Some Sick Sort of Homage.

You.

So high on yourself,
so high in your life
that you fail to see the ground
breaking beneath your feet.

Not much room to walk around
anywhere anyway, you know —
it is always so damned
narrow up there at the top.
Seems to me your feet
have been drained
of all wanderlust.

So afraid of us.

Cannot stroll a mere step in their shoes,
your soles planted firm
with roots deep in your hallowed ground.

Chest out, chin up,
nose scaling the sky:
the very look of suicidal pride
just itching
for the backlash of gravity.

Can’t see beyond
the stained windows of your own eyes,
outside the bold blacks and blinding whites
of that box you hold your head inside.
Cannot taste of a life
through any mind but your own.

Why does a deficiency in empathy,
a mind cut off from heart
by the calloused skin of identity,
always seem to breed
a sense of superiority
in its sufferers —

one forever
and always reinforced and defended
by that surrounding wall,
frigid and impervious to attachment?

When one won’t submit to empathy,
those left cold
fight to deliver the message
by means of the only available route,
the only open channel
by means of which one might get through
to the insensitive:
personal experience
hand-crafted, customized
by those left cold
for those who left them.

Revenge is just another word
for forced empathy.
The cold: it’s infectious.

If you can manage, beat them.
If you cannot beat them, join them.

Yes, but cold is not only impenetrable,
but solitary; even if one manages
to swallow the whole of his pride,
he finds the frigid
to be a devout isolationist.

If you cannot beat them or join them, then,
the only way to win
is to lose yourself and become them:
as one fights fire with fire,
a cold with matching chill,
one tends to become one’s enemy
in order to defeat them,

blind to the nature of their own strategy
as a higher-order surrender,
waving the white flag
in the form of some sick sort of homage.

Just a World Away.

Speak to me
of times of tragedy,
conjuring memories
of the rise and fall

as I saturate
in emotional images
that arise
from your tales as if incantations
aimed at my mind,
my sacred space,

a spell cast so I might
embrace history
spiked with personality
from just a world away.

The Moth.

Nietzsche seemed to view sympathy or pity as an insult — it implied you thought you were higher than another, more capable, and they would be unable to accomplish something without your charity. It would appear to be just as insulting — blatantly cold and sadistic, actually — to just sit by and watch another struggle in my eyes, however.

It could be that I’m looking at this the wrong way, though. It could be that observing while adhering to a strict code of noninterference has a great deal of logic behind it and it just appears so cold due to the way I’m framing it. Relevant here, perhaps, is a scene from the first season and second episode of the television series LOST, where Locke has a conversation with Charlie in the forest:

“That’s a moth cocoon. It’s ironic — butterflies get all the attention, but moths, they spin silk. They’re stronger. They’re faster. You see this little hole? This moth’s just about to emerge. It’s in there right now, struggling. It’s digging it’s way through the thick hide of the cocoon. Now, I could help it — take my knife, gently widen the opening, and the moth would be free — but it would be too weak to survive. Struggle is nature’s way of strengthening it.”

There may be multiple reasons for not interfering with another’s life, or with a culture or even a planetary species, but this is the most ethical reason I can come up with.

Just Another Animal.

Eleven years ago, I woke up in the midst of it again. My eyes were cloudy, my head was spinning as I held it in my hands, pacing in that circular, white-gray room. You stood in the center, motionless, like some surreal, bug-eyed statue, just watching me as I lost my mind, ignoring my questions. Was I stuck in some wicked dream? Are you real or some manifestation of my mind? You never thought a word to me, but you did show me what was going on outside the windows on that curved wall, far down below us, way down on the surface of the earth. One, then another, and perhaps three explosions in all rocked the earth. Flames bellowing outward, consuming, blossoming up towards the sky. I felt so many die. This was war. Human war. Species suicide in action. My heart, my mind, my body filled to the brim, wracked with guilt, with one overarching, sinking feeling expressed in my mind with the words: Too late. It’s too late now. They’re all dead. It’s all over with.

It took me until then to confront you directly and you simply ignored me, as if I have no right to know what all this is about, as if it’s your duty to show me all this death and destruction and make me feel responsible without ever having given me the vaguest clue as to how I might be able to do better, to stop this, and why you — if you exist — are somehow exempt from this guilt, this responsibility, hiding up here so high as you watch a naive species kill itself. There are no gods. No space brothers in the sky. Just judgmental aliens — or plaguing, sadistic nightmares with a mind of their own. Leaving me feeling hopeless, worthless.

Fuck you and the spaceship you rode in on. Humans might be stupid, but how better are you? You’re just another animal. Another ghost in another meat machine. You seem to see us as one rather than individuals. Well, if we’re all in this together, why are you black-eyed gray little fucks just standing on the sidelines so covertly, hypnotizing us with sightings, carrying some of us off and returning us time after time, all throughout our wasted lives?

I’m so sick of feeling insane, and on top of that feeling powerless.

I want answers.

Locked & Loaded.

It may be dramatic, but this is how I’ve come to see the circumstance:

My mind is a battlefield. Every day is just another battle in the ongoing war between intellect and emotion. All I know and accept of myself is the aftermath; my life, the collateral damage.

Antidepressants, anti-anxiety medication, then, is just ammo for the intellect.

And finally, fucking finally, I’m packing. Locked and loaded again.

Yay for that.

Behind the Curtain.

Spreading lies
to separate,
nursing segregation.
Spiking the truth with deceitful
spirits, all to

divide the mass of them
into manageable chards,
to spawn conflict between.

Feeding distraction,
inventing fictional issues,
spinning the news,
securing division, ensuring
no reintegration,

weave your web
so that they will never accept
dissolution
into a joint force
against their true,
common enemy,

or even see beyond the veil
to rest eyes upon
the true tyranny.

Integrity.

It bothers me that I care so much about what other people think of me and how they feel towards me. A catchy suggestion I came across some time ago — that one should aim for “expression, not impression” — defines the nature of my anger towards myself and my frustration with this situation. Too much energy seems invested in (unconsciously; semiconsciously) attempting to manipulate the perceptions of others with respect to me and honest, sincere self-expression suffers as a result.

So what if they might think me insane, picking up on the fact that I have strange memories and experiences? So what if they think I am unscientific and irrational, even hypocritical in my support for the extraterrestrial hypothesis for UFOs and my view that sufficient evidence exists for reincarnation and parapsychology?

Fuck them. I’ve done the research. I’ve struggled with these questions since I was sixteen, trying to make sense out of my experiences and the eerily similar ones of others. It is not inconsistent to announce that I side with science and reason — faith plays no role in the worldview that is emerging in me; I have been wracked with often terrifying degrees of doubt since the very beginning. I check and recheck; regurgitate and rearrange, take it all from as many different angles as I can, and yet I am made to feel like the crazy one, not those who come to conclusions and engage in ridicule without the feeblest attempt to explore the subjects in question.

I believe in science and reason as methods — what we have collectively determined to be true through use of those methods at the present time are always open to revision or expansion, however, and to dismiss ideas without consideration is foolish.

Are we incorrect in our presumptions of what is possible and what “is”? Almost certainly. Historically we have felt secure in notions we later found to be utter hogwash, no matter how supported by observation, experiment and reason. Ideas evolve with more information, they adapt or suffer extinction, as they should.

I considered monotheism and found it to be bullshit. I considered the ETH and reincarnation and found that both have merit. Have I been led astray? Perhaps — I feel confident time will tell in any case.

If I’m insane or just plain wrong, it won’t be for lack of trying. I hope that’s good enough for me in the end, whichever way it falls.

Unnecessary Walls.

The only potential utopia
your life can afford
is one birthed and nursed
within your gourd.

So explain these boundaries you erected,
these unnecessary walls.
Liberty, constipated.
A convict at once his own warden,
guard, prison and executioner.

Wake up.

Don’t roll over.
Open that heavy lid,
shake off the slumber,
focus the eye
deep inside.

Don’t you see?
Its all abandoned
self-authority.

They have gotten under your skin,
infected you.
Obstructed the self-awareness
that would awaken you
at your throne.

Hypnotized by poisoned lullabies,
nightmares dressed as seductive dreams.
Vinyl scratched and skipping
haunting echoes surfing a broken melody:
dismal, subliminal lyrics
of a wasted existence.

You sacrifice a universe.

In the Mirror.

We need a methodology. A pragmatic system. A toolbox of techniques for exploration, experimentation. We do not need faith, we do not need religion. We need understanding. We need hope — not false hope. We need to evolve. Awareness is not always comfortable — the mirror can reveal frightening fucking things — but we must know ourselves, own ourselves, or we will forever be slaves to something else.

Get Laid.

So this fire
is alight again,
blazing white hot,
driving me in,
burning away the veil,
revealing wounds
refusing to heal, igniting
the scream’s eruption.

Frenzy building
on a primitive drive
abandoned, neglected,
yet so fucking alive.

Starvation never kills,
just feeds the aggression.
Find one to ease
the desperation.
It feels so shallow,
but this runs too deep,
the ache just grows
till it consumes
everything.

In the quickening,
forever I fall:
submission to instinct.

This battle always
ends the same way,
only a matter
of how long you can go,
how much you can take

until you hunt,
though not for a kill.

Seeking water
to soothe the skin,
to drown out the noise,
satiate within, so I might

fight to find land,
battle the wind,
feel one again
stop cracking, splitting
within this shell,

my private hell.

Must stop playing
this maddening game.

No shame.

I just need
to get laid.