Static in The Background

"Everything ends."

I knew it, everyone knew it deep down. Maybe they denied themselves, or maybe their naivete persuaded them that they could fight off death with their passion, but deep down, underneath all that emotion, was the demise of themselves, and the end of every beginning of their life. I knew that each end was a beginning or something else, but that would end too, and in the end, if it ever really came, we'd all go out like a gunshot in the dark. We wouldn't know if another round went off after us, we'd be over, and that would be all that mattered for the rest of infinity to us.

I didn't know what we were trying to do. In the end our words would fall on the ground, would be dirtied up by someone, forgotten by most, written on toilet paper as a cute little saying, and misunderstood by the masses. It happened to Nietzsche, and it'll happen to me, and you. I've gotten into the habit of seeing hope and knowing it only as a temporary fix, a fix to cover up the idea that the end can be something positive. And I suppose it can if you're having a terrible time on the ride. Some people do want to die, simply to have life stop beating them into the ground. But for most of us that wish to continue living, who enjoy it, death is our enemy. I looked down.

I was just being melodramatic, I thought. The sun would keep on rising. And who knows, maybe the bastards who have that amount of passion can really keep on pushing themselves into the future like that. Maybe what they said was true, when one life ends another begins. It didn't start as a thought on death, so much as an end to anything. An end to a period, an end to a friendship, an end to a class, or a meal, or a first experience; an end to your first time, laid to waste with the idiotic of your lover and your teenage feelings. Tomorrow you'll look back on it and weep that it ended, weep that you'll never again be able to experience it for the first time. You'll sob over that moron you used to be, that being that you think you're greater than. You'll, quite frankly, look down on the grave of your former self and wish that you would have followed him there, or raise him from the dead and resume his path.

But, for the time being, thoughts like that should stay as they usually are. Fractions of indiscernible noise in the back of your mind: never ending, and rarely defining themselves.

Sunshine in the Sprinklers

Today Spring woke up again, maybe Summer; they look alike but when you look in their eyes you can see the difference. (Towards the pupil, where the iris either changes yellow or stays green, that's how.) The morning came back around, but I missed it. The sun still kissed me on the cheek when I woke up, and I thought about it, felt it's warmth, and the coldness of the shadows in my room, underneath the blankets. Just cooler. It's unnatural. I'm stuck, locked away behind too many walls, and we all are, and we know it. The worst part is that most of us are completely content with that, though, isn't it? So, today was for walking back out into the woods and getting away from the mosquitoes and taking a nap underneath the sun and the green shade. I heard it far off; it should have come months ago but I suppose everything was running behind anyway.

We've been crossing the breeze, but we haven't gotten to know it. And what's crossing anything without diving into and knowing what you're missing, understanding the feeling that you're skipping over so that you know for sure whether or not you want to skip it? I was tired of staying on the roads and just zooming by, and why should I be excited about it? I wanted to lose myself in the woods completely, somewhere where the sun shines down between the trees and where puddles form when the rain comes down, like sprinklers from the skies. God always had a way with making things more grand than a snakes head in the earth shooting out water. I'd sit there and watch the entire day pass before me, do nothing, think nothing, eat and drink nothing, just so that I could understand how slow or fast time went. I'd know for at least a year, completely comprehend the passage of time and how I flow through it like salmon through the river. I'd go with the flow and against the flow depending on my mood.

But don't we all?

The sun came bitterly over the sky, the ground was heating up, sand dunes falling into salty water, dark but with bright, white, foamy crests like mountain peaks in the north; I'd miss it all in the future when all I'd have is the sky to tell me where the water is. Then I'd have to try harder to center myself an touch the spirit of the earth. I'd be further away, covered up by all this flesh and spirit clashing together. I felt like leaving; the door slammed on my way out and the heat crashed into my face-warm and thick like hot, humid jelly. Lately there have been cats in the woods, they look like the trees even though they're orange with dots all over them. I knew why, but it was still strange and perplexing- you can't much get rid of that feeling. I sighed.

Lately there had just been nothing around but the way the sky looks and the air around me, telling me about the absurdity of my soul. Was I suppose to have peaks of passion and such complete losses of inspiration and thought? Maybe my life was just as boring and plain as water; nice, but very typical for out planet. And then I needed the right conditions, when the light was coming down just so through the rain from the sprinklers as to make a rainbow. That's what I needed, and maybe that's why I was scrambling so much about the world around me.

It defined me just as much as I defined it.

Sorry to Flowers

Things have slowly touched my mind. They turned it around, didn't they? When was the last time I had a conversation with myself, or looked at just a piece of me? My mouth with words; always silent because they're affixed to my mind and the tracks that run down my spine. I'd look outside and the wind was green and the plants were purple and I felt as though the sun would set soon, die out in a carriage of bursting flames that just spread their arms over the sky and engulfed us all slowly and bitterly with some sort of desire for both revenge and love. Jealousy, and the world was filled with it all, we were up to our necks in it. I felt like an image on the screen; I'd want to bring you flowers and grab your hand and show you a dream in my head- walk across the water to an island no one but me has seen. It'd be perfect there and the waves would wash away our footprints in the sand. Wouldn't it?

It was just that it was reminding me of so many things that had passed before my eyes. Nothing was like the screen and all those plays that wrecked out before everyone else; it was boring and lame and filled with nonsense and intense detail that no one would want to see, but it slipped passed my nose so quickly and my eyes pick up all the pieces faster than I thought my mind could comprehend. I saw it in flashes, instances; it all went by so slowly, but that was my life and it meant everything to me. All the nonsense and all the lameness and desire for everything to be strewn before my fingertips- it was all that I had ever been and that little, that nothingness, really, was the world to me. I grabbed at it with my fingers and watched it melt through me. It wasn't sad, it was there, just not now, but then. Everything was then. Now is then, even, and I can't stop now from becoming then because every time I try to keep now now, my efforts follow now into the then.

The truth is that I'm stuck, hung up, wanting to experience it all again for the first time without forgetting that I've already done that.

You brought that to me- thank you, and you as well, all of you. You're like the Bodhisattva's of my life, beautiful in your idiocy and delightful in your intelligence . You show me who I am and take away the pieces of who I used to be and sculpt my around your fingers until I'm tangled up inside of who you are too, and we're all stuck together from now until forever whether we like it or not. It's not that it ever ends, it just levels out.

I fell down to the ground. The sky looks so beautiful in the morning. I wanted to call you dear, and call the rest of your my brothers and sisters, to look at you and live with you and drink and smoke and cry and love with you. My tongue kept flickering but no matter what came from it, it all didn't matter, it was all so much less than what I wanted, but I smiled anyway, if not for finding the words, then for not being content with the words that I found.

So I smiled.

I loved you all, and I love you still.

You: Shattered Like a Robin on the Street

The stars are in the ceiling; they sparkle when the lights go out. My life hasn't changed, but I feel like it should have. Tonight I'll go outside and watch the lights turn off in the houses across the lake behind my house. They'll dim out one by one until it's night and the only light to breath on will be the moon and my lamp. The crickets are out, mating, singing in the air with an annoying, droning voice. Every night they do this, it's their thing, their cycle, their life. Mine is mine to take and keep. It sits in my palm, legs folded, eyes closed, nostrils flaring slightly at each short and swift intake of air, and exhalation of breath.

We all repeat these steps, sitting here in our foggy homes. I'll drink ice water and let it crunch in my teeth. Maybe I'll see a swallow in the tree, cardinal in the glade, blue jay in the air blending into the sky. They'll all fall down one day and won't get up. When birds die, do they just fall from the sky? Do they die in mid-flight?

I'm not trying to sound so sad, I'm just wondering. Every thing's absurd. The light coming off the lake in rays of gold, against the black water as it dances in the wind. Rays of gold just buzzing around at my feet as I walk up to the edge of the water. One time some one asked what it all meant and the wind answered him back with a hollow breath.

Or maybe another person told him the answer. Maybe Buddha in nirvana, or the worm in the dirt. Dust and all. I don't understand it much anymore I suppose, but it didn't matter. I kept watching until my eyes saw nothing but dust in the air, swept up, straight into the sky. I had no words anymore, they fell out of my soul into some hole somewhere deep inside of me. I tried to speak, but there was nothing to say because it was all the same noise in different ways, forms, shapes. I didn't have any ideas; I won't lie, it was frightening. I was a stone sitting there sucking up the world, a mountain Bodhisattva. I'd sit here forever and watch this one place change in the wind. A bird in the air; it flew underneath some power lines, metal hooks hanging off from the wires. Perch up there and cocking their beaks.

One had gleaming eyes, fire in the street light surrounded by black. I was tired of seeing birds. Too small, too light, all free.

One time I walked by a storm drain and saw him in there, face down in grief and trying to act as if he still had anything in him. He was proud in the most annoying way, but I knew that he wasn't born in there. He fell in, in fact, he stepped in, knowingly. He might have lied to himself and told himself differently, maybe he saw something shiny at the end. His face construed with jealousy and an injured pride; that's the worst, isn't it? I supposed it wasn't worth it. If I didn't pity him so, I would have spit on him as I walked by, but what's a good shepherd to do?

Play rebound and suck it up? He'd get over it eventually anyway.

I was tired and I had nothing more; water in the sun just being soaked up by the sky. We spend our time rolling our tongues and thoughts on and on from one subject to the next without explanation; it comes out like a shattered vase made of rainbow dirt and grime, blood behind the background, spit, ash, dead skin cells in a mattress. I hope you understand. We've been pounding dirt into the ground, waving bones in the air like weapons, but who are we kidding? Does the sky shiver with fear at us? Or the ground, the water, the fire coming upon us from the dunes of the desert? No. It stands there staring, waiting forever, shifting slowly around us and we take no notice. Too busy busting each other in the ass, bashing each others heads, taking money from the hands of the poor and all. The truth is that I've settled down.

The truth is jaded and all; brittle but still somewhat smooth.

Just a Sleepy Head

I sit here, and what? The whispers of my thoughts from a year ago still ringing in my ear like a series of gunshots left behind the morning after firing some rounds off. I feel as though I have nothing, limited, move my arms but there's not much room to move around in. I've lain down in every way that I think I possibly can. I guess I just have to think of some new positions or break down the walls around my so that I can go into these forms that I can only dream of being in. I dunno. The walls have your name written on it; I don't think that I can really get away from it at this point but it's not bad, it's not like it's something that rooted deep inside of me, and that's what makes me most glad I think. That is, that when I think about you, it's not some sort of sick, obsession of future idea, but simply your nature, your being that moves through space and time with a smile or a frown, but always sucking up everything around you and knowing. You know. That's what it is, I assumed.

You're like a lotus in my mind, floating on the pond of my mind right next to the lilies of my joys and the weeds of my sins.

Luckily it never stops. I went from something limp to something that went frigid in water, sputtering forward like a snake in a spring, some jack-in-the-box like toy for a child. I didn't know where I was anymore, I never did, I never know anything! All I can see is the silly little turns and twists of relationships becoming tatters of cloth that tear more and more in the wind of our lives; I hope that it'll end soon. I'm tired of seeing nothing but the sand and dust that comes up from all of our storms put together. I think that's why I like you the most, you haven't ever made any of that dust that I see near the horizon, smog over the city. When I'm in your world the sky is blue all the way down.

I yawned. I had been listening to too much music that went over and over again, "We cry aloooooooonnnnnneeee, we cry alone, we cry alone, we cry alone," But it's also only Noise, after all. I laughed, lay back in my bed and put my head on the pillow with my eyes closed. I knew that the visions before sleep would be coming soon. My logic would slip away into absurdity, and I'd catch it a few times and laugh at the impracticality of my mind, but eventually I would stop noticing that it wasn't real. In fact, it would be real. My mind would once again become my world. I yawned again hoping I'd have a dream with you in it. With everyone in it.

It never ends.

Slight Change of Rain

You were a face, mossy underneath some branches on top of a tree trunk, near the ground. I dunno, I had no idea anymore. I sat down on a cushion of green and yellow leaves and tried to feel the wind around my skin; I wasn't sure but I thought that I was on to something, getting close to something, finding something that would finally reach down past my skin and muscle and touch the marrow in my bone, touch my body to the core, but something so much more. I wanted to find something that could reach into my mind and touch my phantom as it shuffles away at the sight of something else so close to it. I wanted to be brought to the point where I could look at a white wall and watch it explode into some new reality that I could put down on several white walls and make a life from it, a life from telling people what was inside of my mind. I hadn't written in several days, I wasn't sure how long but it had felt like a long time. I wanted to, I just didn't have the right words to say it. Every now and then I realize that everything I say falls short of what it's suppose to describe. Every single character an atom of what it's building, if an atom. Every time that happens I can't live with writing, the paragraphs go on forever, and I lose the feeling. I can't feel long enough, everything is slow. I looked up at the sky through the leaves; some clouds were passing by like icebergs in the Caribbean ocean.

I was depressing myself.

I toyed with some sticks, breaking some, flicking leaves with smaller, more flexible ones. I was sweating; it was ten and the sun was beginning to make it's climb into the sky. I felt incomplete and as if what I was missing, that bubble inside of me, was filled with smoke that clouded everything I felt until it was just a shrug. I was becoming something different in a chilling way, in the fact that my heart was beginning to get used to it. Get used to falling into my reality in the morning, and falling out at night. I was used to living. I could see every turn and know how to react with the least amount of effort. But what was worst was that I was becoming numb. My mind was alright; I wanted that I thought. My emotions were stable, in fact, I had mostly been happy, and only sad for other people; I thought I wanted that too. I began to pick all the white or near white leaves off of the ground and pile them up next to the mossy tree. They'd be a small community of pearls surrounded by green hills. I felt stupid and got up.

Since when was it about being smart? Or cool? Graceful, polite, and gentle?

I thought about people, human beings, naked human beings in a square building.. We're such awkward creatures, the way we look and act, the sounds we make, our faces and how many ways they can move and what emotions are in their wrinkles and eyes. In that setting no one is better than anyone else. It's like Bob Dylan said, even the president is sometimes naked, and it just shows you how everyone, at their base level as an animal, without the fright of their suits and jewelry, is just as much as everyone else. I shook my head; I was tired of it all and I felt as though I would spill out again, look down and see some tangled wire of a mind bent and shoved into the dirt. I hated it! I shook my head harder and started to run, just trying to run until my heart beat drowned out my thoughts. It reminded me of when I had several thoughts, reminded me of when I would see things behind everything, mix up what was real and what was not real, reminded me of when I would have to drown out so much more. I felt as though, as I ran, I pulled a string attached to a balloon that held it all, and it was constantly trying to pull me up into the clouds where I'd be forever foggy and lost within it's white walls. All I had to do was run against it, but every second I ran in the world I lived in, it filled up with all my thoughts and feelings and memories and mistakes, becoming larger and harder to pull against.

The trees passed over my head; green webs of leaves and branches becoming blurs against the blue sky. Some Spanish moss hung down every now and then, and sometimes billows of Resurrection fern passed in front of me as I floated higher into the tree line. I hoped that I would get tangled up in some nonsense, get stuck and fasted into their embrace so that I could stay at least some what grounded. Maybe some one else would have to catch me on the way, and maybe our combined effort could get us back down to the ground, where were could dig underground, then seal ourselves there and let those balloons fill until we had to walk on the ceiling. I felt a wheeze and stopped running to catch my breath. My heart screamed into the innards of my ears, just loud thud after loud thud.

I looked up coughing. The sun was there, over on top of this palm tree who's head had fallen off, so it was just a wooden spire reaching up into the sky. I wanted to call and ask if I ran towards that, would it pop my balloon?

Never Winter During Summer (But Sometimes Autumn.)

During the fire kids ran around in the street. I thought it was bizarre at the time, it just seemed as if they were desensitized to the world around them, to the lives that were being ruined. Opiated from such thoughts, they ran around laughing in the orange light of the fire as it consumed another house on the street. Maybe they just didn't know anything else, were still too innocent to understand things like materialism and money. To them, all there was was their bodies and their minds and their friends and the world around them, which no one owned, and everyone owned. Collective. I wish that adults could think like that, sometimes, could just let the house burn, be happy that they were alive, and then everyone would help build them a new home with everything around them. Instead they gathered around looking at their lives (the timber and plastic and silicon and metal of their lives,) burn down, back into the ashes that they were born as, back into the ashes that we all our at the very end. And maybe that's why they couldn't be children. Children knew that it was all in vain and knew that it held all the meaning in the world. But adults, seeing those ashes, they thought of their own death, and of the objective meaningless of their lives.

Maybe I was something in between an adult and a kid. I sat there and watched. Our house had already burned down. The things that I rescued was a copy of the documents of my computer, all my papers, my first blanket, and my laptop. Everything else burned down, I suppose. At that point I wondered if my parents had insurance for this kinda stuff. My logic presumed they didn't, but my hope presumed they did. I presumed it didn't matter and that we'd probably survive either way. We had our cars, at least. They were black with the ashes of my parents lives.

I wasn't sure what made me think about that. Summer was almost over, but it was the prime of summer in my eyes. Past all the rain, into the deep, blue skies and bright days with white clouds. It was ideal in that way, one of the few things that are simply ideal, ideal outside of the imagination. Too many things were only ideal in peoples heads. Sometimes gray would roll in from the sea but mostly we'd just swelter in the sun, boil underneath it and sweat until we were just rags lying around on the street, unsure of where to turn or where to go or what to do but talk and eat and talk and eat and then fall asleep someplace. We'd talk until our tongues ran out of our mouths, until our minds were sucked dry of any and all ideas that they could possibly be filled with. The air felt like dust, and everyone had a dream of getting in a car and losing themselves somewhere up north, sleeping on floors and run down motels and in the car parked some place that was going to be conspicuous. Or hopping a train and riding out West with loose change in our pockets to be spent on a candy bar. 

God damn it, I remember the sun would come across the sky with the clouds behind it, just tracing lines over my head, falling behind like leaves in the wind behind a car. Where did that go to? Why is it that every time I look above me everything is the same and never moves, just changing slowly and I can't even look at the changes happen anymore, they just happen behind my back and stand still when I take a look. I can't even shake hands with myself anymore, it's all been washed away in the sea again, washed away by time, but who am I kidding? Who have I ever been kidding? Our mouths move but the words that come out are just ashes on top of ashes. Words and materials and music and paintings and ashes and ashes and ashes.

Time doesn't change or heal anything, only people; people forget and move on.

We never went on that train, it just passed on by. We never took the car out either, it all got totaled, money was too tight, we were all chained down, becoming adults. What happened? I still felt like a kid and that was it, too small, so small, so weak and squished in between all the layers of space and mass that make up the world around me. It squeezes my eyes until they split and the juices of my mind spill out on the floor. Maybe I'm just tired of being an open book, or feeling as if I'm being forced to open up, forced by some power that surrounds me at all times. I had a cup of water, my stomach felt like it was about to explode, I was a fly trapped in a jar and I could have gotten out but I was only being teased. I'm always being teased like that.

Dear Time

Is the sky any other color but blue, navy blue, clouds drifting over, slate and granite rocks that moans as they move over head, shaking the earth with the sound of their voice? Was the grass any greener after the rain came down, dried up mostly leaving the ground wet with it's footprint? I felt as though I was losing it again to the sky, that it was being lifted up and away from my fingers, slipping out of them even as I kept floating higher and higher into the blue, slate sky. The house was white on the outside, run down with the wood dim brown underneath the paint as it flaked off, lost in the grass and the dirt around it. Everything around it circled, too. Somewhere there was a sun behind those clouds, behind the house so that the light came out in rays behind the clouds, in a way that the clouds around the house were lighter. I felt as though I was looking at the reflection of it all in my pupils, but the mirror in front of my face was broken, as if some one had taken a rock and thrown it dead center, shattering everything and leaving only the reflection of my thoughts in my pupils. The air smelled like mint, and the wind was only a breath that scrapped across the grass making it twitch lightly. 

But mostly, everything was silent, waiting for something to happen.

I moved across the ground like a ghost floating, as if I had no feet, put no effort into moving. I looked at the dark wooden door and it came closer and closer to me, like the earth was moving and I staying in the same spot in space. The hallway (dark and filled with end tables supporting small statues, some darker than others, faces distorted and growing long, or small, perfect, almost, with gentle features,) then the living room. The window took up almost an entire wall, so that you could see the grass outside, slightly falling into a forest of oaks and elm trees. A willow tree stood in the yard alone towards the left. Everything just where it should have been. The fan was on and the air was circling around the table, three books sitting next to a small journal. I felt as though it was still empty, empty because I couldn't arrange anything inside of my head, couldn't put it down into the right words yet. I sat down on the couch and picked it up. It felt light and empty, but I didn't open it. The point wasn't to see myself, I knew myself well enough, better than most people know themselves. Maybe there was no purpose, maybe they were just dreams from the past, sitting there in that house collecting dust as the wind died down more and more. The breath of all of my thoughts slowly crumbling like the paint outside. And maybe the wind wasn't a breath.

Maybe it was a sigh.

It should have been, at least. I could feel my feet again, each step; I went into the bedroom and lay down on the bed, face down with half of my face against the blanket. Everything passed over my back, behind my vision, everything that ever happened was behind my vision and all I could do was imagine how it was happening. I knew everything that had ever happened, that would ever happen in my head. Space was like a cream of gasses, white, purple, yellow, thick like water. In real life it wasn't, but in my head it was alive and seemed to move, pass through you. It was old, older than anything. I would float through it, out there in the open, as open as possible. I was afraid of the open but in that dream, I was comfortable. Everything was small, anything that could want me hard, even, were small. Out there in that space, everyone and everything became just as insignificant as everything else. Is it pathetic to find comfort in that meaninglessness? I didn't think so. The space felt like a blanket against my back, and eventually my eyes couldn't open again, eventually I was past it, past that dream, past space and into the limbo of thought and action, where anything that was thought could happen, tottering on the edge of a cliff and ready to fall off, or not ready. It was the point of indecisiveness.