Madness

In the classical age, for the first time, madness was perceived through a condemnation of idleness and in a social immanence guaranteed by the community of labor. This community acquired an ethical power of segregation, which permitted it to eject, as into another world, all forms of social uselessness. It was in this other world, encircled by the sacred powers of labor, that madness would assume the status we now attribute to it. If there is, in classical madness, something which refers elsewhere, and to other things, it is no longer because the madman comes from the world of the irrational and bears its stigmata; rather, it is because he crosses the frontiers of bourgeois order of his own accord, and alienates himself outside the sacred limits of its ethics. -M. Foucault

The Shape of Autumn (thinking)

i've tried to write in a form similar to those before me, but i have not felt impressed. Or i have not been impressed upon to endure the particularity of a craft so neatly devised that i must address each word with careful precision -as if i were wrenching together a plane that will one day carry passengers. Lives are not at stake, nor are dreams. No matter what we read, we bear not the notes that were strung, but the melody we can sing to: rhythm and blues. Maybe a weakness of mine, but form does not represent itself well enough in my state of mind, and i cannot control it like i do the particularities of language. Sure, the overarching thought generated from inside of my head to my fingers, then unto my paper with pen fantastically describes those relationships that ricochet through and through my readers' imaginations, memories, and current surroundings, but what form is there to name of that situation? The scattering of light. A fracture of sight. We are blind, and in blindness we live out our lives, says he who created those words to be emulated. Then again, what sight are we discussing? i have long since begun to write in linear lines, stanzas of numerical meters, maybe eight or nine syllables acting like piano keys: the ebony. i don't agree with ivory, nor do i pronounce it correctly. You see, it's a rebellious act -placeholding in places where people don't roam. There are no forms to accommodate the "Starbucks" cafe or the actions the organization itself has done. No meter representing my favorite bookstore, nor the sound that plays overhead. No syllabic accents to match the conversation outside the Berkeley comic book shop (men making deals with cards, books, and child's toys, then imagining themselves mounting the womens' softball team that's in town). Where does the first accent in their language occur? -at the words that comprise the word "fuck," or the sound of their thumbs riding along the inside of their jeans, just at the line delineating their abdomen. And their plausible wet dreams? Do they deserve a virile scene, pictured with words like "unbuttoning," "lips," and "foreskin"? Frames are the rules of our visionary. Margins, the meandering sentries. And until we develop a "form" that imitates correspondence, no matter, writing will outlast creativity.

Mannerism

I used to drink my dinner milk like a college student chugging beer.
My Father always made me finish everything on my plate, including
my milk. And so, with the exponentially intensifying sensation
warning me that my time playing video games may be limited to
no more than a few more hours after dinner, and one hour prior to
bed time (nightmares), I cocked my head back, swallowed
the calcium of my youth in a mere three gulps, asked to be excused
from the table, where upon I received a stare; those eyes
that could kill cattle if they needed, and I darted into the living room,
to a spot two feet away from the television, picked up my controller,
and sunk into a world that was outside of my physical self, and inside
of those dream-like walls; thoughts, my vacationing location: space
outside time and materials, labor, oxygen, relativity and society.
I guess you could say that I indulged milk, or maybe its slickness.

For the Birds

I have come to a place that, though filled with the refuse from my predecessors, has born an asphaltic child; a pile of rubbish that looks in all directions and disgorges a sense of time and place. Not rebounded by result, nor thrown into the purgatorial, pleasurable guilt of its peers, this youth in revolt; a revolt of inactivity and a passing, has taken punctuationalism to a new high: devastationism. To cherish those things of which the child has created, and not those of which have been generated by what has preceded their life has no real significance (meaning is objectionable, and surprisingly, objectless). As if the garbage of one generation's procreation could not compete with the pacification of those following. There exists (if "one" or a "thing" may) an irony in appreciation: a natural subjugation, not subjection, or at least in a positive sense anyway, of an inner working: the mechanics that constitute our minds, or motives, and our maturation, if there be any of the three.

You see, we are punctual by way of patience. One must be patient with him or herself to preserve a state of mind akin to time. We sit, we walk, we stand, we lie. (Although there be no pun intended, there's no way around the ambiguity. We are liars, and we lie in the froth of our trails, whether they smolder or not.) We wait. But only because there exists (there's the word again) something or other to be waited on. Without exchange, we have nothing to live for. Even in religion, there is an exchange. Nothing is free for purchase, and yet nothing is free from intentional desire. We do things only because we desire to do them. Not to say that there are immoral implications in the doing, but one must recognize that incentive rules our lives, at least while they continue to be lived out.

Which brings us back to time. The child of our fear, the apocalyptic timetable that determines whether or not success has been achieved in the doing from our birth until death. In essence, what I'm saying is that time, like all things we, the human population, have devised, is subject to perception: not such a surprise, right?

We understand that time passes differently depending on activity, or companionship, or solitude, but ever do we understand time to be governed by those same people who are under it? It does not standstill, but only because nothing stands still. And like waiting, we recognize most clearly in those moments of exercised patience, time-lapse. And although I previously mentioned place as being harmoniously associated with time, place has no meaning, much like everything else. But again, this is no surprise. Postmodernists have "discovered" for years that life is only subject to those stipulations identified with. For instance, Gertrude Stein, E. E. Cummings, Michael Foucault, Frederic Jameson, and Rosalind Krauss. The depletion of the meaningful human: a human that owns location for a specific time. And this humanity, the neglected child born from those same worldly neglecting biologists, will only be mildly disappointed when the sun turns black.

Lesson Learned

Well the truth it fell so heavy,
like a hammer through the room,
that I could choose another over her.
You always said I was an actor, baby.
-Guess in truth you thought me just amateur.

That you never saw the signs,
that you never lost your grip,
oh, come on now,
that's such a childish claim.
Now I wear the brand of traitor.
Don't it seem a bit absurd.
When it's clear I was so obviously framed.
When it's clear I was so obviously framed.

Now you act so surprised
to hear what you already know.
And all you really had to do was ask.
I'd have told you straight away.
All those lies were truth,
and all that was false was fact.

Now you hold me close and hard,
but I was like a statue at most,
refusing to acknowledge you'd been hurt.
Now you're clawing at my throat
And you're crying all is lost,
But your tears they felt so hot upon my shirt.
But your tears they felt so hot upon my shirt.

Well the truth it fell so heavy,
like a hammer through the room,
that I could choose another over her.
You always said I was an actor, baby.
-Guess in truth you thought me just amateur.

Was it you who told me once,
now looking back it seems so real,
that all our mistakes are merely grist for the mill.
So why is it now after I had my fill,
that you steal from me the sorrow that I've earned?
Shall we call this a lesson learned?

-Ray LaMontagne

September

I haven't felt poetic lately. I'm unsure of whether this feeling pertains to the landscape, temperature, or even the amount of clouds loftily sitting in the sky. It's strange to think of what the mind is capable of accomplishing, creating, yet it needs just the correct amount of inspiration to proceed... progress... The life, short, beckons a man so peculiarly to be great, to be one so uniquely driven and successful in so many ways it becomes depressive and relentless... as the days build up, weeks build up, years build up. I try. I try not to think about it as often anymore. Whether one has acquired wealth, fame, knowledge -through experience, suffering, contemplation, fulfillment, well, I'm unsure of whether one genuinely wishes to fill themselves with a cup of their favorite drink. Imagine how that would taste near the very end. Our cups need always be unfilled, our minds and opinions, indefinitely open. It does not take long to form an opinion, an assumption, yet it takes years, decades even, to justify a choice, and even then, those are ultimately re-analyzed over again by our successors.