Point Hypnogogia

you've met me at a very strange time in my life

[insidedarkness]

you’re alive today! you have stickers of lobsters and you did not stop to consider how the hallways smelled like ghosts and perfume!

you’re doing swell

[insidedarkness]

4/4/16

They say that numbness is a body’s natural response to intense pain: nervous system shutdown, brain freeze, and, when I think of you in the earliest hours of the crowning morning, those satin shocks that cruise through my solar plexus, leaving empty streaks on the scorched surface like the first rain after a fire. Then there is nothing in me, and I am but an empty vessel with stars in it’s eyes, pouring out my liquid numbness over you.

[insidedarkness]

3/4/16

I’ve got a feeling that this is what love is, and I knew I had to write you to let you know that it’s back. I don’t know what you’ve done but in my chest I feel a crack, and that’s not normal. I guess nothing about me is, but this is something else. This is wind and water and fire. I’m trying so hard to explain what I mean without getting lost in the poetry. This is not poetry, I want to cry. There is no beauty in the sickness I feel when I imagine your ghost by my side; it sends chills down my sides. It feels like metal poles in my throat and now I know what it was in those dreams that would suffocate me. I swear sometimes I see overexposed clips of the past projected in front of me, flickering and glaring. Did they even happen? And is this love? I’m not sure. Sometimes I think you planted a seed in my ear while I was sleeping and now there’s a tiny man that looks just like you wandering around in the empty corridors of my mind, silently smiling and swaying and touching things he shouldn’t.

I don’t want to control it anymore, I’m through holding my heart together. I swear it’s only been two days and I’m losing my mind. I wish I knew if this was love. I wish I didn’t push so hard and explode at nights when I’m all alone. I wish I wasn’t exhausted all the time and stupid and teary and I don’t understand why I can’t want to be with you forever, but I just can’t and I love you so much but goodbyes are inevitable when it comes to us. I know all that, but right now I just want you, just in this second more than anything, and that has to count for something. That I can feel like that because I have to see you again and I can’t even think about any other possibilities or my heart might just might stop.

I wish you could see me now. I don’t know what’s going on. Is this love? Please someone answer me, tell me, what the fuck is this? Pointless, I guess. Pointless but so beautiful it’s taking my breath away and I can’t believe it. Beautiful like a mother holding her dead child and an orphan praying in the darkness. This is beautiful like burns are relieving and cuts are comforting. I don’t think I’ll sleep tonight, but I don’t have to. Each new swell of tears draws my mouth open in a silent rotundness, like an oncoming orgasm, like a secret for the moon. And it’s funny how my brow furrows itself in concentration when thinking of you is so effortless. And though my mind is briefly consumed by the things I should’ve done and all the possibilities of the future, it’s incredible how overwhelmingly present the now is. And the rawness of this exact moment where I am tortured by my need for you.

Don’t think that it hasn’t crossed my mind to hop on a train; that I haven’t watched it all play out in front of me, how I’d silently get dressed and sneak out the front door, creeping up the empty streets to the nearest railway station and catching the next one straight to your bedroom window. But I don’t want to describe anything right now. I just want to get lost in the want and consumed by the mess. The worst part is thinking about how you could be here, and feeling like you are. No, the worst part is wondering what this is. Is this love? Don’t think I haven’t thought of going to sleep. I just know I can’t. And why would I lay in the comfort of my  bed when I could be sat here by computer light listening to sad songs and letting snot drip onto the pages while I scribble incomprehensively, and cry sporadically over...split milk? Is that what this is?

You’re such goodness. I don’t know how else to say it. Sleep feels so cold without you, my hands feel empty, my mind wanders, and I am always reaching for you. You, you, you. Is this love? Just write me a love song, send me music, tell me you can’t sleep either, I don’t know. I want you here on the floor, under this blanket, rubbing my back while I agonize over how that’s precisely where you're not. You’re such a light heaviness, and the way you sting is pure like smelted iron, because you don’t mean to. You don’t mean to but you do and you make me make me wonder and that’s dangerous. But I don’t even know if that much is true because I can’t imagine doing much of anything in this state.

I want to rip my heart out and stick it in a box and mail it away, but I don’t even know who I’d send it to. I don’t know if I don’t want to end up with you because I don’t want to end up with anyone or what. Maybe I just don’t want to “end up,” period. What I want is to lay in a messy bed all day under silk sheets and a flood of satin pillows, wearing a pink robe with mascara running down my face, eating boxed chocolate and adorning the room in used tissue and listening to ballads from the 1960s while I wait to die of heartbreak. I just want you here, and for someone to come and take my blood and tell me what this is. Is this love?

[insidedarkness]

[insidedarkness]

23/3/16

I watch my reflection in the morning tea and wonder how my essence has found it’s way into that dark liquid, swirling and sticking like memories in prisoners, soldiers, runaways. It always does this, everyone does this. It’s not that we mean to, but somewhere along the way our images get imprinted on those side road puddles and vanity mirrors and empty whiskey glasses.

And really, in the end, we are only staring back at a fragment of ourselves; a little piece of our past through some part of ourselves we have most likely forgotten. Why, even in this lifetime we are sure to forget. It’s just one of those things. Like how they'll tell you when you gaze into a familiar river everything will have changed: you and the river and everything in between. But in a way it’s all the same. If you believe that you were in fact once every stage of the river and now you are you but soon you won’t be and that man will be forgotten in time.

Would you believe that even the empty void you ponder is a manifestation of your essential being? Just another bead strung on a metaphysical necklace looping endlessly around itself. And that you were once and will be those too: the bead and the necklace and the whole lot; every tack you’ve ever stepped on, every cat you’ve ever owned, every cloud of steam you’ve ever inhaled are all components of the collective consciousness you simply haven’t learned to access. Would you believe all that? That you are the belief or the disbelief? This sentence?

All I’ve left to say is this: tonight, when you bid a goodnight to your loved ones and prepare for bed, linger a bit longer on your own reflection, for it will be gone in the blink of an eye.

[insidedarkness]

I like you, How unlikely. I like you, How slow all of a sudden. How sweet. You cannot know. You’re destroying me. You’re good for me. You’re destroying me. I have time. Please, devour me. Why not?

M.D.

[insidedarkness]

[insidedarkness]

Stream of Consciousness No.1

This is my story about how gently the rain falls in the mornings onto the quivering green leaves, begging for a drink. Oh no! My ass is red and white like a candy cane. Ho ho ho to Christmas in the Summer. This sun does not fuck around. And I told them one day I’d get up before them all but nobody believes. Well fuck, if I won’t get up before 9am for some homemade strawberry ice cream. It’s so quiet up here now, in every sense. The little blue car is parked outside so they’re either swimming with the ghosts or locked in the safety of their sleep caverns. Some say I’m a very good cook but being a professional chef sounds less than ideal. Why do I have to change my mind about having kids? Growing another person inside you is like the epitome of ending your childhood. How are you gonna be fucking around in the woods with some fairies or riding through the Wild West on your trusty steed if you have your own little critters to be protecting? I swear, if you bring them into this world they’re your goddamn responsibility. I don’t give  a single fuck about your selfish necessities. You threw those out a long time ago when you decided to create a living, feeling being. This isn’t a game.Fuck that. Why are we so afraid to be alone? Why are we scared to die? The breeze does just fine. Do twenty-two year-olds even exist? Fuck, Taylor Swift is old. Yesterday I could’ve died but I totally didn’t. And every day could’ve been my last but it wasn’t. How crazy is that? I think the wildest part it how I just won’t fall in love. You’d think that all this constant infatuation of jaws and cheeky smiles would lead to something more, but I’m too head deep in fantasy. Or is it reality? I can never tell which one is talking: tomatoes or sherbert? Hmm. Why do we pity the card that stands alone in an incomplete deck? Even if soulmates did exist honestly with my luck mine’d probably be dead long before I met them. Why is this what we do with our rented atom clusters? Time’s a tickin’. Fucking fuck how isn’t everyone obsessed with outer space. It’s so cool. Just try to tell me something cooler. Try, you can’t. Fuck. I’m so worked up. How can we even pretend to be superior when most of us can’t even do something as simple as use both our hands. I’m working on it but still...The sky really does seem particularly angry today. I got so bitten up as well. I’m just a burnt and bumpy little skin doll in an over-sized sweater, aren’t I? I love how we decorate our shells. And I love how relieving just using the bathroom can be and how we all jsut give each other life and pull souls from recycling bins and die so young. The moon is just a child and our sun is counting its days but it’s okay because our galaxy is just a lollipop in the candy shop and if you paint your nails black they’ll disappear into the night sky. Man this is all bullshit.

[insidedarkness]

The trouble is, you think you have time.

J.K. on Buddha

[insidedarkness]

[insidedarkness]

11/3/16

I wonder where my mind is

When I laugh without humor

And cry without sadness.

Sometimes I close my eyes

And see only iron gates,

And I wonder:

Am I the greatest victim of my own deception? 

[insidedarkness]

You will find me in places that we've never been, for reasons we don't understand...

H.S., Walking in the Wind

[insidedarkness]

[insidedarkness]

3/3/16

It is slowly driving me mad: the curiosity and pain that comes with the feeling of “oh! how can this empty soul of mine twist so full bodied and contort itself in such a way yearning for a stranger.”

This muse that I have seen in my waking dreams; with the cascading locks I might drown in and a gaze so pure it stings as the sun does a vampire. And even when I do slip into slumber, on the rare nights when exhaustion is finally triumphant, my mind screams out for him in the deep depths of the human subconscious, in such shrill desperation it threatens to shake me from this sentient body.

But I have heard his promises too: his deep and bellowing calls in the darkness, often broken by oncoming swells of tears that suffocate like smoke. We are both fumbling in that rich blindness; a blindness that has lurked under our noses since the earliest day of humanity, spreading throughout our population and slowly driving us mad. Yet even with my hindered sight, I see his distant light, for it is none too easy to hide a heart of gold, and I see how others are drawn to his precious metal like moths to a flame. It glows at the edge of the darkness, much like that distant vision of Heaven that dying men describe as they are pulled in further by the sweet promise of that holy light.

And this is what really gets me. I say I want to find him, shout it from the rooftops: “my love!” I have traded hours and days from my most precious reserve for the sparse memories of our past and future, wished upon dandelions, thrown my fists up at the sky. But why then do I continue hiding? While he casts out his light for me I remain enveloped in darkness, concealed in completeness by the blackness around us. Perhaps it is unwilling, but could it be that I am…afraid? Is it possible I am fearful of what may come when he finds me; when the supple cracks in my flesh are filled with glimmering nectar and his sweet honey breath seeps into my desolate lungs? And what shall I do when his gaze pierces mine in such closeness? Is it possible for a shattered soul to break? And what becomes of the darkness when it is infiltrated by light? Yes perhaps I am afraid: afraid that finding him will mean losing myself. But then again, how much would I really be sacrificing?

What I say is this: if I do come to perish please, Lord, let it be in his arms that I fade away, so that I may feel the relieving burn of his lips on my flesh once more as my last smokey breath meets oblivion at the hand of his honey sigh.

[insidedarkness]

...how strange it is to be anything at all...

IAOS, Neutral Milk Hotel

[insidedarkness]

[insidedarkness]

2/3/16

I am angry at her for the way she condenses my sadness into her own sugar-plum poetry, where everything is as simple as good days and bad; black and white. I am angry at her for making me want to recede into my shell and hide my wounds so that they may not be gawked at and scrutinized.

I hate to think that all of our conversations and interactions to her are just poetry; that as I cry her mind is consumed only by the different ways she may describe the way the tears glisten on my skin, and the pattern in which they fall for her next sweet soliloquy about the tragic friend and her broken greatness and how monstrously she inflicts suffering upon her loves ones by casting their affections away. What a pathetic and vile creature, I suppose. 

I have grown tired of her constant passivity, with irresponsibility bordering on fear. I am tired of making all decisions, either because she can’t be bothered by such petty things, or is fearful of my wrath, or is too prideful to accept the consequences of failure should they befall us. I am tired of her standards and her weak silence and her contradictions.

Though she boasts of her great beauty, she eyes me with jealous all the while. And though she trails behind me like an eager pup, tongue out and eyes wide with curiosity, on paper she is a goddess: cunning and full of secrets she will not share with someone like me.

No more, I am through. I will not longer speak to fill the silences or open my heart or show my weakness. I will not announce myself nor feel guilt for not wanting to be touched. If she so wishes, I will remain her poetry, but as the lines grow shorter and epics turn to haikus, she will eventually find herself before that great blankness. And in that vast white canvas, her own reflection will be dimly mirrored, and that will be all she knows of my secrets.