MAY

Through windswept alleys I tumble, unnanounced.

[secondhandmagic]

I feel myself unravelling again. But these days its not chaotic or uncontrolled. It’s not fraying as I watch on helpless and confused. 

It’s like every part of my being is just softening, the strands and pieces and knots and ribbons that compose my soul are shrugging, stretched in the wash, untangling.

I’m getting comfortable with my own artful mess, breathing deeply, curling up in bed, preparing to rearrange, redecorate, sew myself back up again with love and understanding. 

Warm soup, wool socks, honey lavender milk tea, rest, repeat, heal. 

[indreamswe-believe]

What #goals ought to look like

[the-phantom-cat]

deadline

naririnig ko ang pagdaloy ng bawat minuto 

sa pag-ugong ng laptop, sa pulsong tumitibok sa'king mga tainga. ito ang buod ng madaling araw; ang pagtuloy ng kahapo'ng di matapos-tapos.

ang dahan-dahang pagsikap ba ng araw ay dapat tawagin'g dakip gabi? ito ba ay pag-suyo sa mga bagay na hindi na mahahabol? na, baka sakali, dapat hindi na habulin?

imbis na umasa sa sagot sana'ng dala ng liwanag, kakapit na lang ako sa ligtas ng dilim. ligtas na madadala lamang ng isang kahapon na hindi umaabot sa 'ngayon'; isang 'ngayon' na hindi magpapalipas sa isang 'bukas'; 'doon', kung saan man iyon, wag na sana'ng lumipas ang gabi.

[the-phantom-cat]

Things I reject, apparently

1. Happily ever afters. Or any kind of afters.      Now and here are the only places and times you can be, until the absolute last second and you’re gone. Then the universe slowly takes back your space in history until no one can remember. Aristotle, Plato and Socrates are still waiting for this kind of justice. Until then, it is the purgatory of being remembered. 

2. Promises     What is a promise, anyway? And how can anyone believe in its consistency?

3. Progress     A necessary illusion; modern-day myth of metals to make societies and peoples and the lone human keep going. Keep believing in a point. The new linchpin of survival. All I see is transformation; sands shifting with no particular end. 

4. Love     Another illusion that might very well be proof of the veracity of the human mind to make its imaginations real. In which case, it isn’t an illusion. Or, it isn’t an illusion for those who believe in it. Love is a function of faith. 

5. Faith     Belief in things that either can’t be proven definitively or resist being proven, and treat any such exercise as a matter of heresy. Proof of faith, in most cases, is a tautological exercise of finding what one wants to see because one seeks this validation. Equally valid in religion as it is in bad science. 

6. Miracles     If something ceases to be a miracle once it can be explained, then miracles are simply phenomenon that have yet to be scrutinized properly.

6. Any form of absolute authority    (obviously)

[the-phantom-cat]

You are ill. Don’t make yourself sicker. 

[redlipstickresurrected]

Jiwoon Pak aka 박지운 (Korean, Seoul, South Korea) - 1: Girl With Lily, 2017  2: Blindness, 2016  3: Suzy, 2017  4: Black Eyed Girl With Lilies, 2015  5: Lunar Eclipse, 2016  6: Girl With Hollyhocks, 2015  7: Moonset, 2015  Digital Arts: Paintings

[the-phantom-cat]

She said I sounded too lucid to be sad

Too much and, still, too little again.  This feeling is a catch 22. It isn’t real once you can name it. You ask me why I’m sad, or what it is to be so. Your eyes look into mine as you will yourself to understand. 

I feel it happening as I open my mouth, words tumbling out.  I build sentence upon sentence, piecing it all together as I watch you try to comprehend them. The words mean nothing.

And right there, in the very act of making sense of my why’s and how’s, I vanish. In my place, a narrative of my own despair comes to take a life of its own. One other possible interpretation, one more sanitized version of myself.  I become the object I fail to represent. 

But that’s okay. When I think about it, catharsis isn’t really about understanding. It’s a scream into the void. It isn’t some sense of enlightened relief that meets you; it is emptiness. Dopamine coursing through your veins to counteract the feelings of distress. 

And so I talk and talk, emptying my words into your gaze. And you nod and say, “I see”. And I smile and say, “thank you”.  I mean it wholeheartedly each time, for you, you are the abyss that stares back. 

[the-phantom-cat]

Snippets from October

This is the storm; the silent film crash; the secret between myself and I.

If I am a shipwreck and creatures  find a home in me, If I am the shore that waves are bound  to beat (and break, and break, and break upon), If I am still waters that alone know  this deep and guileful darkness--

Then let me wait upon this storm in peace. 

===

We depart, as we must, because it is in our very nature to exist and cease to exist. 

[the-phantom-cat]

Love letters to a city, #1

I want to write you love,  but each step has been forgotten  (and the next and the next) Because it isn’t your place to remember  our quiet departures and arrivals.

And I pity you, in a way.  You’ve got the temper of a child. (now sullen, now happy beyond measure) But you can’t remember, can you? The way soft light falls on quiet forests, the way damp earth smells on early mornings, as thatched homes rouse from their sleep. Or the city’s streets, bumbling with the acts of everyday living.  The sun sets, and the lights that begin to twinkle  remind me that you are alive, too. And growing (and dying). You do not know this, let alone could you remember.

Neither will you remember these bodies passing endlessly through your veins. Your lifeblood.  You do not know their names, though you  keep them company in the dead of night. You do not fail to keep them close to your starry eyes. But you do not remember their names, nor will you remember mine. And you will not hear me, but I want to write you love. For each glazed puff of breath, each cold morning (and scorching midday), each distant cloud,  and each piercingly blue sky. I want to write you love and you will not hear me.  But I love you beyond measure. So forget me if you must (as you have as you will, over and over).

I will not forget you.

[the-phantom-cat]

I want to tell you that I spent those sparse few seconds with you. That would be a lie. I had more than a sparse few seconds; I had eternities upon eternities wasted lounging inside my head. And was everyone else an incidental whim? Each moment outside that room a moment more to pass the time until I could return? In which case, I am more sinister than I thought.

But it could, instead, be something I have far more involvement in (and far less control over), that being, in the most devastating sense, my inability to hover towards people who make me feel alive. What does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to want living like you want air, like you need it? If that were true, my retreats into myself would be attempts to reconcile my longing to be with others with the longing to be with myself. It appears to be one or the other; my mind or my whimsy. (Or worse: my mind’s longing to find a like-soul, someone who will please know what it means to be here and not here).

And I suppose the safest, most accurate answer is that it is neither one nor the other. That is the eternity I spend: sitting on the fence. I don’t know what this feeling is, but I will tell you that it feels like a slow hollowing out once you have been filled up with too many things. Like an attic, like an old box, like a mind cluttered beyond any good use. Especially the latter most.

I have returned to my mind now. The root word of ‘vacation’ is ‘vacate’. And so, in my time away, these things filled up this hollow space. And so, to settle in once more, I have to dismantle each thing and put it away quietly. So that I may return to myself.

Welcome home, I guess.

[the-phantom-cat]

Prose is for good days

There is a kind of magic that comes from a good bowl of beef brisket noodles and a tall mug of coffee. And, of course, good company. My creature of a mind becomes a happy, quiet buzz (instead of what I imagine to be a room full of call center agents. No, madam, I do not need a new telephone set). I guess the metaphor could work if you consider a BPO one great hive mind with the sole intention of selling, selling, selling. And, sure, the occasional intention of helping a customer out.

I digress. Try as I might, I can’t for the life of me write anything to capture this warm, happy feeling in poetry (what’s up with that?).  To be fair, though, I’m not entirely sure I can capture the feeling in prose either. But the sheer rarity of the moment makes me want to try anyway.

My mind is going “warm. happy. sleep!” over and over. Childseption! My mind is its own child stuck in another child stuck in a long gangly body.

The way it used to be, any moment of happiness would immediately be followed by utter horror. Happiness meant I was content with myself, a thought I had violently opposed for most of my (actual) childhood. Should I call them wasted years? I spent every waking moment obsessed with my own worth and worthlessness. I was, in many ways, both sure of my own inherent greatness and dismayed with the lack of outward results. Which meant, at the time, that I was worthless in my own eyes. That’s how my narcissism tasted then, dry and bitter. 

I have this impulse to laugh those days off and brush them aside as some phase. I don’t think that would do myself justice. Time could just as easily send me back to those dark places. I was a puzzle I couldn’t figure out (and no one else could, either). I felt like an anomaly guilty of its own existence. I won’t laugh that off. Neither will I forget the weight of those years.

And so, my happiness today is remarkable. I need to write about it. I. Can’t. Not. There are already too many sad poems, too many essays to distract me from the noise (that is now just a happy buzz) available for the interested reader (i.e. myself in the future).

About that; it’s quite strange. I feel like I’ve learned something I wouldn’t have otherwise known if I hadn’t gone through those years of ~inner turmoil~

All those years, I was obsessed with the meaninglessness of my own life. There was no purpose I could will myself to believe in; and yet, I was convinced, there must be. So I thought I had to achieve as much as possible to be worthy of being.

But I know now that there is no one truth, one meaning, one purpose. Those are open-ended questions we are charged with answering. And the answer lies in each of our lives. Each contradicting life answers back that this is what it means to exist: knowingly or unknowingly, for better or worse, to live is to define living. To live is to define the purpose of being.

I guess you could say my narcissism has reached its height. Today, my starkest truth is that we are our own gods. The beauty (and bane) of metaphysical thought is that it can neither be proven nor disproved by any given group. In the final analysis, its value as truth to you is a function of nothing else but your own mind and experiences. That’s why it’s called personal truth.

And again, I guess you could say, “that escalated quickly”. Who knew all it would take was beef brisket and coffee. 

[the-phantom-cat]

Words, secrets, smiles --that bubble fragment;           moment caught in time. That kindling fire, spoken alight, there found our once upon a time crescendo.

Then, the slow drift--steady fissure.   Upon us descending were                                        our very steps,                                              our quiet departures.

And so, my erstwhile friend, goodbye for now.

[the-phantom-cat]

Eyes draw like sleepy curtains; in my shadow world, dream-tranced, we wander roads of silk.

[the-phantom-cat]

Tubig, hangin; ang tindig ng alon: marahang pamumugto, bago sundan ng biglaang pagbagsak.

[the-phantom-cat]

"Spectre," they call me. ("spectre," I must be called) Through their windswept alleys, I tumble, unannounced. My mouth is but a shadow. (I am but a shadow).

[the-phantom-cat]

The smell of wild honey is just wao much wao.

[the-phantom-cat]

We're okay. Your trembling hands may be your own. Don't worry. Even the sturdiest branches are shaken. It's people who can't be taken, held, possessed. But that comes as a relief. Remember, you're human, too. You are your own. You are your own. You are your own, and so is your madly spinning world. You are okay.

[the-phantom-cat]

I kind of love the way air chokes up with smoke on new year’s day –the heavy eyelids; money burning with every burst of light.

What is there to say? (too much; too little)

Nothing at all. The taste of midnight air, the moon-eyed bystanders; this is enough.

We welcome the (onslaught; adventure; dream) year, as we welcome tepid waters: with one great leap. With vigor.