New Constellations
In
As traffic, you’re part of your vehicle and part of everyone else’s. As you speed up, you embody the freedom you desire, escape itself, the pleasure of animation, wind blowing in your face, and you become more elastic, more fluid. You begin to feel more and more invincible. You fly on I-95 as pure spirit until traffic slows, and then slows, and then comes to a standstill, and you want to pull your hair out, because you’re a cartoon just like everyone else, in your private car, melting into the public roads, which will never be yours.
You’re in traffic. In your car. In your head. But you long to be out. Out of traffic. Out of the car. Out of your head. You ache for the freedom to be uncoupled from in. And the limitless possibility of out. But everything which surrounds you screams in. In doubt. In person. Inaction. You glance across to adjacent others also in for help. Distracted from their digital delirium, you elicit a scowl. The fuck are you looking at. Your reach for out is firmly shut in, again. But these moments of in, sheltered from the cacophony of out, are safe. In protects in ways out exposes. When we embrace in, we are in control. In private. In charge.
Every word is a spur, an outgrowth, a departure. Language, like the city, is wild, even while it inhibits our freedom, our ability to make peace.
Inside you drum your fingers in boredom. Ba-dum. Ba-dum. You hum a tune you can’t remember. And your mind thumbs through someone else’s to-do list. The language of standstill. A radio offers comfort, but provides none. Your only solace is the calamine of cranked air. Cooling your thoughts as much as your temper, it births freon cubes inside your midsize tin can, still stuck in the asphalt outgrowth of urban bypass. You breathe in translation. Air which has been sanitized and cleansed of the violence of outside. Of greenhouse gas and humid emission. You take it all in, and relax your grip on the wheel.
I don’t know all that I know. I know lovers sometimes need restraining orders. I know the difference between inhibit and inhabit is very slim.
I inhabit a relationship but inhibit my partner. I inhabit a body but inhibit its wellness. And I inhabit a thought but inhibit outsiders. My liminal space is often final. I inhibit letting others in. I inhabit a place of my own, lost in fantastical worlds, infinite libraries and life beyond the stars. A world far, far out there, but entombed in here. A world where the door is shut, but contains limitless potential. A universe so vast it could only be contained within a screaming fever dream. A refrigerated daydream of standstill traffic. And the uninhibited, uninhabited spaces I go when I can’t go anywhere at all.
Inspired by Spurs, by Ryan Eckes (2018).
Eckes, R. (2018). General Motors. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. [Digital File]. Retrieved from https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EDrOinuJyQ0p3zYvbA_gIt_zFoiuDbsu/view.
The Curse Is Lifted
Even if you mute it, the curse is there.
There are so many things I want to yell. But trapped in the corporate amber, my thoughts remain unshared. Unvoiced. Unreleased. The curse is there, but so is the fear. The risk that speaking a violent truth is worse. Catastrophically consequential. Financially costly. Professionally suicidal. So I bottle the curse and save it for later. For that precious liminal space of awake and asleep. For a time when my brain is just on the cusp of peace. That’s when the curse is invited to strike, jolting my mind back to life with its sharp intake of breath, as if resuscitated for the last time by an exhausted, desperate crash team. As I go to the tape, the curse is anxiously replayed. It would have been so much better this way. That way. No way. The real-world curse is eternally muted, but the internal curse lives forever. Forced into endless syndicated reruns, with a laugh track populated by those now long dead.
Being consumed makes you a bloody mess. It also makes you shit. Reducing others to a shit-state is a cruelty. You take something from them for yourself.
As thoughts race, the mess of anxiety turns me to shit. I toss and sweat. I cannot, will not return to that place where I was on the cliff’s edge of hurling myself off into the time travel of sleep. The more I think, space collapses in on itself and the further away I get. My stomach growls with the evening’s dinner as the factory of anxiety churns up real food with mental anguish, mixing together into a lethal diuretic cocktail. I languish in the creativity of an improved curse. The curse of if only. The curse which would have truly destroyed the other in the cruelest way imaginable. I win. I lose. The only one reduced to the shit-state is me. In bed. Replaying the day’s curses over. And over. And over the years I’ve learned to try to let the muted curses escape. They tunnel out in journals. In friends. In alcohol. But like all escaped inmates, I long for their recapture. Their rightful home is in here, never out there.
There is a shitload of codes, a mess of messages, yet the din of it isn’t necessarily noise - that is, it is a signal to be understood. A literacy to develop.
Like an orchestra tuning before a performance, the language of nocturnal anxiety is a symphonic cacophony. We know there’s sense to be made somewhere within, but all we hear in the moment is a swirling mess. Signal will come with time, and out of it will emerge catharsis. I embrace the cacophony, and listen in. Inside it, I hear individual instruments. Quiet conversation. Papers shuffled. And I drift. My mind wanders away from the curse, and my shoulders unclench. I feel my eyes finally calm, and I smile. The curse is lifted.
Inspired by Mess And Mess And by Douglas Kearney (2015).
Kearney, D. (2015). Mess And Mess And. Noemi Press. [Digital File]. Retrieved from https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4gjTw-2br8bXzJ0bzFwcFp0aFE/view?resourcekey=0-L0vp0SlavGxmmIxBAFIGKg.
Vote For Me
THE Future is limitless - the past a trail of insidious reactions. THUS shall evolve the language of the Future.
The future BREAKS from the past. It constantly ARRIVES, destroying the present.
It leaves the PRESENT somewhere and nowhere. Its language is that of promise and purpose.
Those who FEAR the future are doomed to the limits of the past. EXILED to forgotten times.
And the future rolls on. INDIFFERENT to consequence.
It sweeps away the dust of the past and the inertia of the present to HERALD a politician’s progress.
The light of EQUALITY for all. And the new language of PEACE in our time.
But the promise of the future is always BROKEN by the words of the present.
The future breaks from the PAST. The present breaks the PROMISE of the future.
And the future rolls on.
BUT the Future is only dark from outside. Leap into it - and it EXPLODES with Light.
Like a FIREWORK for the soul, the future delights in darkness, then DISSOLVES into the present.
The darkness of the past, of dark ages and dark times, are PROLOGUE for a future bypassing the present.
Which INVITES us aboard as it both arrives and departs.
Destination BETTER. Expected arrival TOMORROW.
The darkness is left behind as we EMERGE from the tunnel of the past, and into the light.
But the light is brilliant, BLINDING. It sears our eyes faster than we can adapt.
We SHIELD our eyes from the blast, and stagger back in confusion.
The future is too MUCH. Too fast. Too soon.
If only we could go back. If only things were like BEFORE. If only the good old days. If only.
MAKING place for whatever you are brave enough, beautiful enough to draw out of the realized self.
A self which finds its PLACE in the future, but respects its past.
A language which breaks with selves past, BORROWS from their lessons.
And an INTOXICATING future which arrives faster than it departs and draws its plans against us.
A promised embrace which offers SALVATION from the present through placing faith in imagined future.
A future in which your problems, our problems, are GONE.
A future which celebrates Heartlands, Main Streets and BACKBONES.
A future in which THEY are disappeared. A future for good people.
A future WORTH fighting for.
VOTE for me.
Inspired by Aphorisms on Futurism, by Mina Loy (1914)
Loy, M. (1914). Camera Work. January 1914. [Digital File]. Retrieved from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69405/aphorisms-on-futurism.
