Blues

The blackened soul of our temporal past has become the whitest light of our spatial future, but no, it’s spacetime that matters, in all of its grey matter, in all of its imperceptibility and outer-dimensional existence, we can’t come to terms with its progress, with its true nature, but we know it’s there, like a phantom limb, like a ghost note, powerful and almighty but not spiritual or deistic or transcendental; it’s physical, bound up in the most minute ins-and-outs of our atoms and molecules and subatomical arrangements, expressed in the grandiose explosions and nebulas of sky, the expanses ever expanding past our reach, unreachable, metaphysical, true, gone; and the blues plays in the background, an asphalt voice and the dirty grime of a rusty and brute instrument hallowing out the breath of voice into something of beauty, sheer beauty, beat, beat, beating like a pulsar, a universal keeper of time, poetry, its consistency everlasting, impermeable, inconceivably brilliant, but almightily simple; and the piano plays, and you lean back, close your eyes, dredge in what’s left, something tears into you like lightning, a power, something actually transcendental, the echo, the acoustics, the incredible power of the beyond brings you out there into the cosmos; and they say god doesn’t exist, and he doesn’t; but music does, but feeling does, but irrationality does, but the most emotive and painfully real emblems of humanity do; “yes they do,” they all say, and back to them you nod in agreement, a shared discourse, a wink, you know, they know; it’s a connection; it’s the infinite expansion; it’s the pain of life, the suffering, the joyous misery of day-to-day dialectics, hate and greed and power overwhelming; and you find yourself there, listening to compressed air, eardrums brimming with electrical excitement, brainwaves alpha, regardless of the level of substance, inebriation; and all you want is parole from this mess, from this insanity, from love and hate, and yes, you have it, yes, you have it; it’s inside of you, forever a part of you, nothing more than you, nothing less; and then you’ve achieved clarity, a goddamn fucking clarity like you’ve never experienced, a beyond once here and never there and always surrounding and enveloping and the cigarette smoke dwells like a humid fog and you breathe it in, breathe it in, your lungs suck in the power, the soul, the god, and yes, finally, you are one with something, with nothing, really, but with it, the burning passion of nonexistence and spatial confliction and temporal disorder and it all makes sense, it all makes complete sense, it’s all goddamn real and you love it dearly, love it dearly.

Presents!

Of course in the search for wisdom you hope to eventually know all that you're searching for, but again of course all you really end up knowing well, like it was written on your forehead, is the relentlessness of your pursuit, sunup day in and sundown day out. Friends and acquaintances and strangers come and go, in and out, really, and you don't know why, how, or even when or where, because all is lost except for what you can see and hear and feel in that little candlelit periphery which hovers around you like an aura as you stumble down whatever path you're on. Funnily enough, the map store is closed seven days of the week; I assume the cartographer got lost somewhere. You can't figure out what you're clinging on to.

And I guess this all in itself is quite knowable but then again it really doesn't amount to much more than knowing nothing except that you're still searching and yearning for That Big Important Something, which, by the way, can be anything except for the discovery that there exists a day between Sunday and Monday.

I do hesitate in going further here because self-destruction is the most egotistical of things and the world tells us not to be egotistical and I'm guessing that the world has some good advice because it's been around a whole lot longer than I have.

Or so the tale goes.

I suppose the most human of things is to continue on in the attempt to rationalize everything down to the most minute of subatomic particles, and, well, there's not much else to do really except keep on being human and doing the most human of things, even though the universe really doesn't care one way or another. Unless we find out a way to blow it up. That would surely be quite rude of us and simultaneously the end of an untellable tale.

This all considered, I propose a thank-you gift to the cosmos. But it has to be good, you know, reflective of all that we are and all that we've accomplished and all that we've destroyed and all the awesome stuff we've made from the universe's grandest gift to us: the elements. I'm thinking a dud photograph - one where the shutter for some reason failed to open and nothing was exposed - quiet, real, indisputable, full of mysteries and could-haves and should-haves and would-haves. We can roll it up into a little tube and launch it at a million miles per hour at the black sky and hope that something supernatural finds it somewhere out there as it's in transit to nowhere and instantly realizes that despite it being curiously bleak and an apparent mistake, they now know more about us than we ever have, did, or could have.

Or maybe it'll just get burnt up in a supernova or smacked to tiny bits by an asteroid or swallowed up by a huge black hole.

In those cases, no difference really, it's always the thought that counts.

Mortality

Salt on the tongue,
Moisture sapped,
And gone.

Anesthesia on the wounds,
The body is a flood,
And numb.

Let bygones be bygones,
Existence's worth behooves itself,
And what it's pawned.

Black at the end of the tunnel,
Light at the beginning.

Word of advice: hold onto your candles.
Words to live by: always have a pack of matches.

Because man didn't start the first fire,
Knowing eventually we all tire.

And yet we all live on.

Similaphor

He sat hunched over, like a drunkard, outside on an old wooden picnic table with his chin resting on a thick novel that he couldn't finish, and his eyes were sunken like silver soup spoons into his pale and sullen face. The weather was overcast yet reasonable, and he had no other qualms outside of the slight numbness that was slowly trickling up his face and onto his scalp like a frightening spider because his chin had been resting for so long on that big thick novel that he couldn't finish despite all his attempts at trying and trying and trying and trying.

He leaned causally, like a mobster, against his apartment wall next to his window with a lit cigarette in his hand that he was about to finish, and his eyes were bloomed wide open like two full moons. The weather was thick and rainy, completely unreasonable, and he had no other qualms outside of the slight numbness that was seeping into his brain and frosting over his psyche because he had been leaning so long against a wall looking out a window and smoking cigarettes and staring at the rain as it smacked and tapped against the window in odd and indecipherable rhythms, and how strange it was indeed.

He laid peacefully, like a corpse, in bed with his back flat against the sheets and his feet hanging over the edge and his arms stretched up behind his head, and his eyes were gripped shut like a boxer's fist right before the throw of the final deathblow. The weather was irrelevant, completely without reason and meaning, and he had no other qualms outside of the slight numbness that was inching toward his feet because he had been laying so long on his back flat against his sheets with his eyes closed and thinking about nothing and everything and something all at the same time, which really turned out to be just nothing and everything but not really something, which later turned out to be everything, which is certainly quite a lot of nothing to be thinking about in an undersized bed which naturally causes the numbing of the feet.

In his brain he imagined the Earth from space - a beautiful blue iris levitating above an infinitely expansive salt-speckled obsidian slab - and he saw the oceans and the clouds and all the pastel blues and whites of our mother start a buttery melting away as gravity for some reason began to quell its magical and inexplicable force. It started out as the coalescence of individual little pearl droplets which fell gently from Antarctica and splashed onto and scattered all over the endless black surface below. Eventually a shiny, marbleized and oddly gooey puddle formed. The continents and the islands and the outer crust then began to crumble away and fall into the puddle, like somebody dusting some melted and and warm and therefore inedible and useless blueberry and vanilla ice cream with perfectly fine coarsely-ground graham crackers. All the people and the cities they lived in and the cars they drove and the paper they wrote on and sent to each other from nine o'clock to five o'clock and even the hats they wore gave the otherwise boring, brown cracker crumbles of land all those important gray and white and black evidentiary specks and seasonings of human life. The puddle eventually dissolved the chucks of land which contained humans and things and dogs and trees and houses and rubber and steel and tea kettles and everything became nothing and thinking therefore became really something which actually turned out to be everything because now everything else was reduced to more or less nothing, unless you count the puddle as something.

On the day which falls after Sunday and before Monday, he did some thinking and decided to drive out to the store and buy a new notebook.

One with fewer pages.

True Story

Sanguine reminiscences of a hapless past tarnish what's left of your reflection in a cracked mirror; you try to wipe it clean with the machine-pressed cuff of your shirt, but all it does is smudge into long, pasty, cheerless ellipses, concentric and beautiful, and now nobody is staring back at you.