x: I just get so annihilated by the suffering of others.
o: Like a scalpel for your emotions.
x: If you’d say that kind of thing and think it to be true then…
o: Oh. Well that does say a whole lot more about the sayer than it does…
x: Lord it over yourself, why don’t you?
o: Pussy.
x: Hard-on.
o: What the fuck? And you’re going to sit there and tell me that you have this over-active empathic capacity, and you’re going to sit there and say shit like that?
x: I could stand and say it.
o: Ah, go twist a nutsac.
x: Please. You can do better than that.
o: Would it were that I could, but, alas, my hindside is blind.
x: Shit. So. What I was a saying…
o: Or more like what you meant.
x: Is that there’s no real reason for me to be so, well, overwhelmed by this hurt I see going on in other people. Well, except that I want maybe to have somebody else feel that way for me if I were in their situation.
o: A morsel of harm does a body good every now and then.
x: But it’s not really driven by selfishness.
o: Really? That sounds like a butt plug for pity.
x: No. It’s more like a condom for tears.
o: Not bad. It’s like you don’t want the mess, or…no. It’s more like you don’t want the consequences of your, or their, suffering to like ejaculate all over you. But it saps you nonetheless, perhaps more so because there’s not the same release. It’s almost fake. And then you tie up the soiled rubber and toss it away.
x: Away. That’s just it. It’s maybe sort of a purity issue. Keeping my soul as clean as possible.
o: Your soul? No. More like a crusty rag for the finished product of your baser instincts having the rule of the roost.
x: Maybe it’s embarrassing. Like I don’t want others to see the real me.
o: Ah. Well. Let’s not go that far. You’re doing fine treading water where you are. Keep at it.
x: Genital wart.
o: Dick cramp.
x: Ah fuck. Anyway. People go into convulsions. I’ve seen it. And I’m not talking physical pain.
o: Of course.
x: That’s a different ballpark.
o: A-whole-nother cup of piss.
x: I’m talking about emotional pain, manic grips of depression wielding insanity as a hammer.
o: Who’s got the sickle?
x: Oh, the tortured physics of understanding. How much must be taken before we learn to give?
o: I’m going to pinch this loaf pre-sphincter.
x: Be my guest.
o: People hold a lot of stuff in, right?
x: Sure, but that’s not…
o: Hold on. Now. I’m going to veer here.
x: Go swerve on ahead.
o: It’s the whole that-person-in-the-picture-is-not-me thing. Though it is you in the picture. And you know this. But you don’t want it to be. It’s not the person who you think that you are, who you want to be when others look. And it freaks you out. It makes you question the very nature of your existence.
x: And a bible to the head could knock some sense into the creepiest among us.
o: I once was lost but now I’m found. But there before the grace of blah, blah, blah go I. Yeah. I know. All that crap.
x: It’s the steps you take to get where you end up, right?
o: I don’t know about that. To tell you the truth, it sounds like a load a manure to me right now. But it might pass.
x: And then you find yourself in line at the grocery store, wondering why they can’t change the express-line sign to read, “Ten items or fewer.”
o: Something like that.
x: A best-side-facing-the-world-at-all-times thing. A minor kink in the operations of expressing your personality, of gaining access to special moments of rapport.
o: Something to live for, right? Or would that be creating things to make your life seem like it’s worth living.
x: Is there really a difference?
o: I don’t know. Really. I don’t. Maybe that’s part of the problem. Is seeing really always believing?
x: My default mode of thinking keeps getting set to the same things. Hell, and I’m stuck with screen-saver sensibilities.
o: It’s like we’re defining ourselves more and more by the things we like. Who we are is what we like, or more importantly, what we own, or, um, that is, I guess, what we import into our lives. We’re turning into a bunch of spoiled kids who are addicts of instant gratification. Gimme, gimme this. Gimme, gimme that. Gimme it all, and gimme it all right now.
x: Gershwin slimmed down to an airplane commercial. Jabba The Hut reciting Milton. Outdoor space heaters.
o: And we get all the news we need from the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
x: There’s a flattering going on. An urge beat into us, something that is constantly trying to persuade us to attempt to satisfy our desires, to want without end, to drink and eat and laugh and play video games and watch the latest big-budget Hollywood movie and to, above all else, spend money on things that we’re taught to need. We’re instilled with a poison-ivy-itch hankering to consume, to be impatient and greedy, to pay with the dollar-sign-hued hours of our days for this priceless gift of existence.
o: And all you’re left with is this life you’ve built from pop songs and loud TV commercials and WiFi tendencies and logos of professional sports teams and the immediate, though extremely ephemeral, satisfaction of texting.
x: Emptiness. Unquenchable desires. And only an escalating debt inflating all the time in the ruins of your spiritual bank account. A job that leaves you dead to the world, exhausted, barely able to push the buttons of your remote control, eat some corndogs, and cachinnate like a Tickle Me Elmo doll while plopped bloated and weary on your couch.
o: O’ beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain!
x: So where does that leave us?
o: Thumb wrestling our way through the cosmos.
x: Shouldn’t I have more to show for myself than a handful of gripes about other people and their problems?
o: Maybe you know it is o’ so possible. Brother, by the way, could you, uh, maybe, perhaps, spare a dime or two?
x: Just being appreciated. That’s what most of my emotional trunk of levied hurt comes down to. That wanting to feel important to somebody else. And somebody with whom to appreciate this distinctly short wonderful thing called being alive. I’m not thorning from the sidelines much these days. You know. You know. You know. Lap it up and let the moonlight wane on away.
o: And you’ve got to ask yourself if it’s merely self-serving, this love you keep forking over.
x: Getting fucked over for.
o: Or fucking over somebody else. If you can tell the difference.
x: Reading bodies and predicting the past.
o: Fall maundering to the ground and ghost the roots of your passivity with chummy sucks of face.
x: Vested interest comes and goes. We pocket what’s left of our heart and move on and move on and move on and move on and move on and move on and move on and move on and move on.
o: A manifesto for evading whatever it is that’s been put in us by nature. A call to arms for the ass scratchers and the mouth breathers and the leg humpers and the condiment lovers and those who’d rather spell words than watch TV.
x: Well clear cut my forest and mistake my mountains for spider bites.
o: It’s never enough.
x: What is?
o: Everything. Nothing. It’s never enough. You just keep wanting more and more and more.
x: Love decks itself out with airbrushed delusions, and we wait and ship off for the ruinous smoldering shores of carpe diem satisfaction.
o: Horace is still quite hip among the heathens I take it.
x: Odes and Epodes, motherfucker.
o: There’s no substitute for lunching with passionate dos-à-dosers. An eclogue raspberries to obscenity. Violence bojangles to freedom. Hear my lust roar!
x: Can it. I’m hullaballoing until the cows croak for dragon-tail snacks.
o: Materializing as a look-the-other-way kind of guy.
x: Fly down into the hard-back chair of your life and kick.
o: Who wants to see the way they are seen?
x: You rise from the plain astral plane of your thoughts to new dimensions of decoding the chaos you believe to be the world around you.
o: A ruche of distilled memories taking root in the briar patch of your hindsight’s sunglasses-tinted retrospective. Tread or be trod on. I guess.
x: That man in the picture.
o: Yes.
x: That stranger who others mistake for being me.
o: He straggles about in your clothes.
x: He puts on my face and wears my hair.
o: There is no you in him.
x: No me to be.
o: Just an imposter who serves as some kind of margrave seeking resources to feed his troops.
x: Pestering me with indifference. Gandering the unanimous night. Nobody knows his name like mine but something the whole tipped-over rent-apart flushed-toilet of wiped-cleaned forgiveness in just-for-you don’t-look-backs follows and follows, and we are born into things too.
o: How many yous can you be at once?
x: Never enough. And still the traffic lights clack up to red, lined up and flashing as they jog away by the ocean in the deep air-sadness of it all. Lately I’ve been noticing the limning that goes unsaid in the amphetamine nightmares of hilltop gazing. The breaks in the yellow-orange decadence, the wounded lines scratching through black-boned swaths of mangled tree and concrete. Mist chugging through in the clumpy cough of fog’s junked lungs over the ocean’s forgone disappearing longing. There’s nothing except everything wrong with me.
o: Empathy swears off bathos and dons a red rubber clown nose.
x: I can’t offer succor to every fucking asshole screaming her way through the chains of being a person alive in the world.
o: You can be you.
x: Ass dimple.
o: Butter fart.
x: Punching through the surface of small talk, of chatter, of burping wit, of dinner conversation, of we-need-to-talk seriousness, to get to the bloody pulp of being singularly you in the plurals of made-up selves.
o: We’ve got to get down to the white, fibrillose ballerina socks of the thing.
x: Fuck it. I’m learning sign language.
o: Yes. We strive for new endeavors of self-expression.
x: I’m growing a mustache. I’m shaving my head. I will give ear to a cut toenail’s final plea.
o: Ten thousand. Ten thousand and one. Ten thousand and…
x: Guns drawn. Hair slicked back with motor oil. Couples getting married. Why not? Why? Why not? Why? Why not?
o: Short pleadings for attention scribbled on tiny scraps of paper tossed towards a trashcan. Balled up. Gone. Still here. Gone.
x: If I could climb inside of your suffering and build myself a fire to keep you warm. If I could cry your tears for you. If I could fight Sonny Liston on the moon.
o: Help me Geraldine! Help me Geraldine!
x: Somebody else always running to your side or running for cover. It’s a gaff to support the woebegone sails of trying to be everything that you are not.
o: And me here all vaccinated against courage. You thriftily spend through the dollars of your days.
x: I tell stuff. I says, ‘I’ve got sleep in my eyes for you,’ to some curdled-milk mouth of a dame. Cat hair all over my clothes. Frozen toes.
o: The mustard’s on the sandwich. The syrup’s in the coffee. The rubber bands are on the wrist. The hotels are all out of vacancy. The best of who we are is only streamed at the speed of the sound of loneliness. Nail a sign to your door that reads, “My heart is not my own.”
x: Got it. Stop twisting my titties about it. Seriously. I got it down pat.
o: By rote. By rote. That’s all. You learn it but you don’t know it on the inside. You just taste it. You don’t digest it.
x: Pacing myself. Keeping the ship afloat for my personal time being.
o: Not anybody else’s?
x: Hope not. Hope not. Hope not. Hope not. Hope not. Hope not.
o: Me too.
x: Do you believe in sanity?
o: Something more.
x: Just suppressed anxiety maybe.
o: Something less.
x: We’ve got more filling. We’ve got tastes like pie.
o: Starts out in all directions, perhaps, or maybe, like a new moon, like shushes chowdering the night, like hassle-free checking, like fallow periods for crop plots, like bloody gums, like the way cars blush in traffic.
x: Where does it end?
o: Warmly.
x: Where?
o: Distinctly when the maple leaves are falling, falling.
x: In the hopes of recovering a surface tension that was lost in the sad closeness of rubbed-the-wrong-way yesterdays.
o: Of course.
x: Yep.
o: The coloring doesn’t go away, does it?
x: It might not. It’ll change, swirl around a bit, pop up for air, deal a Kansas City to your misery, hopscotch over your heart. What is much less if it’s not going to be more eventually? Bad habits add up, and we’ve got bowling shoes horseshoed on our lonely feet to dance away the blues with.
o: A sneeze of gold dust?
x: If not then likely something particularly similar, in the way that disparate things can often times be found to be oddly related.
o: A pedestal to stare from. To feel better about being you. To grunt up hysteria and fool passivity into being humble and never grumbling.
x: A frigate to laugh at the turbid waters of your life from.
o: Hoisted and balled-out. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Must we always make only muck from our missteps?
x: Probably.
o: Fuck.
x: Oh well, oh well, oh well, oh….well.
o: I want to reach out my window with an arm longer than an oarfish, and I want to nab an oranged greeny sheen-slick slippery maroonish leaf from the drooping wiry branches of the tree out there, outside my window I want to sail like a chucked goldfish into the street-slapping rain, I want to extend a hand to the bullion-skinned clouds, and if I draw back in fear let the lasting imprint of my summery seduction leave itself alone, at last, and then, let me reach outside, let me blunder, all the cities of me, let me fail to see what’s right there, let me join a chancy traveling sideshow speaking badinage and wearing horse-mane scarves, let me run to other skins, let the roof hold me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let go.
x: Oh.
o: Oh?
x: See?
o: Never. Never.
x: Dependent on others for the thoughts they keep you in.
o: On the thoughts of others. Sometimes, late at night, I lie in bed, wide awake, making faces out of the darkness, and I want to talk to all of my old friends whom I don’t talk to anymore. I want to be connected, to be enmeshed in the lives of others, to have somebody else care that I exist, to fit into the mechanics of their schedule somewhere, to have a place to do my living in that coincides with where others are doing theirs.
x: Likely it’ll end in Missouri.
o: Like Kansas-City eyes?
x: Almost. Eyes are hard to tell.
o: If there were a storm to tremble the spell from your…
x: Stop it.
o: Now, lord, now here’s a needy time. Jesus why don’t you come by here? Don’t stay long on your knees and pray. Come on by here, come on Jesus won’t you come by here? Don’t stay long. Don’t stay too long lord. Jesus. Lord. Why don’t you come on by here?
x: Keep it up.
o: Parlor talk. Staircase stuff.
x: That need be enough in this case it’s general and we’re speaking troves of pampasy-clear shrugging like indoor wilderness almost.
o: Impersonal. Needy.
x: Galvanized with personable automobiling.
o: Lie down on your bed in the middle of the day and turn all the lights off and turn your phone off and unplug your TV and your stereo and think about who it is you really are when it comes down to it and ponder if that’s who you want to be.
x: Been here. Done this.
o: Check out the ass-cheek flapping on this guy.
x: Go percolate a jar of shit.
o: Sure. Sure. Sure. I guess bliss is not for everybody.
x: Seems like I hear somebody calling, calling, calling, calling. But are they calling me?
o: Not by name. A prominent custom though it is, still, the lottery will take you by number. And that’s not your dollar. There’s a you who license-plates your corporeal shape with letters signifying personhood, this self that is a calligraphic assertion of what this specific entity bearing witness to the world is. A form you take. Hats on a cotton roof. A rustling of leaves. And then, after nobody’s noticed, drooping home to peter out in the shallows.
x: Older than old times.
o: Similar to new times.
x: Just like it, almost.
o: Let me blink and forget about my self for a while.
x: Please. Do the rest of us a favor.
o: I’m like a sorcerer who unwittingly constructs a labyrinth that he can’t escape from, and therefore is doomed to wander within its solitary confines forever.
x: Playing nice with the history of your past. Talking so all the time.
o: So?
x: What’s missing is the retention. It’s like the powder of your experiences is passing through a sieve that catches nothing except empty air in its screen.
o: Bored empathy rears its miscalculating head. Emotional contagion spreading like a smallpox epidemic. Take care of yourself. The rest will follow.
x: Dine alone.
o: Sure, because if there’s a library, and if that library is a universe of multi-leveled hungers, well, my appetite is pathologically strained and full. The tiered nature, whether Platonic or Aristolian, of stacked-plate platitudes will give all-you-can-eat lunches to the more Machiavellian natured among us. And if the news is breaking, and if the bomb’s interminable infinite nature is not my own, is there something wrong? Yes. So wrong. So motherfucking wrong. Something that plows through the current of centuries and leafs through books of days and gets lost in the simulacra-saturated fussy gestures of a generation’s download aptitude. An artist’s rendering of fatty foods.
x: My friends will surround me with the things I need to survive. I will drift in their current. Is that carelessly getting carried away?
o: With care. Always, remember, with care.
x: Being a person can be difficult, can it not?
o: It’s rough stuff sometimes, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Posts
