.

Do you really think you SOUND like that,

Like you sound so full of soul,
What did the wind spray onto you,
And weren’t you in that janitor’s building
Punching a time clock just like everyone else,
Not even attending to the bastions of time
That scaled the walls that and every other night,
.
And isn’t life so specific,
When you look in the mirror at your own DNA
Assuring that to be right is to die
Not now but eventually,
.
The sun’s rise seven hours impending,
Your day off tomorrow already
Shaping you as that bath that will chafe antiquity
To imbue the impossibility of your existence
On this earth to the grotesque beer gut of a pub manager
Who shirks, looking and polishing glass steins, nothing masked,
Nothing afraid.

This is the part of town I could afford an apartment in.

It is unknown,
And it is America.
Life explodes down on me now.
That’s what it’s like.
Explosions,
You look at,
Go up,
And then we all know that
Cinematically when they come back down
We’ll all have a denouement and a cup of tea
But this explosion,
Life,
Continues to explode down,
I see faces like leather
Walking fast,
Clutching purses with what seem to be these fleeting smiles
And I don’t ask myself anything,
I just listen to the snow,
Even though the snow makes no sound,
Because everything else has already been done
And snowed on.

At a certain point I just stopped saddling people with the necessity of responsibility… I cut everyone some slack. There were a lot of people I cared about who were faced with tremulous circumstances. I’d see them squirming in their chairs, or barstools. It was real.

Sometimes I’ll be at my job, or walking by the rail tracks in my town, and I’m just like, MUSIC? What would be the point of MUSIC? Music, no matter the genre, style, or rudiments used, is still a paradigm. South Bend is aching, quaking, with screws loose. But there’s still that same old buzz, the buzz of the engine. We all love that buzz. You can’t care about anything BUT that buzz, or you’ll lose its spark in you. It’s a sophisticated facility wielded across the board, because even if you’re just doing heating and air conditioning, you have to know how to act. Sometimes you talk and sometimes you just listen, and at that listening you’re at the world’s mercy, and the clouds could roll over and pummel you with change, so much change, so much that the next time you talk, you might be someone else.

When reality becomes mentally insupportable,

You numb,
Knowing that you’re in for some surprises down the road.
.
But where books like Reality Therapy
Might try to assimilate you,
You also with the rumination of
Certain affidavits of drollery
You found inferior
Combust a vivid organism
Looking at the strange cars and flags of military devastation,
You can handle it.

Action,

And at action,
One individual sees that
All there IS is action,
It is the constant drapery of his background,
And in everyday life
He sees that tadpoles aspire to be eels,
Hell breaking on the fluorescent lights
Until they are his mess he has to clean up
In his blue uniform straddling the broom-
Stick and riding up the wall to suspend
Self in stillness becoming a fallen
Warlord Indian Apache who only preached peace,
Wore tan and orange and saw the sun’s day engorge
With that fluorescent screen that knows only action,
And a race stricken with it.

The foolishness caresses me sometimes,

Emerging like such a pile of wet leaves
Under nervous traffic signs,
.
Sundry ultimata
That make me think of the mountains and energy’s stoppage,
When men invent golf,
.
The foolishness berates me sometimes
When I walk as a capsule
Past dust-reflective stop signs.

There is never finally a “soul,”

It’s futile.

Nobody is really, truly, a friend. This is a troubling thought that occludes my mind, at certain times.

Of course, I’m still new here, in this town. My hometown. I moved back to my hometown single when I was 26, something about as advisable as doing a pole dance in a thunderstorm. Well, given at least some will to attract.
I wanted to play guitar, but there was one girl there, and like four of us guys. One of the guys fell asleep, right next to me (I always get a cool feeling when someone falls asleep around me, or when I do around someone else), but it ended up just being TV, and it’s hard to judge yourself in situations like these. The dialogue that bubbles to the surface in social situations tends to shirk the true tension of interactions. And then, I was someone considered quiet anyway, but I’d do crazy things in situations.
Honestly, though, the TV itself didn’t seem evil. The people did. Things would always stay the same in the world, there would always be world poverty, hunger, violence, and I think these people knew it. It was always like they were ensuring it, by leaving on the TV. It was part of their nightly rounds, they were making a check mark.
But they needed me to show them a way, they needed a leader. It was funny, I moved back, and there just so many problems unsolved. Like me, for instance. I was always, like, walking through a room while breathing oxygen with a nose and a mouth.
This one fat dude had walked by me and been cool one time. Not sure why. Maybe he had the opposite of swollen lymph nodes — he had unswollen lymph nodes.
It was like the whole damn town took a mist of mushroom jelly. But everyone has their own song to sing, and that’s what kills. Because your song breaks apart, no matter who you are, because if you’re ready for anything, then you fall in love, and when you fall in love, your thoughts begin thinking thoughts that are too big, and then you have to hone them back down to that one girl. Well, technically you don’t HAVE to. You could go on an idyllic walk by the San Francisco Bay by a bunch of sailboats. There, I’m thinking like a Zoloft magician. Do with me what you will.
Taking a drug is like entering a mutually destructive situation that everybody thinks is mutually symbiotic, because everybody is full of fear. And rightly so. What I mean by destructive is that it inhibits a person’s ability to think there’s some bizarre light glowing from outside the liquor store. This sort of thing can get you by.
Cathexis is an interesting word, (n): “investment of mental or emotional energy in a person, object or idea.” Its very existence is interesting, since in itself it implies that there exists an opposite: a refusal of, or successful evasion of, the investment of energy in one’s surroundings. Sometimes, actually, it seems that this opposite is the objective of success in life — to not be affected. To “stand your ground.” People know who you are, if nothing in life affects you. You become a “brand,” marketable. You have an m.o. And the less egotistical your m.o. is, the more likely you probably are to succeed, since you’re taking less. Being “hard” becomes synonymous with this. You just have to have something that gets you by, though, and if you don’t, you have no choice to soften yourself, to open up your feelers and to get to know what other people do. Otherwise you’ll just be thinking how stupid all these flashing lights are everywhere, how stupid it is that we extract the world and sell it, and how stupid it is that the first buildings built on planet Mars will be “sex motels.”

Depression and anxiety,

Pride and shame,
Always our troubadours
Will meet us at the grand
Entrance to the next moment.
.
Are we too big for this doorway,
Will the light light us,
Or that
Of a speckled face costed that has worked too hard.

If some people mistreated you,

Chances are some people got it,
Your romance with language
A porcelain Beijing head on the shelf to remiss,
They must go through it with
Wide fists in hugged quandaries
Before dancing and singing again within
Velocity-laden stagnant death.