The middle is the place to be if you're looking for meaning in life.

Russia has no notion of the middle class. I think that might be a part of it. Everything is desperate, everything greater and more polar by the elimination of that middle ground. I think when you're cold and starving the idea of owning something like a caftan or a horse becomes ridiculous, not even something to desire. And when you have an estate and a title and an inheritance, the idea of suffering becomes ridiculous. Princes can go about the work of the serfs effortlessly and enjoy doing so, because work and life and living are just an amusing sort of game.

So wherever you stand, it's ridiculous. Why not fall in love in a heartbeat? Why not fall out of it the very next moment? Why not engage in some trivial cruelty just to see what happens by it? Why not bet your last copek? What's one more days bread, if tomorrow you will have to go without? Let go of any prospect of salvation, save some time. If you are to be destitute, if you have to reach that point, why wait?

The material does not matter. That's what I see in all this. The rich get poorer, and the poor get poorer. People die, even. But not from hunger. From nihilism. From madness, or chance. And it is these things that are the true stage in the lives of myself and all the Natashas and Raskolnicovs and Bezuhovs. Life isn't a struggle for independence or security or peace, so why bother? It's a struggle to stay on the raft when the wind is blowing you turvy and you can't find anything to live for and everything seems stupid and cruel and falls to pieces. It's about holding on to your integrity when you're the only one who seems to have a use for it. It's about being a witness, an observer, without destroying the experiment by the act of observation.

And I'm starting to learn that it's not Russia. Russia's just a place that happened to notice these things, but they exist everywhere. Up in a tree by lonely parking lot, in crowded cafes, in small and fettered lodgings. There are endless moments when a couch or a bed takes on the qualities of that raft, at once becoming a trap and a safe haven, and I lie there contemplating everything beyond the couch, not daring to touch it because I'm not a fish and the ocean isn't made for me. So I'll sit there brooding, at once very large and very small, and wrestle with the notion of greatness, trying to reconnect with the part of me that writes... because writing is like turning that raft into a spaceship. Why swim? Why bother? You'll never reach land. You have to make your own world. That's what it's all about, really. The ability to acknowledge that though the world may be a tiamatian crazy mess, it need not be your mess. You can pick yourself up, set a world aside, do some good, love. Those who do so are the true heroes of Russian prose.