django
i was struck today by the measure of space between my window and my desk.
i fit a white orchid below the 3 legged chair i found on the street. it gently shook in the wind for a moment and then i closed the gap between the sill and the stretch of white painted wood.
i sat upright in front of my speakers with a pot of black coffee. steam escaped in pirouettes and i began an attempt to chase it with my thoughts. imagined it was 60 years in the past, but nothing had changed because it was still me in my own mind wondering how i might rediscover a song, or myself, or sunshine and the morning paper.
i took my time seriously and carved out a four by four space in order to capture any intensity. the tall chairs in my kitchen became a desk and i had two stations on either side of me. a guitar in hand and a head full of speed. tom waits said that songs are just things you do with the air. i had every window in the apartment wide open. you must understand how to harness energy
if you want to
the fact that there is only one main room. and you see the front door locked. spend your whole day in here and everything shrinks. how big can a cage be. what if the world was the size of a marble. i never understood sitting at a desk all day for work. but here i was, sitting at a desk all day, working. it's really about space, time, content of work. turn off my internet to shut off the paths outside. once you turn inwards; loneliness is a wilderness. pioneers marching across the old country, heading west, dreams full of gold and hands caked with mud and everything that missed the fingertips.
once i was in love. a few times this has happened. i felt very good and very bad, very often. i crystallized my happiness under the dream of everything it could never be. because dreams are just quiet whispers that blow away when night falls and a crescent moon stabs you in the chest. i better watch myself. i'm wandering from the campsite and not paying attention to my direction. i'm shedding all the essential items of survival in favor of fresh ideas. i could never make it in these relationships because i was and am nobody. i am whatever i have done and thought. up to this point. but now that i am here, at this point, im gone. i can still smell and taste but i need to remind myself of my body. so i grab my skin bare. someone else used to do this for me. i lose myself. i have not done or thought anything. i press just below my eyes and into my nose, then pull on my ears and breathe deeply. i put on amon tobin and think back to an acid trip in which i performed the same actions. i needed to, in order to remind myself that i was alive. taking an hour long steaming shower was not the answer since i had already taken two of them immediately before. the trip lasted close to 24 hours and it reminded me of life, which had lasted close to 24 years.
during heavy hallucinations there is not much to grab hold of except your body and your conviction. life unfolds in front of you like a red carpet roll and you need to throw your arm out every once and a while and cut through the fucking thing. to create an explosion. to make sure someone else knows that yes, you were here, and there. not knowing didn't stop you. because at any given moment you can stop the world (or so don juan says).
i sat on the staircase smoking furiously, realizing that certain elements allowed me to place myself spatially within the world. perhaps my feet were not on the ground but there was smoke in my lungs. i had lungs. i had smoke. i held fire.
when i look back again on love i remember hotel rooms and traveling, an eagerness for culture that was sadly anchored in the man i was back home. travel must always be light and quick. in few pockets can you reach your hands for a moments rest. there isn't time. anyway, any bit of solitude and solace will be immediately glaring in retrospect, since the rest of the journey was a bolt of lightning. that is how i traveled once, and maybe a few times after that.
each time you love you kill a big piece of yourself and so you spend time afterwards trying to give birth to something new, in order to survive and become whole again. it is quite beautiful as it happens. like watching a flower start to bloom in the rain. or when nightfall trips over the morning.
i mean to be quite clear. i have 4 markings on my skin that refer directly to the concept of overcoming. and now that i am falling asleep, i awake/django and think that it doesn't really matter who i am.
"People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.














