Primordial Drivel

Journal XX - Banshees and Unrestrained Liberty

2015-10-31T03:33:00.000-04:00

The clouds are falling out of the sky with the screams of

the banshee leading the wind. The screams don't scare me

at night behind the camellias. The wind though. It blows.

People don't believe in the banshee but they do demons.

It shouldn't surprise. The Bible talks about demons but not

banshees. Yeats does though. He was a believer. I'm a

believer. You are a believer. We are all believers. We

believe in rainbows but not in their meaning. We believe in

laughter but not in its medicine. We believe in beauty but

not that it's real. Colors aren't real, they say. Mental

constructs. Like the matrix. I have a mental construct of a

scientist being honest with the ancients. I have a mental

construct of a philosopher being open to religion. Storms

are distant and dark and beautiful and destructive, filled

with shades and gradations and heavy with the weight of

the earth, tough love for the growth and cleanliness of the

world. Sometimes I see animals in the sky. Trees like

people dancing a harvest dance, little pine arms turned

upward and sideways, swirling around in browns and reds

and greens and fifty shades of grey in between. I see a girl,

a beautiful blond-haired girl standing in fifty shades of grey.

Fifty beautiful shades of black and white and the half-light

of a charcoal morning. I want to take my eraser and wipe

away the words I said that made her stop twirling her hair

when we talked. Stop staring at me with dilated eyes.

I want to erase my eyes and my nose and my hairs, but

leave by big belly. My swelling belly reminds me that I am

in need of restraint. Unrestrained liberty is death to the

body and soul. Yes, give me unrestrained liberty and you

will give me death. My liberty is swallowing me, chewing

me like a bird being tossed about between various rocks

like in an alligators stomach - she stares and watches with

sympathetic eyes and a compassionate brow, while

laughing with her friends at my ridiculous confession from

the wet street, standing in the rain with a white shirt

plastered to my skin - no longer white. Her vintage round

sunglasses hang from her nose hovering over a smile that

says so much to anyone who has the ears to hear. I alas

am deaf to the incalcitrant sirenic songs of women. I am

deaf to the words coming out of her eyes and her smile,

her fingers and her hair. I am deaf even to the song of the

cardinal singing high in the bare tree in winter, snow

covering the land like a giant down comforter, soft and

silent and almost even warm looking. The cardinal sings a

song like something her eyes might sing if one knows the

way to look and listen. My left eye is empty. My right is

dying. I am trying to listen, to listen to the voices of my past

and my present to decipher my future. She hangs in the

balance. Any minute could mean bliss or torture,

depending on a language I don't speak or follow. The

language of eyes and brows and smiles and head tilts and

hair and leanings in and out. Crossed legs can say so

much. I want to break the wind and push the clouds back

into the sky, stop the swelling of the rain in the streets. I

want to end the storm that has crashed into my life,

spinning me round and around, saturating my soul with its

uncertainty and lack of direction and predicability. The

storm in my soul can have been the work of Eros only. You

may know of him as Cupid. He isn't a sweet cherub. He's a

demonic asshole. Ready to drop you in the eye of the

hurricane and laugh at you as you are ripped apart while

stuffing his mouth with popcorn. What can calm a storm?

Who? There is a story I've heard about peace and

stillness. Peace. Still. Dreams that visit at night and vanish

before you can wake up with a realized smile of still peace.

3.22.2015

Journal 84 - Gettier and the Knowledge of the Moon

2015-08-18T03:30:00.000-04:00

I discovered the moon late in life, and late at night.
The red moon hanging over a swamp at night, hearing the
critters and the creatures singing in your imagination the
dissonant sounds of heir swampy minor songs, rough and
rhythmic in their passionate cries. The moon hangs there
reflected in the water still but for the moccasin slithering
through the water with a tongue tasting the air and the
swamp, the cottonmouth swimming side to side in the
redness of the rising moon, preyful and cocky as it
shifts its weight around in the starry night. Stars shine
through time but the snakes and the rut-less deer and the
other nocturnal creatures don't notice or acknowledge this
ancient miracles of mathematical models; they eat about
their business happily ignorant of any questions of art,
induction, knowledge, warrant, fundamentalism (whether
physics or Protestantism) or justified true belief. Or
justifiable true belief - or Gettier's knowledge of luck -
ignorance is bliss is not a negative insight - regardless
of a dissatisfied Socrates. Three pages of Gettier thus
confounded the philosophical world...of epistemology, and yet
how many happy people smile happily day to day and pool
to pool, knowing full well they are happy and that they
smile, the wet smile on their wet child's face as she
jumps into the pool in a solid cannonball, splashing all
the other kids with true and justified laughter, is a smile
spread across many thousands of people throughout the
blue marshy world - smiles known to be true and justified
despite Gettier's or Plantinga's attempts at falsifying or
affirming this ubiquitous sample of natural human
knowledge. But can we trace the source of this glad
expenditure of commonality, this common human nature -
can we trace it to God our ontological Father or the cold
mixture of chemicals, accidental in their appearance of
predictability and spontaneity. Civil Wars come and
go in word and song but each day we feel the
presence of those who gave their lives for their word
and those who see the Civil Wars as a metaphor for
ourselves - our relationships with each other and our
proclivity for conflict despite our oh-so-knowledgeable Age.

12.5.2012

Journal 83 - Sound of a Bloody Sunday

2015-08-12T03:30:00.000-04:00

The moment in the evening when there is a general feeling

that everything is all right and good, when you smile at the

thoughts of the kids in the yard spraying each other with

green garden hoses is a June bug in November - a quiet

harbinger from heaven, fleeting except to those whose nose

she files into. My nose hurts only on some spectacular

rare occasions. These occasions of visits from heaven-

painful as other-worldly visits are apt to be - slip in under

my eyelids while my eyes rae back and forth with red

blood vessels swelling into scary rivulets of overflowing

panic, and they (those extra-terrestrial parakletes) blow back

the bloody waters, to my surprise, as angels and gods should

instill despair, right? My despair is my comfort and my

vice. My depression is a yellow wildflower in October-

beautiful and in days dead. I sometimes wonder if

depression is a sin or a blanket draped over a child at

night in december - shielding an onslaught of cold sickles

assaulting what is left bare in the openness of our over-

heating world. Contradictions are sometimes, it seems, all

we have to lead us to the hint, to the whisper, of the

share of truth - the sand(?) of shepherd's pie & fish & chips.

That which is fast is fast, and that which is slow, slow.

And in the end it is we who are fast and slow, not food.

A shaved head & glasses for some reason says disciplined

intelligence, but my stats say intelligence is common

but discipline a relic discovered by a swift spelunker.

The sound of a Bloody Sunday should mean so much

to the world but I think it's just the quaint refrain

of a familiar song. BTW - my pen rests when my thoughts

sink. Why do we have to swelter here on Earth in

constant question of that which is and that which

isn't, craving like a drug addict for God's response-

only to have more questions with the answers in the

Bible while walking in fear of the sweltering threat

of never-ending hell itself? Why is the sirenic call

of the Walking Dead so sirenic? Paul cried out with

a loud mega cry: I would that I had three years alone

with Jesus, Immanuel, He that which none greater could be

conceived - though no lesser excuse could be conceived.

11.11.12

Journal 82 - Dylan Understood Revolutions Per Minute

2015-08-07T03:30:00.000-04:00

The cold rain slipped in like a thief in the night to save

us from the perdition of summer. It is cold and wet and

the leaves glisten in the fallen moonlight and Ik now no

deeper thought. My eyes are bothered by this slippery beauty,

burning in the windy night, crying reluctant tears at all those

who have fallen in this beautiful wet world, like boxers struggling

in the last round of their last fight; like matriarchs who lie

to dance and shuffle their feet with a wonderfully wrinkled

smile and fought for twinkle in her wizened eyes, who passes through

this wet world with hymns and hugs and prayers and squeezing

hands. A hand squeezed can make the venom in a grin grown

sweet like a six year old at her birthday party when that one

certain person arrives ful of warmth and smiling laughter

conquers all anxiety. Red wine is so good outside at night in

the cold. Cold is a state of being and my being tells me I'm

cold. I see the lights strung around the small white fence

around my deck reflected in a semi-circle in my wine glass

like the lights on a runway (were they in a semi-circle) or the

pegs of guitar strings on a giant 27-string guitar; or the

illuminated connectors of a memory board stick, maybe

SODIMM;- and it is good. It is good to see no matter how

or what the method or what the content, no matter the

comparison - it is good to be aware. It is easy to judge and to

correct but to understand is a gift of God. To drink is not

to understand. But still Dylan understood. Life is a record player

and most of us are on the wrong speed, the wrong revolutions

per minutes - we are too fast. Thirty-three is good. Life is a

slow revolution of punctuated equilibrium that settles at the

bottom of someone's dirty ocean. Life is cycled seasons of laughter.

Life is learning ephemeral contemporary thoughts of you and me

and technology too, knowing too late these thoughts are

dark like a whore who has a trust fund in 3 banks. Life is

a song full of warmth and heartache on a record with a

scratch that keeps repeating itself over and over, always finding

a new audience with the birth of another credulous generation

who finds itself enlightened with the spirit of man. A child's

laugh is caulk for the scratches and cracks in this broken

world. The world may be a teetering pivot in a silent cold

vacuum but I hear the music in the dark spheres and i

feel the heat in the distant emptiness of our blank verse.

10.8.12

Journal 81 - Time Wraps Mathematical Models

2015-07-29T03:30:00.000-04:00

Time wraps around my space the way a snake
wraps around a wet rat, wriggling but unable to
scream. Soon the clouds bellow with their water world
and grimace in anger, dropping their wet weight down
upon our hairy heads. I raise my head and poke out
my tongue to taste the moisture and absorb it into my
overheated self, hoping it would surge me like brown
bourbon on labor day...or any day really. Water means so
much to our hot world. My kids and I dance in the
rain and the rain puddles in the gutters in the street
stomping on time like a child's beach ball, waiting for it
to explode and sing its exhausted dilated tune for the
leftover observers in this virtually unobserved world of
ontologically suspicious elements - but who doubts explanatory
models really but the foolish? I do. That's who do. I
laugh at the beryon who briefly appears and then exits
like an actor who enters before her cue. Time is brief but
it's matter in the end, wrapped in a warped singular
nothing that pops in and out of existence in reported
symmetry - nothing being re-defined as something becoming
nothing close to being. I see the stars and I hear the
music of the spheres, the land of darkness and the helping
phriendly book; I see the elements burning and recombining;
I see the dust and I see the black decay. I see the stars
and I see the heavens. I hear the angelic host singing
their angelic song to the Creator. I hear the chorus of
man and lizards and I laugh heartily at God our Father,
the warm laugh a friend laughs upon seeing a long-lost
friend emerge from a snow storm. I see the pink on
God's cheeks and know He cares. He cares about waves
and particles and music and words and symbols and
love and hate and all our lovely labels. He smiles at
our incomplete mathematical models, no matter how well
they predict and account for our observations. There is
an order and there is a mystery. There is music to
the subatomic spheres, bending the laws of our words
as we have described them. Particle physics doesn't know
it but it's a blues scale, bending reality in 3rds and 5ths
trying to reflect the experience of our rational minds
in an irrational world.

9.1.12

Journal 80 - Word Games on Bourbon Street

2015-07-24T03:30:00.000-04:00

Words are games the philosophers say. Words are games

and games we play, but words as games leave nothing to say.

Words may not mean much and words may be sophomoric games

but beautiful women in the distance, blond and tan and wearing

a yellow sundress and smoking a cigarette in the rising moon

light mean something. And it isn't naughty. I cough when

the wind blows beauty my way. The world is wrapped in

beauty like in a child's worn blanket, and the world throws

rhythmic fits of coughing like a James Brown hit - levelling

knees and leaving smiles and rainbow eyes. The night bugs

click behind me in some natural Motown accompaniment. They

make their music and they make their itchy presence known.

Beauty itches when it moves your blood. Dragons live inside of

slender flies; they are the color of ready-to-burst soap

bubbles outside Gilead I hear. Beauty pops as Beauty should,

if the Buddhists have their way. I think Beauty should

stay and play and dance the simple pentatonic jig with all

our Southern souls. Beauty paraded is Beauty unbraided

and decomposed in a cold pedantic distinction of atomic

parts, atonal splatters of night-time blood on a warm hand.

Bloodletting is an ancient practice of God's mosquitoes,

desperate in their desire to appropriate your life for their

insignificant symphonies. The symphonies of nefarious bugs

pale in comparison to their larger cousins. There is no metaphor

for us. I know it's been long but I had a little break you

see. (stolen) I stumble across Beauty on bourbon streets and

wet humid sidewalks shifting and swinging in a warped

nocturnal dance with the streetlights of our present universe.

Despite diesel I still love our world and those who drive.

I wish I was a rain drop falling from the black sky, consorting

with my siblings to assimilate ourselves into some large slung

stream of water to clean and nurture the world, slung as

though from the large water pale of God - smiling as he

knocks us backward in our dehydrated comfort. I would

slide down the stalk and nestle in the nutrient filled earth,

while others slapped the smiling homeless soul man across the

cheek, drenching him in cleanliness while the self-rinsed

rich man cursed me for disintegrating his rich "Do." I

would leap up and slap him one last time from my sharp flagellum.

8.7.12

Journal 79 - Serial Killers and Conformism

2015-07-19T03:30:00.000-04:00

I caught a glimpse of two lovers sneaking a kiss behind the

trees on the other side of the Art building. I found a virgin

furtively watching from a nearby car, rubbing her hands together

but not smiling, studying like a sexual anthropologist. I wanted

to open the door to her car and grab her and bring her head

to mine, kissing her with longing and remembrance, kissing

through her into that reticence yet no further. I wanted to

kiss her on her lusty wet lips then smile and say, "You're

right. It's better when it matters." Then thank her for re-

giving me my lapsed youth, my lapsed youth spent chewing

nicotine gum, staring at pointillistic dots on my computer

screen - green dots of distinct individuality, before the virtue

of the technological beauty and superiority of conformism,

at least regarding visual artistry. I think conformism is under-

rated. Conformism can be good, like the computer screen, or

the serial killer. Serial killers are bad but to succeed is to

conform. Hiding in plain sight. Of course I'm always suspicious

of the non-conformist. The tattooed, pierced vamps who

make me wonder if there is any substance underneath the

makeup, the painful makeup of black and more black clothes.

Screaming children screaming "Look at me, I'm different and

I matter, I promise; can't you see? Don't judge a book by

its cover but don't ask to open me." Forcing me to see you

as different leads me to believe there isn't much there to

see. But surprises rise from the steam of the gutters and

the cabins in the dark lovely woods. It's Frost I hear.

I want to walk the path most travelled and still make

it mater, versus the easy way of the path less travelled

where anything you do (shit in the woods) or say (there

are ghosts in the machine) catapults you to original infamy.

Anyone can be original when it's never been done. Give

me blue jeans and SUVs and corporate jobs, then make

an original work of Art so I can shove it up your

outcast ass. I of course am not me, but some other

similar who actually is original and actually can shove it

up your vampiric ass. Originality is personalised, infused

derivation of those personalized copyists before you who

also stand on the shoulders of their original peers. That

which has been done is that which will be done. No new sun.

8.4.12

Journal 78 - Forged Dreams and Rotten Teeth

2015-07-12T03:30:00.000-04:00

I wonder where dreams are forged, in molten imaginary

lava to spur on the inquisitive dreamer. I wonder who thinks

these dream thoughts of unicorns and iron-clad monkeys, parading

around the circle like two storm clouds hovering over a zoo

with their broad brooding wings of circumspect clouds. Just

as a car needs wiping for its windshield eyes in the thick

of an August storm, so my eyes need a passing wipe of

their reconjugated vision of a modern heaven and hell.

Hell is so blase in this post-everything world. We live

for tolerance of everyone but always exempt ourselves as mere

satirists satirizing such unenlightened traditional nightmares

inculcated by our evolving and devolving times, our post

intellectual pasture is littered with the bird shit of

yesterday's "dire portents." Premonitions aunt our western sub-

conscious like a wolf in the shade of the evergreen mountain

shades his hunt for the procreating jack-rabbit. We hunt

our prey from the pedestal of enlightened tolerance aiming

beady eyes and eagle fingers at our subordinates to Shhh

and Suppress their bigoted outcry with our satirical holier-

than-thou spittle flying through the vapid void separating

us in some wet attempt to reconstruct our parched ways

of communication with winks and smiles, hugs and light

pats on the back saying "Yes" and "No" but I'm hearing

you not mocking you with my sardonic puerile gapped teeth -

my teeth are clean and it takes work to make teeth clean.

Ideas are like teeth. Rot, molded with colored rubber-bands

they are born and nurtured until unwieldy and coached to

truth by some B- doctor who forgets that grades matter.

We don't like our judges to judge us in public with marks

that could walk the line too far to the right or the left -

we who think with laughter in our thoughts and red wine

on our teeth want our thoughts to blend two realms of

faulty lore - the liberal with her satire and her wit

with the rigter and his certainty even when the shit

of words covered in tradition's blankets lands on tongues wiped

without a working blade. I try to navigate these wave-worn

words with oars on both sides and eyes in front and behind -

but pulled on each side by the undercurrent of their venom -

I gulp and yelp with water drowning every thought I give them.

8.1.12

Journal 77 - Music in Starry Nights

2015-07-09T03:30:00.000-04:00

I'm quick to ramble about sad themes and sad stories
of sad people crying in the bathtub at night with their
wine or bourbon, but what of the beautiful happy joy
that envelopes each day? What of the hug of a friend
just returned from some dreadful trip? (see how I snuck
that minor mode juxtaposition in there?) What of sunsets on
the beach with bacchi ball and volleyballs and surfing
and beer and dogs, laughs saturated with the sound of
the waves and the music? Music keeps the world from
imploding or bursting into flames. Music is our world
and our sustenance the way water is to the colorful
fish swimming in that undiscovered land of wet joy.
Music is our life and our breath in it we live and move
and have our meaning. Music is the breath of God, the
soul of our Creator - the creative (and saving) force that
holds the very strings of our being together in their never-
ending dance of ecstasy and survival. What drives dance
but music, and what are we but dancing strings? Again,
music is our life and our marrow. I've got to get away
to where men don't wear masks or hide their out-of-tune
motives. Discordance drives the mad man. Tolkien knew
the creative force of music, and the power of dissonance.
How many people were conceived to the prompting joy
of the notes of the guitar or piano or violin? Lyrics are
second fiddle to the swaying motion of the drums and
the bass. It ain't over till it's over. Music is the seed
that grows the purple flower and the yellow bird and
the magenta clouds and the green frog and the red lady-bug
and the blue-black Starry night; the green algae on the
wet gutter is beautiful as it glistens in the soft distance
rays of the moon. The moon patrols the undeserted streets
at night, or so I've heard. I don't want to get away,
but I do want to fly high with the eagle and the red-
tailed hawk. My friend the slug draws silver streaks of
snail art on my floor - gross and beautiful in its turn
of shiny nastiness. Music watches from the cheap seats
and laughs a hilarious laugh at those jaunty folk fighting
over a front row seat to the show. She closes her happy eyes
and soaks in the Art defecated by the magisterial flies.

7.21.12

Journal 76 - Buzzing Voices and Bladder Ruled Thoughts

2015-07-04T03:30:00.000-04:00

Voices are like busy buzzing bees buzzing their cute
buzz words around my slish-slosh ear. My ear is
distracted by these tattooed words like a ship tossing
about in the ocean on a full moon at medium tide. Words
come slovenly to the thoughtful minds of the drunk at
the nearest Irish bar. They've left their minds under
the oil-can of their rusted car, lost in a neighborhood
wanting localized context, like a man glued to his
phone at the meetings at the office and the bar. It's the
experience of getting the tattoo not the tattoo itself -
tattoos are words that you can never recant no mater
the depth of regret. The pain and significance brings meaning
and uncovers the thought that mattered most at the time.
The tattoo is the permanent timeline of the life you lived
and the regret means nothing except that the idea is
something you once loved. The skin changes and renews
but tattooed ideas persist like roaches and mosquitoes.
I forgot to mention that the blimp is the hot-air balloon
of the intellectual thoughts of drunk minds splattering
their thoughts of life and death and permanence against the
swollen ears of the laughing scientist, so sure of his
warm logical analysis of the life and death of the
unfortunate child. The night is filled with still-born
dreams and dismal flights of fancy about the future -
whether dates or work or hobbies or roaring trophies
in their taxidermist grin. It won't be awkward to
dream about a life of egalitarian equality, a life where
the man and the woman and the rich and poor and the
black and white are the same, sitting at the dark bar
ordering white russians arguing over who can afford to
pay the bloated tab. My thoughts are ruled by my bladder,
and a swallow-tailed kite is kissing me in my tattooed
dreams, wearing a cap to block the black and white shite
that parisails down the nighttime sky in tiny bombs of a
glassy-eyed terrorist drinking the purple tea of ideological
ecstasy tauting the virgins in the wet ether with their
dopamine smiles and serotonin smiles making grandiloquent
excuses for their credulity. I see the kite in its thermal
soaring for the world, drugged in tattooed words, flustering
downy birds.

7.20.12

Journal 75 - Clouds and Life on a Sunday Afternoon

2015-06-30T18:06:00.000-04:00

The dark side of the moon lives in the corner of my
eye, snuggled like a ripe sty waiting for its day to burst
into my lonesome field of view and misappropriate the
light for its sinister dealings - misanthropic principles fill
my body with gory scenes of fake horror blood on fake
horror smiles. I am fake when I smile red-faced and
cool in the air-conditioned luxury of these hot torpid
days, I am fake with my books and my notes, my second-
hand ideas regurgitated from a 16th century fool who
claimed to beset the language's Bard. My ideas float through
my mind like a newspaper dropped on the ground
in a busy subway, the wind of the times and the
rides carrying each thought through the maze of
various perceptions, trying to attract like electrons some
meaningful bond of covalent minds - covered with the
words written by someone else on a tight schedule but
still more depth than I as I tip-toe into the shallow
end, the warm shallow end where the children gather
to reflect their parents' shiny ways of living in this
rainbow killed world. The drizzling of the clouds on
a Sunday afternoon says we live, we live, we live today
in reverse anti-matter undecay of smiles over buck-
toothed bright dismay. We live another sunny rainy day.

7.19.12

Journal 74 - Living in Cloudy White Balance

2015-06-25T03:30:00.000-04:00

I want to live in cloudy white balance, warm and
yellow in my smiling caricature of our human exchange
of emotional and vain ideas. I am drunk and unashamed.
I've had the sweet pleasure of water and tubes
and acrobatic knees on acrobatic wakes. I can
fool ten thousand smiles at the local ephemeral
bar wrapped in its own glimpse of ecstasy and musical
joy. I am starved and thus (man?) inducted into this
lightweight ring of Kentucky-infused inebriated
blurred eye-twitching and double-centered novel
revolving around the gravitational center fo*
this God-induced single spaced single stepped simple
Gas-caddie broken image of our self-aggrandized
image. I love you all and I am seriously not kidding
AT ALL.

7.15.12

* - not a typo; that's how I wrote it in my journal. You shouldn't
find it too surprising given the rest of the completely
non-sensical drivel in this one.

Journal 73 - Marinated Thoughts Dying Like Roaches

2015-06-20T03:30:00.000-04:00

After a three year drought, I began again with these silly songs.

Once it seems I noted each and every thought that
floundered in my brain, marinating for a day or a
second - no matter. I still recorded the lame
limping ideas like a dutiful stenographer. These thoughts,
these plaster thoughts are now cracked and broken,
wide like a drying lake in need of rain and
dry proof caulk. Only they receive liquid in the
form of wine, blood red wine fit for a two-
cent vampire. There is no restorative power lurking
in the foot-stamped vine. Ideas dry up, leaving deep
caverns that tempt but yield nothing but dry air,
hot dry air, choking and claustrophobic - stuck
in the dry cracked caverns of my alcohol dehydrated
mind. No flame burns for me; there is no ember
slowly glowing in the bottom of my soul - I am
drenched in wine and tears and mine and mine,
not yours. Hope dawns they say in the waking
moments of each day, granting us another trial to
reconstruct and reattach the broken bones of what
we de-throned & deconstructed in the previous
cilantro day. Many mouths are cleaned and purged
with the testament that is cilantro - I need a
cilantro bath for my gorgonzola soul. My thoughts
are dying roaches, on their broken backs wriggling
and eliciting pity in your kind saucy souls - striving
for one more attempt at impressing you with their
resiliency - to economic mildewed mattresses, to children
and their ever present selves, bundles of unbridled
regurgitation of their small world, their brilliant
colorful small world, impressing you with their unnatural
ability to soothe you when quiet and absent. Quiet
absence is the seduction of the daemonic voice inscribed
on your dehydrated cortex. This wine is dry and
cheap, but there is a bottle. It feels good to drink
again, even in the sights of my executioner. I have
a hole in my heart, carved recently through the
attempt to make my strange heart plain. I welcome
dry, decayed thoughts as notes from an antique violin -
lifting my insecure world from its misappropriated sin.

7.9.12

Journal 72 - Pillows and Philosophers

2015-05-20T03:30:00.000-04:00

This was the last one of these I wrote for 3 years.

Ants carry their lives on their shoulders aligned and
disciplined like a military outfit of a middle eastern
country, surviving on their obsequious cooperation -
no time for ridicule when the next batch of eggs is
sagging in the queen's ass. I carry nothing but shirts
on my sagging shoulders - separate from the voices of
america I sing the song of the doubting self-doubter
I sing the body corpulent and deteriorated. I co-
habitate with the mice and the roaches watching The
Wire on my two-color TV. Feathers accumulate in
my bedroom from the pillow taking a mild beating
after trying to drown myself in Nietzsche, Wittgenstein
and Rilke - taking a drowning bath I punch the poor
pillow in defeat. The next bottle will comfort my
orgasmicless soul; the next bottle will float my body
electric on the river of Lethe in the valley of Megiddo.

7.23.09

Journal 71 - Naked Bird Biblical Roads

2015-05-18T03:30:00.000-04:00

The jungle is out there on the road again, out
there on the naked bird road again tweeting and
twittering like heckles and hydes jeckylling to the
toony bird tune of twelve tones syncopated pride.
The jungle stands with eyes n the trees and limbs,
eyes in the damp light breeze of the voluptuous western
wind, stands with music in its hairy ears and herbs
on its long skinny nose. Scents of backyard shovel built
farts harangue in limp afternoon snorts of another refugee
lost in the traffic of the modern man's man-made jungle -
there stands on the field there, there on the dried-up
football field, tiny footprints made with tiny cleted shoes
trample out-smoked hope and cures. Footprints of faded
feet trails away like an ancient galaxy turning blue in its
lugubrious retreat. Feet of mighty minds and sour men
careening in their circumambulating aimless wonder trodding
over nothing but images of the dawn when Adam first
saw Eve, or thunder when Noah first looked into the
water breathing winds. Faded images of yesterday's bliss
defecate on calculated theses and well-plotted afternoon
plans of life in fifteen well-worked years, well-termed
plans of life in parties and cocktails and morning tea
shooing away the flies and the wiping away the warm
snot from their well-worked clothes. I welcome the tardy
yellow smile from the barber's jungle, welcomed for this
is the apricot year when spirit-charged grouches will
sniffle and cheer with their tin garbage hat on, cheer with
the nose of a reindeer lost in the eyes of the slaven
stars, stick on their forced mathematical course like
sheep about to forget themselves in the neighbor's terminal
cave. The jungle is wet with black flashes of black
shiny light, painted on the side of its face like a big
subway after the circus comes to town. Drops of water
from the chamber pots of the demented evaporate before
touching the living evaporate in this pallid earth before
corrupting the minds of the youth. Beethoven sings strange
songs the poor in the palm pit of the man longed jungle.
Cross the winds with the sign of the Constantinians and
sing a strange song to the rich in the palm pit of their city.

6.27.09

Journal 70 - Drop of Time in the Ocean

2015-05-15T00:17:00.000-04:00

Time is a drop of rain water in the middle of the
ocean, tiny ripples of self-same waves dying out and
retreating only to return and fold in upon themselves
in another slow assimilation of vapors. Condensation
is good for time to reveal itself as self and mattered.
Extension into our world, vibrating like a physicist's
wet dream string tossing about in the embers of
cold fusion. Nothing is cold at the moment of death.
Tomorrow closes in like the lungs of a violent asthmatic,
with next week a mere coughing attack brought on by
the light cigar smoke and smog of the present day's shrill
enervations leading t a drink and a thought that
the time to make it all make sense has passed like
the spectacular unknown beauty of the northern lights
or the humpback whale. TV is another leveller and
anti-climatic equalizer. Time is a wooden sailboat
rocking and creaking in the middle of the dock, tied
to the pier with loud croaking rope - a wooden boat with
three tall masts for show - unable to sail anymore these
days, unable to unwind and afford the guy a chance
with the girl. Time is a display of jewelry in the
5th Avenue window sparking in the view of layered
faces or dirty teeth. Dirty teeth are sad in this
veneer world of sycophants. Breath of duck mean pizza
and cheap wine with lemon ice-box squares is the breath
to capture the firefly in the summer evening. Sometimes
time lies in the hammock and stretches its old brittle
bones on those firefly catching evenings with the glowing
jars and flashing faces of unbreakable children. Time stretches
long enough for the kid in the towers to catch a bullet
watching the kewl gun fight down stairs in the piss-
bucket street. Time stretches and yawns like a slightly
inebriated uncle on loan from the probation officer. Eyes
the color of ether and the excitement of a fat tick.
The moon has caught up with the hammock and scoffs
at the laziness of time, scoffs at the unchanging care -
less nonchalance. The moon is young in this game.
The moon shines down its flashlight rays onto the
writhing streets of Earth's concrete back yard with
red eyes.

6.23.09

Journal 69 - Words, Laughter and Absurdity

2015-05-10T01:30:00.000-04:00

The word to sum up the world is degree, no -
perspective. No, it is. The world to accumulate
the dust particles we refer to as birthdays appears
to be non-existent, nothing, impossible, incommunicable.
The word to refer to laughter isn't laughter for that
is absurd. But the word for absurd can't be absurd
for that is laughable. Words it seems are contrived
and disconnected from the world. Words are irrelevant
but alone in the quest to co-habitate. Meaning is
tautology for the mathematician but little bits of
soul for geographically split lovers. Words are without
meaning except when Shakespeare says, "To be or
not to be" or "Shall I compare thee to a summer's
day" or even the abstract, "Let me not to the marriage
of true minds admit impediments." But force is still
equal to mass times acceleration, whatever those ostensive
words mean or allude to. Allusion and probability bubble
up from beneath the foamy pond of universal drying
primordial drivel. A chair is not the word chair
but it is not an anvil either. Unless someone sits
on it. But then it is an anvil being used as a chair.
The signifier is not the signified but it is also not
insignificant. Does the chair require four legs? A back?
Arm rests? Ah, to define precisely the chair. Philosophy 101.
Quien sabe? We still know what a chair is. And that
it's not a word like chair or ______. Justice of
course is the tougher battle. Justice is the dark side
of the moon. Justice is the dark matter of the uni-
verse. justice is an abstract base class, a late-bound
instantiation of a virtual conceit. A reference to a
postulate of another pass in the night debate. Conversation
would be so much easier if meaning really was a
cell-phone abandoned and left on with minutes remaining
on the side of the street of the gutter of last night's
liquor piss and vomit. Laughter is another word for
absurdity while absurdity is another word for on-
the-hook thought. Processes live in shared memory for
a time before the out-of-memory killer trolls along and
kills it for abuse of power and resource management.

6.22.09

Journal Poem - On Hope

2015-05-09T19:52:00.001-04:00

Hope hangs her damaged head like a daisy,
In disbelief that hands could be so cruel -

-------

Hope sits in the corner of the bar silent
with the music and eyes and feet -
pressing along with dirty fingernails and
tight clothes on top of folded skin
waiting for the perfect vacant seat -
On which to seduce another damaged man
With dreams drawn on naked bodies;-
Naked wandering beer glass broken streets
For the true and the real life-loving grin;
Hope stretches her arms and yawns
Searching the alternative choices she pretends
Will charm her when the music quavers and ends.
Big sunglasses can't suppress the out-cry
Of a socially dependant grown-up lie.
I just saw Hope wink from the corner of the bar
At the tattooed convict strumming his guitar.

5.22.09

Journal 68 - Language Dried and Wriggling

2015-05-05T05:30:00.000-04:00

Language is not a wooden baseball bat you beat
people over the head with, hoping to straighten
them out or convict them. Words are life
preservers thrown out into the wild winter ocean,
necessary for survival but always to be improved upon
and reconstructed like Charlie Brown's red kite now
lost in the waves of the adolescent spitting ocean.
Poseidon is pissed (pun intended for my English friends).
It seems knowledge and facts are hidden underneath
the modals and the simple tenses lost in the distance
between our minds and the "world." The world is a
conglomeration of disjoined perceptions that swarm
like maggot flies inside our material brains searching
for a way out through the ancient tunnel of
meaning but meaning was crippled by the Qoheleth.
For all our random pseudo-intellectual bullshit about
the noose of meaning every day and each minute
we assume words' meaning and communication. I'm
sorry officer I can't be held responsible for that
accusation; your words are meaningless to the context
and daily life I live. Facts are by-products of the
classical physics of Newton and Aristotle - both
wrong and frustrated in our internetized world of
mass information and probabilistic communication. I
live in a constant state of affairs that changes
with each breath I see from the anti-misanthropic
TV. Yes, constant change. If TV weren't anti-
misanthropic perhaps The Wire would have survived
beyond its adolescent years. Sometimes I wonder if
network TV (including FOX) isn't taking over the
role of psychology and the church - a mild analgesic
story to assuage and reconstitute our worries in a
magical framework of justice and the Hook Up
for a manageable construction of the social political
ways of the new secular world order. Religion has
had its hand in this since the beginning - another
topic for another day. The secular world doesn't
seem to be much better off. The world is a
bundle of potentiality and degree and perspective
dried up and wriggling without the water and the spirit.

6.18.09, 2

Friends

2015-05-01T23:32:00.000-04:00

Friends are spread over the coast

Like lookout fires at wartime

Distant warmth and covered backs

To be rejoined only amid tear-hid

Laughs and clinks of glass

Around the fires of our funerals

Journal 67 - Blog Nobody Reads

2015-04-30T07:30:00.000-04:00

I write a blog that nobody reads. And in this
blog I write that no-body reads I fill with the
pages of this little journal. So now I pressure my
self to write well and clever for this journal for
this blog that nobody reads. As the images scramble
away like the hoppers left in the pit when the
five-o unearth themselves. I walk around like
Omar the stick-up artist whistling to the dead
dark night dead dark lullabies while the images
of the blue black orange world scatter fearless,
scatter in the alleys and the brick apartment
buildings fearless in their selfish clutch on their own
primacy. Soon the winter will stand like a stripped
Poplar on the street; like a Japanese magnolia bared
in November, not even the remnants of its purple tinted
leaves lying rotten and beautiful on the late winter
ground - the winter standing decked out with downed
electricity lines and sharp icicles drawn like a
nasty comic villain. We stand in the street naked
with red wine in our hands and cigars in our
mouths smiling at winter's icy stereotype. Then we
look at ourselves and the cigar falls from our mouth
like AIDS. The bug is here to match wits with our
goofy brethren. Words can be hard to follow when
games easy games are played with the signifiers
and the signified; puns are the mark of punsters
not geniuses. Genius may be a necessary condition
for a punster; not a sufficient condition. Language and
pronunciation is a tricky localized relative endeavor in
evolutions & rights. It's la-fee-ette in Louisiana
but la-fayette in Oxford (MS). Both are correct.
If the localized region uses a phrase or contraction
illogical and irrational it is a boy in Baltimore who
only knows Baltimore radio stations. Nomenclature
carries the weight of the king. Language is a
drug dealer ready to change-up whenever the five-o
try to incarcerate the girl watching the street.
Language spoken real language is not an inscription
on a tombstone reminiscing of the days of yesteryear.

6.18.09

Journal 66 - God, Meaning and Incompleteness

2015-04-28T08:00:00.000-04:00

The world itches for meaning - the world hurtling
the world spinning and hurtling through space
like a big blue streak, a colorful cold comet; the
world in all its wet wonders and glimpses of life
itches for meaning. And like a poisonous itch that
is scratched at until it bleeds, there is no relief
for the itch of meaning. Meaninglessness of Meaning-
lessness; Vanities of Vanities, all is meaningless
vanity. Words the preacher spoke with a fevered tear.
Meaning it's said is lost in structure and context
and meaningfully lies in the grown eye of the beholder.
The eye of Elmo glue pasted letters and cut words
blown apart like a dandelion in the wind with
meaning reaching out in horror to clasp onto another
meme, another lexeme or mytheme to rearrange itself
from that horror that is Dante's 3rd circle of hell.
Meaning vibrates inside the nucleus of the hemoglobin.
Crying out for attention meaning screams with no sound
like an explosion in the dark matter of space. If
there is a listener who can't hear does meaning lose?
Meaning vibrates off the E-string of the acoustic guitar.
Hiding inside the duality of light, spreading its wings
in broad waves and penetrating each dissenter with particular
precision meaning surprises the scientist in the white
blue-stained lab with its unsolicited itch, the scabbed
itch scientists have doused with various itch-relief
formulas of relativity and deconstructed uncertainty.
Gödel and Derrida are unlikely bed mates on the
path to incompleteness. Tapping on our souls like
Chinese water torture these drippings, these continuous
disconnected drippings of splattered meaning resonate
like a tuning fork to our own miserable incompleteness.
Vanities of vanities we try to attach meaning to
our wandering ghoulish lives like prisoners in the
muddy prison yard. We touch ourselves incomplete.
We children of God wander the night like runaways
ignoring the hand of broken experience slapping a
random pastiche of experiences together to form a
broken world of rationalized meaning. Vanity of Vanities!

6.8.09

Journal 65 - Witch's Eyeless Squalor

2015-04-24T08:00:00.000-04:00

I reach outside my car window and grab the
lightening, grip it like a witch's broomstick and twist
it into a tiny ball of dust, silence in the heavens
on a dark gluttonous day. I have no time for silly
quadropedic misdemeanors heads arched up toward the
sky like bodies sung electric. The rain it is said
conducts the electric bolt the way a crow-bar conducts
pain. I stand in the middle of the storm and the
rain, and laugh at the skies like a starving hyena,
laugh like a ribbed skinny hyena for the rain and
the lightening to slap me and slash me and slice me -
throw me across the back of the earth like a gibbering
holy man, a holy righteous man laughing at the
stormy scowl of the trees and the wet wind in the
dry leaves I stand back arched, laughing at the
lightening bolts erupting around me like distant jagged
spears thrown by that temperamental adulterous Zeus.
You wouldn't know if those were tears or rain that
soaked my cheeks in the mid-day heat. It takes
guts or ignorance to laugh. I laugh often but
ignorance is often capsized in my world. I feel
lost drowning sometimes. And then I find myself
standing on the surface of the water and playing a
short game of soccer with the other man of faith.
The man on the shore with the fish doesn't laugh.
And I sink in the sea like a flooded engine block.
I twist the lightening in my mind to elucidate the
gravitational pull; the gravitational pull is nearly
irresistible next to massive objects. My mind is
twisted by massive questions of mediocre care -
leaves in the gutter and spaghetti monsterians. The
world is against us the World is against us the
old world is with us like the new world is
gasping in its eyeless squalor. Eyes are the visors
of the windows of other souls. Eyes invite the external
into our internal world. My eyes are being tested
by the pileated woodpecker. The tones of home
sound like children on the football field trying to
start a fight for the flighty eyes of another pretty
physicist.

6.7.09

Journal 64 - Free Willie and Ontological Equality

2015-04-21T08:00:00.000-04:00

The light shines down in the light of the orchestra
down like a slap in the face in the morning to wake up
for work or school. Life is one or the other. Music
instruments lie silent in their cramped crate clumped
together like forgotten stickers in the back of a child's book.
The stroller sits broken and empty, unable to scramble life
in its tiny plastic seat and wheels. These signs are not
so. They live they breathe they cry out with connected
notes when the new born breath of children breathe the
dormant notes into them like a patient etherized upon
the table. Frankenstein rises from the dead toys each
day ready to destroy with mirth. The earth is old
and damaged creaking like hardwood floors underneath
our feet to those with the hearing aids to hear.
My ears have receded in availability the last few
years, locked on the absence of the ancient music of the
spheres - I toss and turn each night out of tune with
the lady at the service desk in Barnes & Noble. She
has a name tag. She has an identity, like my neighbor's
cat. Rachmaninoff wasn't far from the truth when he
put his warmed cold hands to clefted paper to pen
the 2nd & 3rd piano concertos. He was Russian though.
I hold my head high, I hold my lazy head high
to avoid the quicksand and the rain. If only her
napkin could wipe clean the stain that penetrated my
epithelial tissue. Science doesn't make it all better; nor
do scientific terms. Science is the performer at Sea
World containing the killer whale and forcing him and
her to bow to its every need - controlling it like a
lower pet while claiming ontological equality. I'd
like to free my willie. Yours too but the gravitational
constant keeps me down. I'm stuck wriggling and
writhing to the quadratic equation and Gauss's
summation theory lost as a 3 or 4 dimensional soul
in a multi-dimensional world. Soul? Souls are not
allowed; this is biology not poetry. Therefore poetry
has no meaning in the biology class. Not vice-versa.
And thus God has no meaning in the science class;
except now that means no meaning in any class; Not so...

6.3.09, 2

Christmas Notes

2015-04-19T06:00:00.000-04:00

Gods come and gods go

Gods shapeshift and shit shapes

Afraid of yesterday's red sweat

Under a back-city olive tree.

Dreams are not a warm blanket

Or a cozy home on another street,

But an orange flower spurting

Forth on a cold November day.

This day once was Saturn's day

Commandeered by faint subjects

With too much dirt clogged between

Their swollen calloused toes;

And once this day smiled with teeth

Brown and Whole and Musical. People

Dancing hand in hand around bright

Flames eliciting unfeigned smiles

Wrapped round and around bright

Sparks prodding silent brittle feet,

Hopping without cause and without 

Merit. Merit is not a god's homage.

My dehydrated alcoholic brain misfires

In slow spurts of garbled words

And disconnected strains of thoughts

mired in unsympathetic virtual merit.

Upon this distant pantanomic scene

I raise my brown glass and toast

Quietly to the unheard divine voices

Ruminating amongst themselves.

These voices shatter our porcelain hearts

Like lyrics from drums and guitars

Screaming for one soul to stare and hear

Their trampled song among the wordless throng.

At what point do you recognize the

broken face in the mirror, and at what

point do you cry instead of laugh,

weighed down with myopic soggy eyes?

This Christmas wine weighs my wet body down.

Matthew died tonight with a smile.

Words convey neither more nor less.