11/8

I have a drug addiction — perhaps it does not seem like it on the outside to those unknowing onlookers, but what I desire most is an end to the seizures (the spells, the episodes, the visions).

Drugs make that happen, at least for awhile — hard drugs, not by traditional standards, but enough of them to be measured in grams per day, intense enough to keep me in a perpetual, paradoxical high, a great slowdown of the mind.

My waking, striking eyes are always in struggle against the tremendous forces of the anti-epileptics; yet, I feel when my body revolts, when it speaks to me and says for me to rest. I do not lest, for as the busy world goes, each day closer to strangling itself in the global chains and wires of its norms and infrastructure, about to keel into cardiac arrest, so too do I follow and drift in a drug-laden stupor, hallucinating dim images of future success and liberating peace among this catastrophe.

Sleep is never enough to shake off the effects, no matter six, ten, or twelve hours — it is a waking coma that I am in, unable to fight the burden from my consciousness.

10/19

Watching my ticking pocket-watch.

It’s going too slow, I’m going mad. Not quite eight yet, can’t take my drugs and bask in their effects. Drinking Captain Eli’s, reading Jane Eyre, wishing I had a real beer, that I knew what the French ladies were saying — that’d be true gorgeousness.

Impossibilities, I’m crippled under hundreds of pages of text — for what reason? What’s the expectation anyway? My hands are trembling, my jaw is jerking, I want to scream confessions into the open air and onto deaf ears. I pretend play that I’m in a cafe snapping my fingers to the heartbeat of expression — no more apprehension, depression, or falling behind the imaginary pack.

Cliff Bar, too much sweet in my mouth. Just swallow the pills.

Smoking, 17 Years Old

The darkness molested by the
pollution of city lights and
street lamps blazing through the
summer night hung low over
the pond — we called it the
puddle — and there we sat,
near the edge of the murk, in such
stark contrast to the relative
order around us, illuminated in
sharp blacks and whites like in
those old movies.
Cigarettes hung loosely from our
lips, smoke poured and streamed
into a poisonous plume,
in a smooth and sophisticated way –
as we fancied ourselves to be –
silently pondering the existential and poetical,
smoking cigarettes at seventeen.

A dream during twilight

She bears a burden that chills her heart,
takes away the aches and pains,
slows the rhythm of life to the minimal
pulse excited only by alcohol and running
away from fear, fear of solutions to what seem like
indelible problems yet are as evanescent
and fleeting as fireflies.
Her body becomes colder and her frozen breaths
can’t sustain her for much longer.
Her warm appearance is unlike that which lies within;
while perhaps thoughtful, calm and capable of true
acts of humanity and love, she is as broken and twisted trees,
mangled not of their own accord,
yet still holding with a firm grip on to the power of life
through each brittle winter that howls and roars to claim.
It will take a year of working,
a year of sun, fertile rains and the
loving being of all that is, but she who
once stumbled in the frigid dark and
grasped blindly for a hand to hold
onto may know herself as herself,
alive and empowered –
nothing trivial, not any more.

Television is not a provision

Something’s missing. It’s Saturday and I’m alone in my living room with my steamy ramen noodles. The cats are quietly hawking over me. There is the occasional slosh of passing cars, the click as the gas stove turns on to warm the hearth, and the faint sound of the sump-pump clearing our 19th-century basement of water. It is a lazy late afternoon characteristic of my weekends here back at home.

My parents went to visit relatives, and I am here with the mission of doing homework. However, I find my once-familiar environment disturbed somehow. I have been thinking about it every moment since I came back. We didn’t lose a family member or a pet, but rather a commodity.

The dark, reflective face of the television, sitting dead upon its stand, looms in the corner. The room is so quiet I find it unsettling and peaceful all at once. The television cable has been unplugged from the wall and the box removed. There are not even rabbit ears sticking up from behind its massive, bulky plastic shell.

In an effort to become more economically efficient we decided that our talking box was not worth over fifty dollars a month. I am used to having no television in my room on campus and being bogged down with work. According to my paranoid standards, TV watching would mean academic and social failure. On weekends I went home and breaks, though, there I was, enjoying shows like Battlestar Galactica and Mission Impossible. I even started watching Deal or No Deal.

I do not intend to criticize the good television shows out there right now. What I had a difficult time realizing was that even when I wasn’t cheering on my favorite characters on an episode of Battlestar Galactica, for example, someone else might be watching their show, and so on. The background noise was always there, and passively, through sight or sound, I have seen hundreds of episodes of Judge Judy, Judge Mathis, The People’s Court, and others. I have left the news on for three hours while only watching half an hour of it. I have heard thousands of commercials and remembered the advertising but not the source. It is a strange situation knowing what’s on TV, even though consciously you don’t think that you “watch” TV.

It feels like I have lost a family member, but one that was not necessarily well liked and valuable. While I lived for years without cable at all, the most recent portion of my life has been with the TV there by my side for every moment of it. The power it has to transmit images and alter the way one thinks is almost unrivaled. Creativity and imagination are stifled.

Last night, as tonight, I will sit here comfortable and warm in our room designed for “living” and not watching TV. The radio might be on low as I listen for news from the G20 summit in London taking place now; after, only the silence of an old house and thoughtful discussions which have been impeded by countless nights of TV-dinners and overwhelming volume using flashing lights and colors as our guide for family time. The house feels alive now, the sound of settling and its squeaky pine floors no longer muted by the box that teaches, talks, and intrudes.

A Dewey Decimal Complexity

I want to be a librarian;
I want to have my social groups
consist of books,
not jumps through hoops.

I want the dust I brush off shelves
to mimic a woman’s smell,
and a lust for knowledge replace
the need to breed.

I want to write like I’m a competitive fighter,
and recommend books because
I actively read them.

Calm and succinctly sophisticated,
I want to be a librarian.

Huntress

She sat across the clean, white table,
spoke only with her quiet tones.
Her gaze wandered to his own,
watchful like the Tyrian huntress.

She was gathered in conversation
among strangers and smiles,
and gathered her resolve, just
close enough to hear his words.

The yearning moments galloped on.
She leaned so close behind him.
He spoke only with his eyes,
like the phantoms so near to her
in her dearest dreams.
He turned his head and
witnessed her with a crow’s compelling gaze.
She scribbled away at her notes,
embarrassed.

She sat a bit behind his family at lunch
and wondered if he could spot her this near.
He went for black coffee
and she wished for a moment shared between them,
with delicate sips, sighs, and laughter.

A day transpired into the winterly aether.
Together in a group of youths
swept into a deluge of adulthood,
he stood beside her beneath the eaves
of university, and smiled into the breeze.
Not a word was spoken. For that sunset alone,
an eddy swirled them side by side;
forces beyond the watch of nature wrapped them
together in the temporary tether of a fleeting moment,
where the huntress could wander dangerously through
her dreams and desires, unsure and unsatisfied,
and wonder about her friend becoming
distant then departed.

Under the sinking sun shouting crows
hung over the aging brick buildings and reaching red oaks.