antitextspeak

1.15.2012

write a wrinkle
out a finished
word a finch that
ends a sentence

entertainment takes
a swift stroll through
scholarship makes
for wobbly minds

where winter rewinds
us into an open or
otherwise openable
compendium

an afterego aura
a landslide toward
midnight come back
doesn’t cut it

upside is or isn’t
tautology is histrionic

fireflies

life is a mess
or so it seems
a jangle and jumble
and we go insistently,
resiliently through

but we go haltingly
and abitoff pace,
go and sometimes
synchronize: fireflies
in a giant jar

happiness is learning how to fly without an airplane

looks like there's absolutely no way to ask for and receive happiness from any part of the world. as much as i "am" and exist in the formations of my mind is as much as i can create my own happiness. i might bounce the very notion of it off other people and objects and mind-objects and then claim them to be the cause, but it was me all along.
the end of suffering is not happiness. the word is all wrong. if existence as we know it, as we've created it and continue to create it every moment, is not actual or accurate, then it is suffering and it is the cause of suffering. if suffering were to end it would require that existence (as we know it entirely) would also have to cease. so what am i left with then? another (no)thing to not ask for or receive happiness from.

in this reality i've created, i know that when happiness arises (or bounces back from something i threw it at) it must at some point end. as with my conceptions that create suffering. they cannot be maintained...because they are assembled of things that also cannot last. (ideas, delusions, cravings...) but say, i want something and then i get it. i'm happy with that. but is it really absent of suffering? musn't suffering exist in order to provide the other side of non-sufferings coin.

the risk of going on breathing is that everything must come to pass and go on and end. even me. even my loved ones. and it seems that the only way to "end the suffering" of this pervasive impermanence is by ending "reality". hahaha, so reality isn't real.

the eightfold path is a path written on the ground of the earth. it is words and ideas. but to follow it one must take up perfections which cannot exist on the ground of this earth through words. so, "right"-perfect mindfulness, perfect speech, perfect view, and attention...perfect action, perfect work. what i'm saying here is that the real request is for transcendence. luckily we have the only "yana", the only tool capable of breaking out, of creating the levity required for this flight: the human mind. (also, coincidentally the cause of our problems in the first place.)

bummer paradox: language and perception cause suffering by separating our own phenomenal bodies from the world, but if you didn't have them you'd be totally screwed...and you'd be ignorant because you wouldn't be able to learn...and ignorance prevents perfect knowledge.
really transcendence must be the way out. by wings or ropes or elevators, the way is surely up.

on the wonderful flip-side: gosh, it looks like all you gotta do is love. love until it lifts you up. love until you don't just love a him or a her. love your way out of anything you could ever say about it. love until you don't even know the difference between yourself and all that you love. i'm not really a fan of the Beatles, but it looks like they got one thing right.

friends with words

1. meg
light across the window falls
in slats on the remains of bedroom
eyes, the aphrodisiac of sleeplessness, the
rapture of midnights faced with valor,
inamorata, eyes reclosing and stamps
of kisses on collars, delicate in the
scrumptious cottonbomb bedding,
as the sun returns the sky its name
a parabola on our tongues

2. matt
saturday, a party looms, music
builds in the blood, mingles
with whiskey vapors out to every
limb and in a voice, an echo lost
to the full tipsy moon busting
through this unseen sky

3. jen
in every use there is a joy and
in every joy a green coastline jagged
where ground meets sky, where
tribes make chants, inspire
spirits to kneel, pick up where god
left handprints, hold up totems and
drop tears in the sand

4. jessie
cast back, the sky is just another
color of ocean, an organic chemical
compound for eyes to enjoy, for
outdoor wallpaper, vacuous weekend
hours simple, dressed in nouns

5. me
paper petals make feuilleton trajectories
through naked midnight meadows
where owls hunt silence, where bats map
transcendence in lowveld basins, echoprone
ewers that return the long rush of blood

how to

remember not to suffer a thousand weighted moments for ten of bliss; for real joy rises up from within you and cannot be bartered for nor won through coercion.
as romantic as you are, remember too not to suffocate nor to project any of your tactile visions on those you would presume to love. let them be, and they will let you be, so that you both may grow wise in the accrual of your own selves. you may be mirrors for each other and very little more; and when mirrors are brought close enough together they make infinite curving hallways. find a love that can walk you down that infinite hallway of you without anything but their own reflection as a map.

learn

remember when you are smallish that nothing actually exists as you perceive. remember that you are smallish and nonexistent too. the whole rhapsodic verse of this world you sense is just passing through you. a melodic interference of the tides, a moonlight that you mistake for something more real. take your life up about you and wrap it tight like the obis of japanese concubines. take the cues from gods long dead. from the minds that had the influential power to create them. someone imagined buddha and jesus so fervently that they created them out of the flesh of man. become a creation of your imagination that rivals them and includes them, precludes them, as they do each other.
go forth symphonic and rhapsodize the world as you see it through your eyes...eternally through your actions. treat people as they are. they truly are only what you are - unseeable. and if you think you are to see them, first learn to see yourself through those same eyes. otherwise, don’t presume to know. what you think of your gift of discernment is not as important as the gift given you of humanity. the wheel of life has brought you here to learn a lesson that it hasn’t necessarily given you the tools to apprehend.
it is up to you in your youthful folly to begin to understand and be ashamed of the silliness of your waste of moments. see through your own moments and disregard anyone else’s version if it is not in line with the (un)god you see in every breath to (par)take.

dissimilation

i would miss you if i weren't already caught up in some kind of amiss
and if i wrote to you, tonight it would rhyme. that sucks but it's beautiful
if only that meant something. it fucks me up that what i'm writing
could be sung.

i suppose that i am supposing. or cogito cogito ergo cogito sum...
a quote. meaning: i think i think therefore i think i am.
and yet...maybe i think too much and think i am something to be..,
thought about. but "i" come to realize that whenever i am lost,
whenever i am frustrated or disappointed; it is because i think...
that things should be other than they are.

well then, how am i to change things(?) perhaps by knowing. which is not
like thinking. i know in my bones that things about my behaviour need to change.
and the mirror of the people around me confirms it. but the change itself is
a downscaling. not an ascension to something that i can't be.

reader, i love you. because you are me. and if there is anything to love it is
me...which is you. if more needed to be said about the topic, i think they would
have discovered that about it 2000 years ago when it was being formulated.

and thank you. for loving [us] too.