i am profoundly disquieted as of late. the proverbial chi has been due course south or some non-centric location. dash and damn it all. feelings of inadequacy. feelings of remorse. feelings of early addiction. feelings of no control over anything. there seems no steady ground to return to, whether in my head, where i work, where i live, where i call home, where i used to pray. it is a sickening of humanity, of them all. sad sick sorry ghosts drifting in and out of consciousness, haunting themselves. i see it i abhor it, i beseech release yet i am bound to the same vacillating torture of life and death, personal apocalypse etc. so i asked newt what he thought the once and future escape was. he was a protoge of elliott and kurt and marx and nietzsche but ended up like hemingway and elliott, and kurt's mother. you can guess. i wondered why it was the most beautiful are so sad to look at. always. newt said because then you have nothing to aspire to. he also was endeared to plato and socrates--the whole beauty of forms love affair appropiately labled a platonic love of beauty. newt was a bastard though. as all writers are. sharon though, she is different. i havent figured her out yet. you know i called her shannon. cut me a break, its a one letter difference-- its an r. some how that matters though. it does. the little things right? i say this because newts first wife's name was sharon. she divorced him after a year of marriage. she too was a writer--a damn good one. apparently 4th wave feminism was born from that relationship. congrats newt, congrats; that marriage wouldnt have died in vanity, it was merely, conceived by it.

i am the son of a bastard. not my father or mother. but what i have made me into. i was never too careful about what i would pretend to be, so i ended up so. this is homage to my uncle kurt. mother night. indeed it was. it is now too i suppose. newt wishes he was related to my uncle kurt too--he's related to hemingway! come on who was the real vanguard of literature!? i mean hemingway killed himself! way to go out with a bang. remorseful. such a sick sad way to die. uncle kurt warned me back in the fall of 2005 that he might be going soon, but that i shouldnt worry. he fought the good fight he said. i said i thought so too. he said hed run the race. i said i tought so too. he said he wanted to kill himself numerous times. i said i did too. he said do you know why i didnt? i said i think youll tell me. he did. he said it is because of the sermon on the mount and the beautiful person Jesus was. i can buy that. he said to me, you are not alone, there are others like you. you have been sick for a long long time, but now you are healed. i said it back to him. he smiled then said, sipping his lemonade on the balcony of his new york apartment, "well if this isnt nice, i dont know what is". so i say that too now. such a beautiful person. still, so sad. how is it that such calamity brings such elegance to life?

Dr. Galt was a tall lean man-- a staggering 6'3 stalwart figure who self-righteously wore his dual Ivy league degrees on his sleeve as proudly as his heart. By all conventional terms he was the colloquial ladies man. restless scoping eyes perpetually combed the scene for a new fuck. Ibecause of this ive regarded him as most certainly a bastard in life, and convincingly a bastard in death--because, frankly he didnt give a damn about anyone. the only time i can recall him acting as a decent human being was the day his mother, lillian died. he didnt say a word. i wouldnt have either, she was so selfish she took her own life.

he asked me one day, "Newt, why people? How is it that you can muster any inkling of care, compassion, any empathy toward that sad sick race of mutually constitutive consumers?"

"Paul, I suppose it is because of the sermon on the mount. but then again this doesnt mean that i like people. because frankly i dont. i am obligated to this damn mess we're in. apparently my anatomy wills a continued presence here, the stubborn thing. so until it stops i merely make the best of it" i said.

"that is because you are a coward newt, youre a damn coward. afraid to bite the hand that feeds, afraid to say what you really think. a real 21st century man. a real spineless wretch"

"no, i think it is because i am just tired. worn by thinking change is ever affected by anything good. conformity is just providence. no?"

Dr. Galt stood up from the table in Lula's Coffee Shop rushsed out the door towards a blonde haired woman getting into a silver buick.

when at the bottom of everything its as if you are using a telescope as a microscope when you really need a stethoscope. how life affords us a bounty of square blocks for circle holes must be some running joke God has with the Devil.

shallow people nauseate me. i dont know what it is about them; perhaps, its the subtle notion that they are merely a translucent pallid canvas pulled over twisted wire and machine, wicked machine. go haunt ghosts, go haunt.

i want to marry a girl who is in love with me. some real individual. so that we can care more about each other and in our selfless exchange of care we can survive the vices of a burning city smoking, of a world at war against itself. to be a drop of proof in an ocean of stubborn ignorance that says, such love isnt possible. damn you sea. damn you.

I looked over at Margot now leaning against the carmine colored bricks on the north wall of my new york apartment, she was looking out on the street below smiling. Her smile was penultimate poignancy. It bore an faint eloquence--a slight indication of immanent apocalypse, that deep below she finally realize the meaning of spiders and lemmings, of the callow weakminded skin covered ghosts, haunting the streets below, but it simultaneously exuded an ephemeral whisper of nonchalance, almost as if it were a sigh. poignancy indeed. such elegance. symbols upon symbols--as if it were a metaphor for this whole divine paradox called life. Still, it took a secobarbital dust storm to finally shed the scales. even i was a repeat convert to the concept of "prime and inferior valuations on humanity". why? because it all seemed inconsequential. i reasoned, why would anyone want to worry about the convoluted gyrations and complexities of inconsequential eddies in the larger ocean of the human condition? spiders and lemmings again. Elliott Gardner told me every ripple can cause a wave, regardless of its size. and when it gains kinetic energy in a snowballing effect to the size of tidal proportions is what we call a significantly high molar concentration of stupidity with the intend to distribute. people die with stuff like that. i asked what he thought we were all in right now? he said we're already dead. a true optimist!

sickness seeps inbetween the branches of skeletal trees.
so swallows and specters float
hither and tither in the weeping willows who whisper please please,

let me be. let me be. so just let me be.

jawless swine,
decorticated by an angelic whisper,

are swallowed in emerald smiles, in sunken eyes, in the thicket of sinister shadows. so i know where the silence goes.
so dead dance with the dead.
they prevaricate.

bloodied tongues whip the air to mouth in a tasteless phrase:
i exist for defilement and defiling so it goes.

anthropomorphic, skeletal trees, in january. in february. in june.

bloodied tongues fashion the air into a tasteless phrase, i exist to fuck.

so sickness seeps under the skin of a heart once bathed in the passive power of the truth. weeping willows whisper softly, in a distant care.

so it goes.
so it goes.

i wonder why there was a lack of confidence in the will to assimilate, to rely on some collective homogeneity to say i suffer nothing but fulfillment i am A. B.C. or 1. 2. 3. thus i know who i am and who i will be. do what you want. be beautiful. people need a savior, for they often cannot or do not save themselves. say to the codified machine that is the fringe of a self-denied lunacy, you need me more than i need you and so become free. yet the problem is that the system would say 100,000 lemmings are never wrong. i say would you hit a woman with her child? no you'd hit her with a brick as the old burlesque joke goes. so too they are fools. 100,000 lemmings is merely an increase in the molar concentration of idiocy not a dilution of what makes wrong. yet those tendrils are long and tangled into our fate. we need a real medicine man these days.

You’ll take advantage ’til you think you’re being used
Cause without an enemy your anger gets confused
I got stuck on the side you know, I never chose
But it’s all about taking the easy way out for you I suppose

There’s no escape for you except in someone else
Although you’ve already disappeared within yourself
The invisible man who’s always changing clothes
It’s all about taking the easy way out for you I suppose

Well I don’t want you making mistakes
I wish you luck I really do
But the problem with the puzzle
Whatever’s left to you

I heard you found another audience to bore
A creative thinker who imagined you were more
A new body for you to push around and pose
It’s all about taking the easy way out for you I suppose
It’s all about taking the easy way out for you I suppose
-e.s.

when i think to myself, what will there be tomorrow? what, when, and how shall the future beset me in the pitch black cell of uncovered certainty? i am reminded of times when i used to cast wishes on stars for the will to facilitate my own breathing to slow and heart to seize up in a fit of defiance--a sure way to escape, but then i am always comforted in by thought that as long as the invention of distillation is kept remembered and i have clouded air left in my lungs, i could care much, much less for this pithy, prat, horribly wonderful thing called life. somehow the potentiality of a new dawn is enough to quiet those demons, to put to rest the sad sick songs that play and replay in my mind--for me and me alone they comfort, so loyal, so fake. i see the routine revolutions of a rippled life, spiders and lemings, spiders and lemings verbiage spun out in silk and cotton lettering, words wasted on the iridescent, the lackluster clowns pitted in their corporate personality of contrived congeniality born from feverish bid at homogeneity. so i laugh and say, what a joke, what a gift. so let them be the same, let them be different too. life would be tastless if there were not lemings--so too would death.

you were wrong. i have my songs, though theyll love me like you said you would.

i was across over your bed an exorcist to rid your sin, i was standing at your bed, wont you wont you let me in, i was across over your bed a hidden treasure dug deep in sin just follow my footprints wont you wont you let me in, well all well all walk on well all well all walk on

beautiful:

im so sufficiently wasted alive, i dont need to survive you again, i got my own needy hands.

supine palms unfolded dead awake in chicago, trying to needle and dime the larger ends

its a sad sick song,

so
i play along.


got 40 invested in the irish distilled broken down brothers all cry,

its my brothers blood, its my punched gut,

so what?

so sing sweet and soft, ill befree

what you ought to do with life is: chop it up and hold on, even when you dont want to. but i wouldnt let it, i wont let you either. cuss.

Eli lay aplomb on the sidewalk, bleeding from the bullet wound in his chest under the yellow glow of the solitary streetlight on Prichard St. beneath him was the vast expanse of the system, miles and miles of twisted iron rebar and moulded concrete, now stained a sanguine crimson, a melancholy heather once again as eli's breathing slowed and riptide eyes rolled back and forth in a phasing consciousness. everything was silent.
"Ayn, i have forgotten why i came here. to this whole big nothing, this hellish mess of entropy"
eli said in a spidery whisper, bearly audible to ayn as she leaned in to listen bringing her ear close to eli's mouth.

"eli, we never asked to be born. no one does. i dont blame you, for anything. death happens as life does. when we never really want what we're given at the bottom of everything any way. be free, life is no way to treat an animal, even a mouse" ayn repiled calm and quiet. her voice suggested a collected elegance, much like words a mother speaks to a freightened or maimed child.

eli's breathing was slow now, faint and timid as his soul slowly began to leave this world. he took one more breath and upon its exhalation, smiling he managed to say " what a gift, what a joke, this has all been. so too this shall pass."

though i mean all this to say promises we make to ourselves are always nebulous. my uncle would have had something to say of the sheer brilliance yet coterminously exuded idiocy we existentially confused humans display in our day to day mindless interaction. he is in heaven now, i suppose. though for all his faith in humanity and invaluable insight as to the blatant obscurities and tell tale truths of the human condition i feel as though all his life was a tit for tat, pound for pound farrago of pranks between him and God. both thought they were right. what can you do? laugh. though, i wonder if it ever occurred to uncle k.jr. that his existence too, would precipitate in an aftertaste flavored as a joke. his best yet. that is something magnificient. so what i mean to say is he is somewhere not here, but not the heaven Christians envision--eating pie with Jesus Christ somewhere in the clouds--or something of that nature.