let this be but a scar on your hands to remind you of wearing chains.

if my eyes were a PC, my dignity would be the office chair.

When will the weight on my hands lift and words again tumble from brain to fingers? Billions of signifiers and language units bounce around in my head but nothing comes of them, no parallel lines to slice their centers and string them together into the rigid skeleton of sentence cohesion.

 

There are days when I roll over at 2 pm and think that I should bump into your sleeping body next to mine. Someone must have taken you in my drunken slumber.

 

I lied. That's never my first thought.

 

The capturing of an idea is a tedious process for some. Not so easy as picking up the keys off the table or saying "no" when they told you that you could do better. They say Guy Hocquenghem used to read the newspaper over twice and then take walks through the French quartier while smoking joints of a Parisian bud that we'll never try together. He'd mull over what he read; viewing the whole thing as bourgeoisie bullshit but wondering why men in coats choose to so openly desire having lies thrown at them.

 

Well, I don't have such streets to walk through. To step out of the solitude of our homes and the homes of friends and homes of those we don't know (yet!) is to creep down vinyl village streets, look at the same house, remade over and over again, with the same fateful human experiment going on in each one.

 

1,874 television sets watch us snort our prescription drugs, f**k questionable partners and surrender one hour after another of one (after another) of the 365 days we have in just one (after another) of the years we're a body in perpetual motion. And that's just in my town. It would seem no matter how close I get to the ghost white screen, I can never see you staring in through the other side. "This isn't a movie, you have to go to work now."

 

My mouth tastes like trying to clean beer off of concrete floors with a whisk-broom. I ask "why" but it sounds less like an Aristolean demur and more like a bloodstain from losing my virginity (but I look over it everyday; it's not mine to cherish and definitely not yours to eradicate).

 

"Sometimes, we must learn through struggle."

 

And I know you meant that because you were on one knee and everyone was crying. She had such a nice car, could barely hear the engine running and revving and backing out. But my country home plays no fool and the trees give 'way everything.

 

Shutting my eyes and rubbing my hand through greasy hair. I'm so very tired of having everything to say but no voice to say it.

Author's Note

"this isn't literature! break your fingers!"

Reviews

[Dane Osborne]

The mind is chaos. We fear the chaos so we try to give everything structures and hope that gives sugarcoated stability that we so badly crave. Even the words and the thinking processes we use are built on sturctures of symbols.

Is this a story? No. But rather a poetic outburst of the inner chaos behind the structure. Well done good sir.

[Elizabeth]

This left me with an empty feeling... what a trip. "1,874 television sets watch us snort our prescription drugs, f**k questionable partners and surrender one hour after another of one (after another) of the 365 days we have in just one (after another) of the years we're a body in perpetual motion. And that's just in my town." I love that the t.v. is watching us... and not the reverse. And the last line really ties all the seemingly unrelated images together. It is abstract, as the other reviewer mentioned. And I can't claim to "get it" entirely. But I'm not sure I was meant to...

[arbitrary jane]

dude.
last paragraph - is every one of us demi-divines who has ever had a soul bigger than their own body and brain and ... life. as an aside, it's also me pretty much every night around 3am.

paragraph 3 is gold as is the one that starts "my mouth tastes like trying to clean beer..." although i don't know if the parenthetical part is necessary.

overall, i just feel like its a little too abstract for me to really be able to grab on with both hands and have liftoff.
that said, i think the prose is intense and rich, and you have a great feel for rhythm and structure.