Waging War

 What a profoundly useless thing i am.

Bouncing back and forth from one distraction to the next, pausing only to attend to the attention demands of my cats as they randomly jump on me, swat at my leg, or trill directly at me from whatever frozen throne i currently occupy.

I try to fight time, you see. By splaying open my veins and letting it drink my blood, just enough for me to pass out and wake up somewhere else.

Sadly, again and again i must repeat this until there is no more blood to give, and i no longer wake up.

No one beats time, you see, but you can be quite clever about how you choose to war wage. I had chosen to lose, intentionally, to rush time to consume me, to win by being no more, as soon as possible.

Time is happy to oblige, but like the eternal villain it is, it is in no rush.

It knows it will win, like it always does, and will do me no favors. It will not indulge my gamesmanship.

I cannot find value in the time, in what i could produce or what i could do with it, it is just a barrier between me and the exit. While i wish i could turn passion into progress, i am magnetized to the ground and there will be no heroes ending for one so utterly tied down to the tracks of quantum causality. You see every THING, is tied to something ELSE, and those THINGS are threads, that stretch into infinite futures. Eventually you reach a point where they all coalesce, where they are pulling you in a definite direction, at a predefined rate. At that point, you are a victim of choices past, the things you did, and that were done to you, have put you inexorably on to this path, and struggle though you might, you will not extract yourself from this. You will have your eyes pried open and held wide as you watch the things you know must happen, unfold.

And no one,

will ever

believe you.

Thunk- an ode to not knowing how to stop

 When every thought has been thunk

and every ship has been sunk

I trace the lines on my face like a treasure map

Wondering where all the gold has gone.

-I can't help thinking everything has been thought, every fertile ground tilled, every hidden spring uncovered, tapped and bled dry.

For some reason that reduces things for me, it makes the thoughts less valuable, thinking they have already been expunged from the sacred halls of disorganized minds, danced elegantly upon parchment and spit hastily upon tape and the binary of the impermeant.

I want to be myself. I want to be One of One. I want to be irreducible even as i seek to package and label the ENTIRE UNIVERSE for my own gentle amusement.

For a mere snicker, for a half sigh preceding a laugh abandoned before completion.

I want to be THE one. For you. For me. For everyone. I want them to speak my name in hushed tones or in tones of revelry.

I do not want to be worshiped, merely KNOWN.

"That's the guy," they'll say.

"That's the guy that lives. The guy that is real. The subterranean creature that discovered a rare unknowable beautiful thing and who shares it with the world with wild unrestrainable abandon. He's is what we should all aim to be. For even in failing, we are wondrous and joyful. We are graceful like the licks of fires swaying as the tips of the flame disappear and falter. We are hope, and in trying we express our hopefulness dashing ourselves on the rocks of probability. As there is no fate so cruel as to be alive and resigned to never try again. "

This hurts.

For some people this is some kind of intellectual exercise. Some self aggrandizing flailing about calculated, measured, sanded by machines to a perfect roundness, cut with lasers into perfect edges and lines, no.. not for me.

For me to say something is for me to cry, and feel the channels cut into my face by the swollen tears and rolls down the craggy surface from my sunken eyes. Age has taken my smoothness, but it has not taken the sharpness from my blade. I must draw it to make ink, and mix it with these tears to swing madly at huge blank vistas.

They are worth nothing when i start,

and they will be worth nothing when i finish.

I'm not deluded, see i know the awful truth.

It's that nothing is awful. It's that the world doesn't owe you. It's that nothing is perfect.

It's worse AND better than that.

It's nothing. The world nothings you. As it nothings me. We are creatures designed to seek external cues to guide our internal light that are the only ones capable of creating meaning for ourselves.

The world doesn't hate you. The world doesn't love you.

The world doesn't even know you were born. Or that you died.

Or that i died, i came back, and that i am dying again.

Splattering myself on the fine lines of countless notebooks was never going to draw the EYE of the world, but if it made ME feel better,

if bleeding all that blood into ink made me feel stronger, smarter, more in control, less troubled,

than the price paid was worth it,

and i will pay that price again.