UPHILL LIKE STRAIGHT INTO THE SKY

[this is the experience of a man named Joshua]

i woke early & went running along the sea-breeze  sun climbing the steel beams of the bay bridge as the city collectively rolled out of bed & into an office chair.

[and it moved me, so i internalized enough of it to use his words twofold.]

“Maybe we are cups of water from the same sea. Sometimes you still feel lonely.”

Some nights I sleep so deeply I cease to exist. My belongings, as well, unravel. 
Picture the ocean poured endlessly over the ocean, et cetera. Then erased;  Still the morning comes & I’m there, half awake & holding my coffee in the doorway.

The Impossible Ladder

The elegant plan, the simple inarticulate hope
the incessant dusting, the uncovering that hovers here
the unremarkable rungs of the impossible ladder
that you think of these things at all.
The cups that are clean, then filled, then cleaned
the nowhere fear, the terror of arrival
the sad spaces in front & above, the sap of happiness
the matter-of-fact alleyways
the proper thing to do or say at the wrong time & place
that you think of these things at all.
The honest beggar, the blinding white lie of language
the stubborn smokestacks & on-ramps, the dull ache of static
the bored understanding of traffic patterns
the unspent plea, the common cold openings
the nature of torn pockets, the multidimensional smile
that you think of these things at all.

Good exists. Bad exists. There is some disagreement which is which. 

if it aint broke, don't fix it

i just feel so f'ed up that i have no idea how to fix this thing, or what parts ever broke.
only just that once it wasn't at all like this.
at all-
not even, sometimes

In the land of one season, you can pretend that no time passes.

room after room of such waiting

We are bothered by crowds, choked with the wings of our angels,

standing on the sidewalks, wobbling through alleyways- coughing
;

Projected on the streets like stars


All those lovers in the foreplay of morning


If time reversed, sunsets would sunrise & sunrise would set,

& we’d wake up so tired, we’d fall asleep full of rest-But still there’d be dark, there’d be light. Thunder, then lightning.

& room after room of such waiting..

because, if you want to know the truth, the fabric of our lives5 is full of little ruptures.

i wonder what this thing that i am feeling- how i would experience it's mutation, had i not had any feelings prior to right now.


and if there's still time to get pure.

the night, of course, plays on our secret fears that we, too, have repressed memories—that we, too, have perhaps done things in our pasts that our brains have whitewashed for the sake of our own sanity. This is how interrogations and false confessions work—after being battered with the question “But did you do it?” for a certain number of hours, even the sanest human being begins to doubt her own mental reliability, her own version of events. 

How many people is “I”? 

"Maybe what makes life so terribly fatiguing is nothing other than the enormous effort we make for twenty years, forty years, and more, to be reasonable, to avoid being simply, profoundly ourselves, that is, vile, ghastly, absurd. It’s the nightmare of having to represent the halt subhuman we were fobbed off with as a small-size universal ideal, a superman from morning to night."

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey into the End of Night

hounded fortnights, multiple dreams in a vignette of an unfortunate strangers alibi's

so, i am trying to learn to accept being less holy, ornate, and deceptively resilient 

but i'm nauseous all the time -

so, i am going to have to learn to save some money, silence, dislocated feelings

for a trip to somewhere, with a decent toilet bowl

to let some of this shit spill out; it's almost spring-time;

(and she's less tolerant than February Mondays)

4am

in my bedroom, dissecting fireflies, but when you cut them open
then the light goes out