Worthless Words on Paper

Fuck philosophy.







My life means nothing.
I know this. I can no longer delude myself. I can no longer believe that every life is precious, that every action and reaction, every cause and effect, every inhale and exhale, is a part of some great Plan. This is the kind of bullshit fed to kids so they don’t kill themselves once they reach puberty. There is no Plan. There is no Secret. When you stare into the abyss, there is nothing there to meet your gaze. Only blackness. Only darkness. Only the darkest darkness that your mind can imagine---the deepest recesses, of the deepest caverns, of the darkest cave that has no name, because no consciousness has ever lived there to name it, because no light has ever been there to touch it, and it never will, but in the end it’s not the darkness that gets to you there, not the utter absence of light…it’s the silence. It’s the void of noise. It’s the darker side of nothing. The only sound being that of your own blood thrumming in your ears, building, eventually becoming as loud as thunder, as loud as your loudest inner screams, the screams of helplessness clawing at the walls of your skull with a voice as shrill as breaking glass, and that voice has no vocal cords to ever rub hoarse, that voice never runs out of air, it will be there screaming until it drives you mad, until the vessels in your brain stop fluctuating and the synapses stop firing, until your pupils expand to eclipse the irises and the darkness is finally allowed to become one with itself.
Nietzsche was an idiot. God isn’t dead. In order for that to be true, “He” must first have existed. Poets, philosophers, historians, me, we are all searching for something that was never there. We are all trying to find fact in a fiction, a Holy Grail in an unholy world, a blade of grass in a tin can. I have spent my life trying to decipher a lie. There is no “meaning of life”. The secret is there is no secret. The meaning is there is no meaning. All hail the nothing.
It seems suicide would be the obvious way out of all this nihilism. But sorry, it’s just not that easy. Because, “what if?” The cyclical nature of existence has always puzzled me. The trees die and are reborn each year. The rain falls and evaporates, only to fall again. The moon disappears gradually and reappears every 30 days. Even the Earth itself moves through cycles of sustaining and not sustaining life, with ice ages and cataclysmic changes that periodically wipe out most organisms. What if reincarnation is just another part of this cycle? What if we too only die to be reborn in another body? It is true that energy can never die. What if the consciousness we have while alive is really only possessed in the electrical currents of our brains? Suicide would only guarantee another round on this sick carousel, another set of eyes, another pair of hands with new fingerprints and hangnails, another chance to retrace the footsteps of your own ghost and feel like you’ve been here before. Maybe I have written these words before. The point is suicide would not solve anything. It would just prolong the pain of living with the knowledge that nothing matters. In the end, we are all blades of grass, killed by the winter frost, and waiting for the rains of spring.
Not all knowledge is power. Sometimes it is a burden. Sometimes it is just more clutter to fill the empty spaces of the brain that should be reserved for things that used to seem important, like anniversaries or family members’ birthdays. In this case, knowledge is a double-edged sword, freeing the mind, but at the same time destroying the will of ambition, tethering it to the greater question of “why”, that will never be answered. This is the ultimate form of torture: to realize there is no ultimate purpose to life, but still feel the desire to find one.
I am tired of searching.
I am tired of retracing the steps of yesterday.
I am tired of the circles.
Everything seems to move in circles, circles and ellipses. The planets and moons condense from the stardust into spherical shapes and then rotate as they orbit the stars in elliptical revolutions. The blood in the veins of life circles to and from the heart to replenish the oxygen to the cells, which are round. The carbon dioxide exhaled from the breaths of lungs is inhaled by the leaves of plants, which release more oxygen into the air, to complete the circular cycle of planetary breathing. Cut down a tree and you can count the rings in its girth to find out how many years it has grown, before being turned into pulp and smashed into paper for worthless novels and homework assignments to prove the intellect of the next endangered species or to burn in the fires to warm the bones of the cold and hungry before everything feeds itself back to the Earth. The tides roll in, the tides roll out. The galaxies spin. Every day, millions of cars make the journey from their driveways to the workplace, along black veins of highway, and then back again at the end of their work shift, stopping along the way to check the mail. Even life is a circle of routines.
Eventually, everyone becomes a slave to routine.
I am no different. My life has become a series of bad habits and déjà vu days. I stay up too late. I drink too much. I choke the time from the day with hours of senseless entertainment that has no relevance to anything. I piss in the face of the future. I fall asleep and think I am still awake. The alarm sounds. I wake up exhausted. I hit the snooze button four or five times. I shower. I go to work late. I go home. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. It’s like walking in circles. It’s like sleepwalking. It’s like putting my life on auto-pilot. It’s like being a ghost trapped in a living dream. It’s like being in a waking coma. I am nobody. I am a fucking vegetable with a pulse.
Every day I see this more and more, I become more aware of my own insignificance. Every person is the center of their own little world. Every person is the star of their own reality television show, their own romantic comedy, their own drama or tragedy. Driving to work each day, I pass the various numbers of other vehicles, the minivans, the sedans, the sports coupes, each going to their own destination, each driver following his or her own daily routine. They go to work. They go to movies. They pick up children from soccer practice. They go to the gas station. They go home. Their families and friends orbit their consciousness like their own planets or moons. Ninety-nine point nine percent of them don’t even know I exist. They pass by me in traffic, or walk by me on the street or in the supermarket, but my face means nothing to them, to them I am just another blank slate, another empty vessel standing in the way of their destination to the potato chip aisle. They will never speak my name; never carry a picture of me in their wallet. And I will never know them either.
I am alone.
We all are.
No one can be all places at once. No one can be a part of everyone’s orbital plane. That is impossible. The planet is too fucking big. But we need to be reminded of our own existence, our own relevance. We cling to friends and family, cling to conversations in the break room and standing in the parking lots of movie theaters, cling to internet chats, and cell phones, just so other minds can interact and let us know we are still alive. Without that interaction, what would happen?
I found out the day I disappeared.

Self loathing

It’s not my heart.
Not something so simple,
not just muscle and tissue,
blood and rhythm
fluctuating to the beat
of unheard music in her skin,
not something so easy
to remove with a knife
and pack in coffee grounds
so the dogs won’t find it.

It’s something else;
a different animal
with diamond flesh
that shines like the first
glimmer of sunlight
in a newborn’s eyes,
feels like the finest
pinprick of beauty
on a virgin retina
filtered through eyelashes
into the chest pangs
that discern the truth
from a lie.

It’s the wooly mammoth
struggling to survive
in a room full of spears.

I’ve made it bleed,
painted the walls
into Rorschach inkblots
smeared with a blind man’s hands,
red, red, red,
as the insides of god,
each one resembling
a different aspect of her face.

This wall is her lips,
this wall her eyes,
her nose,
her chin,
disarranged
like a drunk Picasso
designing a Rubik’s cube
from the inside out.

I’m tearing this building down
so I can find a place to sleep,
and hide from the earthquakes
in my head,
where my dreams
float in the crimson sea
from which the tides
leave red stones
I’ve fashioned into my bed.

3:30 in the morning

Every time my heart beats,
somewhere it thunders.

These things are not connected,
except in the minds of hopeless
romantic narcissists,
who want their penises
to be the lightning rods
at the center of the universe
touched by
sixteen-year-old lips.

I want to build a time machine
out of my own skin,
travel back
and assassinate Copernicus
with a telescope.

I could assassinate
myself
before I am even born
by convincing my mother
to get an abortion.

These words taste
like maggots in my mouth,
corpse-flavored
jelly beans that squirm,
squirm and gag me
as I choke them down
before they escape
and crawl to my ears
to weave their cocoons,
hatch and buzz
like whispers from
my forgotten self.

I don’t know who
I am anymore.

Once, I could find myself
here in this blank page,
but now its a void
that opens before me
like a flower,
withering,
a blank face
waiting for my kiss,
my mother’s vagina
filled with broken glass,
birthing me again
as a pile of ground meat.

Read these lines
and become a cannibal,
a cannibal of thunder.

A poem about nothing

These are the quiet days
alone in the house,
the golden hues of daylight
dimming to the bluer hues
of night, ushered in by
the sounds of birds gossiping
and children fighting
with the moon
and their mother’s tongues,
for just one more hour
of freedom.

I remember when a back yard
could feel like a continent.

The books on my shelf
ask me to break their backs
and I ignore them,
instead desiring to watch
my hands pull the weeds
of thoughts
from the cracks in my brain,
much like giving a sidewalk
a manicure.

Step on a crack
and you break
your imagination.

There are nights
when I sleep so still
I awake with the blankets
undisturbed,
and I feel the way
a coma patient must
feel when their eyes
readjust to the brightness
of fresh white sheets
and limbs cold and alien
yet still attached
to their withered body.

I look at my watch
and it tells me
thirty years
past nothing.

I wonder if
when I turn sixty-five,
I’ll still need a watch
to tell the time.
I’ll need a new one by then,
or at least a new battery.
It’s hard for me to find
a good watch to wear,
being allergic to bezel
and all, it makes my skin
itch and burn.

I used to stare at the horizon
and think that somewhere
beyond that great distance
a future was waiting for me.

But now I know
the horizon is just
an optical illusion.

The problem with my love

is that it never shuts up.
It’s needy,
an inexhaustible whisper
that sometimes builds
to a hurricane-like
gale of panic.

It cries for attention
like a baby kitten,
pawing and scratching
the bottom of
a bedroom door,
wanting inside,
wanting a soft face
to nuzzle
and the delicate stroke
of a gentle hand.

It’s afraid to be alone,
afraid of the dark,
afraid of the cold,
the icy grip
of a future always
uncertain,
yet always so clear.

The problem with my love,
is it can’t tell time,
doesn’t wear a watch
or see the angle of the sun.
My love doesn’t know
I’m not twenty anymore.

It wants to be given away,
to let lips drink
from its eternal fountain
in the wellspring
of my aortic valve.
But my heart
is not what it used to be.
My lips are dry and chapped.
My bones are weakening
under the strain
of so many storms,
from giving away
so much support
and asking for nothing
in return.

The problem with my love
is that it doesn’t know,
one more hurricane
is likely to tear me apart
like a house
made of straw.

Let me in

Those opaque pupils
fluctuate in the morse code
of unspoken promises,
the winter-blue hued
irises open and close
like a magician’s hands
around a black marble
that may or may not
disappear up a shirt sleeve,
a silk thin curtain
billowing in and out
on a calm breeze,
barely concealing the sunlight
of an unseen world,
these windows to souls
at first glance
seemed painted shut,
the breeze but a panting breath
of anxiety,
but it’s not so,
just tricks of light
and false mirrors
placed to dissuade
any would be passer-by
with a lust for adventure.

Those pupils hide secrets
not meant for most mortal eyes,
maybe not even mine,
but patience...
those dark portals
transcend both space and time,
displace bodily organs,
open up gateways
to unnamed worlds
where emotions breathe
like oxygen or fire
and words form like
blocks of ice on the tongue.

Melt me.
I want to climb through
the widening iris door,
pull myself up on the silk
sheen of translucent green,
grasping your eyes like rungs
of a ladder
reaching to unseen stars,
the windows to your existence,
pulling me inside,
I want to be inside,
I want to name the unnamed,
I want to swim the sea
never touched by human hands,
I want to dream the dreams
that have never been dreamed,
sing the songs never sung,
build mountains
out of the purest mud,
I want to lie down
and soak my bones
in your conscious mind
until your pain is mine,
until the broken glass
heals itself
and locks me inside.
Let me in.

Origin of Obsession

Was it the first time I saw you smile?
Did it break apart in the breeze,
your teeth exploding
like a burst of dandelion seeds,
each one carried on currents unseen
and attaching to my naked skin,
burying itself into my pores
opened like mouths
to drink in your beauty,
my body nothing more
than a patch of
freshly tilled earth,
and you the gardener
of thoughts?

Was it the first time I heard you speak?
Every word falling
from your moistened lips
like a tiny maple helicopter,
to gather at my feet
in piles of exhaled syllables
washed up by a tide
of coincidence and circumstance
that falls like a torrential rain
and erodes the walls of mud
separating us from
our true selves,
emotions breaking free
into a landslide
locking my feet to the ground
beneath the debris
of my own blood and guts
and the seeds of trees
already starting to sprout
and dig their roots in.

Was it the first time we touched?
Your fingers wrapping
around me like vines,
ensnaring my consciousness
like an abandoned statue,
a home left untouched
for a hundred years,
overrun with ropes of green
choking out all signs
of its past lives
except for tiny
gaps
between the strands and curls
where the color bleeds through
and gasps for breath
like a dog
in the clutches
of an anaconda,
still licking its face.

All these seeds and blossoms
must have come from somewhere,
I’m a walking botanical garden,
a science fair project,
a petrified forest of lost dreams,
encased beneath the bark
and clawing from the inside
like a man alive in his coffin,
unable to scream,
for the vines are so tight,
as I watch you
turn your tongue
into a chainsaw.