Haiku #408

Walk wet shifting shores

One foot entropic, one not

The sea's swells betray 

Evening Stroll

Late night walk
Wearing shades.
My route penetrates
The perimeter
Of a spectral landscape.

Seeing through my glasses
Darkly, a vision filled with
The glow of unnumbered,
Unknown souls
Which resolve with decreasing
Distance into hundreds of
Candles in their
Protective lanterns
Flickering
In a
Graveyard.

Though in a far-northern land
My mind fills
With images of Mexico's
Day of the Dead.

Only here there are no
Dancing skeletal
Marionettes or
Fragrant candy skulls.

Haiku #407

Nice elephant soap 

Moonlight blue cools all it sees 

Trade winds bring seasons

Haiku #406

The leaves turned traitor 

Her eyes colder than moonlight 

Night crashed, fell like hail 

Haiku #405

Earth welcomes us all 

Death's only transformation 

Life shines through roses 

Sapientia Cotidie Oritur

Now, be born as

The past returns 

On sandals worn.

Circle that which burns 

For heat cleanses forms.

In holy flame you turn 

As anterograde sights

In the sparkling night.

Trust in the gilded light, 

Dance now left 

And to the right,

Dance until the 

Yawning morn when 

The Sun again shall 

You adorn.…

Haiku #404

Those who rule us do 

Because we allow them to 

Suss this human zoo 

Haiku #403

Overhear to see 

Domesticity set free 

Dream that lust's a need 

The Flaming Warrior

I was surprised, damn near shocked, at the speed at which the story of the serving soldier who set himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy disappeared. I heard Rachel Maddow mention it once and I saw a brief video of an ambulance driving away. The man died. I remember the monks burning in Saigon. Those were powerful and effective images. A flaming warrior could have been an even more pointed message. And that is why we only glimpsed it. If it were not for the nearly universal presence of cameras, I believe that warrior's story would have been 100% censored. But I will never forget him or his righteous sacrifice. I hope the stench of the burning man got into that Embassy.…

Frisson In The Desert

I do not believe that writing is worth the nervous stress which can only get worse. 

Relaxation is just a myth, like any other belief system. It's easier to train a man to operate under extreme and extremely stressful circumstances. 

Someone not as well trained feels the stress, hopefully not as acutely but, he lacks the tools and psychological techniques to bring himself down and back under control. 

Yup, stress can be a killer, either directly by causing a meltdown or, indirectly by reducing the quality of his work and a wheel bolt or two don't get properly tightened. A sudden assault, everyone in the ATC, acceleration, a hard turn, a flipover and which side has the most conscious personnel will probably win. Will they kill? It all depends.…

               ¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥

It may all be camel shit but I can't see myself doing anything else. I'm a writer so I write. If it pisses you off, shoot me. That's another way to get some shade.

Music, Morphing, Magic

Put on Gary Numan's "Dance" initially at a normal listening volume. Then turn it down a little about every 10-15min. Allow your ears to adjust to the lower volume before you lower it again. You will find that over time it won't seem that you had turned it down at all. Keep reducing the sound and you will keep adapting to it. Finally you reach the point where you strive to hear the words. You are now very near the point when you stop trying to actively listen and it becomes a true ambient sound, coming from beyond you while it is still of you. Tuning into it while it's making out individual words is no longer important. Discrete words and notes played on an instrument will play close to subliminally throughout the night until you wake in the morning. You find yourself fascinated at how clear your hearing is and why you don't remember altering from a state of somatic consciousness to a way of being outside of that base bestial level. Like ozone, magic leaves in its passing a certain static sweetness and revealing the, until now, invisible without any spoilers as to the details. Experience it, breathe it in and accept it as but one more vector along which you exist. As you live your life let but one principle be your lodestone: pay attention. That one precept will gather more of itself to itself as time passes. At a point that you will be only able to refer to as an epiphany, you will become aware that your lodestone has been a true companion for longer than you can fathom. It has gathered up a reserve of magic to itself. This is natural; be not in the least anxious. Just keep up your explorations only from now on no longer alone. On some deep level you have merged with your partner and have traded the the best aspects of each other with each other. From this now forward, fully partnered, intentionally proceed with active attention at all you undergo. And remember!

Now:

Many albums can take you into this listening-while-barely-conscious mode but the effect will vary with the listener and the music but, I do include it in amongst those experiences in which decreasing intensity promotes increasing sensitivity. You learn about your own limits just as you are learning what it is about you that exists without limits. Coiled within your core you remain in touch with EVERYTHING that seems to be apart from yourself.

And there you go, my adventurous friend.…

Mind Winding Down

Prayer. What an 

Impractical practice, 

Imagining undetectable 

Entities with attributes 

That only you can gift 

To them who soon then 

Slip 'tween the slats of 

The predicates of knowledge,

And that belief you gave,

Which you trust will 

Rebound to relieve 

Your wounds and woes 

Or so you chose to choose.

Organise or glaze on over 

That mental matrix kept,

Cherished, safe in that safe

Deep among your mind's

Folds, not much different 

From the thought pot of 

All who are damned like 

Faust to share our sere air.

Fill every gap and crack

You see in your neighbour 

Or! Mercy! In thyself…

Become one of your 

Own captive wights!

Trust indeed a robust ghost 

O'er the insulated shade, the 

The visions arcane of a 

Soul, wherein you can creep, 

Hide, warm, inside a shell 

That, while from Hell you're 

Hid, you know you're never 

More than an Augenblick from 

The home of your ghost, a

Shelter that moves with you,

For the cost of priceless 

Belief that creeps through 

Your every artery and vein

Until it's conquered you,

And all of your all too

Conscious Arctic dreams.

That freedom at your core?

It has no chance anymore.

Independence won't return 

But is it not truly all the same? 

As long as you, 

Your every part,

Is sheltered safe, and pain, 

Life's surest friend and guide,

Is kept at pragmatic bay, 

Until needed afar and away

Until our suffering, moans,

And the cries of the newly 

Dead, their clarion calls 

Both motivate and lash 

To speed those who carry 

The solution, our very 

Salvation, the Future's

Key to a down-filled 

Well earned destiny.…

Hawkeye

Eye the skies, see illusions, 

Veiled confusion, and 

Try to cry, defy the 

Crush of thumbs applied, 

A desperate attempt

To measure the moisture 

In your glassine gems,

That arcane ruby fluid

Carrying such a clear,

Holy and perfect view 

Of the ghosts of your soul.…

On Grief And Dreams

[…💔]

I went to therapy and spouted about all the terrible shit that has happened in the last 2 months. not sure it helped… but we did have a discussion about grief.

[😒]

I imagine that you could discuss grief for a day and a night but I don't see it going anywhere, no matter how much I wish that it would. The only people who do not grieve are the dead, who are exactly the cause of the problem.

I remember first beginning to feel sorrow at about the age of 8-10, +/-; it's been a while and my memories are rather vague. It wasn't because of anything that had happened, it was grief for the future. I had felt sorrow earlier and had found no cure for it except to hope that it would lessen with the passage of time. 

You know that my parents were substantially older than those of my friends. They appeared to be about the age of the grandparents of my friends. Somehow at about that time my brain made the connection between growing old and dying (of old age). I became afraid of the grief that I would feel when my parents did die and how could I possibly deal with THAT. It had to be an early symptom of depression; becoming afraid of grievous events IN ADVANCE of their actually happening. The only way I thought of avoiding the pain would be to die first. Presto! And suicidal ideation was born! And I wasn't even in my teens. I had no one to talk to about it and it probably didn't even occur to me that talking about it could even help. After all, talking couldn't solve what I saw as the root of the problem: death. Being able to face death calmly was a sign of courage, courage that I didn't believe I had. You can compare it to being a skier who has a fear of pain, fear of the pain of a broken leg. It's going to affect how well you ski, no matter how much natural ability you have or how much you develop your skills. My first response would not be to practice more, it would be to kill the anxiety and fear which would free me to do what I do without those damn feelings getting in the way. I didn't know it when I was 10 but (and this is an extreme leap in time) heroin is an excellent solution. As I have said before, H is not simply a killer of somatic pain, it's a suffering-killer, a drug that can also deal with psychological pain. Nobody wants to ascribe any positive attributes to potent (and this varies from person to person) opioids or equivalent synthetic substances but, I maintain that they exist and society has come to believe that the desire for pain relief is a moral weakness that one must not give in to.

There is a different approach. If you can't make pain go away you can try to learn to put up with it, at least well enough so that it won't prevent you from doing the stuff that you have to do. Granted the method isn't exactly perfect. 

Or you can intentionally cause pain to yourself. Cutting and bleeding do in fact have two positive effects; three if you count the release of endorphins into your bloodstream. (I experimented with causing endorphin release when I had shingles that nobody could diagnose as shingles. An incredibly painful condition. The part of my body that was affected was my neck and throat, with the exception of the skin over my trachea. Wherever the idea came from, I decided to soak a cotton ball in alcohol and swab an area of my neck with it. And I thought that I had experienced pain BEFORE!! Christ!!But in less than 15sec the pain faded as if I had applied lidocaine to the area. The effect lasted for only about 10-15min, tops, but it had worked! I had proven the efficacy of endorphin.) The first positive somatic effect of slicing oneself, over time, gets you used to the physical pain itself, making the self-mutilation easier; a simple decision, an act of will. 

Its second positive effect is that it can reduce stress, depression and what, for lack of a better name, I call internal psychological pressure. My explanation for this benefit is that if you think of your circulatory system as a system of plumbing, the negative feelings of depression and stress are analogous to blockages in the piping, ratcheting up the pressure in the system, pressure which if left untended will lead to bursting pipes which, in this extended metaphor, represent a mental meltdown, or nervous breakdown if one prefers, and should that be allowed to happen, through ignorance or negligence, there's no predicting what adverse effects and of what severity, will ensue. So, to lower the pressure, you bleed liquid from the system. Blood is the liquid and as it flows your internal emotional pressure drops along with the blood. There is also the fact that you are choosing to do this, you are taking action, which means that you are taking back control of the plumbing of the machine, re-establishing self-control, at least temporarily. Being in control is in itself calming since you free yourself from being a slave of your emotions. Of course this is not a permanent cure but it is a powerful technique for interfering with an acutely overdriven limbic system, recovering control of your feelings instead of being controlled by them. To toss in a pop culture reference, the Vulcans got it right.

Something I almost forgot to mention. The reason why I haven't gotten a pet is because that which lives is born to die and I don't need anymore grief. Be it a human or be it a cat, if you love it there is no difference in the quality of the sorrow that I feel upon their death. And with fuzzy buddies there is an additional issue. Given my history with cats, all of my feline friends lived to be at least 20 years old. Cats become just as attached to you as you do to them and, at my age, the odds are good that a cat would outlive me. I don't want to create that situation either. If I didn't live alone that might change the equation but it is really quite unlikely.

There was a time in my life, for the life of me I can't pin down when, so let's just say that it was in my youth, before I came down with chronic depression. In that time my mood was satisfyingly stable. I wasn't depressed but neither was I glad. I occupied a grey middle zone between the two. Maybe I was already on an SSRI but that doesn't ring any bells. I can say that whatever the reason, that "no man's land" of the emotions is precisely what an effective SSRI achieves. Has any MD or shrink ever explained the expected effects of an SSRI on the emotions? I'm not going to run through them here in case it's all old news to you. We've texted about it but I can't recall whether Al was on an antidepressant or an antipsychotic so you may well be familiar with both.

Looking back at it all I suppose it is in the end pretty silly. Being afraid of the death of my parents or of a fuzzy friend years or even decades before the fact. Grieving for the future, for events that cannot be altered or avoided. If that is not insanity then I don't know what is.

(These balloons were knitted together and this is the final result. Take note that there's no mention of "the elephant in the room," although Jane is actually woven all through the piece without being mentioned by name. She is my parents, a cat, a sibling, a long dead friend you never knew. And now she's waiting on the river's bank waiting for Charon's boat to dock, a boat that no one but the Boatman knows the schedule of.🌹)

🖤 And what of we who are left here, marooned, alive in body as Time frays, strand by strand, that weak tether keeping sighing souls tied to the side of a dark worm drilled plank, the sliver that was not long past a vessel.…

Enough!! Wet I'm forever reminded of but it's the cold that bites the flesh while Old Nick's hound gnaws hearts with a piercing grinding sound. Hear I aught else? Nay!

Then let it end. Give all over to the lunatic few who survive of the crew! Ahargh! Be gone; I spit on you!!

The damp is close.…feet so silent they may well be hacked away…mist…breeze…

Grey air that trolls exhale…in…out…Yes, I'm well worn out enough, ground down to powder over too many years. "Keep your chin up!" holler the toffs. "Fuck you and the butthole you crawled out of!"

I do believe that now the only thing that is keeping me from hiding beneath the quilts and covers, putting out the light and chasing e'er elusive sleep, is the knowledge that tomorrow is yet another day.…🖤

Coda

The farther this world crawls forward on bleeding knees and technologies obsolete while incomplete, my hate shall illuminate every impotent atom, be it planned in an ancient future or, while living, sutured to the beauty of loving entropy.…