Lessons on Falling for the Risen

After she left, he read the rest of the chapter. It ended with a young man, the son of the book's patriarch, burning down a silo in the middle of a field. Even though he was finally able to remember the cast of characters & could disentangle the conflicting destinies that arced through the a span of what must've been centuries, he still had no idea what was going on. Whether the language had any command over the beings that killed, fucked & betrayed in that world crudely rendered. Those sprawling sentences he would have to stop in the middle of just to exhale only to forget where he was, what had taken place, who had been redeemed & who cast away & begin once more. He read the same few pages, saw the same silo burning several times on the parched hill before coming to some closure that could set him wandering. His chest weightless in the dwindling light, a few spectral hours, as he rolled near the river with beer in hand & played his guitar on the cold grass. Some Turkish kids ran over & he let them play it. One kid played & the rest laughed & whistled. He handed it over to another, a scrawny kid with a mouthful of twisted teeth, whose fingers danced like spiders over the strings. He sang what sounded like a lullaby for the damned & unraveled melodies unheard of as the rest fell into a trance. After the kid finished, he handed the guitar back & thanked him with a solemn smile.

Or Wonder By a Few

He went back & didn't know what to do with himself. Eleven in the morning & he had nowhere to be nor could he think of a time in the foreseeable future where such would be the case. He was having a show on Friday night in an abandoned factory where he was getting 5% of the door but thought he could convince them to raise it to 7%. All he had to do was tell them he had a band & back-up singers & then get some drunk kid from the audience to beat a set of drums & harmonize on the last chorus, buy the kid a drink afterwards & pocket the rest. He did it before. Back when he had more shows & didn't drink so much, back when he would wake in the morning & be amazed each time by how much money was in his pockets & thought about drinking just to celebrate the discovery. So he sat on the kitchen floor, rolled a cigarette & continued where he left off the night before in the book with no cover & no name. He was on chapter 6 which began, It was when I saw her hands, sickly & peeling, that I believed her story to be true. He heard the door buzzer & thought it was some delivery person & buzzed them in. Then a knock & he opened it & the girl had returned & said she forgot something & then complained that she was always late & that perhaps that meant that she secretly wanted to be fired. He answered as she was in the bedroom rummaging through things that she should hold on to whatever job she has in this city & that people always bitch about their jobs & want to quit them until they don't have one & then always bitch about that. She came in the kitchen & said she was going to be late anyways & asked if he could roll a cigarette for the road. He grabbed his papers & pulled out a green colored one. Shit, she said, you're outta papers. He told her it meant that there were still a few papers left. That's how you know that they're good papers.

Scattered Cues

The roommate left early the next morning: he was giving tennis lessons to elderly women at some pre-fascist recreation club in the Tiergarten. The girl came in the kitchen with her hair knotted & eyeliner caked in the corners of her eyes. She asked him if he wanted to get some coffee & they walked to a cafe down the street & she told him that his friend was a child who is trying to attain manhood by manipulating the women in his life, convincing himself that they dance to his cues & will always comfort his distress. She said that she was letting him do the same to her but that she was aware of it & could easily distance herself from the abuse & witness his delusional games with a detached fascination. She talked for another hour as he listened & right before she left to go to work, the wind blew off the squares of napkin paper she had torn & piled at the edge of the table.

Some May Call It Void

He was sleeping in a kitchen in the West during that tail-end-time of the summer when the leaves begin to rot, renting it from a friend who was sleeping in the bedroom of the apartment. At night he sat on a broken bench near the window in his underwear, distracted from the book in his hand by the contorted images that unwound in his head of some old house on a hill, steam rising off a river, splashes of otherwise silent toads. He reached this hallucinatory state every night before sleeping, finally lying on the floor when he couldn't open his eyes any more. As long as he could sleep immediately & not listen to the purr of the refrigerator beside his head, the sound of the roommate's grunts as he fucked the girl he was seeing at that time. He also couldn't bear the pain in his stomach from eating only bread & butter until the pieces clogged up his intestines so that he was walking around with two weeks worth of bread in his stomach, enough to feed a glutinous church congregation. During the day he would wander around streets half-drunk with plenty of excuses to talk up older women who basked in the waning light of sidewalk cafes. Ask them if they thought the world was getting more chaotic or if we were only getting worse at enjoying chaos. Drink up what other people left in their glasses at the bar. Stare at the swans that skated under the bridge. Waiting for them to open their eyes & dip their heads. Coming back home so many nights through the cemetery, sometimes hearing the rain still fall through the trees onto the headstones. One night he returned to find the American girl & his roommate leaning out the window in the kitchen, spilling some champagne on the ledge, some on the mattress & sheets on the floor. They passed the bottle to him & he took a few sips & with his guitar he began singing "Mean Old World" by T-Bone Walker as the girl dangled her naked leg out the window & the roommate swayed his head.

Fragile Defense

Do you realize that I'm a fragile man? I'm not a warrior like some or a hero like few because I would never know which idea I'm fighting for.

Self-axis

Self-consciousness, self-awareness, whatever you wanna call it, is advocated & even championed as a path towards being a more fulfilled individual, someone who seeks out those experiences in life that count among the most enriching & rewarding, someone who "knows what they want" & pursues it with fervent dedication. Such awareness is often synonymous with authenticity, another rung on the ladder of individual expression & understanding. It also affords one a better grip on the ethical repercussions of their actions, how they can achieve a better relationship not only towards themselves but also towards others, thus becoming a more responsible citizen or lover, mother or daughter. Self-consciousness or self-awareness also inhibits the individual. When one is more aware of what one does, one often is given over to doubting oneself, questioning motives & actions & thereby resisting spontaneous expression, intuitive responses & creative choices. Artists who question their choices too often tend to drain their creations of life force, immediacy & effectiveness & yet an artist who fails to question their choices can create sloppy remnants of ego-maniacal episodes. I am by no means claiming that a balance between the two is the type of harmony that each individual should strive after. I am the last person to have faith in a balance between any two seemingly opposed elements. I often like my world-views crooked & ungainly, my concepts asymmetrical & my art discordant.

As if he didn't hear...

The rain was too much of a coward to fall steadily, to bear down on the city, ravish it with its rhythms. Only bouts of grayness spreading over the buildings, through the lindens & across the eaves. Cars like whispers in the mist. He walked around trying to pretend as if he didn't hear the tension in the voices that emerged from the blindness all around him, the wrath that reared up from each vagrant call, each motherly admonition, the unfathomable pleas to a sky so long blanketed in its own petty tears that no pitch could rouse the light to release itself over the bodies that groped down the street as if it were a tunnel unto the gate of dawn.

Mumblings

I wake up. Open up the window to the courtyard. Standing there with the cold on my skin.
She mumbles something from the bed, wrapped up in the sheets, still asleep. The light does
not fall through the clouds. The cold only seeps deeper. She says my name, then speaks of a
city whose name I've never heard before. Pigeons scatter across the sky. I stand there until
the cold burns then turn away from the window & crawl back in bed, ready again to taste her
poison.

The "poem" about the "Poet"

I once wrote a poem for a "poetry workshop" called "The Poet." I was inspired to write it out of sheer frustration, vitriol & childish pleasure after being subjected to the masturbatory monologues of the "resident poet," the "facilitator of the workshop" during the first "session." The poem that I wrote was composed of a series of blunt statements: "The Poet licks Mayakovsky's asshole," "The Poet is a bum disguised as a lecher," etc. The other "participants" in the workshop, those gathered around the rickety table in a moldy chamber of untouched poetry books, didn't quite know how to a muster a response, drained as they were of all inspiration after having listened to an hour of poems & their subsequent "critiques," or "readings." They made their rounds of inane comments, stamped their feet, their fists, expressed total confusion, utter indifference. A few friends had joined me for this workshop & were trying to hide their laughter with their hands. I sat there dead still, a poker-faced charlatan. The "resident poet" offered up his "critique" then excused himself, scampering off to the toilet. A girl at the end of the table with permed bangs that jostled over her eyes said, "I just don't understand what you're trying to do. Do you? Maybe you could help me, help us understand." Maybe I could've, now thinking back on it, but then I wouldn't be able to see my friends trying to hide their laughter in a ship of fools.

Frail Refutation

I would leave, but I don't know a better place to live in this world, at this hour, during these wretched days. I've never left a place without first having a vision of where to go. I couldn't even consider another life without the hazy hope of a better place to dwell & wander around in circles. I have no other city on the hill. No other language I'd like to hear & recoil from not in horror of the language itself, but in the self-realization that I have no will to let it speak through my soul, to be possessed by it, housed within it. No, I've been suckling too long on the mother tongue: my mouth is petrified according to its sometimes dour tonalities, its wave-like pulsations & phrasal fluidity. Where would I go? Where would I begin again? Armed only with the knowledge that I can abandon any place without reason or that I can forget as easily as I can walk away & that both come second-nature to me? I would leave, but I don't know where else I would suffer so gracefully, where else I could learn the art of careless living, where patterns fail to apply, where lightness of being is passed around on a mirror, where I could spend months anticipating the next transformation & realize that I just underwent a dozen of them.

Radical Performance

If a man is being willingly dragged down the road by another man, is that a performance? If everyone passing by deems it a "performance," then it's OK to walk on, laugh, smirk, or admire such radical histrionics. If it's a performance, then it automatically has no tangible effect, or is thought to have no tangible effect. But a snapped spine or bloody hand is an effect of a series of actions & yet it's deemed a "performance" just as a play would be, or a musical act. Of course, pedestrians might yell, raise a fit, tell the "performers" to "take it somewhere else" like to a pre-ordained performance space, a place where rituals are enacted beneath the security of concrete ceilings, barricaded by rows of cushioned seats & surrounded by a wall of benumbed gazes. An element of drama is distilled from a theatrical performance. The audience has agreed to participate in the event & therefore the chances of total surprise are minimized. They expect drama & are not as affected when it occurs. Whereas when performances are enacted in streets or in other frequently stultifying environments, then surprise is maximized, pedestrians automatically become audience members & are hurled into a thicket of emotional responses that've they neither prepared for nor have much control over. Drama is reinstated. The most effective performances are those that redefine the very nature of performance, that turn citizens immediately into audience members, that truly dramatize their daily lives where the rituals of urban motion crash into the rituals of a spontaneous performance.

Notes to a Testament (Part III)

I’ve made my admonishments against fear & I don’t regret being admonished every time in return. Just for the pure abuse of it. To be rattled, knocked around before the lifeless gazes of my compatriots & enemies, or no audience at all if my demise is enacted upon such blissful grounds. Wagging my finger at the thorn in my side. This is not the way to go, friends, but it’s undeniably preferable to being humiliated by a sleeping beast than by one you’ve roused with the sheer will of your words. I know I’ve lured fear before into the only space where my body stays tethered to the floor, where my breath’s unleashed at syncopated intervals. Full heave, cough, tremble & expulsion. Am I fighting against a force which should only be met with renunciation? Before you personify your own inner devices of immolation, remember that the steadiness of your sanity hangs in the balance.

Notes to a Testament (Part II)

If I accept the impossibility of happiness, will I feel more liberated than ever before? What kind of liberation is worth a renunciation of possible happiness? A liberation which soothes my restlessness into a doleful sleep, calms these erratic fingers, this scowl & burning heart? Liberated & catatonic, like the revelers who drape the street with their laughter. Freed from any potential for surprise, cataclysmic awakenings, sudden eruptions of lust & delight. But free. Yes. Never to expect a moment's beauty. I'd rather have faith in the possibility of happiness, believe that I've felt it before & may feel it again even though my skin recoils at the very mention of the word. Believe it & accept the nightmarish spell of routine, these selves constantly hurled to the floor or lifted up into the light with a view to scrutinize & condemn them for what they fail to represent or uphold. Having faith in happiness without ever expecting its sometimes graceless embrace, its drunken kisses. Suffering for the possibility that one night I may be surprised.