posterity, boy

So difficult, to cling to the idea to ascribe the obligation to others: feel, reciprocate, understand that there is a sort of pain no amount of well-intended but futile attempts at inspiration will even begin to approximate, much less alleviate. Give up, look inside instead, but still find nothing.

I do this place a great injustice. I have not written, have not been a writer for such a long time that I do not believe I even deserve the title anymore. I stare at screens and pages, as is demanded, and they stare back, not asking me to finish so I can get to making my dreams like a good boy, but asking what new colors I’ve seen, what new leaps and bounds of logic are worth talking about, whether the city will ever again have a chance to raise phoenixes for fun and profit and social status, whether Francisco’s tears really have shielded his eyes from the rust-choked wind, whether Salvacion will resort to her etiquette or to her visceral disgust at falling for an uncut heathen whose only claim to her was that his heart was struck by lightning the moment he saw her from the trees, even whether the Supreme Court of the Universe’s decision will look the way it does in the mind’s eye. Catalina’s eyes still betray her, the four men are still standing over that infernal hole, it still thinks His best work was to create that hole that could fit any kind of peg, the rikugunshokan question was still a stupid attempt at capturing the moment when enough concerns collide to kill her in a car crash, the couple still speaks one-liners in a contrived library as tribute to Carver, and no one knows of what happened to the bulul key-chain after the jangling stopped.

Long relegated them to the side, books for absent thoughts absent from the daily lug to and from home, and it is perhaps one of the most painful things I have done to myself, absent banging my head on walls and desks as (if that could help keep a tired brain awake anyway, idiot). The days simply march on, mechanical, unfeeling, and worst of all, unforgiving. I stare at scratches of an angry chicken, with all the feeling of running one’s claws into bleeding stubs against an earth that has long since dried up, not even rot to nitrite it. And then, I shudder at time lost in not keeping an un-maintained engine running. The machine is never the machinist.

This is perhaps the most horrible form of self-indulgence: the senseless sort, stuck in between the desire to lash out and let darkness speak in tongues on behalf of many a caged misanthrope and cynic, and to heap shovel upon shovel of distractions and misdirections onto a word that will never be read, much less understood by the eyes it was meant for.

carpe noctem

It never helps when someone makes it a competition, as if they could stave off the meaninglessness of it all by somehow being able to tell themselves that their pain is is greater than others’ and that that, somehow, makes them stronger.

It never helps when someone makes it a match, of who spouts more bland niceties than the other, until it all blends into a stream of redundant and rephrased nothings, words without meaning, as if the world turned on light alone, as if there was a way the coin could be heads on both sides.

It never helps when someone makes it a race, trampling on safe spaces and preferring to let dismissal and silence creep in, turning the camera toward their corner of the world, their chance to show the world what a wonderful person they’re trying to be, when all we really are is just a bunch of idiots, trying to become our own intangible Joneses.