No, don't slip away! Relief, my most cherished emotion, I've worshipped at your alter, why must you always abandon me right when I am no longer scared of your disappearance - even though I knew it was coming all along? Fuck and run. You just left me with the expectation of orgasm and the reality of desperation and longing - much like that for physical release or emotional intimacy or ownership, in a sense, of a person's being. At least temporarily. Usually a
specific person's being if the situation has gotten to the point of pain.
Temporarily is my least favorite word. I'm trying to be part water / part stone. Detached. Free. I will not depend on others for my joy. I must delight in being the water. Sounds easy enough. But how the fuck do I delight in being a rock? As a metaphor, it's steadfast, unmoving, changes slightly after years of water flowing over it, but never loses itself. Allows whatever flows around or over it to just not really affect it - detached. As a thing to take delight in being? Boring as fuck. I'll be a river but fuck a fucking rock. Am I the only one in the world who feels like having an ego is more fun than attaining zen? And exactly how horrible does that make me? I'm sure when I'm 50 the idea of a thoughtless mind will appeal greatly to me, but right now I want to want things then fulfill those desires. I am like the anti-buddhist - yet I am a vegan and a pacifist who deals in karma and kindness. I've been told I'm confusing. I agree.
I'm grasping tight to the relief, hoping for a larger well soon. The government will do everything in their power to prevent that from happening. This is a Boardwalk Empire and our Kings and Queens are Jack Daniels and Marlboro Menthol Ultra-lites. Our godfather is the Atom Bomb. Our favorite food is Apple Pie and our national passtime is baseball. Our body count is high, our awareness low. They like it that way. We don't seem to mind.
Steak
June 11, 2012 12:33
He sees through you. He sees into you. Into your barren soul surrounded by a "vehicle", as buddhists would call it. fascinated by baroque, by displays of the dramatic, by death and drama, even, you'd hesitantly admit when drunk, by blood, because blood is life, and life is animated by, if nothing else, a flair for the dramatic.
She shared this flair - by the age of 8 her forehead had become well-acquainted with the back of her hand. Sometimes the only power a woman has is to make a scene. She knew this all too well.
He sees your lies. He sees that man you who gave you such a rush - that man you didn't know, but let think he knew you - dumbass. He sees that time you looked at your sick Grandmother with contempt when you were nine years old because, for a split second, you resented her for taking up time spent in Florida which might've, in your mind, been better spent at Disney World. He sees that time you got yourself off after your boyfriend fell asleep. He saw your fake orgasm too. What's more, he heard your fake "I love you" - in the opinion of many, a much bigger lie than any which can be told with one's body. He drinks whiskey because he is a cowboy. He might even wear a hat. The cherry of his cigarette burns as red as his retinas, infrared lasers which penetrate your eyeballs, giving you an uneasy sense that he knows too much.
What if he sees it all? Everything? What judgment would he bring upon me - is he
capable of bringing upon me? I don't know who this man is or where he got his power, but I know it is borrowed. He was not born with it; it is not his. He takes it from me - from those he judges - and he knows it. Without those from whom that which those have is taken, that which those have taken does not exist. We know where the power originates. We know we are needed. We are the overfed, hormone-filled cows made to suffer lives of misery so that wealthy people can dine on steak - our flesh. He uses our own power against us, a form of deception much hated by Americans who were alive in 2001. He lives off of steak. I survive because of their secret and unspoken need for me. I must be the lower 50% so that he may call himself the upper. I must feel guilty of my sexual indiscretions so that he will feel comfortable with his sexual inexperience. I must be a woman so that he can be the man.
It is at the witching hour - 4am - that my pain and longing screams out the loudest. I, perplexed, wonder whether it counterintuitively chooses to scream when no one can hear but me or if I just don't hear it all day during the din of bullshit and sunlight. Is it my loss of distraction - or is it the silence itself drawing these fears as close to my breast as a nursing child - my thoughts wander to nurturing. Something I have always wanted but rarely gotten - but I can get sex with a look. I hear the radio blaring its agreement: "So I called up Marie, she'd have sex for free, but for 10 bucks an hour she'd listen to me" - how does Butch Walker know me so well? Butch Walker of Cartersville? But he's not of Cartersville any more than I am from Roswell or Alpharetta - we are both children of this city. Another line blazes through my brain: "Oh, Atlanta, please need me like I need you, let your sweaty embrace open wide..." - Oh, Atlanta,
please need me.
I want everything - coffee, sedatives, laxatives, cigarettes, heroin, and sex. I want anything. If I can believe in it for 5 seconds, I'll take it. This bloody battle plays its way out in my head at a 20 minute lag behind reality - No sleep or food for over 20 days. I see past events of the day in dreamlike states, asking people whether or not they even happened, assuming the negative - it's always the positive. I cry for sleep - I get none. My soul I keep - but not for fun.
Aprei moi le deluge - A selfish turn of phrase which has clung like dryer sheets to the lexicon of the more cultured members of our culture, or a declaration of an intuitive sense of impending destruction and one's own imminent, non-abstract mortality? More DiVinci, less Salvador Dali. More real. Her eyes follow me wherever I go. Melting clocks tick louder as heartbeats become fainter.
Human of the year - congratulations. Outside the cars are beeping out a song just in your honor. All mankind are now your brothers. But you don't speak to your brothers, so I'll attempt to make contact. Why don't they want me? People want very badly for me to kiss away the pain they can't even recognize within themselves, but I am driven to self-destruction by loneliness - who will kiss away my pain? I have no mother, but I want it to be sexual anyways, so I'm not bothered. I have no lover, but I want it to be motherly anyways, so I'm not bothered.
Remember when we went "mining for gold" in Dahlonega? We were so excited - we might find REAL gold. It ended up being a sandbox within which some employee had scattered sharks' teeth. Remember when they sent us out into the world? We were so excited - we thought we might find REAL life. It ended up being a masquerade ball at which masks were never removed; identities never revealed; truths never spoken - it was a lie all along.
Remember when I found your heart? I had no pretense, no promises, no specific hope, no expectations. I saw you sparkle in my peripheral vision before I glimpsed your golden light. I dug slowly but instantly into your chest cavity, found a heart, delighted in it, went mining, and found gold. My search was over. Such has been said by many a fool. Cubic zerconias are the fools' gold of commitment - diamonds grind them to bits, the battle isn't even fair. Give me a diamond or give me nothing - I can't bear to watch our love erode.
Sometimes I see visions of future sandcastles made by us and our children - colorful buckets and shovels and smiles - when the ocean inevitably destroys them, we do not mourn. We build another. We must never let our love erode, but if it does, we must use our colorful tools to rebuild and restructure immediately. We will add a hidden chamber to our castle this time - one which keeps our secrets safe from the grasp of harsh artificial light and the judgment of the faint colored glow of gorgeous stained glass windows, beautiful children born into a war that doesn't belong to them. Fools' gold has no market value, it can only serve as a memento of times gone and done. If one can't afford gold to gift a lover, one can't afford a gift but love itself. Love itself is more than enough - it is completion; climaxing and beginning anew simultaneously. You've loved before... maybe once or twice, maybe... but never THIS love. Your eyes have sharpened, your senses have become keen, your heart adept; you won't fall for fools' gold this time. This is your mantra. "Not this time." Brush, swish, spit, repeat.
I'm remembering things, feelings from my past. They haunt me, they hurt me. They overcome me with sadness, wash over all my wounds with a salty singe. Watching the clock and counting down the seconds - hospital time always and only happens in seconds - until dilaudid will be pushed into my blood with a syringe by a person I haven't met yet. Shift change can only mean two things: fear or relief. As I lay, body beaten and bruised, in my hospital cot, my mother snores beside me on a folded out chair which cannot accommodate her 5'2" frame. I remain hurt by her betrayal but equally hurt thinking of her watching her daughter suffer tremendously and needlessly, ceaselessly, now coming to a head in the hellish pseudo-reality that I assume makes her wonder the same things as me. Dilaudid has long been my stated favorite drug, but it's not a simple mistress. Drugs give and take a-fucking-way. Especially these - synthesized heroin for the injured and sick. My marijuana lays hidden in my poolhouse lest anyone discover it, yet I take this heroin every four hours. I think because you don't have to smoke it? RUSH. My neck is overcome with the recently refamiliarized feeling of paralysis, simply unable to move my head under the weight of the drug. Ahhhh... My pain melts under its weight for 1,200 individual seconds. Those were ok. Familiar. Soothing, even. Then it drops you. Right back into the beaten and bloodied tarhole from which your beaten ass was dragged into a fleeting euphoria. What happens for the rest of the seconds feels UNFAIR. No, cruel. I again think of childhood trauma. My life is exactly what my child self expected and most feared, although my childhood mind was not privy to information that would allow her to create such a dystopian future; she was not yet familiar with Ray Bradbury, plus an almost unfairly heavy pressure to set myself free from bondage. My child self existed in terror. My now self is supposed to get the fuck over it. My now self feels equally as defenseless and equally as abused, although nothing could truly match the early days. 1,800 seconds til my next dose. I recall the frailty of childhood as a tiny blonde girl beats on the windows from inside her small house, screaming and crying and trying to stop the violence against her family outside. This flashes on my hospital screen in colors that should really all just be blood red. Death insists.
I wish I had the strength - or weakness - to tell myself you're going to save me.
Capable of saving me. You're just another fucked up wreck with no hope of being saved yourself. If I could draw, I'd draw you a map of our demise, both as individuals and as a unit. If I could dance, I'd choreograph a number in whatever is the saddest dance that speaks the most of sorrow and parting to foreshadow it for you. I already know - getting caught off-guard is one of the worst parts. Maybe that's why I'm glad I already know.
Just because someone will hang out with you and do self-destructive things does not mean they're your soulmate. Let's just call this a hard lesson learned.
There is a darkness that supersedes night. It’s the feeling of the first bite of crisp Autumn air, some night in mid-October, when your senses are flooded into remembering you’re alive. The sharp gasp that becomes a deep, all-encompassing breath; the chasm down which you fall, from which, once you have fallen, there is no emergence. At least not until Spring, when the chrysalises become butterflies and the girls become women, and the dreams of Winter begin to come to fruition, blooming with the dandelions. For, while they may be weeds, no flower is as lovely as a wish.
So, while the girls remain girls, the homeless chop firewood and dream of a hearth. Summer will fade, with its chimes of laughter and heaving hot breaths, and the Autumnal twinkle of Mother Nature’s eye will light up at the sight of the dance of the leaves with the wind, a sensual play of the season’s passions.
Sometimes my soul seeks the solitude of the woods; the consistency of
the rushing river water. My mind is ecstatic with the buzzing neon of
city lights, but my soul longs for the dark star-spangled cyclorama of
the untarnished night sky that is only visible in areas adjacent to
pastures of horses and fields of endangered ladyslippers and magnolia
trees.
LA pulls me towards it with promises whispered from the lips of a
drug-addled wannabe model who desires to take me surfing at his secret
spot and buy me vegan gyros; LA calls to me with its party culture and
its true west, true sunsets, its glitz and its glamour which ends,
inevitably, in red blood.
NYC beckons me to dance with it, to open my mind to the vast amounts
of knowledge and information streaming streetlight to streetlight,
beggar to homeless woman, exhaling itself into the night air and
infiltrating the psyche of every resident. Its busyness, its feverish
rush to accomplish, to experience, and to witness the heartbeats and
breaths of its citizens, the consistent buzz of activity, and a
general air of endless, breathless possibilities of hanging out the
sunroofs of limousines in transit bring me alive with wonder.
ATL is raging with the sparkle of city lights and the hum of infinity.
I come to her when all others turn me away and know that she will
accept me into her lush green soundscape of natural wonder, beauty,
and rock ‘n’ roll. The undead ghosts of Michael Stipe and Kevn Kinney
hover over my head as I pluck strings and sing things in El Caballo
Negro, cheers all around.
I don’t fit in but I belong. As for where I’ll end up, I will follow my song.
Each person appreciates a different aesthetic. Some love muted tones,
minimalism, the trademarks of hipster culture, pastels, or the
black-and-red of the horror-punk aesthetic. Sometimes I wonder which
aesthetic I appreciate most and how it would best be described. But
sometimes, I know the answer to both of those questions, and all I can
say is that the answer to the latter is "It cannot."
It can be loosely attributed to various elements of style in the
pop-culture of our modern world; to music videos, photoblogs, fashion
magazines, clothing trends, highly-stylized movies and TV shows and
even bands, but it can never be pinpointed. All it can ever be is a
mental montage of photographs of skinny girls in oversized clothing,
trollops through strawberry fields in rare un-fitful dreams,
sepia-tones bleeding through my memories of beaches both real and
imagined, imagery of myself sitting on the ground holding my purse
after imbibing alcohol and recreational drugs at small parties with
large ambitions in small rooms meant for the coolest of the cool, and
flashes of new bohemian culture accompanied by child-like
accessorizing to accompany a new sense of child-like wonder present in
the young adults of generation Y. All it can ever be is all I can
ever be.
I'm needy and bloodless, a vampire trying to feed from myself. Into
the darkness I go, night after night, necessitous and seeking;
desperate for blood, for life force. I can't find it within myself,
so I become another, separate person - a creature of the night; a
bloodsucking beast thirsting for life force through blood. My own. Can
I taste within my own blood what I can't feel coursing through my
veins? Can the bright blood-red contrast the darkness of my
desperation starkly enough to light up the night?
Everything seems magnified by the quiet majesty of the wee hours; those hours in which I feel a conflicting numbness between my desire for sleep and my drive to succeed. It’s 2AM and I’m drunk on my own potential.
I write a lyric, sketch a face, find self-soothing, lose it again. The clock is ticking and the intimidating sneer of my 8 o’clock wake-up time is in my face again, like it has been during so many other nights filled with fitful longing for hazy dreams.
To sleep
is to succeed at this juncture. Where does that leave me? A lonesome warrior fighting a conflict-filled battle for her own soul. Lay me down, let me sleep, so I might have my soul to keep.
