10–17–22 After 10
October
I told someone October was almost over today. Only a bit over halfway done. I stretched $10 for two weeks and scratched what I could from wherever it is people get by from.
I can get food; produce, grain, lentils, bread is all easy enough to come by when you know where they come from. My landlord slamming at my door for rent like they have a thousand times to many lives, tread lightly this is not your land to occupy.
Settling in, a homestead digging beneath the parcels distributed for free as long as you displace and remain. Then when your time’s up you lay down and the pavement is poured over your face, molten asphalt bubbling to fill sunken eye sockets where life once saw itself all around. It’s in the contract, you signed it before you were born, you came down to do something, but you forgot coming out of the womb.
Maybe you remember at 6, maybe you live to a ripe 45 before you find the cavity where the long festering viruses had long been spread to all you’ve touched and everyone you know had already died and been reborn. It’s not too late, or was it ever in time that you were awake.
There’s a second between night and morning, my mouth is parched while my head shoots up through one nightmare into another: water. Icy cold it rushes refreshing to an empty center where I forgot how hungry I was before I slept. When I ask myself how many hours I’ve gotten, how many hours spent my nerves pulsating red, skin tightening while I shiver with my eyes shut praying that sleep proofs some relief and a little death.
The dreams are much more vivid without my brain loaded, lifted, high and low fluctuating; in times of fast where clarity pierces my joints and soreness latches into torn muscle fibers like rabid teeth. Diet and caffeine free cola, alchemical magic that leaves me parched and much too awake. Spinning in circles, stuck in time yet moving on one plane, desperate to put it behind me. The rear views flash bright red and blue, closer than they appear she floors it 70, 80, 90, breaks a hundred before pulling over to the wrong side of the highway.
“Hi officer, which way is my way”
Don’t even ask, you see the road in front of you and traverse parasitically, the constant plights of your privilege astonish, venomous drivel to my poor ears. An entire body to disguise a persona, layers of lies calcified like a sickly reptile that just cannot shed the shell it grows out of. Flesh and blood spill from a rotted cornucopia of festivities long passed, of which no one remembers why they drank and the few that could share an idea of its origin shudder to utter and reinstate the curse.
Is-ness or isn’t-ness is not of my concern, it is. The shoulds and should nots of the it like a dim candle through an endless hallway. The floodlights could spark at any moment and its tenuous multiplicity to reach a cliff of another prison. Falling in love or rising to meet it, depending on perspective to/from a language of agency. Flip one switch and your choices fractalize into an infinite complexity of interactions, or return to the whims of a greater other. Perhaps the switch is held at its center, schrodinger’s agnosticism, where true believers practice disbelief and devout followers pray through doubt for truth in faith.
Can this hollow void be filled, was it not once eternal dark yet always full of some unknown growing spark. Unaligned divine purity preceding chaos taken up orders of narrative development too contrived for a god to create without a healthy dose of lazy chance. Luck, karma, obedience to a dying world, built on death or sacrifice depending who you ask. It is October after all, and we pay respects, remember and celebrate, don the face of a reaper to act an honor we wish to bestow on our children. Please child, be born to witness the horrors as I have, carry me to my grave in laden wool through icy mountains so I may rest, I have never counted on another the way my mother had counted on me. Let me pass this curse on to you so you may awaken and break it and so I may lay peacefully in hopes that, yes, you were one of the good ones I prayed into existence, and I am too. Please, do not do as I have done, do exactly as I have told you, I was taught by my experience, and look how old and wise I have become, don’t you wish to be like me? An image of your god, your creator, as I have made you out of star stuff, not bodily fluids. You are divine, this rock is your home, this water is your blood and the sun is your father God that blessed with us fire to exist.
Archaic times in amniotic fluid, primordial twists of proteins curled together and spoke, life said
“stick together”
And all of her pieces screamed
“No! I am not that” “Yes, I am this” “No, I am that!”
They ate each other, it was a feast. The remains remained, burrowed into our bones the stuff of others grown from their viscera. Us, you and me, and you and you and you and you in me, Us. Yes, Us. Thrust, pound, hear the sound of flesh hitting flesh, bite down harder, taste iron, the salty insides run thick with plastic and lead. You are just like me, I was inside you and you inside me. We just breathed, we just spoke, we just shared, we just fucked, on how many levels procreation, pre-creating secretions most of life is foreplay for a moment that defines you in the minds of others, tucked away to torment them in their dreams.
“I am NOT like that thing! That THING!!”
They are just like you, and hate or admire it. We would be the same in their position and they the same in ours, almost predestined or preconditioned. Nature or nurture simplistic binaries of a neuron shooting on or off, and there are so many it’s hard to keep count. Maybe if these all go off here, and this lights up there, they mean to say this but said this. They would have done this if it had not been for all the other stuff from when that happened then. As if to imagine we can figure anything but how to wipe our ass and not kill everything around us at the same time.
Maybe, if we all got in a line, and Jane ate Sheryll’s ass clean, and Judy passed the favor back, and we all took part in this ritual of ass eating and cleaning, there would be just enough nothing happening for someone to figure out there is a machine or a bug or a fungus to do this for us. Maybe if we found out there’s a way to put this whole three-dimensional fuss behind us, and we can just be pure consciousness floating in that primordial ocean again. Before one electrical impulse gets curious and puts its non-corporeal mouth on another’s metaphorical asshole because it got bored of not doing it.
Is my brain too fried to integrate with society? Am I too abnormal or dysfunctional to get along with all the other people, who pretend they aren’t poisoned, or act like the toxins that line their arteries are as natural as water? Did my specific affliction doom me to isolation, are there others that would accept me, will our children born with birth defects en masse shun the silhouette of DaVinci’s ideal when none can truly do more than echo their ancestors? Perhaps I am closer to amoeba than person, perhaps we are closer to mutants than man. An octopus or dolphin may never pollute their home like we have ours, but they lack anti-octopus artillery and dolphin borders. Too busy are they camouflaged in sand or passing around poisonous fish like a hot potato to worry themselves with those things.
Who had it right? Are we on the way? This is just a cosmic step on the path to balance. Rambling drunkenly into the night, stumbling through a great dark with no light at all, high on faith and prescription opiates, white powders and distilled fermentations of every structure of glucose nature can afford to us. I partake in what makes us human and find what had kept me separate in myself, illusions of diversity unaccounted for in utopic unity. The whole life and death of a flower preserved on a tree, every apple and leaf lining the orchard, connected further by dendritic roots in soil media. Worlds within worlds of increasingly infinite complexity that can lie in a simple cosmos without more science than a neanderthal had there not been a smart ass desperate for attention to mate. Peacocks and donkeys only, covering pigs in makeup and adorning a nest with colorful trash to provoke some flush of chemicals in a mate.
Or maybe just for fun.
