Spewing them hot into the night air. Squinting intently, eager for portent and hidden truths.

Words in lieu of entrails; the voodoo of modern conversation.

Poison in my blood and static in my head.

Everything's a tangled knot and I wish I could just spew it all out. Gluuuuughkk! and be clean.

Digusting dependencies (You haven't even started anything you stupid little shit, yet you're indulging yourself in the that word? God help me, I'm finished with you...), worthless facades, and behind it all: that stupid fucking soundtrack of half-cooked metaphors. Jesus, just give it up already.

I'm too fucking old to be this insecure, aren't I?

Blinded by the sun, struck dumb by the water.

Inertia: quit that shit, man. Move, for god's sake! MOVE!

Pale Sighs. Revision. Petrification.

Each gust of wind pours over itself to steal a drag from the smoky torch in my hand.

Not today, little breeze. I will jealously hoard it to my lips and breathe my pale sighs.

I once thought it a bizarre ritual of self-cleansing. Filth coaxing brother-filth inexorably from the corners of my sunless and squishy insides-- but alas! My treachery would unveil itself as clever Diaphragm springs back and vomits forth my collected blackness into the lonely, hungry air (See: how quickly it did gobble up that cloud!).

But (as you should know) youth is revision, and nothing revises more readily than flights of boyish fancy.

I know what is really happening. I've seen the diagrams and photographs; I am (or rather, was) a man of Science! Bruises and blotches multiplying, a quiet meiosis of tar until lungs are choked black, cased solid. Two Gorgon-stared lumps. Petrifying eyes not content merely stopping there.

Maybe that is what I'm after (lord knows I'm hastening-- quick-breath quick-breath-- towards something): That my heart will, one day, finally become a stone.





Postscript: Aiko shared: "'Bad art is more tragically beautiful than good art, because it documents human failure.'" I should make that a scrolling banner on this page.

The Same Goddamn Thing. The Same Goddamn Thing. THE SAME GODDAMN THING.

No, NO, NO, you stupid asshole user! I will not format and type up your entire fucking resume for you. I know that is why you have come up here at least ten times in the past two hours asking me questions about Microsoft Word, and subsequently taking me to your stations to show you how to perform the tasks that I have explained. I honestly do not mind walking over and showing you the same goddamn thing in MSWord a few times because-- let's face it, here-- we're not all as bright as one another. And I'm a magnanimous sort of fella.

But you know, when I start just showing you how to do the same goddamn thing in MSWord on the staff station instead of getting up, maybe it's time you put two and two together (spoiler: that equals four) and realized that I've been showing you how to do the same goddamn thing in MSWord as every single time before that.

You are a UCLA student. You possess, presumably, sufficient mental faculty to start problem solving all on your very own after I have given you a series of starting points (which, as the more canny readers among you might recall, are all consituted of THE SAME GODDAMN THING IN MSWORD).

Counting to ten. Counting to ten. Counting to ten. Counting to ten.

The metaphysical weight of your paycheck (HURRY UP, WEDNESDAY.) / The tangible STUPID oozing from idiot user.

$$$ / !!!

...

You win this time, paycheck*.






*Paycheck always wins.

Bone-crushing. Moebius Strip. Fissures and Crumbling.

Bone-crushing disillusionment. Just the kind of cold feeling in the gut (fingers spreading up the spine until the mind is frozen in wordless exclamation) that, in days long gone, was tell-tale sign of the faerie folk wresting away his soul in oblivious delusion heretofore and forevermore.

Tooth meets lip until salty iron crashes the party: He was right, Eric. What the fuck are you going to do, he was right and your options are drawing in on you. Magical vanishing box, faces and vertices moving implacably inward. What the fuck are you going to do?

The Moebius Strip, alternating face but always the same thread: Will that weary strain be another hand-me-down from your brother? Is that your figure you're seeing framed in his seemingly-threadbare (loose threads only grow ever-looser) cloak of feigned fulfillment?

That busy old fool casting his searing glare and burning away the marine layer (Saccharine sweet smile: And up next, the traffic report for your commute on this sunny summer morning!); daydreams do not stand up to the reality of serious scrutiny. Chaff on the wind: it scatters so quickly in a rogue gust, dissolving tracelessly into the air. One can scarcely believe in his remembered belief.

She says: Icebergs behoove the soul / (both being self-made from elements least visible)
Reply: Fissures spreading; terrifyingly invasive metastasis. I am crumbling in these tepid tropic waters.

Would that I could fashion myself a career out of volumes and language. But that's another world, and I'm in thi$ wretched, reali$tic one. God help me, I wish I knew where to go.