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I have so many questions. So many conversations “in my head” that have been discussed throughout time, but by who? I don’t know, and the answers still move around half dead somewhere in a forgotten gutter in Manhattan perhaps.
I sit down and speak to myself sometimes, well most of the times because there is no one who is always worth speaking to. When someone is present the rush of interest usually coming from the other person could compare to a empty bottle of whiskey downed by a widow with hallow eyes.
People ask me curiously, aware of the fact that I no longer acquaint myself much what it is that I do with my time. My response is I spend a lot of my time reading, researching, writing, thinking. Most tend to be taken back and look at me with a strange confusion and an even more odd sympathy or pity. This makes me sick. Sometimes I test them and say I watch t.v; the reaction is more normal. This makes me even more sick.
Sometimes I think of writers; well artists in general and how each one of them came to find themselves thrown at an alter with two gates at some point in their lives. The first read “you will risk numerous deaths, horrible madness, & grave moments of delusional insanity at the price of being able to fully analyze and craft your journey; of being able to express. When I arrived I thought hell, I’ll take it. The other gate reads “here you will be safe, you will be warm, please come in. Most people take the 2nd unaware of the fine print underneath that reads “you will always be dead here but you will never know it”.
Writer’s discover all the hell’s of this life also of the spiritual world and even the most gruesome of them all find some sort of secret throbbing peace before their final gates.
I hated reality with a fury that would drive a mother to murder her children. I hated the way the sun made my eyes feel in the morning. I hate the pain in my back and the sour feeling in my stomach when I did not get a good nights rest, and I usually didn’t. I despised how everyone drank coffee in the morning and I hated I hated American coffee even more. I hated the miserable unbearable routine that everyone succumbed to and that I was apart of that numbed madness. The smell of office buildings and supermarkets nauseated me. Officers and any kind of authority at that made me cringe. The humidity during the month of August in south Florida was enough to make me wish I was dead. The heat trapped in my car after hours of sitting in the sun and how the hot temperature of my steering wheel made me want to cut my hands off.
I could not stand Valentines day, and I usually never had one. Everyone expected a gift or a card or some of those disgusting heart candies that say the most pathetic generic sayings on them. I could never wait for winter to come while I lived drearily throughout my days in the horrid Floridian sun and when winter finally did come and I had worn each one of my coats that usually had little stains on them from the year prior I could not stand it because showers became unbearable due to my entire family lines belief that the heater causes illness and that it was a complete waste of money.
I could not stand the worlds infatuation with technology. I could not stand that most people were so blind. Car AC’s made me sick and when I rolled the windows down I had to listen to some far fetched crap playing on the radio in a nearby car that made my ears bleed iron. I hated all the heat and wearing short sleeves only to end up sweating. I hated shaving and always wished to move to France where people understood that body hair is not something to judge, we all fucking have it.
When I woke up early my eyes were usually swollen for whichever unknown cause, they were also extremely sensitive accompanied by one obvious lazy eye. My nails irritated me, my skin irritated me, my hair irritated the fuck out of me, the clothes I bought irritated me. I wanted to burn my entire closet most o the time and throw my bed out and just drown myself deeper into my misery in one of my drawers or the cabinet underneath my bathroom sink. I wanted to wrap myself as closely into my blackness as I possibly could in a tiny contained space where no one could reach me or assume where I am.
The only thing I never wanted to destroy was my bookshelf. My anger never even tampered with the idea of causing it any damage. Sometimes I would sit on my floor and just stare at it with a strange pride. It was the only thing that made me feel okay a lot of the time, the only thing that made me feel some sort of abstract warmth.
I hated food most of the time and the way it made my body feel stale and rigid after I ate it. I would picture what I consumed coming out of my pores. It was always a horrible scene in my mind. Then there were times when I loved it, when it was raw fresh and uncooked and with an on the go routine that became extremely complicated so then I hated the fact that I lived in a metropolitan area and had to deal with those feelings every time I ingested something.
I disliked pharmacies and pharmacists. The boredom that raped their faces, their crude and stale niceness, the numbness that plagued them due to endless hours being surrounded by pills that made people more sick and benefited our corrupt medical system.
I smoked yet the smell of it on my hands made me insane. I was not cut out for relationships. I hardly understood them. What I knew best were short lived fits of passion that consisted of no reality or grounds however I longed for stability but simply could not bare the thought of a brutal routine. The everyday phone calls, the “Hey baby, how are you? what are you doing today? when am I going to see you? All that made me very uneasy and when it started to happen I became anxious to run for my life.
I disliked feeling needed, I only wanted to feel wanted. How can someone depend on me for their happiness I thought, when I can’t seem to find mine. I knew that it was not fair. They all hardly understood they wanted me to depend on them for happiness and I simply never believed in codependent happiness. It’s an easy way out and I never relied on those routes. If I did I would not be here writing this, trust me.
I broke many hearts and that did not make me happy either at a certain point. So I refused intimate invitations with promises of some form of serenity for awhile, but that did not work. They all seemed not to care about the consequences as long as the mystery became more strange and alive. So I broke more hearts. It was not intentional. They just did not understand. Some ended up hating me, some who are like me with bad timing understood, some became destroyed, some wished I was dead, some still have not given up, few did not care and that was always strangely comforting but not nearly as comforting as the ones who understood. I never made any promises. I imagined, I wrote, I fantasized; but I never made promises.
Given when I did want to reach out and dive deeper I either got my heart broken, bad timing, or unfortunate circumstance always seemed to make it’s was through. I had my share of pain which is why I am the way I am. I am thankful for those who gave me those experiences even though at times I refuse to accept that. Right now I’m giving the word my all. No more keeping secrets from my language.Here it goes.
I disliked rainy Sundays and sunny ones even more so. Water tasted like iron and I got the hint of chlorine when I concentrated. I smell and taste a lot more than your average person I had this confirmed by a doctor. That did not help my sensitivity. You see I was all kinds of wrong in all kinds of wrong ways.
Writers enjoy alcohol more than most and I was no different. We write to escape and we drink to forget. It was all about getting as far away from this prison of a life as much as I possibly could. A bottle of wine would give me more comfort than many things and along with pen and paper the three made the ultimate company. They all just listened.
Glass cups bothered me, flat plates bothered me, ice bothered me, people bothered me, trends bothered me, zombies disguised as people bothered me. Remembering that I was a part of the human race was enough to make me scream bloody murder in the canned goods isle in the supermarket.
Sometimes I simply felt like I was rotting away, this would last more than a week sometimes; then I would see something that changed me like children helping each other without being told to, or a genuine smile from a complete stranger, or the wind whispering a peaceful poem to me and then everything would be okay again for a little, there would be a flickering hope in a black world.
Then I would get up with a lazy eye, the sun would blind me while I was stuck in traffic as I sat in silence because the radio made me feel more dreadful and my cd’s always went missing because I took so little care of them. I would deliberately train myself to be irresponsible with material things so that I never became attached to them and fell into the ridiculous norm. Except of course my books and small reminders from good nights; things like wine corks, dead flowers, and notes. I would walk into work and receive at least 5 fake good mornings at that point it would all come crashing down again, the reality of my life. I would sit at my desk staring out of the window to a horrible view of construction on the highway while my manager made lousy jokes that made me imagine a scene where some invisible force was banging his head into the wall, blood everywhere, all over everyone, the office would get evacuated and I would go home happy; I would smile and he would assume that I thought his jokes were slightly comedic and a slur of pride would come over him. If only he knew what I was thinking. I would wish he did.
I have discovered over the years that one of the things I despise most is the sound of unwanted voices, it twisted my nerves around in a deranged madness. The sound of the news reporting a dog being stuck in a tree while thousands were starving to death and the sound of t.v commercials also did the same to me. All brutal reminders of how mindless people are.
Simply: I hated reality. I disliked practically everything about it. Every second of the real world fell on top of my head like a drop of boiling water and there was no way to escape it.
So I wrote about a world that seemed so far out of reach and there I found refuge in ideas of flowers growing from the snow where the sun and the moon would pro create between two bodies that bled in passion
I wrote about love that Juliet would be envious of. I wrote about the kind of pain that ran wild through Fanny;s chest upon receiving the news that Keats has passed.
I wrote about a utopia of secret languages shared silently between two women who didn’t understand what they were feeling who escaped reality in the realm of catastrophic art.
A world where rain forests bloomed from the rib cage and veins are rivers of honey and milk, where empires of magnolias kneel to kiss your hand, where loyalty lies far beyond the coffin and orchids run barefoot towards you to kiss your feet.
I escaped from reality late at night in a poem and forgot about where I really was not realizing that by doing so I made myself more delirious with the thought of reality. The more extravagant I wrote the more I hated my life, and the harder reality was to accept. Revising my poetry was pure torture for it instilled the boredom of my cosmic weariness. Pain was one of the few things that still made me feel alive( I would have rather had it be painful to breathe than to not feel my chest at all) So I destroyed and destroyed and destroyed until there was almost no humanity left within me. Until my soul began to yell warnings in my ears during my long hours of sleep. I had began to sedate myself with sleep for it was the closest I could get to being lifeless. My dreams had went away. I was nearly gone and I stopped writing. My poems began to tarnish my experiences further they began to tarnish life more so as a whole. For nothing in the present could live up to par with the language on my paper; the exaggerated world I had built on the shores of my own fantasy world.
I knew I had to do something and wondered long about it. How would I learn to understand and distinguish both my world and the real world without tampering with either or mixing them. I decided to do what I never thought I would do. To write of the reality of things, simple things that I go through everyday; that we all go through. I have waited so long for something not knowing what it was and perhaps this might be my cure perhaps it wont; everything is worth a shot. Above I wrote about things I never dared to write. To shed away on paper in order to rid myself of so many things I must learn to extract them from the inside.
Nothing will understand these basic yet complex frustrations the way language will for language judges no one and accepts all. I came to poetry to escape and now I shall come to poetry to shed and accept.
-Rune
