Most of what I publish here traces extraction outward — through institutions, language, capital. This piece traces it inward. The writing is old. The artwork is mine. The vulnerability is the point.
violently nostalgic
abusing the clock and its logic
minutes once were metabolic.
Neurotic nostalgia claimed I had found a kingdom and everything I ever wanted years ago.
The problem is I believe(d?) it.
The deeper problem is I’m not sure it ever existed to begin with.
The deepest problem is the story matters more than the reality, sometimes being right means you will always be alone.
———
Tonight I tell myself stories— I choose to mourn some dear moments and friends, a time of youth seeking and finding meaning in the chaos of its coming of age. On a bridge I used to know, inhaling deeply, passing freedom like a torch, a ritual resuscitation of the soul. Always breathing, bracing, gasping for a childish wonder, soon choking on burnt dreams. An elusive distant sensation of peace, my breath sacrificed for the thrill of being alive. I recall the essence of eternal, orderless momentum, where every moment came neither before nor after, but exactly where it must be. There was fear and there was depression, there was love and hope as well, but most of all there was no loneliness. We were lost, and so it had to be, but we were, I was something echoing with a deep, archetypal presence that I had always known was part of me.
Somewhere in that invented forest, somewhere in that golden age, somewhere long ago I found a place, a way to be free. I look at my words and who I’ve become and cannot help but feel I betrayed myself. I chose to care, I chose life when death stood before me.
That word — invented — I wrote it without thinking. But it might be the most honest word in the sentence.
———
The sensation that beautiful things have been lost and nothing has come worthy of replacing them — what does this mean? It means the mind has made a religion out of memory. It means I have been worshipping in a church I built with my own faith and called my convictions something I discovered.
It started with open arms and bright budding irises, expanding cohesion in a promise of infinity. Then the clock read some numbers, the movement became a bit more precise, and the pulse swelled something more than pure blood. Jaded, jaw-grinding, bones cementing to gravity, and mind boiling to a dry dread, the soul found itself filtered and famished, the body slowly withdrawing into a hugging recoil. Bruises and blasphemy, scars and scalps, heaven and heartbreak, cuts and cognition, the statue solidified with an arm outstretched, reaching, always, tendons in a tight knot.
That tension feels like defiance, a refusal to let the hand be empty.
That defiance kept me alive for a while. But defiance is just another way of clinging to the version of yourself that’s already gone.
———
So I see a hole in my head, that leads to a hole in my heart, that leads to a hole in my soul, that leads to a hole in the world, that leads to a hole in the very universe. I walk into the vast emptiness, endless and expansive, to find a place so deep and distant it could not exist, but here I am. And I travel the circle that leads back to the mirror, to the pit of my pupil, to the morgues of my mind, to the hollows in my heart, and deeper until I face myself again.
I am looking for a dream in the daytime because I am still asleep.
And here is where the search gets dangerous — because you can chase the missing thing so far inward that you forget there was ever an outside. You can forget that what you invented, what was once loved and held, continues to grow. In your mind they remain like isolated islands, looking nothing like what the world out there has become on its own.
At a small lattice metal table I see the promise of eternal happiness. I picture tangerine bathing two people, from the flood of a late summer sunset, wrapped in warmth at this small restaurant table. There are smiles and laughter and love and a large bottle, or pint glass endlessly filled with the substance I imagine gives a mortal the disposition of God himself. I remember the freedom; all my baggage nowhere to be found, just us, just this moment moving along as it does.
The way our skin can’t contain the soul, it leaks into the atmosphere to change its density and now it’s heavy with you and I. The room had been relatively weightless until I thought about it. I feel the need to run outside so I might disperse better, so that physics might return to some idea of normal, because while we are here time ceases to function as it should. Still, the vibrations are ecstatic, regretful, and unrelenting; but I can’t let go to let it be as it may.
I said I see this and I must let it go, one way or another. But I swear it’s stuck to me. I couldn’t relinquish it if I tried.
Yet I know that it does not work that way. The thoughts have not gone, only been stranded for as long as their connection is severed in the systematic shutdown of a mind; they will return again. Displacement is not release. And so nothing but deception, constant and excessive, will keep the truth at bay.
I tried to make a person into a country I could live in.
If I cannot feel my own skin what could I feel in touching yours, but a greater lack of sensation in my soul and a growing distance between yours and mine. It becomes clearer, with every movement I make to hold you close, to feel something deeper, I reach for what may or may not be there, that I have no hands to grasp with and no heart to beat with yours.
The vulnerability, as an old scar I rip only to bleed once again, I look to you to heal me. You do not stop the hemorrhage, you do not dig deeper, you rip your own scar for me to see; and I recognize we are not band-aids. Bleeding out, the life spilling, sloshing at our feet; this is all we know, this is our dearest act of intimacy. Sometimes we breathe shallower, our vision tunnels, our hearing fades, and the brain forgets that it has reasons to not always be in ecstasy. We can only hope that our invisible crimson confessions may drown us and we die for the twilight as we fade to sleep.
———
yeah we could
we could let go
I know the sin
but not the soul
we could
we could say so
I know her skin
but not her soul
I wrote it in
without words
I spelled it when
she let me go
———
prism passing, moments lagging
and all I can think is sleepy, slow
times elapsing, bones bent and dragging
and draw my drink until its steeply low
I would sleep for days but I know
I would not wake to a brighter sun
or a better soul
just a fractured passion
painting the figment
with the colors that make no whole
———
I had to write; it had been so long. Etching out my thoughts in filament stains to remember that they had a presence, that they could take form, in hopes that I might be able to speak again. I’d said only a single word in the past two hours. My jaw locked tight, no room in the air for my ill-formed vibrations; I drifted through the night’s fog of fluorescence and neon and let it fill my hollow headspace. I could no longer find structure in the language, there was nothing that could be built and hold any weight.
This is what it sounds like when the words stop working. When the thing you’ve lost can’t be named because the naming is part of what broke it. The paradise I mourned was held together by language — by the story I told about what that bridge meant, what that table meant, what her skin against mine meant. When the story collapsed, so did the world it described.
I know something about how that works now. I’ve spent years tracing how language builds realities — how a word like engagement hides an addiction engine, how rightsizing hides a body count, how personalization hides a surveillance apparatus. I can see the architecture when it’s out there, when it’s institutional, when it belongs to someone else’s extraction.
It took me longer to see that I’d been running the same operation on myself. The golden age was a currency I minted from selective memory. The paradise was a story that kept me seeking — and the seeking kept me from arriving anywhere real. The mind, left to its own devices, is its own best extractor.
———
These days are not like numbers that rise and fall in accordance with a pattern, but more like brand new eras that follow with no plot or plan I can trace until it is clear that I am somewhere different. Each hour declares a war upon the things that seemed to have always been and that which are. When a truth is glimpsed it does not redefine the moment alone, but takes the past that was like a certainty and shatters the solid mass of memory into a heap of pieces that no longer fit together. I sort through the rubble, because I will not be built on misunderstood, broken parts, but will make mosaics of meaning that I have begun to see.
My epiphanies are just recollections, my evolution is just positive regression, my new understandings are just things I’ve forgotten.
The questions I was born with, the curiosity that crippled my functions in societal standards, the surrender and then the rejection of my body, the embrace and the release of my essence in conscious awareness — these repetitive cycles of the same thing with a different paint, the overwhelming compulsions of a lost amnesic — have seeped into my everything to remind me of the potential in nothing, and its place and its purpose and its source.
See, it’s like this — there are colors you can’t normally see, but once you see them you know they exist — and you want to paint every goddamn optic nerve with the new spectrum. I’ll tell you, it’s a bit like neon in that it glows, but it’s a bit more like freedom.
If I didn’t do the things I did, I would not be sitting here with you. If I did not hate myself the way I did, I never would have learned to love myself, and now be able to love you. If I hadn’t nearly killed myself, I never would have lived as I now do. If I hadn’t spat at the face of God, I never would have seen the saliva strike the invisible hands of a loving creator, that hold me now.
———
settle us; settle dust;
settle vessels unto the crust.
revel, lust, and it all was just
a devil or an angel
a moment to think or touch.
but the metal must,
with carbon’s lush
tremble such
in things and dreams
until its crushed.
blooming petal,
despite the hush
feel the blood
ignite in
electric blush.
balanced but not level,
feed the time
sweet ashes
sharp bevels,
with salt and rust
and let it settle
in all that is us.
The ground remains. What persists remains.
The story changes, not the air that breathes them or the hand that shapes them.
— Fire tongue🔥
This is original writing, original artwork, and original vulnerability — each one the distilled product of decades of living through what you just read. If these are things you value, your subscription is what makes it possible to keep sharing them with you.
this is great writing thanks for sharing with everyone
This is quintessential existential cry for meaning and connection expressed with eloquence of ts elliott