Be new to avoid ennui.
Do not track linear paths:
Think sideways, backwards,
upside down, exist laterally.
Accept contradictory truths:
they are not just possible
they are frequently inevitable
and if you haven’t found one
in your search, keep going,
friend, until you have.
Let no one’s truth define yours.

Be quiet, not stupid,
be rarely edible and
hoarse from joi de vivre.
Be invisible, not loud,
be a hoax until
you are undeniable.

I find that twenty four years later,
I am still screaming while blind,
running down an escalator
and the act of opening my eyes
does not wake me anymore, I am asleep
sleepwalking a pattern, pilot-less,
a train on an incomplete rail.

I am not looking for who I am,
I am just looking to wake up, open my eyes
to the first primal light whence we came,
and for Moksha, I would like to stay there,
or, never reaching those fabled stars,
drift to the fringes of the unknown,
step outside the box that confined,
and then look in, a scholar of the universe
with the old concerns resigned
to lazy academic observation.

Here, there are mirages of control, and
motivations of dreams control the waking man,
walking him at night, unaware.

Far from learning from our mistakes,
I find that practice makes more of them.
I find speech does not serve its purpose,
by giving myself the ability to communicate,
I have made it easier to garble sentences.
The Lost and rarely found department of translation,
where very feeling means less because
there are so many of them floating
like dead fish on everyone’s pond.
No one wants to touch them
or even talk about them, but
the birds feed heartily on the water.

This tragedy seems so terribly unfair when roses
are so much prettier than instruments on planes,
every petal a miniature piece of God’s own skin.

I need to walk down to the roadside florist if I can
get out of this sweaty blanket into this chilly weather
and find one of these shitty roses so I can dismember
its petals one by one. I must disembowel this litany if I can
she loves me, she loves me not, she wants me extinct
bred out of this world for convenience,
just like the forgotten smell of those roses.

The tragedy to be told is that women are not supposed
to be the main course in your life, the glorious bouquet of roses
that you set the table around. They are more like condiments
to an existence already charmed, but if the ketchup has gone rotten
it tends to put a damper on how everything tastes and everything smells,
I can’t smell the flowers and there are too many forks.

If he didn’t, he’d have plenty of free time to study the organizational theories of refrigerators and dishwashers. Perhaps he would discover a mathematical solution to the most efficient placement of food and dishes, so we can store more food for more dishes. It would be a study in supply and demand economics, home schooled. He’d have more time to conquer relativistic problems on the freeway. These wouldn’t just be qualitative observations while better cars leave his second hand junker in the dust, but actual calculations of vector velocities and bank dynamics. He could study the emotional cost of clasping and unclasping his watch band, or peer across the city from his tenement to ponder church spires and pagan symbols on top of temples, standing serenely in the midst of a Godless tempest.

It’s not the kind of life you can devote your mind to without freeing it. An artist must learn and think about everything so he can understand and portray the human condition. The life of the artist leaves him gasping, focused on the ideas and the concepts that he needs to expel from his mind before they pocket his sanity. He could type these words madly, imitating the speed of thought, or he could just kill himself before his mind melts. Razors hurt, rivers are far too wet, gas smells awful, nooses give and guns misfire. In that context, artists would rather write, paint or sing. They never chose to draw a single unique stroke, or to write with a semblance of understanding, or to cry for injustice; the choice for these extra sensitive people is really either pain or even more pain. Most people balk when they face that. Artists might stutter and stumble, but they are not afraid. They jump into it with the courage of boys at a childhood pond.

I love the sound of atonal percussion when these ideas begin to flow through my fingers onto the keyboard. It makes me feel good inside when the letters just slide into place, making words, which in turn make sentences and reveal thought. This is why, despite being first into battle, despite only wielding a pen against the hosts of luck, fate and the universe at large, I don’t begrudge the masses their peace of mind. I can’t opt out; it is my sovereign duty as an artist to be that shield wall. It isn’t against my will, and neither is it a fate of my choosing. In Latin they call it, “cacoethes scribendi.” The insatiable urge to write. This is what I was given, and I must use the talent for being able to take what is wordless and clarify it – or risk wasting it, which is the greatest sin that can be committed by any human being.

Such a simple word, clarity. It doesn’t belie brevity, articulacy or poignancy. Perhaps it implies a fluency with the language, and comfort with something that isn’t as easy to grasp as simple grammatical rules: the intangible. Normal people spend their whole lives searching for one lucid moment when they truly understand themselves. They’re the lucky ones. Albert Camus once said, “La vie est tragique seulement quand elle devient consciente.” Life is tragic only when it becomes conscious. Misery begins when we start to understand the fevers that wrack our bodies and minds. There is no art without pain, for it is the widest gate of all muses. Happiness doesn’t quite do the trick. All art must be conscious. If all art is conscious, all art is tragic.

The less you have suffered, the less happy you feel relatively and the less you appreciate those fleeting moments that make life worth it. An artist appreciates those moments, and welcomes them with both arms and a groin. He seeks pain and wallows in that hurt much longer than the need dictates. He enjoys its familiarity and revels in it. He leaves no stone unturned, no avenue unexplored. His kind is the reason Humanity progresses, for without the irrational and the creative, the clock stops and the world resigns  and constrains itself to what has been invented already. Without the artist, Man acquiesces to the sunken, obsolete cesspool of a Humanity that will never, ever have the capacity to better itself.

That future would be a lot more tragic than a conscious one. It is a good thing that a few gifted (ha! The irony) individuals bear the brunt of creation’s shortcomings, and of its glories. This flood is dammed within the lucky masses and unfortunately, they will never understand the surge of power an artist feels from releasing it. They will never understand the satisfaction of true consciousness, or the bliss in immortalizing it. They will never understand why great writers are always ridiculed for having disordered livers and puffy eyes. Why they are mentally imbalanced more often than not. Why artists always look like they have let themselves go. Why they sport several days of stubble, why you can physically cut the smell of rotten sweat from their skin. Why their boxers cake dry, why they recycle their clothes the twentieth time over, socks dry and hard, feet stinking, leaving an aura of filth following dark, sunken sockets and rolling, yellow eyed cynicism.

Artists live lives that are races against disaster, but they are full and rich. That is sufficient recompense for a lifetime of service. It is only the artist that understands that art is so much like electricity. Just like current flows because of an imbalance in the polarization of a battery – from positive to negative – inspiration also flows from an imbalance. It is like a jug always full, pouring its contents into an empty cup. Both jug and cup are set down when the cup is full. The world drinks and is happy, but the jug is always full and the artist drowns. Like the forgetful creatures they are, the masses only remember the drowning without understanding that without the jug, they would also die of thirst. But then, when all is said and done, we all die. Some of us die seeing only the surface of life, the flesh and blood that the masses think is life. The artist dies because he is cracked and splintered from the spine of life, so much harder under the skin.

You saw me in a pair of cool khakis
on every midnight in that fevered summer
and you didn’t care much, you said,
you wanted me comfortable, you said
because I ground words for long hours of the day
and for longer hours at night to keep you.

That struggle was like singing songs to an Angel
to make her forget the choirs of Heaven,
it does not matter how beautiful are
the slender cracks in the human spirit
which are slivers of the infinite grace of a love
that is common as air in that Kingdom.
To such a creature, surely,
even the whole world would not be enough.

A man with nothing is unequal to the contest, and
a new cellphone enters my life,
to replace the one I lost months ago.
The world smiles as if to say, here’s a toffee,
it really is too bad that you’ve been starving,
and here is a consolation prize you cannot eat.
Here is something that cannot sustain.

What I came to understand was that we are
a line drawn between only two points,
a string taut from a stationary niche
to a pencil desperate to escape the leash-
the string snaps and all that is left
is the thirst of entropy too long bereft,
a scratched scar leading off the page,
but circles in peace, and others in rage,
in obsession, and in indifference,
gibberish as a poet’s language
to represent what once made sense.

Their lives and mine are perfect
by the all too human reckoning
of a life’s worth calculated by wants supplied.

A lone cyclist pedals a basket of dew-drenched vegetables
to his usual earthen haunt and tarpaulin,
swerving around the territorial pack
as they change course, trot over and throng me
muddy paws on the best clothes I own,
breath smoking in the dry chill,
I buy myself a pack as the cigarette vendor
unpacks his wares out of damp sacks,
it is a miracle that my breath does not catch fire
or that my eyes have not turned into cotton-balls.

Yet another stranger has brought me home
to the sputter of a third-world petrol engine.
He gets his fare, it’s only fair,
and I’m just glad that I will sleep,
I have nowhere to be in the morning,
I have adventured and now
I am tired and there is a yawning hole
that I slip into without knowing.

It is warm at last,
I cradle my head with the soft side of one hand,
as if it were mother’s,
and this is well, for as things stand,
my dreams welcome me in
and their characters are so familiar,
that I may have just woken up
from a foggy, unmemorable dream
into childhood clear and real.

Jackets become overcoats,
skin peeks from behind rolled up sleeves
pants are obsolete, we say,
fuck pants.
There is a sense that what I’ve been wearing
has never seen better days,
so why try? Staring is easier.

It is then I decide that these clothes
are no longer mine, that they belong
to she who they’ve chosen and that
I’d rather be naked than feel the shame
of being second best for my own wardrobe.

The siren song of Bohemia dies in echoes,
even mythical creatures study silently in fascination
this creature with a cat’s grace masquerading
in a mongrel’s wrinkled skin.

They understand my urge to
rip her clothes off in
strips
like a peeled orange.

I find myself screaming,
don’t pretend!
Clothes are lies.
We are what we are.
We have repented the first Sin,
but I still feel pride in shamelessness.

Day in and day out and in the bosom of  nights,
living in the deep and dark places between pages,
resting my weary shoulders on the stronger spines of books,
I have borne witness to the last breaths of friends
as finally the page arrived that ended halfway
sometimes with a Star beneath to signify the end
like a twinkling leading me to Nazareth,
a lie,
a home without friends,
a life where they do not add to me
and there are only the memories of the stories they lived
crystal clear because I lived them too.

I have choked down the ball in my throat and
I have bitten back tears
at the disappearance of fictitious characters.
When Sam Gamgee and his two friends
watched as one of their own sailed
when their fellowship was laid to rest,
even I counted myself a weeper on the shore
and my cloak was just as heavy on my back
as I rode home.

One would imagine that such pain
would be mundane!
That the soles of my feet would be callused steel
against the sharp blades underfoot,
grass stabbing upwards
on hills rolling like the pangs of loneliness,
rising, falling, far as the horizon,
angry like a tempest in the ocean.
The greatest weakness of the heart
has always been daggers, and
only the edge of Nothing is sharper
than the edges that cut now.

Did the skin of Helen of Troy smell of mangoes?
Did Tristan’s Isolde ever touch my cheek in love?
Did Dean Moriarty ever make me laugh up spittle, and
was Humpty Dumpty the only one who ever tumbled?
Did Sam Gamgee ever hold my hand in the face of
insurmountable odds, and did the Vampire LeStat
ever save my life?
Did Daisy Fay ever forgive?
Did Dorian Gray ever paint me strange sea monsters,
and did the wisdom of Meursault ever tell me that
I only love monsters because they do not exist?
Was it Montressor that showed me that nightmares
only exist either in night or in wild imagination?
Did any of them sing, or dance, or even breathe?
Are they dead, or do they live still
somewhere I cannot follow?

Perhaps they do, but if their life was fire,
I worked the bellows as I turned the pages.
Your forge was always your own,
its heart a searing glow of crimson and gold.

I can read myself up some new friends,
but where will I ever find another you?
Perhaps the mystery is the difference,
for no matter the depth of my relationships
with the friends I read,
the candle bows to the lighthouse
and I never could read you.