one hour that meant the world.

stolen

by daylight savings time.


This time I'll take it personally.


because it's not my fault my life depends on dusk walks, or trees, or the water that paints childish images of them,

or the sayonara squinting sun.

it's my spilled aftermath, that I'm happy at.


but the fact that the day now neglects us, and the light's in such a hurry, offends me.


It's what happens when you offer your soul to a season. heartbreak.


And we were doing so well.



Maybe I'll get my light on weekends, tell friends i have beams to catch. Maybe two day's worth of personal photosynthesis can float me through winter. maybe not.


either way, i'm responsible for this seasonal love sickness. i've managed to knit myself to an uncaring chaos, and i feel dumped?

when it's my life that prioritizes the hours? my culture that adjusts the clocks?  


but could i give my job for this sun love? would I retire at 25, stand outdoors and starve in romantic hope for a cinderella plant transformation?  i'll intimate: when birds cyclone over the black tree backdrops and the west pours its best bedtime dregs, beliefs start hatching.

my face could look handsome on a tree.

and blindness doesn't sound so bad if I can keep one last ecstatic orange.

Sincerity is worthwhile.

So i try explaining with all sugar remaining why i'm awake at the first watery sign of light, every morning, to absorb the blue verges of the sun since i refuse to miss a single spear.

Nor a single whiff of leaf smoke on the wind, blowing frozen dream ships home ballasted with collective memory.

Any chance to feel simultaneously small and significant.

Streaming like spider silk loose between trees, my pulse pushes poison through pinholes in my skin, and i let things return to being perfect. Feeling each tedious scene of the season, tracing the fate of every fiery leaf.

And in ecstasy of sweat and faces fading i recognize my mean: madly hunting the everlasting.

alone on an unremarkable day, during an unremarkable moment of luxurious boredom at work,

i felt 'stretched' again, for a split second at my desk, before my attention could run its feedback circles to that concentric knife point of doubt, stabbing the experience right back on the crowded fiber board wall labeled somewhat misleadingly 'self.'

i was looking outside, letting dreams encroach under the smile of the plush elephant who watches me work while the sun tints at its 5 o'clock angles and sets him laughingly on fire. the windows, unlike most offices, offer the tired-eyed typist a trumpeting shebang of distraction as opposed to the limply done porthole strip teases of half-pulled economy blind slits. this fact is a double-edged sword that i find myself tonguing jealously like a lollipop. the glass is made of dark maple syrup that was baked and polished into thin sheets, and set in the walls to give mellow panoramas of the surrounding business park. a single tree ruptures like a heroic anomaly out of the goose-choked field that stays slow poisoned and half-dead in the runoff outside our building. from where i sit, i can see the wooden lightning veteran, rumbling its knotty fists upward in geriatric defiance, the whole time dwarfed in size but not personality by a long holy shout of sky.

so while i stared, unremarkably, and let brain grass grow casual stalks toward space, i noticed that i was starting to see something disorienting and holographic in the panes of petrified molasses before me. it was only my own eye, wide and viridian, but the way it lurked like a predator into focus caught me off guard. i inched closer for more detail, taking the opportunity of solitude to inspect myself without embarrassment, and suddenly the quality of my perspective turned strange, seesawing so smoothly between praise and disgust that they became inextricably entwined in the same sine wave of emotion. i've heard that staring at your own reflection is used as a confrontation technique by chronically anxious people. the more i think about it, and do it myself, the less i believe the exercise is a very responsible prescription on the part of any psychiatrist with scruples. this is because, after some interval of time predestined differently for everyone, you stop seeing an eye and begin to perceive something far less identifiable. it's best to imagine a scenario like this: your gaze acquires a razor sharp point, and looking at something for any extended length of time applies a slow but powerful pressure on the object of attention. this sets off a chained momentum of knowing through the arbitrary and imagined layers of being that peel away and arrange themselves in your consciousness like a cross-sectioned wall of geology. you sink into a snake charmed mental quicksand, yielding to the spiral tugging of its gravity until the frail foil paper of face and two eyes gives way to a bulbous and oily cave. it's all quiet except the humming, and you walk to the very end, stabbing your finger through an embryonic contact lens as delicate as a water bead wicking on a leaf. the torn orifice swallows you into a blind expanse of muffled blood that could last forever if you don't find the right path and smash through the lamina sheathe shielding the tender mattress of a brain. 'the final sanctum' your thoughts start saying, but where the journey is assumed to end, another camera embarks on a spiraling dive forward through bubblegum clouds of chewy tissue, panning smoothly into something like a Discovery channel "nature of reality" documentary montage (the kind that concludes with quarks because there's a programming schedule to keep). but this time the show goes on, and back on the surface where you are swimming in the monitor footage of this deep-sea probe with the macro world at your dizzied peripheral, your handle on the moment detaches and you feel instantly unanchored in a pale and primitive immensity.

And I ran through the process a thousand times, each time a thousand of the same ways, as if every cell of mine were a separate but identical captive audience:

until unsticking my look from all the idiotic distance in the amber glass, i tucked my eyes kindly in their lids. and in the whisper of a few moments, calm returned and the soft growing brain grass. and i sat safely bathing again in 98 degree soup, picking back up the slow churning work of making my mind:   

and deciding that i prefer to consider it a miracle we are the prodigal offspring of stars. that life is a risk taken by rules and mathematics. and that being anything in a great eating ocean, with time enough to start waking from a long dark and supernatural sleep, amounts to a hope worth toasting.

There is no stopping a realization. No punctuation to demarcate our infinite name.




a shadow casted itself over the crystal caramel window, and i found myself staring into a skull. a hydro-cephalitic head inflated by one haunted angle of light. but i still abide in the belief that most if not all exaggeration and monstrousness in this world is only the ghost story of truth. but there must be ugliness under the blankets, because i can almost smell on me the state of mind it takes to look near fluorescent and reptile in a body that can hardly be said to exist at all.

No more soul sour diatribes. I've made a rule. These leaves have turned and underneath there is a world worth loving, because like you it is pointless and beautiful.

I'll let the eternity in a moment of change apologize for itself, because I am just colliding through the universe like everything else. Nothing is at rest, and nothing in me ever will be, because peace is not a halting but a surrendering to life's war. It's so hard to balance the attention you lend to the voices in your head, because I am a mutt, a mineral, a miracle of molecular cooperation. So don't ever believe me except in the orgasm of an instant. There is nothing solid, nothing enduring, just a stormy glassed in probability. So cliche...But! What's cliche is reliable and what's reliable is an inch from truth, what's reliable is that I am a controlled explosion of needs. And I need, always, to be in passion.

The terrible magnetic core of my problem is that I feel, beyond the salvation of doubt, that my passion is leaving. And I do not know why.


You try biting into the world to see if it bleeds, you shoulder the debt of passion. You try cocooning in the cobwebs of life's dark corners, hoping and dreading that passion sniffs you out. You die desperate and pale.

I ran for miles tonight, just to push my heart, see how serious it really is. It seems like the only way to make fleeting friends of the parts of me is to leverage threats, force them all to call my bluff but give them a common enemy. It's just a big violence, one programmed control ritual of dominance. Why do I need this teaspoon of riot to make the comfort go down? It strikes me as bad engineering.

(I'm fragmenting.)
(Succumbing to the war.)

Why do I finally feel again when the beer soaks into my roots, what balance is it striking in me and what is the sum of the difference?

Could the reason I defend life is worth living for hinge on a feeling I require more and more assistance to reach? Then I am an addict to the world, a sunset drunkard running out, a pining fool without a real reference.

I am capable of such Everests of frustration. The only word pinning it is fuck.


One more soul sour diatribe...It's always one more.



maybe i'm more consistent than i want to be.