small poem for 4am

Where have the dramas and daydreams gone,
gloomy at rest and at dawn? I learned the ways and the names of some,
counting them one by one: like beads in a game, they rattled refrains
like peas in a hollow drum.
They flowed through my fingers like sorrows remembered, like wars relinquished and
Won;
And each precious moment earmarked to be kept, now dashed to the ground and done;
Like beads in a game, they rattled refrains, like peas in a hollow drum.
And if i could win the sight of the world, the world that the lover lost
In the body and arms of the girl i loved, in the footsteps that we crossed
Then i'd pay with words and money, id pay with fire and frost,
Id pay with my heart and my blood and my soul, id pay whatever the cost.
But the answer returns like the wave that spurns, the breeze that strikes us dumb,
And the trinkets i count and covet amount to a paltry sum:
Like beads in a game, they rattle refrains
Like peas in a hollow drum.

Whistling in the Dark

"We on the roller-coaster of life have long since given up our urgent desire to get off, and, instead, succumb to the ups and downs which are, after long use, known and predictable, and always of short duration, the downs as well as the ups.
The problem that awaits then is not one of despair but one of boredom.
So, how to get through it? Concentrate on the qualitative over the quantitative, good advice in general. Lack of interest in material things is a sign of maturity. Stand on your own truth and stick to your guns and you will not go far wrong in this vale of tears.
To me even in misery there are always such qualitative riches, which is part of the antithetical sweet compulsion of pure existential choice.
In that dynamic space, between the poles of fatalism and freedom, despair and hope, there are whole continents and oceans of beautiful, ugly truth.
We are, as Rimbaud says, "slaves, but not cursing life"."

dream in present tense

Im up somewhere high and have been writing a note. In the skyscraper where are set into the floor thick glass panels showing a sheer drop. On one of these i sit and can all too easily imagine myself falling through. No feeling of verigo or dizziness, only a repulsive sensation of fear related to falling which makes me recoil and stand up in confusion.
Outside to a level platform in a shopping mall, again incredibly high up. A motorcycle has somehow become broken loose from where it was chained to a railing and plumeted down several stories to a fast food restaurant. A small girl shows me the broken chain and i look down, hundreds of feet below.
Now im in the city and i see a friend, some blonde girl dark eyeshadowed, but she fails to catch my eye and makes her way down an unknown culdesac, near the confluence of lights where the traffic still sighs even though it is late at night.
I say to someone, "It is intolerable to wait".
(Memory of Preston Lancashire when the woman jumped from the bus station rooftop. I didn't see it but i heard a suprisingly loud crash, and thought someone must've thrown some heavy object, a chair or table, from the roof.)

Right up until this summit of lost peace that takes itself as the standard and point, i will adress sorrow. Thereby banishing it and reducing the pain of life, and of acting. Like i have come relentlessly from point, advocating it as a creed, blind to the pathos i was creating, deaf to empathy except momentarilly, and not free in myself. And i was unfree enough to speak a language no-one understood. Sorrow: i address it, and set it dumb. I give it everything, i try and kill it with candour. I feed it till it bursts, it diminishes, or it should. I sometimes mock it, but i am usually serious. And in everything i was a totaliarian, a fundamentalist, a melancholic.
These were not roles but demonic possessions which shook me, i spoke in tongues and cried out how i missed my home. I was stubborn but not ungenerous; i gave of everything freely, and everything returned to me, the totalitarian, who accepted and rejected arbitrarily and soundly, always with one eye on the clock. I disarmed suffering by welcoming it, but not sacrifcing to it. And i spoke the truth in the face of death, and it did not matter, and never will matter, that no echco, however faint, was returned. The tragi-comic mask slips, and the void is revealed.

Cut-up number one

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after gilgamesh

Like if we came from the mountains and came down in the valley
And found our tribesmen slaughtered
And you are saying i simply do not care about politics
I care about the changing of the seasons
And the song of the birds.
I can lie and say:
I have learned to live with my solitude.
I have done violence to myself in wanting to jump
Out of this world.
And i will not roll in the blood and the mud,
Backbreaking work for babies not yet born,
Toil for millions in the new dawn.
I will find a corner in which my spit
Will become like a river
And my curses (fucks and shits)
A rich compost heap
On which to grow
Bitter silver flowers of hate.
Razorsharp, the petals
Of brilliant metal.
Grit in the eye of the demi-god
Burning a sacrifice to the immortal
Prometheus.

Brilliant realizations still sparkle at corners. Lazy writing, they call it. Leisurely to a fault. One addenda after another.
I say, i am not a bad man. I have seen and known bad men and i am not one of them. I just like to see things through my own eyes, do things at my own pace and in my own way, that's all. I like to think my own thoughts out fully, even if the results are despair or madness. You can travel through such darkness and out onto the other side. For me this dialectic trajectory is extremely common, almost omnipresent. That's why what i am writing about is hope. What is conceived and expressed spontaneously and from centre is most authentic and worthy to be expressed. I fall back upon the old myths of integrity and authenticity unashamedly, i have no postmodern embarassment about these things. J'accuse the phil. department finally of intellectual fraud, of not believing what they say. J'accuse the postmodernists of imbalance, nihilism but not of the romantic and worthy sort, of circular reasoning, and of inhumanity. How dare anyone announce the grand meta-narratives as dead. Question their orthodoxies by all means, blow raspberries at them, decry and throw them down. But be aware that they are human products, and as such still have an appeal to the human hand, head and heart.