by Tomorrow's Man
I spent the last month with the thoughts in my brain fucking like sharks. I'd let you know the result, but there's too goddamned much chum in my sinuses for me to even know my own blood at this point.
I pulled a strand from my dark suit that then cried like the cold baby I picked up off the corner late Friday evening; of course, I told no one about the baby I found, because no one believes you when you're honest -- I was just trying to warm a body and keep a life alive, but it could have been seen as smothering a soul, eh?
I live for love. I believe in lives, and the cubed Rubik Mad Libs I get from dealing with them every day. Yet, so many question my intentions.... Why?
Because, of course, I'm a human. And as a human, I'm untrustable. But -- of course -- it applies to the untrusting, too. They avoid acknowledging that; the fact that they are judged by their own mirror as dispassionately as they try to judge me.
So be it. I'm just trying to save babies, be they humans, kittens, kisses, thoughts, or a pony's first shaky steps.
I'm just trying to save babies, forgetting to be human, forgetting to just save myself. I refuse to live simply to save myself; I'm not important enough to be the only thing left. It is about trusting all; nothing is important enough to be the Only Thing.
Just ask God; then smile when you wonder why we're here.
The Patriots are in first.
The Bruins are in first.
The Celtics, whom I could not really give 1/2 a rat's left buttock about, are a game out, with two games in hand (virtual first, potentially).
Yet, as December approaches, the seventeen sports-fan cells in my body sigh, Gosh, my do hate the Yankees.
Thanksgiving Day: A Diary
10AM - 12 PM
2 cups of coffee. Get the blood moving.
Thick rope of string cheese, the first thing to hit my belly with cruel intentions.
Gerbil-sized chunk of colby cheese.
Teaser-hunk of turkey dark meat big enough that I'm sure a live turkey could not have walked comfortably without it.
Chinese-throwing-star wheel of venison sausage, w/ matchbox car of muenster cheese.
First ever deep friend pork rind. Also, last ever.
Two potato chips. Can't eat just one, of course.
12 PM - 2 PM
Beer #1. I waited til 12:01 PM. I'm a guest, after all.
Corn chips. Potato chips. Already losing control around the snack table. Must try to hold on til dinner, being served circa 2:30.
First deviled egg. First muttering of, "Fuck it. I'm doomed." Second deviled egg.
12:22 PM: Animal Fat Digestion Respite, Part One.
Begin Beer #2.
More chips. Deviled egg #3.
End Beer #2. Begin SoCo & 7 #1.
Countdown: 1 hour to dinner. Celebrate with two gall bladder chunks of cheddar.
SoCo & 7 #2.
2:38 PM - 2:48 PM
Huge frigging wad of turkey the size of, well, a turkey.
Devil's Tower pile of mashed potatoes with butter, gravy, salt, pepper, and angioplasty.
1/2 a Buick of Semolina & Cheese Pasta Salad in thick mayo & coronary sauce.
2 buttered rolls, the size of dumplings, the density of Brunswicks.
Stuffing. Aptly named.
Meat Coma. Carb Coma. Catatonic Food Paralysis. Discover at some point I ate my MedicAlert bracelet. Can feel my pulse in my split ends. Far far too full of far too quickly consumed food.
Deviled egg #4.
2:51 PM
Chocolate Eclair Pie the size of most of Luxembourg. Deep autonomic throaty gargles of "Why God oh why" from under the kitchen table. I'm not sure if it is me saying it. I can't open my eyes. The lids are stuffed with potatoes. Fade to black.
3:51 PM
Where was I? Exit Hypoglycemic Tryptophan Coma. Think, "I can not believe I ate all that food. I can not believe I ate all that food, and not a bite of ham."
4:08 PM
Still immobile. Vow off food but for beansprouts and lite water. As I said last year, next year I WILL NOT GORGE.
4:33 PM
Time to leave. Hugs all around. Limp to closet. Mincingly put on jacket that I am sure fit me when I got here. Stare with mix of wonder and loathing at the mountains of leftovers that remain on the table.
Stare a bit longer.
4:35 PM
Deviled egg #5.
The Nightmare, Pt. I
I prayed she would not look up. The little girl, the young black girl, maybe eleven, staring down at the covered remains of her mutilated then discarded older sister. I knew that when she looked up those 51 stone steps -- when she used my eyes as witness to bring her gaze to bear on the world outside of that stone cell -- all would be driven mad.
I had never seen her before. But I knew she was here, in this hospital, down below all the floors, seething down near Hell. I had never seen her, but I felt her. And I had to bring them, the doctors, the sinners, down there. To free her.
To unleash her on the world.
The Nightmare, Pt. II
I led the pair of doctors to the basement. We dropped down the three floors of the hospital in an ancient wood-frame elevator, really just a dangling wood floor on a rope. The basement was dank and dark, all harsh grey concrete, wet with death.
The female doctor waved her flashlight down corridors, saying to me, "See? Nothing." I pointed into the dark behind us and said, "Look down there." She waved the beam of light into the corner behind the elevator.
Back there was the stone staircase that carved through the earth to a single stone cell below the foundation of the hospital. 51 steps down. I knew that before I knew it was there. Bakc there was where the flickering light caught the dead, exposed foot of the girl who had been tossed down those stairs; that dead girl, the light caught her, and her baby sister staring down at the corpse.
The Nightmare, Pt. III
I just kept praying she would not look up. I just kept praying the little girl, standing there over her dead sister, would not look up at me. If she did, I knew I would go mad. Even as ghastly and horrific as I could imagine her face, I knew I could not comprehend the horror if her eyes turned my way.
"Elephants & Flowers"
How can he find a savior?
How can he find a good talker, to give him a good talking-to?
I can fall in love, all over again, and again. Just watching you.
A picture's painted in red and gold on a bare stage. It's all heat and sweat, all dancers shaking in costumes. All of this is the act of stripping down, denied.
All of this is the act of falling in love, over and over again, denied.
I think I'm gonna fall in love tonight, again. And tomorrow. Again. I am going to sweat without sorrow, I'm going to look at fear and lick its shoulder and make it cringe away at my audacity. Oh, the audacity of this shy angel!
Strip down. God damn it, do it, before the flowers trample all the elephants to oblivion. Strip down.
This is my body. Maybe I'm not Jesus, maybe I'm not, but here, I offer Me to you just as honestly.
I am so far away from everything I have ever been. I can reach up and touch it like the dry skin atop pudding; I used to be so sweet, yet just past my prime.
Now.
Now?
Now, I'm the pudding. Oh, motherfucker, am I ever the pudding.
My new air freshener smells exactly like the belches this very old woman whom I used to work with, Dolores her name was, shot in a gooey jet from her dentures each time she ate undermicrowaved 'brie and jerked vension' Lean Pockets.
I really wished they could have fixed that microwave. Gotten the cheese of the light, at least.
Pixel is snoring.
Pixel is snowing.
Pixel is rowing.
Pixel is roaring.
Pixel is boring.
Pixel is boating.
Pixel is floating.
Pixel is flaking.
Pixel is flaky.
My cat is snoring.
It is a beautiful day, more sunny lies before the ice age drops. With that, I will pick up my book that has a man on a toilet and read it near the things I pulled from that box of meat I found in the lobby.
Good day.
It took a while, it took a long time, but I finally woke up to the external epiphany -- while eschewing my insecurities and fears in favor of my motherfucking immensity -- that it's better to be lonely than let someone you think loves you keep you bruised.
A Letter I Found This Week, Coincidentally
No Sleep, On The Train, 11/17/93
There you are and I finally figured out how to write it all down...I hope. Dear Diary...dear Beth, dear Matt, dear Mike, dear all the rest--it has at last come to this. There will be revelation and swearing FUCK FUCK FUCK okay, out of the way, a slight idea of what to expect, but don't have any expectations before the train starts moving...
I raised myself on caffeine and fear and a sense of Burroughs' dog nipping at the corner of my eye but enough about you time will pass in this 'memoir' to state and erection, all about fucking and fear, dishonesty and love, and other synonym pairs--
Peel my skin--
Always red underneath--
Will it always heal? I am constantly trying to find out as it deteriorates to muddled grays and browns, obvious rot and decay, bit I can not let it go, a loss of part of me or just too lazy? For you to decide. 4 U 2 decide.
I can't tell ive been awake for four and a half days, over 117 hours, and it is strange because it started with work work work but about 50 ago i found out that someone was trying to have me killed, or was trying to kill me, or some such thing. I didn't take it as true all the way course except for a little paranioa i mean give a guy a break huh? I have been prepared for this for a while and I was already on my way to how-do-you-say-wigging-out when the brick came crashing through the store window missing my head by three inches of course the glass didn't I ate much of it but yes that's why I'm a little weird right now.
It said "YOU DIE" on it. The brick, not the glass.
Oh, Matt, I'm starting a book, but I don't want it to end. One thing I've always known to tell your own story it must end in death. Perhaps I can change the story in progress so that it is no longer about me, but then who or what must die? The potential to murder.
The influence in my skin like salt the influence ricochet endlessly growing harder I can't find the Goddamn words endlessly
Influence is mine, sayeth the Lord
And I'm breathing deep the gathering gloom Ray, Justin; An ambience settles in, a texture, an influence
a virus
an inspiration.
Later i'll describe my Beast of Body, by whom or which I am quite possessed.
i'm sure i'll never enter anyone again, celibate as a pregnant nun...
so iive decided to tell a story but not about me.
i'll be alive at the end.
Stop It with My Language, Already
I just heard the stupidest fucking thing I have ever heard in my life. On the TNT network, I just caught a commercial that ran like this: "FOR THE FIRST TIME ON TNT, MORGAN FREEMAN AND MONICA POTTER IN THE GROUNDBREAKING WORLD BROADCAST NETWORK PREMIERE OF 'ALONG CAME A SPIDER,' THIS FRIDAY, SATURDAY AND SUNDAY, ONLY ON TNT."
If you can show me how something can premiere three times in three days, I will happily show you how to fit a 54-inch flatscreen television -- plus TiVo box, and - for bitterly good measure - every different marketing-addict DVD version of Lord of the Rings -- right up your ass.
Hey, don't mind me! Have yerself a day that feels like a premiere! Have it over and over again everyday!!!
I absolutely refuse to acknowledge that something did not happen today that never happened before.
Rising and falling, rising and falling,
just like the measure of the weather
outside,
just like the value of a work of art.
It is in every chest
that rise and fall
of every breath with every heart
beneath beating.
It is every static smile lying above a frown -
lying about a frown - that stops my chest
from moving.
It is every place I never fit despite
all my exhaling,
and even when I am standing tall
my chest is always falling. (Maybe one day
it will be worth it to think of it as always rising.)
Rising and falling,
rising and falling,
just like the measure of the weather
inside,
just like the value
of a work
of heart.
I'm more than heavy limbs and a bag of meat. I'm more than the muscles that clench my wrists into bleeding wads of bad poetry. I'm more than my left arm singed from thrusting a flaming sword into the fatherly right eye of God. I'm more than it's thought my desires to be. There's the mistake so many have made -- I'm much more than you'd think my desires to be, a truth that lies in the fatherless left eye of me.
Something is odd about the light today. About the sun. The way it is glaring onto the huge piles of leaves everywhere, raked together so diligently during yesterday's springtime hiatus from the cold. Those piles of leaves, they're on every corner, at the end of every driveway and sidewalk, some three, four feet high; and the wind this afternoon is supposed to be gale force, upwards of 35 miles per hour.
Maybe the sun is glaring down like this to make a point -- to show how fleeting so much effort can be. To show that all of the calories burned yesterday, all of the work completed, all of those high spirits and good feelings of accomplishment can be wiped out with a wind.
Everything can be wiped out so simply; maybe there is a good lesson in that. Maybe I should pay attention to that lesson: despite everything I try to do, if I hear that wind blowing, if I see the sun glaring too sharply, if I read a few choices sentences on a screen that truly define everything I have been so naively missing, I should take care to remember that lesson.
And maybe you should, too.
Dear whomever this may concern,
Im in truble and I need help please. I can realy sing real nice. You can belive it or not but I know I can sing and every body is jellouse of me. Give me a chance to prove myslef. I could make you verry rich. All so when I put close on. I look like a model a number one model. Please give me a chance to prove myslef. Iv seen girls model on t.v. and they don't even measure up to me at all. I never had a car so I coulden't go places. I diden't even finish school. I quite in the 6th grade. I realy em a gift from God. You can realy belive it or not. But Iv got a gifts from God. And thats for sure. I can even bake home made bread and yeast muffens. Please help me be rich so I can help people out. I whant to help the poor people. And I don't care what race they are or not. I know I could realy make alot of poeple rich! And that's for sure. When I sing I don't need music at all. That's how gifted I em.
Im living at a mentel place called a group home. They take blood out of me every week and all so they make me take 500 mgs every night. They have metel things in my head and they realy realy hurt when I am bad. I am not bad they sey I am. They tie me down and use leckrisity and I get sick and can't see. Some of them trying to touch me when Iem tyed down. I all ready cut my arm & leg and neck. Please help me out. Thats not all they did to me. Theire nothing but anamels. Theire worser then anamels. I have 9 sissters and 2 brothers and none of them would come and see me or help me out. Please help me my name is
Medallions
The small victories you clutch bleeding to keep your sanity in one peace, holding onto cake and candles as the ice cream drips through your fingers, and you're screaming, you're screaming, and you hear someone screaming and it's you
it's you.
Do you find yourself in tears these days, surprised but not knowing why?
Do you find yourself afraid of the daylight, the dark night, the bitter bitter truth?
Are you always wondering what it is that is happening to you?
Do you feel that your heart is slowing, struggling to keep it's beat?
Do you fear time as the enemy, grinding you toward the end?
Over into that abyss you are so afraid to fall, whats down there could be failure or faith, and as the dark opens it's eyes around you, you can hear a voice screaming, you hear a voice screaming,
you hear someone screaming and it's you
it's you.
Where do these ghosts come from, these that leap from the bottle and turn my loving arms into spiders teeth? Im venomous, but only to those I love. Is this my life, to teach others lessons about whom not to love? So, I depart, this time further back and faster. Pull out of this circle. Centrifugal force. Centrifugal self-hatred, and Im a gyroscope, spinning away. Check out my shadow on the moon. It is my destiny, to destroy light. Truly cursed.
A Playground Full of Daisies then Thin Lithium Blood of Madmen Smile through Tearing Pain Razor-Sharp Love and Devoured by Wolves Vomit Black in the Snow The Memories Staircase Climb Steps of Bone Collapse in Horrors Daddy's Hands Writhe in Pain Confessional Room The Grunting Priest Explodes The Result Scared of Night Scared of Day Alive by Virtue of Fear of Death Blind and Dumb while Within the Mind A Forgotten Playground Exists, Full of Daisies.
"Good Morning World!" He shouted to the colorless masses, "Have I a need to know you!"
Broken eyes, amber tears, but He felt that there must be joy found somewhere within these billions from a simple Clown like Him. He pursed His lips, scratched at an itch, then bellowed to the billions below:
"LOVE!"
A few glanced His way, many of those with looks of animosity or derision, sarcasm, faceit. He sensed that the wolfen smiles did not understand and believed the misconceptions that mutated across the rest of His majestic tour.
Could it be the same here...? No! It could be nothing that a simple Clown like him couldn't shake from their grey souls! Again He tried, louder:
"JOY! HAPPINESS!"
Similarly dark looks, but all new faces as the world was turning. He began to sense, He began to see, the broken eyes, the amber tears, the grey grey souls drowning in fear drowning in
"DESPAIR!"
Many slowed, many looked to the sky, toward His shout. Many wanted suddenly to hear more. They cried out as one, turning in their minds, shifting in their beds. He watched them below as they struggled with the ultimate truth and pierced it with bullets, blades, and chemicals.
They understood this summons from on high as the sad old frustrated Clown screamed silently into each of their heads. They were swept East with time as the bellows arrived:
"POVERTY! HATRED!"
"FEAR!!"
Faces came alive as they whirled by, faces that knew, faces that wanted to know the pain, faces that had resolved to accept their sad end since before they had been born. The sad old Clown realised the way of this world, so much like so many others stretched across the expanse of His infinite tour. He whispered, resolved:
"Uselessness."
The heaving mass sighed back an eternal "YES."
His face cracked as if worn out plaster, and the minute pieces of the old Clowns facade fell thousands of miles, dissolving into the seas without a ripple, dusting the sad heads of the world, a storm of dust tears unknown and quickly forgotten.
I've lost the relationship between feeling and affection, aftertaste and boredom have sapped my attention, I've married myself off to sleep deprivation, I blame it all on ephedra and alcohol addiction, other caffeine lovers laugh at my affections, I never seem to tire of accumulating tensions, I'll separate from sex and all it's degradations, self-loathing and influenza are my constant afflictions, my heartbeat will slow through chemical mediation, I drink blindly to excess in perfect moderation, my concept of communication is medical attention, I'm making sure to destroy myself with the subtlest precision.
i think what i can do is put a nail maybe a nail through my head in the place where i make all of those decisions that i can't seem to make correctly the place in my head where i drown out my indecision by killing my hearing my one precious thing (i kill) and then put another one another nail somewhere as in if like communication like a relay like satellite the thoughts'll go up the nail in my brain and then you see the mumbo-jumbo of bullshit that i like to call my 'decision making process' (y'know, my personality) will launch at in a microwave from the end of the nail in my head to the end of the other nail the other nail, the one that i've put in the other part of me like my hand which doesn't make mistakes or my penis which never hesitates or my eye which tries to see the beauty in everything or my leg which will finally blessedly kick me off of this self-made cross.
So far out of my world I'm running out of time She's so upset I'm lost in myself
My world is not spinning Its in more of a static decay A failing orbit A bit of a trip and fall the way angels fail Did I mention her upset? I have burned her again I swallowed her soul then puked it up, worse for wear, and I hear the secret This one is cracked crystal in a world of broken glass, and I am a hammer I am a tuning fork I am tuna fish I strike hard, I shatter quietly, I just plain stink; I play with string, actually several strands at once, winding around my fingers; sometimes I choose to knot them, sometimes I don't, but they tangle anyway. It tends to resolve the same every time, though: I wind up with a tense ball of tangled strings, knotted together all intertwined and deadlocked, once promising, now useless, except that I may roll up in a ball and throw it away.
I'm Mickey, you see, in the hat, that long pointy magician's hat, and I'm trying to win, trying to do right, trying to love, but here come the brooms Hate Lust Desire Trust Lies Love Passion Caring Jealousy Fear Lassitude Pessimism Depression Suicide Alcohol You Life Life with You Fear
MultiplyingMultiplyingMultiplyimgMultiplying
And I just want to be your little mouse again in a pointy hat, I just want to be ink-drawn, then erased, maybe to come back to life by your loving pen, redrawn as a good man.
I realize, now, that I am emotionally destitute. The love and trust I thought I had been working to perfect in myself are ashes, fields of ashes feeding no one. I am a dead, barren field. Id be better off remembering when I was in flames, at least burning brightly.
I need to find the first of ten thoughts that will get me through November. Its going to be a cold month, a long month, it is going to be insular. And I have to start it with a thought that will feel like crackers in hot chicken soup, pillowy and warm and comforting. Unfortunately, all I can think of is the fact that my first thought is done, and with nine more to go Im no closer to being as comfortable as soup.