I left god many years ago
he never hurt me but I wasn’t in love
since then he’s sent me letters everyday to an old address
maybe I’ll write one back
tell him again
it’s not you it’s me
but I hope we can still be friends

why today seems not to be special on its own, my eternal struggle with time, with “presentness”, and with death:

I had an hour long discussion with myself last night over this. Arguing with myself that I need to be in the moment but realizing my fear of death was keeping me from doing that. So, then I tried to rationalize my fear with myself, and up came the deep seated fear of hell and the afterlife which no matter how I tried I could not reconcile. So then I realized I have been – and all of the other people have been – living in a kind of daydream where we won’t die, life is life, and it’s happening but it’s forever so we continue on and continue on as if we will never die and this will never cease and we will be forever wandering. But the reality is that my body is a clock and the end is coming but I’m so caught up I can’t even enjoy my life. So what of death? Not if, but when, for death and as for what comes after I’ll never know and no one on earth knows. It’s such a mysterious subject – the mere thought of it is rejected continually. Instead, when we grow up, our bodies learn the motions to quiet our minds. What of death? All things die. Every man, woman, child and animal in history has died. What of it? It’s the contrast. If one doesn’t know what ones after death, life is hard to frame for it just is. Like the earth is large, but only in comparison to us and it is small but only in comparison to the rest of the universe. Contrast. Death, unless one believes in an afterlife, is a dark and murky hole which we know lies at the end of our path but refuse to acknowledge. And therefore life just becomes the road, not necessarily taken for granted but not recognized for what it really is. So, where does time come in to play? Time on the road, with no foreseeable destination, becomes a pliable construct of ones own mind and yet knowing the journey will end forces us to attempt to fast forward, slow down – stop. But time itself has a flow. Time, I believe, time and life and death are all separate forces working together to create consciousness but our perceptions of these elements determines how each of them work. For the christian, life is sacrifice, death is a gift, time is in God’s hands. For the atheist, life is a canvas, death is a hole, time is play-doh. Even as I’m writing this I can feel the sway of time, pulling me in all directions at once – into the past, the future, the present moment. I can feel it ticking inside me, and I even have a physical reaction to this supposedly mental construct – blood pressure rising, my heart is beating a little faster, there is an anxious tension in my legs as if I must get up and move and shake this off, fall back to sleep. And then you have “the walker” of the road, man and all his internal conflict. His habits, beliefs, wishes, fears, reflexes, his “issues”. He becomes a tangled ball of yarn, rolling down the road, occasionally opening his eyes, occasionally thinking…often caught in a sleep walk of the social constructs built for the sole purpose of survival and avoidance of death – even the thought of death.

mother

when i was in your stomach you must’ve thought i was a miracle. when it was silent and all you could hear was the blood in your ears, did you know my name? dear mother, when i was born did you think i’d have all these questions? did they remind you of when you were young and still thought questions had answers?

the emptiness after you’ve come and gone
as if there were some kind of chasm
I crossed to reach you and
take you home
but you wouldn’t go

reconciling with god, and the cave. the nerves in the machine and the soil…

reconciling the inside of my insides with the white city wall

“When I say I have come to love you
it is not because you please me.
You are reckless, you are spoilt,
and you are careless with my heart.

God help me.
When I say I have come to love you
I mean that is what I am here for.”

“the flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and the men drink too
much
and nobody finds the
one
but keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh.

there’s no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.

nobody ever finds
the one.

the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill

nothing else
fills.”

-bukowski

say one day, say it’s a friday. say the house on the way home is white and you only just noticed. say it’s getting dark. say the muscles in your cheeks hurt from frowning. say nothing makes sense like it used to, when you were young and realized early there were things you couldn’t touch. realized there were things beyond your realizing. say it’s dusk and you’re waning, lungs heavy and tongue like chalk. little pinpricks of mint in your mouth. say someone put a smear of orange over the mountain. say it looks like a funeral. say hey, it’s cloudy but you don’t want to leave because there’s a rhythm to it. say, i need my pain. down to the well. say it wasn’t your fear, filling the room. and wasn’t it clear?

when you say life my love
what do you mean?
break it down simply for me.

do you mean the web
the splinter

the winter

do you mean the last breath
the first whine, in realization
you are here and cannot
unthink yourself

do you mean the circles
or the moon or the smoke?

do you mean the road?

arranging imaginary furniture in
our living room. where are the
ash trays? and the welcome mat?
lost in the invisible room