life imitating art?

I wanted to drive off into the sunset. But I realized that if I'm there, in the car, driving, I wont see myself disappearing into the sun, I'll just be driving, and then it'll get dark, and I'll still be driving...

To K

Do you see the pain
written across my face
written in your hand
with mortal ink
you have gashed your name
across my face

I am nothing
more
than an open wound
like a gaping door
flung wide
rebelling against its hinges

gasping for the relief
of your hand
to quiet the tyrranical tempests
of longing
writhing within
renting me asunder

Through your absence
I have become
a god
suffering the unbearable
eternity of the present

ambien rant

enough abstraction, enough hiding behind the vagaries of vocabulary - damn, i'm doing it again, even in the act of resignation my words, my precious weapons that i use to battle my way out of the grasping specters of loneliness come back and haunt, hovering over my fingers... can i ever escape these spiralings, is there even something to escape to, a more primordial core authenticity or are we just smoke and mirrors, running from surface to surface, missing that nonexistent depth that seems to hold the secret to something... i don't even know what. it's easy to move forard, propelled by inertia, Newton's first law or third, i can't remnember, much harder to stop, look back. like a man running down a hill schopenhauer once said, but then why am i quoting some dead german guy... the point it running downhill, you build momentum and it's eassiest just to keep in check with that, because if you stop, you'll fall (i did when i was seven, running down the steep incline that leads to the park in front of riverside drive...) fell on my forehead with a smack. Memories, i spoke to K of my earliest memories at this very table. She really enjoyed analysing them, vivid they were. But she is gone and i must learn to forget. it is so hard, but to unlearn is far more important than learning at this point. but i was saying that the sense of progress you get from flying forward is deceptive, it's not real movement, it's the inability to stand still, to turn around and stop the flow of time in its tracks, i've been reading benjamin and he's on to something here. i feel like i'm writing inbtimately with you guys, one of the greatest anxieties i have as a writer is the reader, but this sharing feels safe in a way... yes, i'm probably affected by the sleeping pills and stuff, but maybe this is the only way to get beyond the pretention to get beneath the assumed vocabulary that has taken root in my writing and speaking, and root it out... who can just stop flying with the flow, and accept the fall, the crash - scrape your knees hit your head, that all too familiar nauseous wave that engulfs you the minute after impact... what memories. but you see, maybe it is the memories that help in this halting, coming to a stop, not to live in fear, not to be propelled by the negative energy expended in order to keep the fear behind, but to allow it to catch up with myself and inhabit it, don't slay the dragon become the dragon

for those with myopic vision...

Monet Refuses the Operation

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one- another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

The Heretic

when the last threshold is breached,
when the depths of interiority become vaster than transcendent dialogue,
when the scream of wounded subjectivity drowns out the call of the other,
when pain becomes more omnipotent than God,
...the age of the Heretic has begun.

broken hearts, darkened days

MERLIN: Love is, after all, one of the strongest forces in the world.

YOUNG ARTHUR (incredulously): Even stronger than gravity?

MERLIN: Well... yes, I suppose it is.

And the Tree was happy...But not really!

Doesn't the added appendage to this concluding phrase sum up our childhood?

In the beginning was the wound. And the wound was with God. And the wound was God.

Pen to Paper

The surface is scarred
Dull black spatters

Staining the virginal
Emptiness of the page

Burning experience
Long extinguished
Now revived
With wounded whispers

The slow breath that entices the ember to glow


Words are the memory of experience
As ashes are the memory of fire

Knife to Skin

The barrier is breached
Searing red spreads

Intoxicated colour
Over penetrated skin

Waves of pain
Crash
Upon the shores of indifference
Shattering the icy trance of numbness

Eruptions of throbbing intensity
Drown out apathy’s ubiquitous despotism

Abolishing the limit
Wedding inside to out
Blasphemous communion