all it takes to be complete is to exist.

the totality of reckoning is instant now, consummate awake forever. transcendental loneliness startles the cusp of the moment; brings a weary look of seeming before acting, knowing before understanding; and understanding it’s now and it’s alone and it’s always, do you know… shatters like glass. growing pains and breakthroughs. so let me be my hyster let me have my time (a kind of necessary only consequential madness…) let me go swallow my hypnotics let me lie down with my knife; heartbeat transfigure the patter slow, i drag along a life of wrongness, because life is wrong. a wholesome inertia of coldness clear, and we all have insides, which are our escapes; we all have minds, which we were made to change and throw-away. bodies neglect to damage the life we suppose. but we can’t–knowing less, i sing the wind; living for free, living for nothing, in the mystery, i realize (everything is its own explanation only.) unlettered metaphysics in the dark. with insight like a star shooting through the shadow; like a blast of hot water in the face. stricken, i throw open the window and feel remorse. as if i were god i look at the sky and my body stares back, but i remain where i am. and all i need is as far away… together with the salty smell of readiness, and the gavel-beginning of motion, of turning; dance without a dancer, design of the universe, or dizzy beginning of time. endless before my sentence; tracing the arc of days, i’ve come to run where the sun rises, to catch up with it where it lands. and stay the night; to live the whole through. chew on faulty regret, fingertips of Perhaps. and an afterword slow-walking of thoughts, the feeling-arrest like afterthoughts; migraines of yesterday scar today… it’s important to remember how to content yourself, distantly; to be of no use to anyone. to appreciate life only where it accedes to the senses, reason is light, sound, memory; noise is hurt. intelligence stings even as touch is revelation, sharp and hard and sudden. and the body itself but a slow-to-last meeting, the soul an eternal teething, old gnashing of desire; bloody grind of nothing against the something that shouldn’t be. the only way out is to eroticize everything; make grief gelastic, the creepy glorious, fear fantastic. the only way to out-pretend the pretending that is life is to outgrow it; not by accepting, or negating, but sublimating, transmuting; maturity is what you call psychotic. the only way to make sense of life is to elect not to live, even as you dress for the wrong season, make funny faces and bang your fists. life is an obsessive-compulsive disorder. lately i found a new look in my eyes it’s kind of infectious, kind of dangerous, kind of frozen, haunted; painted on i notice it in reflections and in the reflected stare of other people; it’s like sadness, but without despondency–a kind of incredulity, complicated of vague dismay and i push away from life, as from a meal i’ve already enjoyed too much i still my blood followdown thud; my heart doesn’t know where its been./ Published October 2nd, 2019 on Expat Press. Read on MLC June 3rd, 2022