Authenticity Peddling
America I love you but youāre bringing me down. These tired eyes are searching for something concrete, something tangible in the muddled mess of meaning that greets them. Days turn to weeks turn to months turn to chances missed and taken and itās all worked out far in advance, calculated on ledgers stacked neatly in rows in the third level sub-basement of the apartment four blocks down. Music keeps the hearts beating, rhythms and rhymes leading where they will and want, and somehow this will all make sense, it will, we know it. Thereās things in the air, emanations, lists and such and so forth, areas of contemplation and capsized creation, faith for the faithless and face-time with the fated. Cynical pondering aside, thereās too many things in our heads: media and message, sex and stalemates, solitude and symbolism, the fate of the dollar in the world market, faith and god and love and death and sex and time and strange bedfellows and simplicity and more sex and more more more everythingā¦ It is overwhelming us, it is over us, we are over it. We are underneath the guns now, sites aimed and dropped and all hands lost in the gale. All the time. All the time. All the time in the world. Waving the flags hanging from the broken mast, these hands have seen and held the world, exhaustion preceding explicit material preceding more exhaustion. Oh well such is the life weāve chosen, and such is the time weāve spent, and so we will move along into the mild new wonder of autumn. Leave the well enough alone, weāre stocked up here. Go on then, thereās more worlds than this in the offing. And these tired eyes have seen enough for today. So call this a lullaby I suppose.
Consciousness I love you but youāre bringing me down. Needs must and needs demand, and thusly we all end up meeting between want desire and disavowal. Oh well, move on, nothing more to see here, just write the phrases out ad infinitum until itās noticed and called in to headquarters. Keep calm and carry on lie back and think of England and wait for the perfect moment to try to change things. Itās coming itās coming itās coming youāre coming Iām coming no oneās coming ok weāll get it next time Iām sure of it. Canāt hang your head now, thereās worlds to be won and songs to sing and ends to mean and means to end and this end might be too mean so it means nothing, in the end. A box checked yes no or Green Party but we demand a recount! Protest the villains, destroy the heroes, and raise up the glorious middleman, the blessed mediocrity, the normal national nightmare of numbness. Little things coming and going in and out of style and STOP! Your life depends on THIS! Only you can help, but you must spend spend spend! Defend the viewpoint, have fun storming the castle, and donāt forget: weāll be watching for your downfall. We have planned and plotted and tasked and renewed and waited and waited and waited and still we have nothing to show but matchbooks in our pockets and a scriptbook for an unreleased film of the novel. (DiCaprioās attached, itāll be big in Europe.) This is masked hostility and humility and humanity and attachment passed off as propaganda in order to confuse and fog the mind. True to forms, we writhe and wind, adventure and abstraction meeting somewhere in the middle and leading to phonecalls to strangers and late night confessions and repressing the real meaning behind anything, everything. We laugh at catastrophe, we dance with the dead and we make plans oh we make plans and we get up early and we stay up late and we never get anywhere anywhere anywhere. So count up the actions, create a diagram and make a presentation to the board. Itās happened too fast to make any sense of anything, so letās forgo sense for now and embrace the randomness of the moment. Go crazy on each other, I say. And of course I canāt sleep. I am weird and vital, full of electricity and neurotic impulses. My hands are moving of their own accord, fashioning arcane symbols from my bones and using my veins and arteries as the twine in a complicated cross-hatched dreamcatcher.
The World I love you but youāre bringing me down. Words float by in front of me, like I was in a comic book, but this is the uninteresting part before the hero/villain conflict emerges and the archetypes manifest. Oddly enough though, I am joyous. Nothing is static, everything moves and shifts, and this pleases me in ways both large and small, so that the weirdness is dealable and I move in sync with the rhythms in my head; I am everywhere you see I am nowhere I am everywhere I am nowhere I am wondering whether I will sleep I am wondering when it will all go down in flames I am wondering when lift-off occurs I am wondering how much my lunch will be tomorrow I am wondering whether this weird existential sickness infests people in Ethiopia I am wondering which bill to pay first I am wondering if itās imaginary these things I want and think and see and feel and the blood, oh the blood. Thereās things Iāve done/seen/been that no one knows, that no one will ever know. Donāt blink donāt breathe donāt move, muscles twitch and sounds emerge from the other room but itās all static to me but nothing is static. It will continue to change and in 2 days I will be a different person and this will all seem like it was written by someone with a different brain chemistry and I am wondering whether I want another. Scholars and soldiers know but little else appeals to me other than change, so mutatis mutandis and onward into the glorious unknown. Single coils and double backs and triple plays and quartered torsoes and steel toed boots to the gut and axe wounds and typed out lists and wires and veins and wires and veins and wires and veins and conductance through them all over again and again and never again we all die but never again and somehow this made a difference before before before oh no whatever never mind over mattered very little sometimes when I think itās all overrated over aided over it over it over nothing itās nothing I feel nothing I want nothing I am nothing more than this isnāt overhead down and Iām just a shade more than awake and aware of more than what is normal here. My heart is my head is my heart is empty and full of everything and everyone and it beats in doubletime and then I doubleback and I am still here still right here in this chair in this room in this house in this state in this body in this chair. My eyes adjust of their own accord and the prickling in my skin has subsided and the nervous energy has dissipated and now I just want to feel alive again and Iām wondering if I really need to wait for 5 days until I do again and I am inside the impulses in my brain and I see that everything is available at all times and everyone is everyone and everywhen is now and then and somehow it all makes sense to me for once and always.
The Universe I love you but youāre bringing me down. Atoms coming and going and coming and smashing together and leaving trails and pieces of themselves behind, and itās ok. It really is. Missing pieces are what proves that things exist; nothing is whole nothing is pure nothing is unbroken. The only thing unbroken IS nothing. The absence. The lack. The hole. The whole. Itās what is at the center of everything everywhere everytime everyspace just nothing nothing nothing nothing. So we fill it. With stuff. With people. With ourselves. And itās still there, the nothing. So we ignore it. For minutes. For hours. For years. And itās still there, the nothing. So we face it. With god. With sex. With everything. And itās still there, the nothing. So what? If everything is nothing and nothing is everything what is the ultimate point of anynothingnothingnothingnothing NO THING. OK. This has gone on long enough.
