how to lose in 3 easy steps

here's a blog where i complain about my life with words

[dontburnflowers]

insufferable is one of my favorite words, considering im an apt example

A French café, a woman tells her friend the story of “her husband’s son” finding a girl he really liked in college, and how nervous he was to tell them but he did, “I really like her, dad”. The friend works in theatre, but then it’s about her father and Alzheimer’s, determined to survive his loving spouse her mother wracked with colon cancer, determined to live a bit more, cling to autonomy, refuse to succumb to a life “bookended by fascism”, childhood memories of a man called Mussolini and the fading present of a man called Trump, and the paperwork, oh all the end-of-life paperwork. All the paperwork it takes to get prepared for someone else to die. And people can cry so easily. But boy, is the other friend bad at aizuchi. A school-aged couple holds hands looking at each other looking at the menu. The amicable waiter high-fives another dining couple after she negotiates veggie-modifying an order. All of our parents will grow old whether we’re ready or not.

A Georgian restaurant, there’s a business date and they ordered too much to eat half, there’s an older date, and a new date. A group of girls come in and their adorned backpacks, full of cats and squee and sarcast bombast and you can tell how cool they are because they use adulting as a verb, though I guess we all do now. I wonder what it’s like to be restaurant workers in observation of the inherently social act of eating in public, eating in dating, strangers come up and wait on you, and you chat to each other in a language they don’t know. I bet one’s saying, “He doesn’t know how to eat cheesy bread even though I showed him.”

A sushi place, lunchtime for most but brunchtime for them. A matron goes without a smidgen of irony, ‘my son so-and-so, who graduated summa cum laude from Harvard…’, trading ideas on business and pleasure, a faux liberal affectation, unadventurous dishes, a colonial elder belle, skimming samples and instilled with a worldliness emanating completely from the self, tipping meagerly.

A Frenchman walks into a NYC bar and talks about gilet jaunes, he works next door at the upscale chicken joint. I’m writing in my notebook, as is another regular there who I met last time reviewing a screenplay from her ex, someone comes up to us and praises us for keeping the art of longhand alive, a quick segue to immediately attempt to flirt with her, and I laugh a little to myself.

Sitting on the train, a homeless guy wanders from bench to bench, stench to stench, and eventually it’s my turn and he chooses to speak, “You’ll die tonight. In your sleep”, and I stare into far away in front of me. The other day, there was a man who texted a phone contact named “Beautiful Wife,” and I smiled, the busker in the traincar started rapping about seeing his mom chopped up in front of him, and I stopped. I gave no money. On the subway, like in real life, everyone just stares at the voids between people.

[dontburnflowers]

a sort-of sonnet for a bet with a friend

Let’s watch nothing inside our muddled tea

and who can say how it all drifts away

because we both are married to the sea

where the waves wander and weave and allay

all those worries we share like little beads

strung along a lost child’s lost necklace

cheap and plastic, thrift store potpourri seeds

in an eternal wait yet are so amiss

like all things are when no one’s searching

like all the jetsam flotsamed in the water

in an idle slurry softly sleeping,

in a secret dance of metal and solder,

the sea is just tea made big, and the red

in your eyes are just stars made small and spread.

[dontburnflowers]

everyone believes in their own majesty

What happens when you’re so desperate to run away from all the things around you, clip on to a new toy, tales of bygone years, mayday mayday free trader Beowulf, it’s Grendel in the mirror and he only moves when you do, raises his hand against himself when you do, what do you do? Imprisoned in a shakening panic, others live your lives, reading books you wish you could read, talking talks you’ve had in dreams with phantom folks, bouncing bounding souls never to impinge, the incessant raking feeling in the air you’re breathing the words unspoken that flavor the worlds they’re swimming in. Don’t forget that living, suddenly you’re here, living is awakening each second to realize you’re forever ensnared in the present seconds in the winding and slackening of a rhythm unprivy to and unreproached of.

Is this terror or just waiting? Is this a trick of looking through your own eyes forever, a flippant errant consequence of walking down the abandoned overgrown rails in a strange percussive pause of wanting to hear your name called out in the loud and in love and pulling you on the righted wrighted path to wander together in shared aimlessness, wanting to hear but not but your gait is clear and the hanging strain of listening to winds whispering cicada coughes and dead leaf laughs that sound like summer but smell like fall, and all your self-indulgent sighes lay flat and wasted among our flightless dreams of prey.

[dontburnflowers]

human closeness is a joke because of how easily it comes to others, especially those who say it comes hard

There'll be a day where i'll lose my romantic idealism, and that will be a sad day but kinda sorta inevitable, inasmuch you expect a muscle to atrophy when it is not used, except in this case of course you can't exercise it yourself so you’re just watching yourself rot away even though you try, and now this has all become just a bit of an incompetent mixed metaphor? I can feel myself believing it less and less. To feel such dreams atrophy, simple dreams like wanting to look deeply in someone's eyes for no reason other than to do nothing together and count the off-color flecks in our irises, wonder what it means to be human and look across in that stagnantly close space with insecurities and unsteadiness between us, to flusteringly stumble into each other's spaces to find we are welcome somehow, somehow, tread into my garden where you are the only flower...

More and more now, I can't stop tearing up, I can't stop coming close to crying and I don't know why, or, well, I do know why but no one's interested in hearing it. And isn't that funny, when no one cares about it then it may as well not be true, for things like externally-aspiring emotions like a lonely sadness oscillating between waiting and trying to be held or to hold someone, can someone caress my soul for a moment while I let it all go, or will I just keep sitting here alone, a rhetorical question for an answer all well too known. And yesterday I flipped through my journal to find that I had jotted in the margin, “drinking is the closest thing to feel held when no one is there,” and I shook my head. What am I supposed to do, yell at myself more?

I still imagine, still, holding hands and gazes and each other are the best gifts of the first-person experience as humans damned by an isolated mortal consciousness. But my opinions couldn’t matter less to anyone, why should they?

Here's to faces I won't ever see, humans who are all just a dream, words never to be mangled out of my mouthhole, thoughts are clogclumps, sticky, hairs and miasmic goop of an origin better to ignore, and yet there it is, nothing can flow through without facing it. Losing, naturally. Dribbling past with 'nary a clean spot, untainted terribly or unscathed scarcely, and floating along, forgotten flotsam of an idling indulgent mind.

[dontburnflowers]

if you aren't what you wanted to be, what are you waiting for? if you’re already what you wanted to be, then what’s the point?

There’s nothing that hurts just a little so consistently but seeing hands held together of couples, that super young couple over there is like a sweet latte, over here the couple-with-baby-stroller-that-has-just-become-a-family an exquisite espresso, over yonder the elderly couple like that black diner coffee that no matter how mediocre it is, or perhaps because of that, it always, always makes you feel like you’ve been brought home.

Or I could just fall in near-love with any remotely pretty face that I see, I suppose that sad soul-searching is automatic, I try not to stare into them but I always want to know, who are you, who are you, why do I want to know and will you ever want to know me? And no one wants to know. Everyone is just searching, but not everyone is in demand to be found. In the end, who isn't in love with someone that's searching for you? No one is. No one ever will be. And if you are ever in doubt, just keep trying. It's only western human nature to always keep trying, because anything close enough is always possible unless you don't put enough effort in.

Someday. Someday. I wonder how many times I’ve wondered how interesting someone’s little story, who you are or want to be, the way you smile or say hi, or the way you are confused in the bright daytime before any words are said, I’ve sometimes been waiting until anyone, and sometimes I’ve been searching for that anyone, and other times I’ve been focusing on everything else but that anyone who will forgive me for who I am, and who I was, but no one will look into my soul so curious with what I think, with who I oh-so-imagined could might maybe occur in the splayed-out strained-out thinness of my life, who will ever ask about myself and will be unsatisfied until they know an answer, my answer, hear the streams of sounded thoughts formed in those words I said just for them, just for you.

Perhaps it is for the best that I forget such things I say, such slippery thoughts of nonesuch meanings and sordid nuances, kill me, kill me, kill me. And I think, deep in my thoughts or thereabouts, in that waste of the deep and dearth, will we have the wherewithal to withdraw to within ourselves, whispering so madly of all the hatred I cant let go even when I do. Always this aimless game, gabbing on and on to myself.

Don’t forget to smile. That’s free happiness you’re giving away not only to everyone else but to yourself.

Smile. It’s all you have left. Or it isn’t. But either way, it’s worth it.

[dontburnflowers]

but don’t you know, tumblr aesthetic and hipster/youth fashion is worse than any beauty magazine in terms of artificial standards of appearance and image

not too long ago, day-drinking alone in a cafe, I wondered if I will ever fall asleep on someone’s shoulder. will there ever be a time when I can sit in the shower hugging my knees eyes shut and let me pretend the running water are tears because I can't cry still and someone will come up to me, take me in their arms, brush my cheeks with the back of their fingers, cradle my shoulders and close your eyes with me, intertwined hands in our hearts on the outside, it's desolate here, so empty but it will never be dead, it is so lush as long as you are here next to me. But remember. You're not allowed to be the damsel.Will there ever by a time where I am hurting but we can crouch down and hold each other in our arms under the running water. But remember. You can't expect life to be like a fairy tale where you hold hands and find yourself stealing each others glances so evenly, quit being a romantic and be realistic.And don't even think about being the rescuer, no?

Can't be the knight, can't be the damsel, can't just be the survivors who have found each other together, just be the nothing while all these stereo-archetypes are perpetuated by all the people around you anyway. Such a strange dynamic, tell me, what is the weakness in wanting to be comforted, in waiting to be taken care of, for the other to take the lead. Oh no, tell me, what is the weakness is wanting to comfort, wanting to take care of, wanting to take the lead. I didn't think it mattered but it still does to everyone always.

I know that one day when you turn to me the infernal machine of spurning thoughts shuts down, you the eternal flame running through with sword my insecurities. To you, my bulbous cheeks are endearing, the way I stammer is only telling of how much I like you, the way I alternate from intense eye contact and shy downcasting nods of how close I feel to you that there's just no room to keep my eyes straight chin up.

All these dead thoughts of dreams in vegetative states, desperately scrabbling for consciousness, for dreams are only brought into our existences when we wake.

I have believed the truth that loving a human cannot be replicated in all its dimensions and depressions with imagination, and not I’ve locked the gate of escapism and fantastical sorrowful relinquishment of this mortal torture, I wish I could be flawed like that to lose my rationalism for an imaginary personage, someone to imagine that could hold me when I try to cry, but my lust for an independent other, a soul with agency even while drifting and dazed, that deep desire for the most romanticized idea of the closest human connection possible, it has parasitically drilled into my density within myself, Gordian twines of endless rumination, and I cannot get it out, it cannot be excised with failure, and it will not be drowned in the false ambrosia and nectar, for I will never be able to tell anyone how we would burn each other alive in the wilderness.

Breathing and moving is like trying to sleep exhausted in your day clothes with dried sweat around your eyes and above your lips, you feel spread out thinly and caked on at the same time, your face feels heavy with makeup or glaze or oil and you rub your skin to feel nothing, but in your mirror you see it still there, because since when is the thinnest mask ever, not count as a mask?

Retie your laces, scruff up your hair to the best cultivated natural mess you can, hold your breath to go outside and don’t forget to victimize yourself, how free we are of culpability when we take it and blame ourselves unconditionally, we take the poison but preemptively by chugging it ourselves, don't we…

[dontburnflowers]

on a train ride the other morning, wishing I were someone else forever

a bothersome little man, pestering some young woman at the train stop, a nebbish little moon of a face like a dollar store knock off of a Woody Allen bobblehead, the unfortunate tableau before me nearly completed with a reluctant Soon-Yi, and he's saying yeahhhhyeaaahyeahyeah with the sublime squeakiness of a creak door you were sure you shut and god dammit you have to get up and close it again?!

I only need to look around to wonder, is this the future I wanted myself to grow up in? All these adults on their phones, beyond sosh meed is it truly necessary to read the New York Post or Huffpost on your phone, that’s like giving up, and the sign of Financial Times beigey pink is almost a relief, if they can't resist the digital siren call and leap off their weary lives and turn away from analog thinking and perceiving… all those swollen hearts and lives with the ever-cascading stress of being conscious for longer than 30 years straight…

And I'm sure we teach weakness in ourselves. The younger adults of us, thought ourselves to believe in concepts like “adulting,” prolonged adolescence of the spirit, millenialism, seeded and nurtured by our baby boomer and Gen X parents, generationism is all marketing don't you forget, the thought-terminating idea of 'millenials versus baby boomers,' don't you forget advertising is concentrated human creativity and industry to make you addicted to purchasing, to believe in such glittery cellophane confetti, because I want you to know, the Olympic sprinter and how she trains and all that expended effort, you think that effort and work would be any different for any other job, field, work, for advertising, for art, for any other sport? Remember that humans are spending their entire lives to be very good at things and sometimes these things affect us in very odd ways. We fight against ourselves always in a machine we've made exactly for that purpose and we love it that way, don't we?

I've become the enemy. Look at me, diddling in my marble notebook, as if I'm any better than those on their magical electronic slabs glued to their hands, if I saw myself years before now, how much disdainful jealousy would I hold and spit in my direction, though I still cannot but roll my eyes when someone-or-other mangles the idea of cryptocurrency and blockchains because they just read about from some pop internet culture bauble video/news site somewhere, and those efforts I must keep carrying because there won’t be any other way I'll get any better any further from where I am now. All the years of wasted worlds languishing in thoughts of escapist mystical vistas far begone, for I had waited all this time for reality to catch up and give me something to stay for, tried all this time to snatch a purpose, shatter it all, how hunched over I am crafting crystallic cities of glass and sinew of daydreams and dead phoenixic hopes, lose yourself, if you treat life as one long journey of getting beat up then that's what it'll be because it it is.

[dontburnflowers]

anniversaries to strange memories of a world glimpsed in passing along the riverbank you so often remember

sometimes i dream of the morning after, vulnerable, eating quietly in a diner, quietly nerves and excitement, a tenuous connection digging deep into the roots of ourselves...

And i was done dreaming daytime drowning in the afternoons and i am so unsettled and un-allayed, there are no wandering eyes ever ending in my direction gazeless but pointed and i think i’m left waiting as always weighted by the heavy shivering of an iron cannonball, how can nerves be both flighty and heavy, i will always wonder, always wonder.

i think it’s time to be tired. it always is, isn’t it? being awake is just finding ways to be conscious for hours trying so hard until you finally give up... and to surrender like that, it’s a cop-out, isn’t it. i think i am only ever good at surrendering slowly while i say to myself, i am going to keep trying hard always forevermore, because martyring yourself, throwing a piece of yourself on the furnace pyre, it is surrendering for the truly weak like me, weary and only ever hoping to be the hero, waiting for my great comeuppance of cornucopic happiness, for the day to return in all my Chuck E Cheese tokens and tickets for an indeterminate reward, a stuffed giraffe or something and i will reach for it always in my mind with outstretched arms.

are you drowning yet? where is that urge to breath by crying tears you've never been able to make well up in your eyes, surrounded by Alexandrian libraric annals of identical humans in situ of success beyond anything you’ve ever done, effort effort, it is all that you’ve been told, all that you could ever do, now and tomorrow too in the row in your mind as all that is wrapped up around you closes in yet again and if only it were here to crush, no, but to comfort of the frostbite lullaby of dying cold, no one, no one will be holding your hand, and how hard you will try and i will try and laugh because for all those people who have brushed their fingers past love while they were not looking, they know something different, something more, their emptiness if they carry it is in their arms, their void is a solid, their emptiness is tangible from the experiences of their lives, their emptiness is held full, holdfast in unerring presence and placatory exultation.

[dontburnflowers]

perhaps someday you will realize no one will save you

writing prompt: the ocean

I always thought, in such fleeting dreams flickering by as I look out bus windows, train windows, of standing on the shore, the tides are rustling up to my bare ankles and I'm gazing out to the horizon, I'm looking at the sky and sea at the same time and there's that wistful fog settling over my thoughts and what I ever wanted to take from this life. And there's never any sense staring out into the distance. Into the faraway tinniness of things never-to-be, across the buoy bells echoing somberly of the sound of 4 a.m. mornings and the pitchest black-blue and the cricks of seagull caws and salty wind all little pieces of a grand universe that once passed by my mind after such few little lives spent nearby, nearby.

She looks at the lighthouse in the bright sunlight, it's winter and early in the afternoon. And there's the water, there's the ocean. Wide and welcoming and grey and rippling forth and fro, don't the lapping waves wear you out as you watch? She crosses her arms, closes her eyes. The day is cracking, don't you know, she's cracking, we're all breaking and breaking and no one will be there to pick us up from the drowning, the sound of the ocean is loneliness to people because loneliness is constant movement of an unshared life and it is spectated barren surfaces where the liveliness underneath is locked away from your glances.

The ocean, its sweet and dark, and does she look out like a sailor widow, no, no. She's the captain and she married the sea, on the cliff scuffling the gravel as they trawlingly fall beneath the moving grey concrete of mid-winter waves, looking down at the distance, the beautiful distance between your past breath and the blankness after, will you touch it? Will you?

[dontburnflowers]

don’t stare too long in the mirror or you just might find what you were trying not to see

I wonder if what I write is strange, and not in the good way, the quirky way, the unique and artistic interesting way. Maybe people just read this and wince, this is all so very strange, there is no need for me to associate with such a person. Perhaps I should just keep to myself.

You know, it's what they say, just be yourself. I mean, it's not true, what people really mean is, just be the best you that you can be, and if you have to change stay as genuine as possible. But that's not quite as pithy. And furthermore, there's no law of ethics or physics out there that states that if you be yourself, you're true to yourself, you'll get what you deserve. The idea of deserving something, it’s very much a human and artificial concept. Because all that is dependent on the actions of other people. I think everyone gets too caught up in the idea of good people deserving good things and bad people deserving bad things, when all that is so much so arbitrary.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that I'm sorry. For what, I'm not sure. I’m sorry for such flaws that make me a human that isn’t worth the time and energy. I don't know why I'm never someone who people want to be there, someone who is missed, someone who is wanted.

Is it because I can't talk to people? I've practiced so much over the years and nothing fundamental has changed. Is it because of my body? I can't seem to ever think I'm not fat, even at the tail end of college with my emaciated hipster build of the time, with super skinny jeans, it didn't matter. Is it because I don't exercise enough? Even when I was in the military for a little bit (lol), and I was super in-shape, it didn't matter. I wonder if it's the way i'm dressed. But I certainly dress better nowadays than I have in the past. Then is it who I am on the inside? Am I flawed on the inside? Do I feel entitled? I don't think so, I don't feel like things should happen to me, but isn’t it only human to feel sad when they never do?

Life has conspired to make me believe that there is something wrong with me, and i'm so inclined to agree. And people all around, they would have you believe that if you're doing everything right but all is turning out wrong, you are to blame.

What makes a human worth existing, anyway? Don't we make those decisions when we keep talking to someone, and we leave someone else by the wayside? All those lives that we are never to witness again. It's so strange to think that every one of us, we're all so struggling and confused and eventually we'll die and return to nothingness, that little moment we're alive, we can't recognize that we should make that brief moment the most pleasant that it could be for each other, for ourselves. You know when we die, our consciousness just dissipates into nothingness, right?

[dontburnflowers]

i watched your name/kimi no na wa tonight, after a year or so of procrastinating.

and isn’t there a deep longing in all of us, one day we might find it, and some of us might be living it but inside don’t we all have a secret dream, of living in love with them? and that emptiness, our emptiness. so present in the days we’re awake, oh so there’s such a way to find each other, as long as we can still dream such silly serious things.

and we’ll just have to keep running to find out. and i hope. i hope we find each other someday.

[dontburnflowers]

youth is minimizing as much regret as you can without realizing it at the time, while maximizing the nostalgia you don’t know you’ll have

The other day, I had an idle daydream, one of those guilty pleasures that I hate myself oh-so-much for. A summer day outside, it's like those crickets and cicadas you hear in movies and anime, maybe we've just woken up, bed-hair and everything, eyelids half-closed and I think they've never looked cuter, not what they look like but who they are, just being present and candid, a snapshot of present memory before our eyes of a brief bit of life, the whole atmosphere and everything, maybe they stumble in yawning, wearing makeshift pajamas out of whatever clothes happened to be nearest, they sit down, we're weary from nothing in particular, I bring us some coffee and tea I just made and they take it only by looking at me and smiling, saying nothing because nothing needs to be said. It's midday already, and it's warm, we're outside on a bench on a porch, and we lean into each other and I play with their hair, we give each other a quick kiss, and we're doing nothing beautifully together, and I say, “this is what I want to do today,” and they say, “me too, let's start right away,” and we close our eyes, curled together just hearing the summer noise. Just listening. Listening to each other.

So somehow I remember a memory of something that has never happened, no matter I how much I tell myself, this is useless, this is useless. It's a fool's dream, a mental idling. Because did you know that dreams are constructed, and not by you, they're constructed by the images and stories swirling around as we grew up, and we never realize how far we've been led astray by ourselves.

And what a terrible idle daydream to have, it's a fantasy featuring a faceless nobody I'm both looking for and waiting to find one day, my mind is screaming at me that it's so tired, it's so broken, I shake my head and laugh, there's nobody there for us, we'll just have to keep forward or sideways or backwards or anywhere.

And people out there, out there they're hurting as they always are, like I am. I wish, I wish, I'd hold you in my arms if you’ll hold me in yours. I'll say sweet things that I mean because you'll mean it when you say the same, and I'll try to get know who you are and you'll try to get to know me, we'll dance in the middle of the night for no good reason whatsoever, we'll listen to the silence and sound we hold in the air together, and whoever you are or never will be, I hope that we cross paths someday and look in our eyes to say to each other, “I think, I think, before you I never knew but now I do, you were what I was waiting for all along, all along.”

[dontburnflowers]

new years for new disappointments, for fighting life, one thought at a time

You know, I don’t complain to you anymore, I know it brings you down and you always have nothing to say. And I don’t say this to you anymore, but I’m dying inside. The loneliness is an expansive nothingness in my chest. Every time I think I’ve moved past the feeling it returns, as if to spite me, and the vastness, it’s implacable and insatiable and yet it eats nothing. Nothing. No, it churns inside me and I begin to devour myself. What a terrible existence. It lets you destroy yourself, that’s the worst part, it does nothing to you but reveal what you’ve hidden in all the places you pretended to forget, and when you finally come face-to-face to fight yourself you always lose twice.

It is the worst. You know they say that your imagination will always conjure the most frightening things than any book or film can do. It’s true in love, too. Left with only your imagination all this time, for all the time, such things seem so distantly close, both better and worse than it could ever be, and it’ll be the most longing you’ve ever felt, an almost-real made just a little too much fake. Time goes by (as it always does) and I struggle for that feeling, it fades away like dreams do but leaves the feelings behind like dreams do, I’ve been told the tales of stars but I am yet blind, and no one who can see can see what I imagine them to look like.

[dontburnflowers]

find someone who will cry with you every day. or some day. or at least one day, please, just one day

Will someone ever take my hand. Will someone dance with me. Will there be someone waiting for me when I return, when I go, will I ever be there waiting for someone, i'd be the best, all I wanted in life was to share it with someone else. What a laugh. What a laugh. God was having a laff m8 when I was made. I mean, god is a lie, we all know that, the fear of mortality is so strong, aren't you scared, oh I am scared to death of death, I don't want to die oh my god, nothing but I don't want to die and I know will someday, maybe I have already, maybe I will in the next five seconds. Who's to say? Will I wake up again?

Are guys supposed to sex-crazed? Are guys supposed to want casual sex? Am I supposed to be like that? I just wanted to find a right one, to go on such sweet adventures, to raise a family one day, to lock eyes and smile because we couldn't help it, I look and sift through my memories and it's just ingenue-innocent things, I blame media, romanticized pop culture, I didn't want to just fall in love, what a selfish act, what an impersonal thing, but I had thought for a moment at some point in some year when I looked up at the stars like the fucking idiot I am, there's someone, not just one person but there's people out there, and maybe I'll meet them one day, and we'll be what we were always looking for all these years. And I believe it until this day, and I'll believe it until I die, how sad, how sad.

Who gave me such dreams. If I could wish to become a fuckboi, i'd do it. Just as soon as i'd wish to be white and I shouldn’t but I totally do and thanks childhood, don't you know that I hate this human that is in the shape of myself. There's no point in being a romantic when you're a loser, and you know, everyone thinks they're a loser but do they always get proof from life directly? They're never so alone, are they? They always manage to find someone, somebody, some people. I'll stop asking if i'll ever find someone. But inside I keep thinking that way. I keep feeling that way. Is there a clock? I don't want to be with someone so much younger, so much older, I don't want that unequal power dynamic. But since when has it ever, ever, mattered what I want. I'll watch like the passer-by, for I am simply a passer-by for my own life, window-shopping my own memories as they whisk by in the wind, lost words of small talk and fleeting things you wonder before you never wonder again, never wonder again. I won't ever wonder again. That's a promise. Wondering is hope. And hope is such a silly thing. I won't ever hope again. I won't hope again.

[dontburnflowers]

As the beginnings of pain and pain in just behind my eyes and sight, following the music that i've always known, clutching, clutching, driftwood debris in the storm and all you can do is squeeze tight, pray, please, please, thanks, please, and this dumb song, ‘past is prologue’, was this the song I listened to so many times when I was younger, it's funny, they say your teens are just a phase but when I look back I realize what kind of outsized effect it had, so many problems that could've been avoided if my teens had gone differently, even the past 5 years, it's so strange, how much do I need to hope before things happen, how much do I need to try and do before anything happens, how many successful things, songs, p[eople, in any way, creatives, professionals, money, love, you name some intangible other, higher, a concept that people really do, they really do, I know I can't believe it myself, people really do make lots of money, people really do think it's all down to how hard they've worked, everyone relaly does think, don't they, they're worth just as much as you in that way and isn't that so frightening, people really do fall in love, they do things worth talking about to

others. You, right there, where are you reading this from, some shitty screen, do you know how that screen works, what do you think of the cloud, I hope you do, I hope you're a techie, whatever that means, oh goodness, we're all gonna die in ignorance aren't we, no one knows a god fucking damn thing, and those that do they just know such a tiny sliver of something, computers, computers, they run our world and you really don't care, do you, I guess we should all not care, and that's the biggest lie, you think apathy is rebellion, that's the biggest lie every constructed, how meticulous, how insidious, by not caring you cede all your power, what, this is how things become the new normal, you stop becoming upset or outraged or whatever and there it goes, this is how the world works as it always has and does and will and that's why you can't just settle down, apathy is the man, energy is rebellion, perpetual energy is perpetual rebellion, don't you know, I don't, I surely don't, i'm just lame and losing in the mud face-down and listening to lyrics made-up and lies self-told, how many times do I have to be upset with imaginary enemies, imaginary societies, but there is indeed a difference, if not a difference a distance, if not a distance there is a disconnect, and it is sharp, it is so sharp, it is made so clear when I open my mouth to interact, and so does everyone else think, and I laugh, I laugh, how can we all think the same things and feel the same things and be so different, are you to tell me we are all the same but really, but really, because you won't die alone and I will, and you know it, and there are people out there, many, in fact, who will truly die alone, and not just the minced definitions that you and I are using to pin ourselves like little band lapels and badges… and I'm so tired of the words I use, the same word I use all the time, I look in the mirror of all the unfinished things i've left and even the ones that matter to me most i've left undone forever and I cannot continue, it's a coil of melancholic bucolic destined death, it's a purposeless machine I see before me churning through the glucose and proteins for no apparent reason but to hurt itself, doubt itself, and who could not laugh at such a useless construction, such a useless construction, doomed to peer out panes of windows and windshields and the glass beyond the cages forever, the fleeting sights of passing by, slowly crushically dying under the silly wanton thoughts and how many times do you have to see other people be sad but happily before it's time to surrender, surrender, how many times do you have to see other people talk about the same things, complain about the same things, their friends, break-ups, all these human connections they hoard and lose and gain, they think it's a game isn't it, isn't it, it's a game and I haven't got any tokens and I know better than to think I will ever get any, and everyone else, oh, they don't even know, they can't even tell the tokens in their palms they're slotting in, they're slotting in,

and one day I will agree with my mind that it is time to give up and I am so afraid, I am so afraid of dying but why am I being dragged into it by myself, did I ask for this, did anybody, did nobody, did I, I did surely, if no one will take responsibility for my life then it lies to me, doesn't it, doesn't it. don’t send help, not because i don’t want it, but i think we all know no one will call for me, don’t send help, isn’t that what your mind has already told itself, told me, and i agree. i agree

[dontburnflowers]

turn sharply clockwise on your neck for the next express exit

Snippets from October

Please oh please I need that out of my head, I hate hate hate those wisp-like thoughts curling through my thoughts, hoping one day I’ll have someone that I can play drinking games with, someone to boop on the nose, and we’ll give each other butterfly kisses, we’ll hold hands, oh I can’t get it out of my head, my head, I've been wanting to fall in love since elementary, middle school, who’s given me the time of day but sundials, let's grab a coffee or a drink and I promise to be authentic and no obligations, we either click or we don't and that's the end of that, settle in because it really is looking like I will never have someone in my life that will actively attempt to help me, my friends won’t, it’s not in their style, and the more the more the more I see all these ideas around me, pushed into my hurting head by movies and adverts, falling in love, falling in love, that’s all I want out of life, in a moment of mutual vulnerability, fall in love simultaneously, it doesn’t need to be fantastical and unrealistic it only needs to be real, only real. Who’ll ever want to share that moment. Someone, no one, out there might, won’t. And they'll look in my eyes, they'll not know for sure but they will want to take the leap with me. And that little moment is what I want.

You know, when I was younger, I thought, sex was a rite of passage perhaps, and teenage hormonal lust. I soon saw that as a silly thought. Everyone says it’s not a big deal. Soon enough they say that love is overrated, that being single is great (and by the way, no, being single can only be great if you’ve been coupled before). And as life goes on and you get more and more lonely, none of that stays true. Then you just become a loser.

And there’s that one chunk, it's an impossible bundle of dense denseness. I can’t believe physical intimacy is a thing, well I can, I can believe it happens with people all around as it does. I can’t believe it for me. I can't approach it. It's embarrassing, it's shameful, it makes me deeply uncomfortable, do people really come together, be together like that. Do they really touch each other, be with each other like that. Why does sex seem like ‘the S word’ like I’m still stuck in elementary. Hurt, like, I’m vulnerable. I’m dumb. A human in the shape of me doesn't deserve anyone's physical touch. I'm just a kid. I wasn't able to grow up. I didn't know how.

I'm just losing touch. At this point, everyone's a fake nerd because the line is drawn so far back now, so far back, like you have friends, you can go out, you’re a fake, ha, ha, what a wreck, what a lame life, terrible, tripalasaicly, here, here's a fucking made up word from a bleat from melting brain, plastics in the oven, oozing, oozing, and you know basically every “reclusive artist” that ever was was a fucking faker, fucking fake, losers, losers, I'm losing, I've already lost and I haven't realized it yet.

I’m an amateur professional poser, are you a poser, are you like a solved Rubiks cube with the stickers swapped when no one was watching, like I am, like I am?

Don't you know, when people talk to you, they leave little threads and crumbs, like little arrows, sometimes pointing intentionally in the wrong directions, what you can stroke and caress and sooth to make them happy, like little pressure points you might find, that are exposed, and in small talk it’s small nothings, they're asking you sometimes to say the right thing to make them feel better, like a puzzle, for conversations with people are people puzzles, like a moment missed, when the stakes are low the rewards are low, and all you need is the perfect compliment tailored for the person, something self-affirming and self-validating, maybe not even a compliment in the conventional sense, I can pick that up, I love it when I’m able to give them such a sweet supporting compliment and watch it pick them up, because when everyone talks, there’s always the tracks, sometimes soft like ‘I’m feeling good but I could always use a nice thing,’ sometimes breaking like ‘please please, help, someone, I can’t hear myself and I don’t think anyone can either, please, I’m already drowning, please.’ 

When you're a loser, no one tells you and you just have to find out that drugs and alcohol and love rule the world. Like, holy shit, after college everything is about bars or clubs or drinking? Drugs are really that common? Wow, they get it so easily through who they know? D.A.R.E. Drugs Are Really Everywhere, prescription drugs and pills, weed and alcohol, dance tabs and hallucinny things, bathroom breaks for the poor and wall street wolves, needles for junkies and bored kids, or load up on benedryl and robotussin, it’s everywhere and people think the best way is to pretend like it’s not? Drugs aren’t the answer? Don’t say that to me. Don’t say that. Don’t say that when everyone else, and you too, everyone is using it as the answer. Don’t say that.

School was like a trap. Real life is maybe a trap. This is just a giant nowhere to go no walls no roads no leaving because there's no coming. Wait for what, exactly? Life is a bore. My friends who don’t exist don't give a shit. Well, it's clear to me that you have nothing to contribute to my life. I used to think that I did, that I could add something to someone’s life, but how can I believe that anymore? How can I? Should I really lie to myself like that? Should you?

[dontburnflowers]

who grows jealous when i dream of you

Snippets from when the fuck ever: fake poetry edition

i was married to the lakes and libraries,

but i heard once about the cure for solipsism,

and i like the way you say hi, come hang out with me,

touch me on the cheek, and hold me closer than i've ever been to you before, i'll close my eyes when you promise to me something certain, certain, certain,

drop everything and drive across the country, roll the windows down with music that makes us crack and bubble inside, makes us feel a little sad, little wisty-eyed, and we laugh, and look at each other too much, slight sharing glances glancing away, driving away, and there i was, we were walking along and all of a sudden the blankets lifted from the ground to reveal the yawning precipice just inches next to us, and we pulled each other away, you pulled me away,

we went through the city with nowhere to go and nothing but time, we came back to that fancy yuppie flat you see in films and shows and shit, nice countertop and grand ol’ windows, we came back to that “slumming it” apartment with nothing but dim light and dirty linoleum, you’re coming home and i can’t wait to say hi again, i can’t wait to say hi again

Just you and me, we're on the sea sharing the shore with the sky when I say to you the world and you say to me the wonder, and we can hear our breathing and the waves and the breeze. And you said to me, “we're lost at sea in a glass of water,” here by the breaking levees, here before the storm's loamy wreckage, swinging our legs on the benches on the beach, come say that I'm wrong and show me the path, why don't you please grab my hand because I am so lost, take my hand and lead me somewhere out of these places, let me come close to you, let me sit by your side, why don't you let me feel what you are feeling, and I'll hold your hand and go with you wherever you want to go, I'll follow where you lead if only you'll let me in, I can be what you think I might want to be, I want to hear what you always dreamed of becoming, let me put my ear on your chest and listen to how your heartbeat rumbles when you talk to me, when we tell each other soothing stories and mumble sweet swilly silence. You know what to do, even when you don't know what to do. Because I don't know what to do, even when I know what to do. Who knows where winds like to go after they've blown?

Autumn is my favorite because everything

is about burning, the leaves are burning, the

sky and fruits and people are burning

and I'm growing cold in the dark evenings now

and I like the scent of the winds.

And everyone is burning, I see them gather together,

how closely they put their heads together, and they

talk and they huddle and how warm they are,

burning for the winter, like so many branches and sticks

and I have none in my fireplace,

and I'm growing cold in the dark evenings now.

it's time to lie down now

it's time to lie down

it's time to be broken before winter

[Poem I wrote on a whim and posted somewhere, someone wrote a poem about fall and I couldn’t resist responding, and it’s all gone to the abyss now. It’s still too structured, isn’t it? I’m too nervous for ultra free form poetry, if you could believe that, so what, I’ll be in between and neither in nowhere, all this slinking prose poetry, I’ll be creative like poetry one day, pay no mind to the punctuation and prose, I hope, I hope.]

What are you gonna do. Will it be 2 am forever? What will you die, what will you perish with you, what can you take down as you tumble from the bridge, eyes caught open in the hurting wind, there's that daze that catches you so good and so forever and all those stories that will be gone in an instant or a little longer too,

and I saw one day a note i drunkenly wrote down to myself, “please don’t let me die alone,” and what do you even say to that, you’ve let yourself down again, I’m sorry, I’m trying the best I can and it doesn’t matter,

remind yourself, remind yourself, you have to wake up first before you feel tired,

I am a living unforced error, that's all I do. Just watch me. A broken leaf in a creek, soon-to-be-dilapidated, torn up and ready to decompose, off on the bubbly water. Bubbly like the rain into the puddles, like reverse boiling. The forever feeling of assonance in the second person, you're almost but not quite seeing yourself in third person, walking down the sidewalk, all the sound round you like a little whirlwind, a petite spinny jenny. And it makes you wonder. Why not scream. Why not yell, why not cry out and jump up and down and make a fuss, just make a fuss when you're living, don't be like everyone else, be like everyone else, liver and languish and roil in your everpleasant everpresent ability, human choice to be, and to act out, nothing’s your problem, everything’s your problem, and laugh and laugh and laugh, how absurd, how too real these things are, you never asked for this but yet here you are and here you will be.