Deployment

A retinue of pompous moneylenders coalesce around rule-honourers, citizens, average joes and janes dutifully enduring the maddening maze of directing blips of lights, painted lines, squawks from televisions, looming grimaces of controlling consternation by the multifarious Uniformed, to reach spiritual spaces the dimensions of a tictac where more briskly ushered pretenses to consensual authority say when to eat and by which manner food shall be obtained. The moneylenders call them "jobs". They hire people to call them jobs (the job of telling people they have jobs or should and what they are). These jobs are bound by a web of contractual gobbledygook bound, in turn, to mystify; that is the point. Lobotomized by moneylenders, con-artists--they give themselves other names, ones usually requiring the breadth of a medium-sized mid-western library to pronounce; and that, too, is the point--warrens of domiciles, quaint and to the purpose of feedlotting the lot of us save those whose names demands the endless decimation of forests to pronounce, are erected in woe, with sweat, dreams bloodied and false to the blood dripping from them; and then in the small crescendos and declensions of life the lives of the swelling biomass of our species pulses forth, moneylenders riding the sludge of their decaying bodies like surfers on high.

Then something happens. Beginning from as simple a spark as a campfire brings, never guttering, accelerating, though in defiance of a moneylenders' natural law, never consuming, the bright and forever cordoned guff of one child renders forfeit the flabby deceit with the tiniest cry ejected voluntarily from its chest, a single act of causeless, non-contextualized sound shattering too many miles of historical edifices to the disjointed fragments they meant to deny themselves to be. The cry, the allborn wail of insistent justice, bears the unique meaning of the babe's own name, never squandered, economized ubiquitously only to itself, bereft of bequeathing and ending where it began. The mysterious sound echoes eternally, forming the reality of a world begun again. The moneylenders, trying to sequester, nurture and restore their dissolving bones, cry "no, eleutheria or fate cannot coincide!" Soft notes not unlike the gods nodding imperceptibly at dandelions or galaxies swirling, make piquant with meaning, by sound, the sound of the babe's, how to resolve with or without death, either state the same as the other, the confounding dissatisfaction of waking up while remaining asleep; that is, having a job.

Sunken libretto

Infernal Louisianan sun simmering my skin, I dropped two sacks of refuse into the industrial green bin receptacle, one of two tucked into corners of our building complex. Sentinels of sanitation, the waft of their stink barely touches your nose as you walk away. But enough to dispel any illusions.

Heading towards the mailbox in anticipation of finding therein a meagre symbol of coin designed to stave off physical insecurity another day for me and mine, a tiny lizard scrambled past my feet with that skittish, undulatory motion that reminds you of a frog's hop and snake's slither simultaneously. The gecko--I suppose--made towards the gate to the pool, pausing every few paces, stockstill, to assess whether my foot sought its spine. The sun was a molten ball concealed sufficiently by cumulus fluff to let me unblinkingly spot a hawk sweeping high to my left. The hawk circled;  the gecko held that ancient fearful pose.

Was the creature aware that its real threat lay high? Did that fleet whip of mottled green grow taut with adrenaline at the right danger? Lumbering, I could never catch it; inedible to me for all impractical purposes, it could have leap between my teeth without harm coming to it; yet standing there electrified by the feeling of deja vu over a scene that had been played endless times in every squirming cove of life; as certain of my own  heightened awareness at the timeless little episode was I that the small beast knew nothing of its position within the web of life; no telltale cue rendered its fear of me inert; the hawk could have snatched and swallowed it without its twitching a vertebrae.

Music, a murmur of strings, crazily struck the air from a nearby apartment for a half-beat, never concluded. My muscles slackened. I walked to the mailbox.

And I wondered: would the same myopia end me, too? Would I know, finally, that I had cannibalized myself?

GFYM

A pilled morning air daftly suffuses the bones of the wood constructing the balcony supporting me. Generous molecules give their frenzied energy in expressive love for those that are mine, ladled on and in this being. They support me no less than I them, this slab of errant urge, as frenzied, without hope of knowing a state ungenerous.

There is a line reserved for mystics and death for writers that you never want to cross if the latter's your deal.

Eggs infiltrate plate, ape responds by knifing it and ingesting. Ingesting, ape gurgles, belches, moves forward a few steps, a few steps more, a yard becomes a mile, energy has accrued and been dispersed.


And I'm fairly sure this is what we're supposed to call life in the biological sense, and in the sense to which capital has reduced it. A mere nay-yay-saying bit of sallying 'round the pole we imagine feeds us. The pole is "physical security"; its price, the feral opposite, blood-thirsting eyes in the middle of the night, by streaming dream or the hateful shard of paper claiming another bit of you.

Denouement.

Resumption.

This afternoon

An iniquitous Gordian Knot, self-indulgent and strangulating, is the desire to unburden my metaphysical suffering when the nature of that hurt hurts you, casting a shadow in your life that darkens mine again and in turn. The "desire" isn't the culprit, really: the psychological mechanisms of retreat, defense, biological imperatives, a clutch of factors puzzling themselves into coherence, a yearning for completion or truth or another name to valorize and justify this urgency in me--these are all co-conspirators in drawing out words from my mouth that silence the good mood between us. 

Whatever "it" is, "it" is not our material circumstances, nor anything pitted about my love for you, nothing wrong or false or unhappy. "It" is the morbid nature in me, and the inability to gain pacification through anything but myself. 

There's nothing tarnished in this course of us. I mean you no pain and seek none. I'd ask you to forgive me for airing my feelings this afternoon, which while not transgressing all principles did violate the emphatically Catholic one I believe: don't hurt anyone.  

Traum

Woe the fellow who thinking that he has it all understood concerning the person lying beside him, when snug in his belief that he's privy to all of the inner workings of that being, slumbers with the utmost peace; for that man will find himself awakening one day, whether he sleeps or not, to the sudden awareness that within this trusted sanctuary for his thoughts, the place he thought to lay his unearthly and earthly goods aside safely so that he could repose, are chambers unknown to him, passages where she alone treads and which map she keeps secret from all but herself. 

And then pearls before swine revisited. Then a brief nod of acknowledgment to a status secondary to box, image, paint, the rank commonality of the sleek bourgeois. 

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty": the first law of thermodynamics

The coordination of economic policy honed to a simple ordinance prohibiting smoking within our apartment coerced me minutes ago onto the baking balcony where I considered the vast orgy of absorption, release and re-absorption, that smorgasborg of unending appetite engendered by photosynthesis, which we genuflecting hole-mushers have as the piquant sum of our earthly delight. On a baldly energetic level, to live is to consume and return; and it tickles us. We eat and rut and die and are regurgitated after bacteria and fungi redistribute our molecules into the soil for solar-eaters to feed and thence become feed. Obliterating a few dozen abstract categorizations leaves us with the winking reality that cannibalism proves the irreducible material principle of existence against which linguistic niceties have no gainsay if truth be told, burped, highlighted in the sky by the northern lights or L.A smog, etc.  The fork that lifts a glob of carcass to our mouths and the one stacking sacks of carcass onto trucks for distribution are with a little imagination the same; let that imagination extend to a principle: differentiation can only be in form, never essence. Form becomes the physical articulation of essence. When kissing my lover's nape, rapt with the soft heat, this transference of ardor, the desire to bite sometimes overwhelms me, sensibly so; I wish to consume her, assimilate her molecules. A supercilious creature whose impatience would meld art and essence, in the roundabout cells burrowing and surfacing her, I would have everything in one tripping glut. But devouring the form disperses the essence elsewhere and then all forms, failing to be speak her, would grow grey and one-dimensional. I would preserve her form above all others for the love of a satisfied sigh protracted in perfect, punctuated beats until I'm, quite against my will, made anew.