pompeii

i read somewhere only recently that unsolicited announcements are always untrue. it made me laugh.

unsolicited announcements are very likely the only things that are true. a person never makes one but out of despair, when all illusions have shattered and there’s nothing left but the secret, sorry truth that they’d rather die than tell. but they tell it in the end because the only thing left otherwise is to die.

it never matters, though. it never makes any difference. because by the time one is willing to tell it, everything else has wilted and gone to ground. ashes and dust, dead and gone, irrevocable.

ironic, isn’t it? there are very few things in or of this life that have ever called to me in a True Way. people and circumstances come and go for the most part – everyone cares in the moment, but moments pass and naturally, that means people do, too.

i don’t even know what i’m trying to say. it doesn’t matter what it is, really, because words don’t know it, language doesn’t work, and the big, emptiness of it refuses to be made tangible.

words don’t work for this and that’s a damn shame because words are all i ever had.

i think there is one person you meet in life that you let take away your faith in everything. and one person you meet in life that you let restore it. my problem is, i met them out of order and now, most often stand around looking confused. of course, neither of those statements are true. we’re either born with it and kill it or we’re not born with it and we earn it. earn it like the animals do, all silence of thought and reaction to stimuli, conditioned responses and howls or whimpers until we figure out that survival is nothing more than knowing when to run and knowing when it’s ok to sleep.

i keep trying to tell myself it’s all a dream. doesn’t work because i know there’s no difference. awake, asleep, it’s the same. i’m the one who has the need to split the hairs and believe in hypnogogiaand alternate lives in shared spaces.

there’s nothing left but silence, in the end. no matter how long you scream or how loud, there’s only so much you’ve got to send into the world and most times all you’re doing is bouncing energy off the emptiness anyway.

i don’t know why i am trying to say this. i’ve already admitted it can’t be said. it’s like trying to say the air you want into a balloon. doesn’t work. you can’t speak inflation, only breathe it into presence.

i don’t have lungs enough to rearrange this world. hell, i can’t even rearrange myself. but i miss how it felt when i sat by the fire. i miss the comfort of not needing to know more than how to look at the stars. or how to smile.

maybe i’ll start making sense soon, but i doubt it. don’t hold your breath. never works and i’m sure you’ve got your own balloons to see tied off. it all makes perfect sense to me, of course. isn’t that frightening?

do you remember the first time you were willing to care for someone more than yourself? how good it felt just to do something that you knew couldn’t see being done but that you were there to do it? do you remember how it was just to be happy because you could?

i once bought a man clothing. i didn’t even know his name. saw him stumbling along the highway in the freezing cold and he looked so tired and worn down that i couldn’t stand the thought of breathing if i didn’t do something to rest him or at least see him warm. he declined me all the way down the road. hell, i had to park the car and walk with him to show him i meant it when i said i wasn’t leaving without him.

he cried like a baby as we drove. just glad to be warm. i cried too. i could feel his relief and it broke my heart.  i told him if he thanked me for any of it, i was gonna march it all right back in there and return every damn thing. i wasn’t the point. i knew he didn’t understand. probably thought i was nuts. didn’t matter. he swore he had a place to stay and when i believed him, i dropped him off at the diner a block from wherever it was he lived and then…. nothing more.

i reckon i could just about write for hours before i run out of those stories. but it’s hard to tell them without someone deciding you’re either making it up or bragging. so i usually don’t talk about any of it. but it’s a good example. of the whole ‘just because you can’.

not that i’m getting any closer to the imponderable. but i can at least outline it. throw rocks into the void. if you’re looking, you can see for just a moment the place where what we know disappears and so does the rock. still doesn’t matter. can’t say i know why i’m trying. never could. compulsion, i suppose.

i met a man a few years back who was dying. when i met him, he was just about ready to let it happen. i wasn’t scared that he might do it, i was more scared that he’d do it for something i said or did. i was scared as fuck to know him. for all i devoted myself like a shadow to him for the time i knew him at all.

i made him promise, no matter what, that if he ever decided to do it, he’d at least call me to tell me goodbye. but i reckon those kinds of things pass on and away like everything else. i don’t have faith enough to think he’d call anymore… for any reason, so instead i just pray every damn night that he wants to live.

i remember the night my father came to me in my room. i was staying with my grandmother, briefly, before my mom showed up to take us to what would eventually lead me to the streets. he wasn’t supposed to be there. he sat on the end of my bed and looked sad and angry all at once. he told me he wasn’t going to get to see me anymore. i tried not to look glad. i was afraid he would hit me, even with my grandma in the next room.

he told me never to let boys get too close to me because they only want one thing. i knew he was right because… well… he was a boy, too. but that’s ancient history. i only mention it because it’s part of the pattern, the invisible one that outlines the things i can’t get into words. hard to explain, but you’ll understand eventually. maybe. or maybe you never will and this is just me spinning my wheels and wasting my time… again.

it’s my time. it’s the only time i’ve got. and i reckon i don’t think it is a waste.

someone told me a few months back that the only reason i want to do good things for others is because i expect them to do good things for me. they said i was the worst kind of person because i pretend to care but am really just selfish.

it didn’t hurt my feelings, but i did cry. how hard a place, this world, when it’s so easy to think the worst rather than the best. i left them alone after that because there’s no sense in trying to do well when all someone can see in you or of you is ill.

i just said that to someone else, too. the same, but different. i said, “there’s no mattering how much good intent you have in relation to someone if they only thing they can see is bad intent when they look at you.”

i was trying to explain. but i don’t know why. i have been calling it ‘hope’ but i’m wrong. hope is something that expects an outcome. i stopped expecting things a while back from the person i was trying to talk to… i dunno… i think it was just my way of making sure the important things got said.

stubborn as a mule, that’s me. the important things can never be said, not really. which just makes me a fool as usual. but i’m used to it. kind of part and parcel, you know?

this is all eeyore down by the riverbank, of course. some odd steel kept me standing through the holidays i don’t celebrate anymore, but that fucking donkey, got to have a say. bray, you ass. scream like it matters. what a pitiful joke.

it’s midnight, but the bell never rings, so i never get the cue to run down the stairs and conveniently leave my shoe behind for you to find me. but it’s alright… you’re not looking anyway. sometimes i would not mind at all being a pumpkin. sure beats raking ashes from a cold hearth.

once upon a time, i went by the handle silentscream. lately i try to tell myself i’m a phoenix. mostly it’s just trying to keep myself from inertia. harder to hit a moving target… but not by much, i admit. got the dents in my head to prove it.

can you see the shape of it yet? i’d look, but it’s just illusion anyway, slides right off the side of your mind. pollen on rainwater, rolling into the gutter. i bet there are amazing flowers wherever that river of shit leads. lotuses, at least.

once, i had an idea for a business. pretty simple really, giant rocking chairs, big, fluffy blankets, and senior citizens. you could pay to have that tender hug and the feeling of being safe. but i dropped it because let’s face it, if you have to pay for it….

someone told me very recently that i represent the path untaken. it was like a piece of the puzzle falling into place. which is ironic, as that is precisely how they described it, too. i thought i might write something about the path untaken, but i can’t see it the way they do. the path untaken in all the stories is never a better path. it’s always overgrown. it’s always dark. it’s always dangerous and filled with all the things you never want to even think about, let alone get cozy with… of course, i put a good face on it and said it must be a gift to have such a chance to experience it without overturning life and its comforts.

i did mean it, but here, in my head, the frame of what the path untaken really is just rolls and tumbles. the path untaken is the one that was lessor, the things that are almost-but-not-quite good enough. you want to talk about repeating patterns? this, the golden mean of my life. entendre, you never let me down. you lousy fucker.

sometimes i wish i could return to the canyon. i miss the feeling of security and care that was there. i miss the ducks, and the meditation house. i miss the old oak tree. someone told me i’d never forget them and they were right. i wish i still felt like that was a good thing.

it is useless, of course. no matter how much i write, no matter how much i let pour over the top… all magma and ash and blood, there’s still no words but the ones i know and the shape of the empty cannot be defined by them. i’ll say them anyway… after all, it’s only breath, only sound.

well. i’ll say them to myself. no sense being a bigger idiot than i absolutely must and besides, there’s only one other person in the world who would know what they are or why i say them.

and they aren’t here.