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grey brown ground
stones and sticks
turning touching
yellow dots of life
calling the bee
hidden in a bulb
can you hear
the hum?
.
I knew that it would rain, as everything turned to ash, as I stepped out of my body and into the pain, as he told me it was cold out, and I found hope or hope of a job.
How can she not. She's lived in this place her entire life. She doesn't want to know. She's never had to know. I'm going to stop asking for help from anyone. It only wastes minutes of my life and breath of my lungs.
I have to vent because lately the game has changed and things seem different and there isn't much rum left so I might as well down the rest of that bottle. I can admit that I'm drunk and not screw things up. I can look at you with pursed lips and not even stumble when I'm drunker than you've ever been. I'm young, too.
The world is ending and fast. The world is dying and fast. We the writers are just sort of ignoring this in hopes that things will turn out all right, and perhaps they will. Perhaps they will.
But why should I make such a huge statement about things when all I'm really trying to say is that even though it shouldn't it bothers me that this girl doesn't want me as badly as I thought? Or perhaps she does but it is, in the end, as most things are, quite beside the point. God my head is killing me. I want to swear but Dorothee would delete this.
I do all the things they told us not to coming up. I smoke; drink coffee; drink; drugs; don't sleep much; etc. I do all these things, go to the lengths, and I know that I will never be satisfied. Sometimes I fear I'll have an embolism and that will be the end of me. But somewhere deep inside I know that's for suckers, that fear. I lose jobs and find them again. I listen to dirty music and think dirty thoughts. I jerk off when I feel like it and rarely keep my house as orderly as I would like to.
Sometimes I think that being creative is a sort of madness; and often I wonder if it really is a choice or not. Is it, this a-type torture I find myself constantly under, this self-imposed drive to succeed succeed succeed, something we are born with? I want to know but I probably never will. When the answers were being passed out my ashtray was shaking under an earth quake. I'd like to quit smoking but I don't want to. I'd like to quit all the things that are taking my life away, including working and living itself, but I don't want to. I just want to survive and listen to Billy Joel sing of Vienna. I just want to succeed.
Mostly these days what is driving me nuts is my complete lack of women in my life. It's not that I don't know how, it's not that I can't, it's just that I'm too damn lazy to go out and get what I want.
Yes, lately the game has changed and I don't know if I can change with it again.
Nicotine is spattered on the walls of this home and really there is nothing to it. Eviction notices are on the door but the rent money is in order, and really there is nothing to it. I wonder does it mean I am dedicated to one goal if I let many other things go for a time. I have done this before. I just wonder. I must succeed. I don't know. I crave the wrong things at the wrong moments--I want sex when the world is asleep, to write while I work, food when I'm not hungry, to clean when I want to write. Things get mixed up now and then. Life gets mixed up now and then. Anger does provoke more anger, as I've been told, and if I got angry about life then my prose would get angry at me, would rebel and the ink would stop flowing altogether and the pages wouldn't matter anymore. The pages wouldn't matter any more. A statement made in the assumption that the pages ever mattered in the first place. Recently my friend wrote a poem and it said, "And I said / words never counted / yet no longer do." And so they don't and so they never do and so they never will. It is in the face of this that we write on. It is in the face of this that we carry on, knowing all the while that whatever we do is a spit in the ocean, that whatever we do will make no impact on the world in the end, that whatever we do we are just hopeless wastes. Even if we make it to the top, which the talent shown here in this very venue says to me that some of us will. Well on that matter and on that note, I am one of those I believe who'll eventually succeed because I have a passion for life and a lust for writing.
Midnight was in her eyes when I told her things were different now. She saw my smirk and I told her that life had never changed, the world was just looking a little different but was still exactly the same as it had always been.
And the other day, as I waited at home for my ride to collect me, I lay on my bed and looked out at the softening pink blue sky and I remembered "Just a Moment" and I knew, right then, what it all meant. In the rushing of the world, with nuclear threats from Iran, horrid human rights violations in Africa and North Korea, my parents and their silence, my bike fall, my work load, unfinished scripts, Presidential idiocy, war, famine, hatred, violence, destruction and death............................
With all that going on, I lay on my bed, looking out at the sky, seeing new life pushing through on the ends of the branches and I knew, I KNEW that the moment was mine, it was sublime, bliss even, as everything hushed, and I was nothing but love and the Universe all at once, a valley of stars and light, and everything was nothing and nothing was everything and I would never die because life and death are one in the same and it was and I AM. That's all that it meant. The I AM that is mentioned in the bible. I get it. I AM.
And I was. And still AM.