Artificial outlets
Replacing human emotions,
The relationships of people
Lost inside yourself,
Releasing your energy
To everyone, no one
Not someone.

Cowardice,
Compromise.
The unwillingness
To change a situation.
Expressing a situation
To everyone, no one
Not someone.

Courage,
To engage,
To give of your heart,
Regardless of consequence
Removes the necessity for art.

Art as artifice,
A replacement of human emotion
Artist as passive-aggressive
Lonely is the artist,
Because there’s no need for art
Unless you’re lonely.

People crave the community of the tribe. They revel in ritual. Eventually, though, the music must end, reality descend, and the community of the tribe decay into the modern, dislocated society. In some few, isolated areas, it can be maintained a bit longer. Perhaps so far as the present. Another hundred years maybe, and it will be no more than what for the most part it is, even now. A performance.

Terrors flow like seasons,
Migrate like birds,
Grow as they’re fed,
By a cruel twist of culture,
Terror is abhorred,
Which creates terror
At the thought of being terrified.
In the hearts of the meek,
Who inherit the terrors
of their fathers,
And so are they kept meek.
The strong are those who mask their terrors,
Behind calluses.
Meekness covered by such tough hides,
They succeed
In losing that
Which they were.
Truth is meek
And firm
But hidden
By callus
Of fear
Of fear.

Grasping for things desired,
Heard but misunderstood.
Touching at the edge of the world
Lying prone at your feet.
You dream, forgetting to sleep.

People get beat down, over time, when the hardships are hard enough, when things seem so far out of your control that even wishing for more strikes you as masochism. You begin to put out of your thoughts what you can’t control, and this becomes habit, until you do your best not to face any problem at all.

Rain,
Blows upon an aching body,
Predisposed to defeat.
Pain,
Shows the world it’s embodied
In scenes of bloodied meat.
Sane,
Though not sure of the reason,
For the hail or the sleet.
Reign,
Over my own aching body,
Dominion of my feet.

Wild cascades of hope,
In sleep, dreams,
Awakened, alone,
The holeness, it blares,
Screaming.

There are times when I lie
Upon the cold, hard floor,
Feeling my reason slipping,
Listening to music doesn’t help,
TV only makes it worse.
I sip on wine
Red, remember Paris.
Days spent in lost memorization
Of its foreignness
Without attempts at proximity.
Now,
Sitting alone,
In the city of loneliness,
With only my wine,
Thinking about the ease,
Relaxing the muscles
Which hold my sanity in place.
Doing the things
Lying beneath my net
Of endurance.
I’ve thrown my body
Ypon it, but it struggles.
A single laugh, maybe,
It will be gone.
Trouble,
Time spent searching
Inches into yards.
Deeds, happiness,
Realization, contempt.
Loss, harm, return.
Too late.
Can’t speak
True thoughts, true thoughts, thoughts.

Allowing the truth.

Alone without ideals

Alone, come to face

Real, pragmatic strength

Offering, pushing a hole

Through the stomache,

Encircling the heart,

Trying the soul.

Not allowing my one phone call,

Sweating,

Not from heat,

Energized with flaked passing

Passions

Unfilled,

Despite all attempts,

Incomplete.

The Decadent Athletic Ascete’s Aesthetic,

Or,

The Decadent Ascetic Athlete’s Aesthetic

Or,

The Decadent Ascete’s Athletic Aesthetic

It’d be dangerous for me if you showed up now, Joey. I’d be liable to follow you anywhere, into any kind of trouble you could conceive. And it’s true you could always conceive of trouble. I was always scared, reticent, in the vain perception of my own greatness, protecting my future; afraid to lose what lay before me. But now, in fact, it is lost, to time or to a shift in my own perception, I know not, but gone, regardless. I no longer face life as the guardian of a crystal chalice of potential. Perhaps, now I am ready, simply, to live. To livre.

The moon sits cloaked in murky clouds, entangling
wisps of dark obscuring rocky shoulders.
Glows large, glows, glows,
Orange and grey,
Sad and troubled with
Blotches of some disease,
No healthy glow this,
Caked and dying,
Bloated from bad air
Like a man drowning.

I had an epiphany about this with Reuben one night, months ago, at a jazz club in the village. These three guys, two horn players and a drummer…they were playing very fast, abstract, free jazz. And they allowed themselves to get deep, really deep, down to that personal inner self others hardly ever glimpse in the mundane world. Yet, in fact, they simply opened up and let it rush into the void, the world, where such a thing is so rare as to need to be told.

And so what came to me in a flash was, hey, maybe that’s where they lived, there at the core of their selves, striving to comprehend what they found there, and to release it into existence as sound. This striving to create one’s own personal expression of the qualities of beauty in the world, and of ugliness as well, well, perhaps that’s enough. The fact that they did it, not alone, but as part of a three-headed convergence of free inner expression, that’s something more.

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A Prophecy

A post-climate change, oil-drained, world dominated by competing Theocracies, maintaining a tenuous, pathetic, and surreal link to science and technology. Their thinking will be circular, like a Rube Goldberg machine, and specious. Their architectures and aesthetics will be similarly distorted, misshapen, and just somehow jarringly illogical. It will be as if the world were in the midst of an anti-Enlightenment, reacting radically against the values of our age, which led to all their suffering. People will be filled with regrets for a world they’ve never seen, except on fuzzy, illpowered, little lcd screens.