Thu, 19 May 2005

a public display of recreational disfigurements
When I sleep, I pretend she is beside me, in my bed. Sometimes, mostly asleep, I reach out to touch her. Put the words in my mouth, push them until they form spastic motions at my fingertips, until I can see the words before me and know that it is not just another wasted day of not writing, weeks and weeks of staring blankly at the screen and bashing my fists into the keyboard. The words will come, she said to me, but she isn’t real, and my entire life is based upon impressing unreal women, not a life at all. Clumps of stillborn stories in my head, bits from alchemical texts and victorian pornography now cast in a selfsimilar brown sludge that stains my skin, apparent to anyone who would bother to look. Headaches and nausea. Missed opportunities. Underwater bass drones, detuned chords which never fully fade sent from some wandering radiotower out in the snowfields, hiding at the center of a grove of trees where farmgirls go to get high and fuck each other, every mouthmoist promise broadcast into my swollen brain. The crows are made sick with the smell and scream at the stars. Something crawls within the walls, calliing out to me to come closer, to set my ear against the drywall. I am too far away from the small details of everyday life, caught in some empty hole hidden beneath the stations of daily life, of telling details by which we are made identifiable and comforted. It is a trick, the shape of my face, the fat which hangs from my bones, a trick disguised as distinction. It is a sickness of my education to believe I contain organs, memories, crushes. All the books I read when I was the other person have flown from me, so that the best I can do is rattle off titles like rote prayers emptied of meaning, and it is the same for the names of my friends, and it is the same for the list of my accomplishments and failings and characteristics. Stoned farmgirls stare through me, as there is no mental comparison by which to trigger attention. That I can hear their thoughts means nothing but that I do not matter, that what I learn of them has no use. At night I am filled with dreams that these broadcasts speak to me, if subconsciously, a sidechannel display of elaborate possibilities. It is difficult, and takes all of my now-limited abilities to follow the causal chain, and it is always so close, the notion that it is not for my eyes to see, not for my hands to touch. When I was younger, everything was pregnant with secondary meanings, omens buried beneath the surface, but now all that is gone, and even the primary purpose is scratched out of the earth, so that nothing remains but running from pain and embarasment. There is, however, something else hidden, as I am hidden from what I want, and at night it broadcasts marco, and in my sleep I whisper polo.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #