what if everything everyone ever told one another was a lie.

Oct 26, 2006 03:17

a blue smudge rubbed in remembered. lists.
words books fiction. stories poetry syntax.
war genocide third worlds starved photos of faces too tired for expression and ribs you can count from across an ocean.
solipsism. passing our existence describing our existence with circular logic and forgetting to shave. god. your god their god my god no god who's god what's god?
games and sports and adrenaline rushes and chemicals and teasing our minds down to simple cause-and-effect machines, so we can pick the causes and revel in the same effects time after time.
stars and planets and moons to remind in some superficial fleeting way that we're not far past invisible.
phallic culminations of human technology breaking into smaller and smaller pieces until landing softly on another world with a new horizon and a redder sunset and a different kind of quiet. or turning around instead, hurtling back toward families and sculpted clay that somehow outlasted hundreds or thousands of years of human instability and violence and symbolic destruction of symbolic creations, that somehow survived, until now.
rubbing out the periphery over and over and filling it with cracked confidences and walks and flowcharts of faces and behaviors growing and receding and tangling up beyond possibility of extrication until the here and now's all there is.
sickness and love.
dinners and lyrics, alcohol and costumes and filling nights with anything just to keep the empty out, and an addiction to human company complete with all the associated withdrawal and paranoia of any hard drug.
scandals. little boys in churches and older boys with politicians. xenophobia in washington a god monopoly by the pope. good deeds coming with terms and fine print. engrained insanity. indiscriminate immorality. suicidal immortality. racism and human trafficking and child prostitution.
sandals. cold feet. describing one another out of existence with rapt attention to every minute physical distinction. lamenting on the immaterial materiality of physical attractiveness even as we wear its blinders.

you can only stay awake for so long, and dreams matter too. we think in words not ribbons, too many to list but few enough to count. i wake up eight feet under and tread faster as i sink, smaller and smaller until the water in my nose is the water in my mind and my ears are covered and there's no shaking it out. no matter your views on determinism, choice is deceptive. i go to sleep hoping to float the top and wash up on the shore, playing dead to trick the current. i write the list over and over on my skin, in my throat, wherever it won't wash off, just in case.
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