by the way, that last post was no slight to shellen - not that anyone outside of my own friends actually reads this, just wanted to say that i like the site, it just made me think a bit.

shellen.com :: friend to woodland creatures

a poem

Soho Loft

i wish
i was young and bohemian and trendy
and lived in a third-floor walk-up loft in Soho
above an indian takeaway
(but not a dirty one , run by actual indians)
and an organic fibrous shit pusher
who offered me spelt grain pita bread
from under a black trench coat

then if
i was young and bohemian and trendy
(and lived in a third-floor walk-up loft in Soho)
i would have lots of 'artist' friends
they would make paintings that i could put on my walls
and poems i could frame
or maybe even have the visual artists
make a visual interpretation
of the poem and then i could
hang it on my wall
and all my other artist friends would be amazed
at my creativity and genuine inspiration

and then if
i was young and bohemian and trendy
my third-floor walk-up loft in Soho
would be kind of a hangout
just a free place
where everyone could jive
freely
and revel in the peace
maybe some of my artist friends would make music
and i could play it on soft fuzzy vinyl
(no cds; it ruins the feng shui)
in my hemp-carpeted living room
and we could all sit in the lotus position
with our spelt grain pita
burning incense
and homeless people

maybe if
i was young and bohemian and trendy
and lived in a third-floor walk-up in Soho
everything that happened in my life would become interesting
Helvetica 10pt would be the font of my life
everything would be special
just because of my soho loft
and i could maybe have some ramen noodles
in little styrofoam containers
in my cupboard
(just to keep things "street")
and i would have a black friend
(to show that i was "urban")
and he would be part of the Nation of Islam
but i would be Okay With That
because i am an accepting bohemian trendy person
maybe he could be named Mohammed
that would be very ironique, n'est-ce pas?

i wish
i was young and bohemian and trendy
and had something to say
yelling out the window
of my third-floor walk-up loft in Soho

but then i look out my window
and there is an overweight lady with fourteen kids
hanging dirty laundry
from a rusty clothes line
and i realize
that Soho is an ocean away
in more than one way

david foster wallace - infinite jest , brief interviews with hideous men
jack kerouac - on the road, the town and the city
gabriel garcia marquez - love in the time of cholera
anthony burgess - a clockwork orange
robert heinlein - time enough for love, stranger in a strange land, the moon is a harsh mistress
john steinbeck - the grapes of wrath
george orwell - nineteen eighty-four, animal farm
t.h. white - the once and future king
j.r.r. tolkien - the hobbit, the lord of the rings
frank herbert - dune
arthur c. clarke - rama II, rendezvous with rama, return to rama
irvine welsh - glue
philip k. dick - do androids dream of electric sheep?
dave eggers - a heartbreaking work of staggering genius

involved

"If you tell a man he's eight feet tall and say it often enough, with your eyes wide and a throb in your voice, he'll start stooping to go through seven-foot doors."

An old world vanished and then there was none.

Robert Anson Heinlein

a great misogynist

a poem

orange reflection in a pasta pot

misunderstood?

no.

evil
never explain by stupidity
what can be adequately explained
by malice

when a pig learns to speak
it is a sad day for the world
the unclean
unwashed masses
should keep their mouths shut
the proletariat
should stay
where they belong
under the thumb of
intellectual power

an orange reflection
crossed arms
stainless steel pot

misanthropy is justified.

well then.

a poem

anachronistic bleeding father figure

When i speak, i sing always and forever your praises
even as you lay in the gutter
leaves covering your pale eyes and dirty mud
licking at your wounds
as though it were a slavering hound
layering its affection as icing on some cold
pale
stiff
cake

Difficulty is this.
life presents its hazards
you address them poorly and you are my teacher
where do i learn if not from you?
how can i overcome your faults?
is it possible
or do i slip as always
into a pit of despair
using words like "anachronistic" without knowing their meaning
and wondering if i should find a dictionary
so that the general body politic would think i was more
than i was
than i am.

Muttering veils of summer skintight sunlight
flee a crooked castle of cruel misfortune
par excellence
do i overuse imagery?
i think not
for as you lay and the downspout of life
pours on your tired face
and you give up on life and beauty

i weep
tears on a plastic computer keyboard
thoughts of death are not real;
mommy don't you know you'll live forever?
but i know better than this
and while you may have left it behind
i cannot speak
i cannot breathe
i cannot open my mouth or close my heart
without singing a (glorious?) hymn of praise
to you
my bleeding, anachronistic, father figure

i know where the sun goes when it hides behind the clouds
it passes
to me
go peacefully into the moonlight for posterity has saved your soul

a rhyming poem
(holy shit)

science fiction hero

On a sunny afternoon of doves
in the forest of springtime loves
of a waning moon on a waxy sky
a dull child in a rocking chair may cry
green paperback pulp fiction on his thigh

Rocket ships and scattering time
(welcome escape from daily grime)
yet when the ships have flown
and the cover is blown
the only life I have ever known

A cardstock crease mutters sadly
the browning wood pulp tatters madly
the questioning astronaut seems wild
to the weak-willed aquiescent child
and for an hour, his sadness is only mild

He was not running or cheering any longer. He was back in the Ministry of Love, with everything forgiven, his soul white as snow. He was in the public dock, confessing everything, implicating everybody. He was walking down the white-tiled corridor, with the feeling of walking in sunlight, with an armed guard at his back. The long-hoped-for bullet was entering his brain.

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

George Orwell, 1903 - 1950

But it was too late for another effort then. For that time it was his destiny to die, or, as some say, to be carried off to Avilion, where he could wait for better days. For that time it was Lancelot's fate and Guenever's to take the tonsure and the veil, while Mordred must be slain. The fate of this man or that man was less than a drop, although it was a sparkling one, in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea.

The cannons of his adversary were thundering in the tattered morning when the Majest of England drew himself up to meet the future with a peaceful heart.

Explicit liber regis quondam regisque future. (The once and future king)

T.H. White, 1906 - 1964

"Well, here at last, dear friends, on the shores of the Sea comes the end of our fellowship in Middle-earth. Go in peace! I will not say: 'do not weep;' for not all tears are an evil."

J.R.R. Tolkien, 1892 - 1973

Florentino Ariza listened to him without blinking. Then he looked through the windows at the complete circle of the quadrant on the mariner's compass, the clear horizon, the December sky without a single cloud, the waters that could be navigated forever, and he said:

"Let us keep going, going, going, back to La Dorada."

Fermina Daza shuddered because she recognized his former voice, illuminated by the grace of the Holy Spirit, and she looked at the Captain: he was their destiny. But the Captain did not see her because he was stupefied by Florentino Ariza's tremendous powers of inspiration.

"Do you mean what you say?" he asked.

"From the moment I was born," said Florentino Ariza, "I have never said anything I did not mean."

The Captain looked at Fermina Daza and saw on her eyelashes the first glimmer of wintry frost. Then he looked at Florentino Ariza, his invincible power, his intrepid love, and he was overwhelmed by the belated suspicions that it is life, more than death, that has no limits.

"And how long do you think we can keep up this goddamn coming and going?" he asked.

Florentino Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights.

"Forever," he said.

Gabriel García Márquez, 1928 -

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

Jack Kerouac, 1922 - 1969

The thoughts of experiences past are for me some of the most profoundly tragic considerations in the world.

The mark of a truly monumental book.

As I near the end, as the pages begin to shift to my left hand and thin out in my right, I begin to feel a thorough melancholy creeping up behind me, unmentioned and unbidden, yet quite present, and as I begin the last few paragraphs, I feel the sinus cavities begin to tingle, the tearducts begin to open, and the hair on the back of my neck stands up. I begin to speed up, feeling the brutal urgency as though these are old friends of mine whom I will never again see, that I cannot say goodbye for they are deaf, and I rush through the last few sentences. I hit that final period, and goose bumps overtake my entire body. I drop the book on the ground and begin to cry, for within those pages I have lived another life and with the closing of that cover I am dead, buried, and trapped in an unquiet grave in a godless universe. Just as the old man weeps for the days of his youth, I weep for the days of others, days I never have and never will experience. When Frodo Baggins waves goodbye to Sam the Gardener as he passes over the sea, I cry as I never have before. When Florentino Ariza speaks the word "forever," three syllables coax from me the tears of a thousand funerals. And when Sal Paradise speaks his final thoughts and thinks of Dean Moriarty, no tragedy in my life can compare to the depth of sadness I feel.

I don't need drama in my life - other people have it in theirs, and that's as good as my own.

There are times when I feel completely overcome by the beauty of the past - when history seems to become too much for me and I just want to lay in the road and weep for the fact that it will never again be recaptured. At midnight on the eve of a full moon, when the night shines as clear as the dawn and the waves slowly erode the shoreline, everything else pales in comparison to the incredible perfection of the moment. Cool autumn air, kept out by a hundred-year-old fur coat, gives the air an astonishing clarity, and I cannot help but understand why technology is useless in the face of the fundamental joy contained in nature. When life is this gorgeous, the concept of melodrama fades away to a distant memory and I want to love the world as much as it loves me. Only in nature can imperfection and chaos be so perfect and orderly, and only in nature can I truly be happy.

Nothing humans have ever created is good. We have raped the very concept of truth itself, corrupting the simplicity and utter certainty inherent within the balances of nature. As a human being, I am fundamentally malicious, for with every 'civilizing' action I take, I bring the race one step further away from true happiness and real peace. By tomorrow morning, all will be forgotten and truth, beauty, all will be reduced to a simple processed concept inherited from a contaminated society. Even by using this computer, this instrument of the pillage of the human soul, I destroy an ideal. Yet right here, right now, in this moment, at 12:48 AM on one Saturday, November 3rd, 2001, there is so much beauty in the world and in my spirit that I weep on this plastic keyboard tray, I cry the tears of a young boy disillusioned, for I know that there are precious few more years like this, and there will be few moments like this in the rest of my life. I have begun a downward spiral into humanity, a goal I once thought was precious but now see as a curse. I am an animal, a sack of meat who can think and act with some measure of logic, and when I attempt to see myself or anyone else as anything more, I am betraying the ideal of truth.

I can sense the feeling leaving me, never again to be regained in this way. No poetry nor words can even hope to express what I have felt for the last two minutes of my life and will never feel again. With each salty drop that falls from the corner of my eye, I have lost something.

I can never speak for what I may feel in the future, but right now I have the most profound certainty that this is not teenage angst, this is not a false sense of drama, this is true humanity, right here, at its basest and most profanely astounding. As I discount true emotions as overwrought drama, I betray love and life itself. Whatever I may say in the future, whatever I have said in the past, know this; that this love is within me, that it is here and it can be felt - perhaps one of these days it will be as open in life as it is right now, but until then, until the clear night of my heart and the breaking dawn of my life, it is hidden and tucked away; hidden and pushed behind layers of nonchalance and morbid cruelty.

i stayed home from school today.

i smell bad and have not showered yet.

i'm presently updating this site from a craptacular pentium 100 that i am "refurbishing" for my aunt ... it is presently displaying in 16 gorgeous colours at a 640x480 resolution and i think i want to KILL!

plus it used to be on a school LAN so it has novell netware installed and i can't reformat because it has no cd-rom drive. i'm currently trying to set her up with a free internet service but since this computer SUCKS so badly the installation fails every time.

sometimes i wish that i could reformat my brain... i'm way more cluttered than any computer.