~ Please, understand me, won't you?
...If words could ever produce a psychic orgasm... this is mine.
Be real now.
I have never been real;
No one is as unreal as I am.
When I wanted to be real,
I created disaster.
For me, and for others.
Because I didn't believe in reality.
So I played it as a game,
Going through the motions,
And the others got piqued
If I let myself believe that I am real,
My heart races around
And my breath gets funny
And my nerves twang
And jump like wires
Or grasshoppers set on fire
Or beams of light
But ones that ache.
My reality, minute by minute,
Actual minute by minute,
Is inset with a flickering madness
Of joyous self-will
And carelessness
Of which I am deeply ashamed,
Violently proud.
Madness is near.
To murder someone's pride
Or to pass into social catatonia,
These are the common terms
Of conscious existence for me.
Rage or quasi-pietistic acceptance,
I distrust the wavering tick-tockishness
Of the shrinking and
Of the dangerous enlargement
Of the self.
The mood and the life's history
That has led to this dark and devious grandeur
– the grandeur of lowness –
Is linked to self-disgust,
Self-admiration.
In my room,
When I sit or lie in the dark,
My madness looms.
Reality, time, awareness –
Trite problems of everyone
Searching for purpose.
Awareness of the dark,
For instance.
Not nothingness –
Time is something...
Am I ill? Surely not,
Not in the accepted sense.
Life is making me ill.
I know that the first enclosing paradise
Was the human belly of my mother.
It was so changeable
That I encountered the passage of time
In the paradise there,
The salt birthplace of my spirit,
In my awareness
That one would feel better,
One would be all right:
That was the loose evidence:
That was the measure of paradise
From the beginning.
Amphibious state.
The first schizoid state of man.
The unreturn that time is
Includes the mechanical thing
That awareness has always
An element of resistance
To time itself in it.
It refuses the identity
That time proposes
To bestow on minutes,
On everything.
It is a force of resistance,
Resistant even to those forces
That constitute it.
The force of individuality
In a particle,
Since it is time-ridden,
Would vary and weaken
Not entirely mechanically
And give birth to the world
And to anomalies.
A balance, a situation
Has to have a form of awareness,
Or knowledge, of itself as a balance
Or how could it exist as moments pass?
The urge in time itself is to exist –
And it names and individuates
Everything in a mystic electricity
And force –
In eerily always renewed individuation
Until it fails for this or that thing –
The hurried dawns and
Semi-sleeplessness of matter
And its nakedness
To the brushing formation
And anatomical trespass of the creation
Of existence – and then the lapse,
The letting go, the decay –
The restlessness of amendment –
In that, I drown, waking-and-sleeping,
Fluke-attentioned in ways that jeer
In the mental light in the dark
At really crippling fear
Until thoughtlight becomes a dance
In mental darkness of fear and beyond-fear,
A little natural chemical fire in the skull,
A little buzz of hellfire
And resistance – in the skull,
Beneath the hair.
Without cure or remission,
The flickers of memory
And the present-tense of merely-a-room alternate.
And in resignation to the crawling,
Wormy,
Maggoty minutes and breaths,
The tiny, transparent monkeys of my breath,
The snake-flutters of eyelashes and of lungs,
I endure my punishment
Like in a Dali oil.
In the alternations,
It seems to me,
My shadow eats the world
And drags me in its belly
(in the mind of my mind)
Into a moment of eclipse.
My darkened self proposes
And manages an awful kind of marriage
And filial thing with darkness itself,
With awful matter.
An infant patience,
Seemingly infinite,
Inside the night,
Preserves me
As I straddle the alternations and twists
And moment-by-moment prolongation
Of this condition of loneliness
And of predicament
In amphibian contradiction
Of everything I have been taught
About simplicity and ideas.
Clapping a mind on top of a mind,
An observing consciousness,
Another placement of awareness
On top of the one before,
And then piling body on mind,
On minds, and superimposing a giddily aerial
(and sad) form of mind
On all of that,
And still another form of mind to watch,
To judge and observe,
I rise to a kind of a glimpse
Of the nighttime room.
People say, I know all about it...
And: we know nothing about that...
Explaining or un-explaining
Man's longing
For the divine intellect...
I am not tired of god –
But the idea of god is so much simpler
Than the sense of presence
In the passage of moments
That I can't ask for anything
But merely wait for mercy,
Here,
So long after my birth
Into the immortality of sheer existence:
One rises with a heavy beating of wings
Into a condition of migration.
Thought and recognition
Of the motions of thought,
The most elaborate imaginable collection
Of simultaneous rifflings
Of predatory exercises
Of worded will,
Stories and whatnot,
Made of stiff letters
Erected in a phallic one,
A single quill sufficient,
Or insufficient,
For warding off despair.
I want to be like a book
In its powers of survival.
Or a painting?
I feel the whispering
Inside and outside of me –
Strange primal stories:
Would you like to speak
The language of atoms?
The formation of the cosmos?
The first war cries on the shores?
If you fail to sleep,
You can hear the howling
Of the electrons
In the black spaces in you;
And a kind of Troy arises –
And falls then – the nothing
With its peculiar motions stitching it,
Seamed nothingness,
Into borders, until it is me –
Factual and predicted light of awareness,
Like light,
A form of time...
