Keep it down

Today has been about
keeping my thoughts and liquor down
breathing as though air were a scarce commodity
damage control of the mind
be still, and remember that you are a person
who doesn't hold anyone's hair back
True, she is
a tiger in a nursery
brutal without ever meaning to be
but not evil, never evil

One to nine

The other day an old friend from high school
comes to my house
a sad character with whom
I hadn't heard from
since graduation
and would you believe
that after all these years
the first thing he says to me is
that he's too drunk to stand up
so we sit down awkwardly and he starts talking about this
and that, until finally he admits that
He has fallen into a sorry state of disrepair
he is a morbid caricature of his former self
There are large gaping holes in his stomach
something, I observe, has been eating away at him for years
‘Do you think I will ever be able to get my life together?’
is all he asks, then just stares and awaits my honest
reply, for I was always someone he could trust to give
him my honest opinion
he might as well have handed me a gavel
I didn’t answer him
I just told him about these concrete statues I once saw
at a bus stop in Portland
like me they were sullen, waiting for the bus
that had not come;
one man was scratching his concrete head over a
sudoku
in the back of his concrete newspaper
another was frozen in the act of lighting a concrete cigarette
and years later,
when I went back to that place
they were all still there
every one of them
waiting
for the bus
for the nicotine hit
for all the numbers to align
from one to nine

the colonist and the native

In my experience, the interplay of love and sex is extremely one-sided. It is like when the Colonist tells the Native to sit down and speak the language of business, that is, the language we believe to be universal. ‘This is some fine soil you’ve got here’, he says, taking up a handful of dirt and appraising it as a jeweller would a zirconium. He conducts himself coolly, without giving away his intentions, much like a collector considering an item for his already extensive collection. ‘What say we make a deal: a nation’s worth of this terrific, cultivatable stuff in exchange for more liquor than your virgin liver can handle!’. And when that pen is placed in her hand and she takes her first deep swig of brandy, she might be forgiven for thinking that she’s just duped this delightfully naive dandy for all he’s got. ‘Dirt for liquor!’, she will exclaim, blurt out as it were, once the liquor has rendered her thoughts as transparent as the bottle she drinks from, ‘what a one-sided exchange!’. And the Colonist chuckles quietly to himself.‘Indeed’, he will say with an affected, car salesman grin.

Faux flowers

The flowers in my house are changed often
And at great expense but
I have no trouble telling what’s real from what’s fake:
Flowers, even the ones in full bloom, are not without their
Imperfections
browning, fraying edges which
Remind you that they will soon be
Replaced.
A flower that gets watered and preened is real
Just like a dog that walks on it’s hind legs is real
Accept, for the moment, that they are there,
Poised and perfect
But always remember that some manicured hand has gone to
great lengths
to make you itch to reach out and touch them
Just to make sure

Runway

This weight fell on me
like an airplane onto a runway
I could see it coming
but when it happened
it was louder than a bomb
in my head
 

Spice

Years ago, I read of a man who left his house to collect the morning paper, only to find a basket, made entirely of crystal, sitting unambiguously on his doorstep. The article’s lead paragraph described the basket, its preliminary appraisal, listed its exorbitant net worth, and then finally, in a vague, tersely written sentence, described the basket’s contents: a red, palm-sized brick of what appeared to be grain and plant roots, which crumbled at the slightest touch. The contents of the basket were not mentioned again in the article.

At the time that the man, a fifty-three year old clerk, made his fortuitous discovery, he was deeply in credit card debt and on the brink of divorce, two interlocking tragedies made worse by the fact that he could not see them as two separate manners, one demanding strength and insistence, the other vulnerability and patience; as different from one another as cutting down a tree is from amputating an arm. For this hapless man, this man of quiet desperation, the worst feeling of all was seeing that stack of envelopes on his front doorstep, his divorce folded twice in order to fit inside the envelope, a document to which he must accede, and for which he must sign the same signature he gives to VISA. But on this golden morning, the envelopes that once abounded at his doorstep were gone, vanished, into the vague disconsolation of the past, and in its place a priceless hand basket of pure crystal. He fell to pieces at the sight of the enormous glistening basket. Sunken-shouldered and prostrate as though relieved of an enormous burden, he prayed incessantly to a God in whom he did not believe, because he knew the envelopes would never return. His marriage was saved.

I didn’t think anything of this story at the time; I saw it as a poor attempt at human interest, or allegory, or both; but over the next few weeks these articles kept resurfacing in the media, stories of ruined men finding crystal baskets by accident, and delighting at their own good fortune.

Forensic scientists and horticulturists had no record of the substance that was found inside these baskets, always the same seven inch long, five inch wide red brick. When at last they agreed to classify it as a spice, it was only to bring the months of obstreperous disagreement to a respectable conclusion. To speak freely, things as simple as classifying a new substance into an the existing taxonomy of data always seemed to drag on. It happens whenever a stagnant discipline happens upon the unknown; the men of science ramble on and on out of fear—a crippling fear of appearing unqualified and hackneyed in the eyes of their peers by defying the natural order of chapters in their coauthored textbooks, for only source of validation men of science need or want comes from other men of science. Nonetheless, everyone was captivated and, for the most part, baffled, by this exotic and previously unclassified substance—only the frail-minded scholars affected disinterest, fearing that opening their mouths on the subject would expose the gaps in their classical education as quickly as the ones in their teeth.

By the time horticulturists amended their textbooks so as to include the spice’s name and picture, it was promptly forgotten. It was not until years later, when it was flagged by a reputed medical journal flagged for its acute psychoactive properties, that the spice reached the acme of it’s popularity.

The journal related the story of a man in South America who murdered another man and then his own family. He was tried by the state, whereupon the following was discerned: The accused, a former general, had found a crystal basket in the courtyard of his modest, agrarian home. At the time there was a terrible, persistent drought in the region, and dying, drooping black flowers partially concealed the basket from view. When he discovered it, the man brought the crystal basket, empty, as it was discovered in cross questioning, to the victim, a successful merchant in the province, with the intention of pawning it for grain. The accused decided to sell the basket to this man, his prideful family beginning to feel the oppressive pitch of hunger, which they associated with working class destitution. They began to loath the accused for what they saw as his failure to provide for them.

it was said to induce in users an avid belief in their own immortality, one so intense that it could turn a timid, lower management type into a revolutionary. ‘drove’ scores of people to senseless murder.


or at least this was the belief held by the chaste, puritanical members of society who spoke of spice as a great, unprecedented evil
“What horrors will befall a nation in which every man fancies himself a Napoleon?”
it was my belief at the time that the explosion in spice’s popularity was fueled by those evangelists who, in their attempts to blame the spice for society’s ills, undermined human agency altogether, that is to say, brought the capacity of man to exercise moderation and judgment in to question

Then followed the inevitable backlash: a roaring deluge of passive protest by the self- Ritcheous left, likewise elevating spice to this idealistic platform, into something more important than it actually was. They took spice and turned it into a design on a mass-produced, slim-fit 100% cotton t-shirt. For these mislead youths substance abuse became a symbol of personal liberty.

Because it was undetectable, and betrayed no outward
signs of intoxication, the user was often the only one aware of his own
mental state. I used spice, in a ‘safe place’ and recorded the event on my phone. I have no memory of how I reacted to it, but the video shows me staring at the people around me with an alarmed look on my face, the way …first thoughts of immortality were as follows…

“everyone is about to die Why is it all still business as usual for them? I feel so much pity for them all as a whole, but as it stands I am incapable of feeling any empathy for them individually”

the crime and suicides did peak
and naturally, the spice did become a convenient device for
prosecutors whenever they were unable to isolate mens rea
every single toe-tagged doe in the morgue
became another victim of the will to power
a wife might find wake up to find her husband had hanged himself overnight
an unfinished glass of rye, no coaster, sitting on his desk
and she would get angry and refuse to read his note, so insistent
that he hadn’t learned of her infidelity,
“It was that cursed spice, a veritable scourge of the Earth”

nobody knows exactly why some people felt the urge to
kill other people when they were on spice,

most people had used spice at least once, they might have been
preparing for a job interview, an important sports game,
a major exam; the spice obliterated any thoughts or feelings
which might distract or otherwise inhibit a person from realising
the potential of their actions
However, what I found worthy of note was the difference
in how I imagined the future as a shapeless mass
where all of sources of uncertainty would fuse together
like hundreds of small cracks in a window pane
each crack a vector pointing to a contortion of the present
where everyone has two unique aspects and you spend
your time just staring greedily at the world around you
trying to see everything from the most gratifying angle

At first I only used spice to understand what exactly
drove my friends and family to murder;
But I grew to need it, like everyone else
Funerals were an ordeal if I wasn’t on spice
and there were so many funerals back then
it seemed like every other day I would hear about
a friend from high school
executing his entire family and then himself


When under the influence of spice,
the immortality often spoke of
is not so much a refusal of death so much as an end to anticipation
You stop envisaging the future as significantly worse than the present
I remember thinking that no matter what happened to me
in that uncharted wasteland of the future
my heart would still beat

The Rubix Cube

THE RUBIX CUBE

My dream last night was a collation of every party I have ever attended. The uniting feeling was one of insignificance. As is not uncommon in dreams, I was overwhelmed by an ineffable sense of peril, feeling like at any moment I might fall off the face of the earth into oblivion, and because it was a party, that it would all be muted by the shroud of lasers and smoke machines. Even though I was not dying I would perfect my last words, obsessing over the most trivial and insignificant choices of words the way a job applicant gets bogged down in superficial details like whether or not to wear a tie. I would approach and be approached by strangers who knew my name and would indulge in conversations about their future prospects or what it all means or a band they recently discovered. In addition, these people were all horribly agreeable with each other. They would speak in platitudes and false complements, and even though they couldn’t hear a word that was said, would still affect a look of intense, undivided attentiveness; they would nod their heads and raise their eyebrows as though astonished by some revelatory, life-altering statement that was likely a recount of the time they scraped a credit for an exam they took hungover.

I was perplexed and fascinated by these people, imagining circus chimpanzees checking their reflection in the mirror whilst balancing a pyramid of plastic cups brimming with tap beer, and all the while nodding their heads and raising their eyebrows, even when they weren’t talking to anyone. I became entranced by these incantatory head nods and eyebrow raises, which slowly became synchronized so that everyone was moving as one beast. They became little parts of this massive rubix cube, as big as a building, with every square painfully grinding and contorting. There was a palpable sense of desperation; everyone who was part of the rubix cube strove to be the first to single-handedly group the like colours and so solve the great Riddle. So great was their vanity, their wish to disentangle that which so many others had failed to disentangle, that it became even more jumbled than before. For every fluorescent green or yellow there were three flesh coloured, misshapen squares (a geometrician might call them rectangles). These squares, it was clear to onlookers such as myself, had become vexed and disoriented by the movements in which they were forced to participate, and just screamed as loud as they could with the intention of making others as dissolute as themselves.

While all of this was going on, the cube as a whole moved with an efficient, clockwork-like exactness, wholly disinterested in the wellbeing of its aggregate parts. Some simple minded people who abhorred the cube’s coldness accosted me with questions like,
“How are we supposed to live our lives with such an omnipresent evil constantly pestering us?”. I loathed these people and their convictions, but still I tried to answer them.
“The cube isn’t evil”, I shouted above the din of the music, “it is just what it is is, doing what it is preconditioned to do, just like the rest of us.”
And they would feign understanding, unable to hear my reply but acting like they understood the essence of it. They would each nod their head and raise their eyebrows, and would immediately be digested by the rubix cube and assigned a square.

My head was spinning and all I could smell was a sickening perfume of sweat and hairspray. My thoughts came and went, and so all I focused on was my one desire: to exist independently of the cube, the organic ‘antheap’ that this party had become, no matter how unremarkable or mediocre I appeared to others when standing apart from it. I could tell that people felt the same way, but would nonetheless allow themselves to be digested in grotesque, spasmodic lurches. What scared me the most was the way these people acted just prior to being swallowed up, the way they would dance with lifeless vigour, like the needle of a sewing machine dances. I gathered that these people had found consolation in perceiving their bodies, which danced mindlessly on the puce, fleshy tongue of the cube, from afar—that is, they realised they could, at any moment and with ease, flee, but instead just danced like blind animals on their hind legs.

Suddenly I could hear these people in their thousands screaming out at themselves. It was as though each person and their corporeal form were two escaped convicts hobbling to freedom, bound at the leg—the repetitive dance music a prison siren. One of the prisoners, the more resolute one, had Paradise in view, but could only move at a snail’s pace because of the latter, who seemed oddly content with the prospect being captured and living out the rest of his days in bondage.