August 11 2005

I got better this year.

It was a mixed message, a contradiction, a confusion between intention and intension, a philosophical quibble that blew the latch off the universe. Johnny Cash unleashed the hordes, and cracked me open with a ragged chord, the man came around, knocking on every door in town, the man came around, get your knees on the ground. There's no reason to cower under a burlap sack, but there is also no cure for a heart attack. Wishing well parables, the vacancy of fame, the mundanity of reality, the adoration by hypocrites is all we can count on. This was morose, corroded your mind, asking the trees for a ledge, to climb, Zacchaeus on the edge; an invitation to the masked ball, rip down the decorations and charge drunken through the hall.

Lou conjures lyrics, raw as a teenager.

Why do we assume truth is good? Lies are more easily understood.

The mat upon which I sit in the gym, provides clarity of thought at a strange angle, prostrate I contemplate the moments of my day, I see futures pasts and conversations overheard as premonitions. When I lay down a chorus in surreal raucous chaos is so sweet my eyes rush close to join the Sandman. I can't repeat that sweetness; is no one else touched by that sweet madness; of course I'm not the only one; don’t you think you are the only, Roy Orbison touched a nerve singing ‘you're the only one with a broken heart’ for what is a broken heart but a vicious certainty that loneliness is permanent, no hope for connection with Supreme things in the sky. Let's draw useful wires from this cotton-candy-spinner-kaleidoscope of consciousness mixed intentions and unfinished nirvanas, half-built skyscrapers monuments to cognition ie please stop and think, face facts I could run over a buffalo with I could turn you inside out like Stipe I could unravel this whole week and lay the blame at your door.

What words are prohibited; why is the writer the only one who wants truth, but the speaker is silent and ashamed, trying to put humpty together again, Richard III the humpback in me, so sly and cunning and shy?

I tumbled from a glass, a rag in the sink, I had a bit of soap on me, was a telephone receiver left too long off a hook, beeping uncontrollably, so many noises it irritates, and the desert in the heart needs irrigation lush growth in explosive blooms after a storm. My pathetic fallacy's an Achilles heel, my metaphor's a crutch.