around town looking to rent a place for a bit

i dont read books about anything real
it doesnt work anymore.
gone are the days of seduction
by ideas and images full of promise,
the long nights of transcendence through
other people's transendence that they sold to me,
that i downloaded or stole.
there is no more curious boy adolescing
in the tiny room above the war.
he might be older now but such things dont matter
since he forgot and we're all insane.

a cigarette is the couch is the receipt is the mirror is taking out the trash is the turning page the picture frame is the waning smile is
the paralysis of many tiny futile and
impotent beliefs
fragile as wax combs.
and just as the wax comb is the most labor intensive and delicate thing the bee makes
so is my own concern for life
as something long and particular.
what do i care about?
ask the tree it might say nothing
it might say something you think it should say
ask me and it might one thing or
nothing as well.
yes, it's me. yes, i am more than a bowl of ambition
trying to push my own smile out into the world
insisting that it's it. it's love. it's worthwhile.

what is it that i dont know and
will it save me?
this is the question under the dirt
for the deeper-digger and
not for the one who stops satisfied to be satisfied with that they've found at the surface.
this is the question for the one who lives upon the edges of edges.

one day the world is the world
the next it is not.
it crumples and shifts like the idea that it is.
why my nose is bleeding
why it feels like this
why i write and go on
these are not things i know.

be careful, i don't need you.

the rebirth

anything and everything is possible. never settle for anything but love. you deserve nothing but pure love and admiration, and be commited to giving the same, seeing the warrior and angel in everyone. everything is a sign... the world is our friend. trust and have faith. overcome the hurdles of beingness to see the splendor all about you, and remember to play. it's an infinite game.

live in your million senses--touch, feel, taste, make love! to everything! run wild, think hard, be ferocious and unapologetically sincere! scurry like a nymph that doesn't know the rules. read whatever books you enjoy--it's all the same story. dance, make music, flirt, breathe deep, be present and engaged, roll and flow and run--it's all the same timeless, sensual experience of your given, beautiful world. allow yourself to get turned on, TURN ON to the world around you! HAVE SEX with everything. SEX is innocent and it is magical, it is PLAY with your whole body and SOUL.

listen carefully -- everything is speaking and trying to befriend you. we are all each other's beautiful, powerful angels... here to fulfill our roles, find our strengths, and heal each other.

THOSE VOICES? they're real... there's no such thing as crazy... there's only GIFTED, having the gift of acute and unique sensitivites that whisper and guide.
so,,
trust, listen. hear God,
be a heretic,

and don't forget to BURN. . .

I'm writing again!

Hi, I just opened up the computer and started to type, and this came out - it might be a little dry...

I just came across a passage in Gravity's Rainbow succinctly describing, but only in passing (unfortunately), an idea that I’ve long held:

“She knows her own precarious thinness, her leukemia of soul, and she teases with it. You must want her, but never indicate it--not by eyes or move--or she will clarify, dead gone as smoke above a trail moving into the desert, and you’ll never have the chance again.”

In this case, the speaker (thinker, I suppose) sees a physical thinness, and associates with it a mental, emotional, spiritual, really just total overall thinness in the subject. It’s clear too from context and from the quote that he holds this against her, although her powerlessness is certainly not deliberate.
He thinks she teases with it. She is taking advantage of her lack of power, really flipping around the whole arrangement. As if there is strength at the rock bottom - because he wants her, because showing he wants her would be too strong, she would blow away, although interestingly enough Pynchon also uses the word ‘clarify’, as if there would be something left, something dead.

So she knows that a person might want her, and she knows that her power is that they cannot show they want her, for fear of destroying her (or at least their connection to her). She might not, however (although this is dubious), know that this particular person wants her. At the very least there must be doubt, in her mind, as to whether he wants her. The moment this doubt clarifies, she clarifies as well.

I’ve often felt a similar feeling while sharing space with people I desire. As if the possibility for sexual connection is always there, in fact is real (however tenuous), until the moment when I express my desire explicitly to its object.

Maybe the Beatles knew it too: “Hey, you’ve got to hide your love away”.

Until I read the quote above though, I never connected the idea to powerlessness in the person. I always saw myself at a disadvantage. After all, it was I who had to hide, and the outcome was never up to me, right? It must be admitted that every once in a while someone did clarify into love, after all, even if most admissions of desire ended poorly for me. But seeing only my own disadvantage hides the greater picture, that my disadvantage comes from the same situation as above. The girl in the quote’s powerlessness is analogous to the systematic oppression of female-bodied people worldwide, and any power I perceived the many objects of my desire to hold over me is analogous to the power the girl holds in the quote - the power of death, the power of a last resort, the power of having nothing to lose.

as close as a heartbeat, as vast as the horizon

****blissed out****

contact improv festival at a hot springs in the sierras. Every day I transform, yesterday into an electric red earth and today into a self-existing white mirror.

I leave my body while dancing and feel sensations through the body of my partner.

A snake lives inside me which coils, writhes, enlivens, scares and initiates me into the knowledge of good and evil, all polarities and challenges... which ultimately all go back to the same source, the garden,

the flowering of human evolution.

What are you paying attention to? Do you use your enlivened body, your awakened neurons, to wake up your mind? Imagine yourself as a ship, piercing through space as you move, leaving ripples in your wake. How does your existence in the world change as you pay attention to the forward movement vs. the leaving moment? The being moment?

We are surrendering. We are rising up.

if you feel called, thecosmicrat.blogspot.com
gratitude.

trash can emeritus - eh eh eh eh pick pick pick pick pics on the internet - like we own the inner net - like we dunk that better bet - and if we like it we can keep it - all the twinks and tweakers surround the speakers and if you put your hand to floor you might find you wanna speak it - we saw the hurricane when it was coming cross the lake and the lifeguards called us in - photocopier emeritus - and anything we do, well i don't think it merits this but - go ahead and try it you should prolly try it - and if we like it we can keep it - and the people who aren't going to berlin on saturday night are moving to berlin for some crazy reason they can't explain - and everybody's shouting in german - and we are clutching each other - even the quiet part of the night that's just the wind and us in torn in two by the drunk boys and hobo bros and other bros - sure all the bros - and the street lamps make everything look suspended in orange jello - and we say oops and recuse ourselves like it's not our fault - like it happened to us - but our faces hurt from laughing and we run away from home - oops - and this week middle school teachers and grandmothers and professors emeritus die all within in our near vicinity and we write screeds in the woodchips of the playground with our piss - people are here for a year - for the next two and a half weeks - the people who say they are visiting might never actually show up - and you're probably moving in five or six months - so we all use the same towel - and say what we mean when it's past eight and we've been drinking since two - because somebody thinks we must own the inner net - and everybody thinks the other ones are hogging all the fun - you must be - we must be - if other people think we're having fun - we must be.

to my knowledge there exist no archetypes of 'the eternal girl'
such as there exist for peter pan and little princes

i am determined to create one

silence is dangerous when you make it talk

in a boy's body that pretends it's ready to be something else:

i am not a bird or
a tree that stands in everything
loving its own life for a long time.
i dont know how to be that way
though apparently i keep trying.
im not the immaculate berry riot
in the garden
satisfied to do what it does and
no more.
oh, but right, we read in books now
how everything is everything else
dont fear, we'll be reborn
as a leaf or a rock.

fuck that i dont want to live for that
because i cant
if i cant live as a brain heart with
ten fingers ten toes i cant be the mushrooms
or the rain.
i cant be the rock. i'd let us all down.
we're learning how we'll all heal by
growing organic vegetables on stolen land.
it's the new salvation.
and if i cant have faith in that then it's my fault.
im told the tides are coming through
and we're all gonna change into better things
we'll be more like before but different.
ive heard that death is also different and that
people are waking up that
it's only a matter of time until
folks renounce their stupors
and shit-filled pinatas and
we'll forget that we're boring and unloved.

i love the bird overhead , the one that dips
down from endless grey mute
but i cant be that bird and i dont know a thing
about flying. it cant see me down here
through the panes of glass
among the poems i write to save myself
each one less and less effective.
i guess what i am saying is
ive hit the ground.
im against it.
the only thing preventing me from becoming it
is my beating heart and time.

how can you ask me to dream in the style that you do?

your world and mine are not the same, despite what mary says.

i dream to wake up and just find some berries.

i know magic is real and i know a lot already about love.

i am nervous about being a puppet to an idea.

be it love.

why?

i distrust the glorification of life,

fetishization of eye contact and the truth

i wont put up with it,

the aggrandizers.

it is not endless bliss and cosmologically ordained.

it's not seamless light. and

i dont always know how to hold what it is you have given.

do you fear me then?

Here's why I can't leave Chicago.

Lake Michigan is my o(w)nly site for prayer
July August
my frenzied festival of religious ecstasy
water warm enough to wade into
and let slip
murmured, stored up slights
at night
the edge of the world seeming
the land dropping off
and me far enough out
that I see no one

and the things I speak to the lake
it holds
today I beg
to be strong
not because I have learned not to get hurt
but because I am simply strength
and I apologize
the cigarette smoke the only burnt offering I can produce

long walk there
long walk home
bearing the penance of walking alone in the dark
bearing the heavy looks from those not alone
bearing the lashes of concrete on my bare feet

Lake Michigan holding me
and all my whispered promises
vows dropped in its terrible depths

and if I could I would drink the whole lake down
but the summer storms
have pushed the river beyond its boundaries
and shit has washed up in my temple
my eyes swell with bacteria every time I put my head in
but I can't leave
because the lake knows everything about me