you may worry about my state, dear reader, but you shouldn't. our messages often bely (or belittle) our truths and directions. i like to play with smoke. this is true. i am a wretch at times, or can imagine being one which is just as effective. besides, pain can be as lovely as joy, yes?
i'm not entirely sure if i write these words for you, dear reader, or for me. i suppose when all is said and all is done, we'll all sit back with a fondness of a sort, remembering the mischief i've wreaked upon this life. whatever the outcome, the art remains. we are works of art, beginning in action and ending with a release and a sticking to. the art of living, of cause and effect, never perfected because it already is. and everlong will it continue to fascinate.

Last Man Standing

You can feel the weight of thoughts
accumulated over time.
The unsaids and all the little
snatches of loose-string unfinished's.

I just want ot read out loud
all the verses I already shared.
Stuck in a rut
because repeats or rejects
(which is which)
lose their lustre over time
except within my eyes.

I'd like to express
an eccentric scifi-slice-of-pie logic
that slides and dips and dives
between and under,
through past and over
and within between
and evades words of mundane avenues
and all the spoken modes.
A logic of dense integration
within laboured matrices.
Hot-wired-short-circuit bird's nests
and scrambled over ne plus ultra
mnemonic combustion fearfully complex.

Unnerving to strangers.

I don't want to sleep or shut down.
This tangled off-beat grid isn't ready to go.

I want to embrace the the exhaustion
of psychologistics.
I want to juggle this mess
and spin not-quite-delusional (yet) plates painted narcisistic-me on pointy sticks while walking over glass broken barefoot.

Time doesn't stand still but the mind does.
At least the remnants anyway.
The run-off and the overflow.
Synaptic sawdust and endpieces.
The dangerous little bits piling up
in loosely packed mounds.
An unstable growing residue
that began existence as
simple discarded peelings.
Dead cast-offs ready to collapse
and drag down with unwary footfalls.
Psychology is the new dead skin cells
but the cranium's closed atmpsphere
prohibits Erosion's broom
from sweeping away all that junk and clutter.
The polluted untended gardens a bramblous stew
rampant with crazy thorns.

I just want,
am breaking with wanting,
am becoming transparent in suffering with wanting
to be wrapped up in arms,
folded in with another,
the heart pinioned by love's bondage,
and allowing a dispersal, a deluge of energy,
colliding storms of rescued sanity,
a mixing up of the spiritual fuels
to be reconstituted and purified.
I desperately need a merging of mouths,
a weeping dance of tongues that permits me
to feel a metaphysical cleansing
of overdue memetic slag.

I can hope my imagination and
imagine my hope
can sustain the alleviation on its own.
These means are ripe for reaching the flashpoint.
The consuming nature of believing in salvation
exacting awesome tolls out of this
carbon-basd bipedal sentience.

The continued expenditure
of afterburner dreamengines running wide open.

The weight of thoughts.

The last man standing gets
the best and worst.
A single soft machine
sucking the air of others' scattered shutdown remnants,
focusing in on itself
and taking on a sole engagement
of post-polydriven momentum.
Converting and retaining stray frequencies
of the-now-disconnected.
Embracing the impetus alone.

Imagining chess.

Imagining conversation.

And what-ifs, I wonders and maybes.
They coulds, you woulds, I mights.

Bittersweet in night's strokings.

The last man standing is the only one
rewarded the proud curse of
such pain exquiste.

Dora Clad.

Dora Clad.

Dora Clad. this is the most powerful name i have ever encountered, dear reader. that name and all the attachments clings to me lately. i met her in circumstances similar to my encounter with Julie.
in a dream.

the most powerful dreams i have aren't about what happens, they're about what's evoked. in my case, they are heavy emotions that ride the waves from dreaming to conciousness. they are grave in their surreal density.

while this dream is not the weightiest of them, it assuredly is the most provocative. it is, in fact, the most inaccessable of its kind. the most purely speculative.
her physical form is almost identical to the character Penny Lane from Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous. upon waking, i thought that was who i had been dreaming about, until her name echoed in my head for an undetermined length of time as i was trying to pull myself into the awake. Dora Clad. Dora Clad. Dora Clad.
(i think you should know that i have never dreamed of a person's last name before this, dear reader.)
i realized with a sudden fury, that Dora Clad was not Penny Lane. that's when i began to try and back pedal, began to sift through the fog and the fuzzy to retrieve the suddenly critical-to-me dream of Dora Clad. i can't stop thinking her name, and when i say it, i only want to say it more.
in the dream, i believe Dora was saving me from something. a guardian of some kind. i think she may even have been there to save me from myself. from something i was maybe doing to myself. something fatal. but beyond this was the promise of something more or something deeper. like she would visit me again later in another capacity after she had thwarted me from my danger. the only visual thing i remember is her face, angelic, eminating this sort of glow, or mayber highlighted from a different glow originating from behind her. like looking at her as if i were on my back and far away, looking from far away through some liquid that magnified her face to approximate how she'd look up close. wavering. reassuring me.
i found myself not exactly reassured at all. i found myself lonely. (but how else could i be, yes?) i found myself repeating over and over Dora Clad Dora Clad. floored by the intensity of the name. how could i have possibly thought of a name like that? i couldn't have could i? it must have been planted right? somehow, by someone?
well, i don't know about all that. i don't really claim to know anything, dear reader, save for the fact that her name is perfect. perfectly sounding, perfectly memorable, perfectly symmetrical. perfect.
it makes me want to be foolish. makes me fantasize about madly searching for her. a search that eats me alive, taking the fat off my body, devouring the muscles, pulling my skin. painting rings around my eyes and bestowing my hands with shakings. robs me of sleep and outcasts me from life. just to get her. to her. it has a sick appeal to it, a lofty dedication i have to admire to some extent. i've read too many goddamned books.

i googled Dora later that afternoon. i searched a little bit in a few ways. nothing immediately advertised itself as a lead. a lot of the children's charcter Dora the Explorer. there's some salt for the wounds in that coincidence.

i don't know, dear reader. i guess Dora Clad may fade into my mind with all the others. i feel blessed to have been inspired by her at all.

Last Time I Knocked

Whittled away
under carefully packed new layers.
Filled out over
crumbling in.
Beeline for the corner.
Back to the wall.
A coward in the seat of power.

Easy carresses and a sense of courting guilt.
Tentatively touching failure,
the act wishing so bad to be real;
Pinocchio's effigy.

37 cigarettes.

Quickly turned, morosely pondered
after the hipocracy of driving.
The rude intrusion
and the attempted another.
Giving up hope
for a tailored welcome
and hating this skin for its contents.

Damned and caged in a tension of no place to curl.
Hating you for avoiding this weakness.
Nothing changes in this addition.
I fear terribly
the power in these words.
My undoing spelled out
in case you should read this.