Scratching@thepine

Canon to Hope and Entropy

Pushing shadows at the light, holding dreams against the night.

I broke back. With savage convictions what else is wandering. I had thoughts of being president once. Happily they are gone. An elixir to soothe the soul sometimes sounds better than it smells. Fuck the would-be world that imprisons us with thoughts of conformity. If I had any new thoughts I’d share them with my hairy palm of solace. Sorry if I am sparse. I’ll tell you how I feel. If you must, feel it for yourself. Plastic Druid, the world is more savage now.

Dumping needles in the harbor after the tea; little girls offer it up on every corner. Grab the brass ring, before it starts to rust.

Walking through the winter on a warm sunny day in shorts I noticed my numb mind is broken. I like it this way. I chose this cave and ate the breadcrumbs. I used to understand what it meant to be a good person and strive towards so near a point. Anger took over somewhere and pointed me at someone’s head. Loaded, trying not to go off, someone’s screaming in my ear but I can’t understand what they are saying anymore. Difference no longer has a following. I once wanted to be Jesus Christ, Atheist.

I decided I would go back but knew I wouldn’t.

I once wanted to write pretty little stories to let people know what I was day dreaming about. Now it’s just a colorless world where black and white are the only counterpoint to gray and shadow and light flicker inside the mind like a poignant legacy of what I forgot somewhere in a place in my past like something from childhood that I still dream of from time to time. Try to hold the waters at Niagara in your hand, all of them for a year or two, without letting a drop reach the ground below. Try to be who you used to be, when you were functioning. My hands are dry. Try to grow your pine try as high as redwood, sit and watch and shit for fertilizer. In a few years you’ll have your own pine box.

I once invented an island.

I lived there all alone.

But then the medicine rescued me.

Now that island is gone.

Imagination is gone. Most of the time it leads to introspection. Try throwing yourself on your bed of nails, hands first. Rust tears burn my eyes. The world is filled with deteriorating steel and dying particles of carbon. Crucifixion is a world unto itself. I can’t understand the world through reality and I don’t want to learn how. I just want the waking dreams to end so I can get on with living. I don’t really like it like this, I just tell myself that. It’s like setting your alarm clock ten minutes fast, you know you're not late, but if you believe it, it will get you where you need to go. Broken canon waltzes dancing across the battlefield I have constructed with dead emotions eat the dead flowers of thoughts and dreams I once believed in.

Eye through a pebble at the leaf with the ant on it, floating in the deep end.

It hit and the aunt fell in the water. It’s legs moved for a while, then stopped,

And started, and stopped and started, and stopped.

I never moved. I thought about getting her a stick.

Does anyone on the shore have a stick to save the sycamore’s daughter?

Try looking at the sun until it burns a whole in the back of your head. Then imagine it gone. It was pain but you still miss it. Sometime ago I went blind to a part of me deep inside.

Palindromes- I saw evil, live was I.

I fought the evil until it corrupted me. I still live a moral life, but I no longer take pleasure in it.

PAGE TWO

I need a preacher or a prostitute

Or a television set.

I have thoughts without distractions.

My God is dead.

My TV is gone.

A crisis of remote fate.

All I need I don’t have.

All I want is a quiet room.

Three meals a day and

Responsibilitylessness.

All I have is not enough,

Dreams were once,

But thinking is like tumors in May flowers.

Once I wanted to be immortal.

I don’t think I’ll feel that way again.

Once I wanted to save the world. I know now that thinking leads to darkness. Maybe I can find the light again. Maybe it’s just distraction. If I really was, was I this bad off? I think I wouldn’t be here, but I cant and speak in tongues to find the truth buried by supposition. Truth is relative to reality. One is what we perceive; the other is what we don’t. It’s like staring at a monitor in the dark, blinders hiding the room around us.

Lucy has a fine palate for wine.

She keeps it on her basement floor.

Stained glass sinners,

Always back for more.

I watched everyone else get piss drunk and pass out on the floor. I’m still sober; I’ll need another excuse. I am a shadow of an echo.

Try to cut down a redwood with a worn out toothbrush. Did you ever try to feed the color black? Or disguise your thoughts with Man-O-War wallpaper. Can you scream until your throat is so soar you have to scream. I am not sure which is which and witch is daemon. I used to have a theory, but lost it with the missing link and Cro-Magnon man. Is Santa really Satan misspelled. I need a purpose or a cause. Maybe that concept could give me something to fight. Maybe I should be fighting Santa, or Sanka, or Sally Field or some other too cute marketing strategy.

Does Solomon Rushdi really believe in Mohammed or was he just trying to save his life? His soul? Isn’t that what belief in a higher power is all about. I believe we all are our own gods. I just was stuck with a Satan/Hades fruit-roll-up on the brain. I read from the scriptures in my own hand.

i used to be the

fastest,

smartest,

best looking.

That was before,

stopwatches,

s.a.t.’s

dating.

Sometimes believing in yourself… I know I’m here, but sometimes that doesn’t help… Sometimes believing in yourself is an act of faith.

I once killed a dragon,

I drank from it its blood.

I once killed a flagon,

And stumbled home through mud.

(Actually it was a bottle of night time...so I could rest, something like 50 proof of stupidity)

A Joke:

So Descartes said, "I think not" and poof he disappeared.

And poof, I think, and I am lost inside my own shadow, circular reasoning imploding in on everything I am. If I can find my way back home... if I can find...

"Love is a circle that doth restless move, in the same sweet eternity of love."

There is a generation of ideas and I hope someday to find it. ... hope...

Party games, does your arm reach the wall? Do you want to pull my flesh off? Do I scare anyone besides myself? do I ask to may questions. Do question-marks and faith cause too much conflict. Why bother with question marks with rhetorical quests. I am just a simulacrum of someone I used to know. Maybe he’ll be back someday. He died in fourth fraud, and again in fifth, an again in ninth, and some more as a sophomore in college. I buried him in what should have been my senior year, and laid him to rest with grandma. He is still scathing, scratching at the pine. I used to have a purpose. It’s gone now. Let it go. Even God has his detractors.

I meant to call yesterday,

To ask if I could come to visit.

Then I meant to call today,

Before it was too late.

Dad called me to let me ‘no don’t call.’

I know he will miss you more.

I only knew you well enough

To know I didn’t know you well.

From gold to guad to gold,

The fish swim in plastic mold,

In the little lamp I used to watch,

Until I thought I knew how to tell what was cheap.

Words are cheap, they are not thoughts.

Only thoughts and memories live on,

In the memories and thoughts of those who share.

I am only sorry I did not share more.

I remember the little lamp and the sycamore tree in the front yard, the tiny goldfish pond and hours of scrabble.

I remember Lawrence Welke and jigsaws, the tiny pieces of you you shared and ages of regret.

And in conclusion I’d like to thank the academy and all the little people who made this essay possible and extend a hardy convulusion of the world to those who made it necessary. May their live be as twisted and confused and broken and boring, but not as painful, never as painful. And don’t forget I had a heart. If no one understands, maybe I’ll be president yet. Shagging cigars in centerfield like so much oatmeal. Try to tell everyone what it’s like to lose nearly everything and make them understand. If I can find hope nothing else is lost, but it is still hiding somewhere in the periphery.

Hope

I once found a maiden,

Who said everything’d be alright.

I once found a maiden,

Just then my heart took flight.

(Well, not yet)

Still searching for the way home,

Epilogue-

Crack the capsules and pore the powder out in a circle around me. Keep the demons at bay. If I could only still see them, but to know them is to feel the heat of their breath, hear the grind of their teeth, feel the blows that never come.

I am an internet. I exist nowhere but am still here somehow, waiting to be downloaded into the greater consciousness.

Whisper to me louder, I can’t hear. I can’t be here. I want to destroy the world of me. There have been times when I wanted to die, times when all I wanted was quiet and I wanted to puncture my eardrums. All I wanted was the anonymity I existed in.

But still searching…