get lost

There will be a minor flaw in the way the air tastes when I read this back to myself. Bitter and unconditioned. For this speculation alone, I have not returned to the page in what seems like years. Maybe it has been years. Maybe I have let myself slip. I have avoided this confrontation for many months now. Leaving whole lifetimes of change and experience to lay waste in dank passageways, covertly averting their potential stench. No matter how fresh the thought or day has been in my awareness of it, I've subconsciously stifled its daily chances at fruition. What sort of nihilist have I become? Cold & impersonal, in denial of my own humanity. But I have survived my own travesty. I have kept some part awake in a cellar below. And for what reason it has found light today, of all days? I cannot be aware of responsibility. There was no diligence involved. No amount of necessity either. There is only the natural escaping of gases from a surrendered corpse. The eminent smell now staining these pages.

Why the impulse has fallen on this non sequitur day in my life, to stand on shaky, drained legs and stutter toward the permanence of the word & its reflective self-awareness, I cannot conclude. But finally I find myself here in a doorway that has been left open for months. Until now I chose to sit in the dark of non-expression, watching months pass by like gasping wet eels across gelatinous pavement; snagging a gill now and then on sharp objects left in the street. Do I spend the next 45 pages then, trying to recant moments that I deliberately, or out of human error, did not write down on the day? Do I care that much about what has past and is therefor non-existent & impertinent? I can only say in my defense that I have been unruly & unwilling to cooperate with myself, my own best interest ignored like a thought that invokes nausea. It's this nausea which so often drowns me in defeat. Weighted down in pools of my own disinterest. My retaliation swims to the surface of incessant social interaction like a double-edged sword. Splitting the seas with laughing and drink. My raised glass fills my lungs with apathy.

But if ever an apathy could be brim with another emotion, for me this has been a curdled joy. A pleasure smirking with betterment. Never so fatalistic as in old eons of youth & despair. My frustration often now stronger & more hard-boiled but with a yolk of non-pessimism. And I say non-pessimism, and not optimism, as the word optimism reeks of dead babies. Whether there are babies to consider, I've come to terms with their mauling. I know they are not fresh and plump with rosy potential. Potential perhaps, but hardened by earth and more of a steeped charcoal in hue; And so warm from gleaming in the fire. It's there that I've been basting; in the kiln of 'the here & now'. Consciously avoiding the throes of my written fabrications. Creating a service for my over-worked, hyper-emotional self and yet leaving my neglected talent to drain its functions into a rusting bed pan. The life-support of my overextended social life leaves no written insight but relieves itself through a catheter that recycles the stream of denial.

The good news is that I harbor no remorse. I have enjoyed myself. I have let myself run amok. I have even tossed myself into a balance that sometimes feels like denial but most often refreshes that which once festered as despair. I am now giddy in my beaten rejuvenation. I have spoiled & scarred and overcome the worst of my inner demons. But I've not let them take me down. That through the madness of my recent year I have no documentation, that I have no regrets and that I can now put pen to paper eluding the pain of its permanence, I rejoice. And plunge back into the heart of it with daggers drawn and appendages unfurling on to the battlefield, like fertilizer for the dead.