In Diegesis

from where derives that particularly human mystery,

that saying, “more than the sum of its parts”, the soul?

to know what’s ‘more’, we’d have to know life’s whole,

the parts, the narrative, including your secret sexual history

and the things that you’d never ever tell your family.

which is funny, because its from parents that we receive for free

life, and thus too, indirectly

innocence, destiny, that “more than the sum…” spirituality.

i’ve got mom and dad inside of me, playing the role of fate,

with me and the sibs learning the part of free will,

but i feel like i’m on back-up, an understudy in undergrad.

brother’s the oldest and wonders, okay, free to do what now exactly – have kids and try not to be dad?

i’m the youngest and i wonder, okay, free to know what now about me – that i’m reasonable and not sad?

we both look at sister and behold: watch her swim! what grace in a mermaid’s haste, a human face races dolphin lovers! ever vigorous, ever sensitive, a lesbian free to have non-impregnable sex as much as she wants,

and i think, okay, i see you boys; i see ya’ll’s penises erect and stiff, now those is some things i could identify with. i could get fucked by some young male artist.

makes me wonder if masturbation is incest. makes me wonder if incest isn’t just innocent self-interest.

(so)

man passes on boners to man.

through generations, pornography deepens like a grocery shelf, from pre- printing press rapes to naughty shows, from black and white to color magazines, to vhs tapes, to being as free as the internet, to right there, in the kazaa video folder on my dad’s computer.

i didn’t ask for this life, but i’m inheriting all life’s desire, and all this answerless epistemology and communism glowing inside of me is making me lose feeling in my infinite ego. so where does the desire go, and how would I know?

well, i believe, to romance and ambition,

to making mom proud, to making dad listen, to being proud of mom, to really listening to dad,

to wanting to eat food and perceive art all of the time, to finding my life’s value in suicidal rhymes that i post online,

to spending holidays and birthdays with the siblings, to the diminishing necessity of facebook validations,

to making love and having sex, to masturbation and warm, spiked egg nog,

to serious attractions with no forward romantic actions, to writing and writing and writing, and

to me and the rest, which is everyone else,

and nothing more. isn’t that enough?

what’s the deal with motivation problems and suicide anyway?

was i not raised right or something? am i just lazy?

why the hell would i want to die instead of do shit?

here’s a sentence that ends with a period.

that doesn’t mean these questions have answers.

but i guess it does mean i did something.

i think about what mom asked me last christmas in san francisco.

“do you enjoy anything?”

i thought, apalled, at first, ‘of course, mom! of course! life is fascinating, movies are beautiful, people are sublime!’

now i wonder if these sounds and visions don’t just cake over my senses without any meaningful affect.

now i wonder if there’s any fun to be found in feeling pointless.

now i wonder if i can be saved, and if so, have i got what it takes?

and of course, i wonder, does what it takes involve asking for help?

because i’m not good at that.

i want to ask jacques catudal, the head of the philosophy department at drexel, so many things.

i want to ask him how he keeps up an erotics with the world outside his wife.

i want to ask him how he keeps the depression and suicidal thoughts at bay while still being sensitive to them.

when i’m not sensitive to them, i’m drunk and unappreciative, obnoxious, a dick that fucks without remembering.

when i am sensitive to them, i’m obnoxiously quiet and really needy. and i don’t do anything but sleep and feel shitty.

what am i now? do we ever know these things? identity, a theme as old as i am, heh. that was a joke.

it seems lately i wonder if suicide isn’t such a tragedy. i have lived intensely, and i have loved.

lately i wonder if love wasn’t ever really meant to be shared. it seemed more passionate when i was imagining it.

way back when. the infatuations. they had nothing to do with the girl. they had everything to do with me feeling free.

now all that’s left of those times is an addiction to pop music. would my life be better off if hot chip had never made ‘ready for the floor’?

i am ready for a fall.

i am not ready for another winter. not without my mom here to shovel a path through the snow to my school.

it’s been years and years and now i have a forty minute walk instead of a five minute walk to school.

now i’m bigger and can walk longer distances? now i’m smarter? it’s still fucking cold in the winter.

i guess maybe i’m kind of psychotic. i have an addictive personality. i can drink every night if i want, and i do.

i smoke pot and eat and eat and eat and eat and i never gain weight. if i did i could pity my poor looks.

but i don’t have reason to pity shit. i have great sex generally at least once a week. i have a sharp mind and lots of friends and family who love me. i am surrounded by fascinating stories.

still i walk out of philosophy classes, bad work ethic in hand, and i feel pointless and bored and meaningless and i think, gosh i don’t want to live.

neither does the girl closest to me. neither does my dad sometimes. my brother too, i suspect. my mom says she needed kids to “survive”.

we all need something to validate our existences in a serious way. for this twenty-one year old, rich, who i met in cleveland, i think that something is a rough neighborhood filled with bullies who never let him think too hard about the point or meaning of life.

on halloween i got punched in the neck by some black kid right outside my house. did that make me want to live more? eh. didn’t really do much. reminded me of the 6th grade when i first considered suicide, when i got bullied a lot by white kids.

now i’m 21, and i got bullied again. the pain’s gone, and the hate reflects his insecurity more than mine. i doubt he’s getting a one hundred sixty thousand dollar education. i doubt he gets as much affection showered on him as i do. so.

no big deal.

i don’t know how this should end.

i’ve got all these relationship projects. i try to work on them pretty diligently, but sometimes i spend too much time thinking and writing to pay much attention to mortals. i’m a poet (*pats back*), it’s true, and i’m a little proud, but i need to be a warrior-poet. i’ve got all these relationship poems that i need to fight for, because who else will?

i keep sharing my poems with the mortals who love me, and i don’t know why i expect them to be moved; they love me; they’re already where i’m at; where do i expect to take them? cleveland? philadelphia? cripes.

mike, if you had a four-hundred mile cock, i’d use it to spoon out all the gelato erica brings home from work; i’d slurp it all the time, trying to give you pleasure, and it would never get hard, because it would be four hundred miles long. it’s good that you don’t, really, because i don’t need to distract myself from the fight. and neither do you.

and neither do you, stranger! so quit waiting for your girlfriend to realize how great you are and how many blowjobs she wishes she had given you, and oh wait! she wants to start making up for all that lost time RIGHT

NOW; hahahahahahhha, what do you say, stranger? i know just what you need. if i ask you to give up all yr relationship projects, will you let me be yr girlfriend?

wanna know where yr happiness is? lean in, feel my breath on yr neck as i tell you:

a confederacy of tough ghosts hid all the happiness in a field of disappearing rocks. those fuckin’ first generation humans, i swear to god i’m gonna beat the living shit out of them.

walters. ian walters. warrior.

bitch.

the other night, after my twenty-first birthday spilled into halloween, i lost an orgasm.

i might have had one – i have reason to believe i did.

indeed, with someone i love, whom i hadn’t seen in forever.

but i blacked out, and i can’t remember it.

i said things, sexual things, erotic things, exciting things, loving things perhaps.

i did things, rubbing things, moaning things, licking things, kissing lips.

these things i remember as though they were only suggested, impressed upon my consciousness like a vague dream.

i can’t help but question my behavioral sincerity.

i can’t help but believe that i could have appreciated the other night.

instead i lost an orgasm.

who am i to complain, though – i take sex for granted all the time.

what difference does it make, to lose an orgasm or to throw one away?

either way, babies’ spirits go un-realized.

either way, i don’t appreciate life.

makes me wonder: all those wishes i received that went, “happy birthday!”, where does that energy go?

i suppose it’s up to me, isn’t it?

Sometimes I want snacks. Sometimes I want an orgasm. Sometimes I want to run. Sometimes I want to make the spirits that I see visible to others.

Sometimes I want to make the spirits that I see go away. Sometimes I want the spirits that I made go away to come back. Sometimes I want to hear music. Sometimes I want to dance like I mean it.

Sometimes I want to stop wanting. Sometimes I want to find shelter in a dogma. Sometimes I want to live. Sometimes I want to die.

Sometimes I don’t want anything at all. Sometimes I spread out into infinity and feel something I believe is called happiness. I always want to share my infinity. I never can.

Sometimes I want someone to buy me something. Sometimes I want someone to give me head. Sometimes I want someone to run to me. Sometimes I want someone to make the spirits they sense sensible to me. This someone always has a name.

I want to meet a girl named Desire. Her twin sister will be a vicious, undead zombie. Me and Desire will roam the world. We’ll have sex and forge a singular reality together until the thing she loves most finds us and eats us both.

That won’t happen.

I do feel some romance in my destiny though. Also, art.

(Float tight in the soul of the universe, baby girl. You’ll get born eventually.)

you know how to live; you don’t need me to tell you (drugs!)(drugs!)

i’ve been / buyin’ / snacks like crazy (snacks like crazy)(snacks like crazy)

if i treat everyone around me like family, who am i going to have sex with?

i like yr story; i’m gonna make it my narrative; i’m gonna take yr narrative and make it my narrative! i’m gonna take…

make stories, not orgasms.

follow yr heart erica.

beloved, fall

asleep please.

lapses

of time

must pass nervously

in rhymes, so

I can tease

synapses, and say,

this is mine

mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine, all mine, mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine, all mine

fuhrer!

goethe!

einstein!

all mine, nime

nime nime mine

mine mine nime

mine nime mine nime mine

nime, oh you!

where in life’s line do you find the time? (for e)

and you, yes, you,

what in this messy time do you hope to find? (on e)

Here’s a piece of advice that I could only think up because

Beloved’s been asleep:

Remember that you know how to live.

(does he mean it)(can i have it)(is it mine

mine nime?)(and the world laughs with me,

isn’t that true?)(hahahahaha!)(not really true)

(what is?)

aw, screw it, if you want to feel

validated so bad (like me), go be

honest with someone (like me), and see

if the person minds and

looks you back in the eyes (then

we’ll know what’s min(e)d)

“You make everyone want to read ‘Steppenwolf’,”

Erica jokes; as of this morning, she’s a few pages

deep into the preface. I’m really not trying to own

my loved ones’ time. I put on “Dance Yrself Clean”

all the time to make everyone listen to it, to make

myself listen to it, for effect. I don’t own yr love or

my own. When I was twelve I decided to spend my

time watching movies. By seventeen, I had left my

spirit where I knew it could be safe. These days my

heart is stuck within that Art-prism. My face reveals

very little, and Erica wonders, where are you, lover?

I am looking at Dionysian colors, life, the children

of the Sun; and the Apollonian plane where people

stroll sequentially, where editors cut and directors

yell, “Action!” In the best times, what I look at and

feel affirms my self, reminds me of childhood and

that eternal optimism. I’m addicted to the best times,

and I’ve been making a map of the muses. That’s

what this has all been about. And if I ever forget

I need only listen to ‘Person Pitch’ by Panda Bear.

But I know that I’m done forgetting, that I don’t

forget like Voldemort wouldn’t forget what his

Horcruxes are. What I need to learn is that old,

favorite artworks can’t receive my good, that the

children of tomorrow’s utopia need inspiration

like I need food and sex. I have been dutifully

living since I was twelve, latched onto the teet

of the beautiful and sublime, getting busy not

killing myself. I need to get busy helping Erica

and the kids not kill themselves, because they

are alive and awesome, and I know that, ’cause

I see it.

This is not a good poem;

this is just your life’s time;

that is all.

Hey, man, I am

talking to your listening part.

I’m talking to the poet

who breathes in your heart.

When are you going to stop

faking a start?

You’ve matured yourself

in some ways, sure.

You wrote a poem earlier today,

and last night, and quite a lot relatively.

But you’ve been masturbating yr spirit out of you

in the room of regularity, been honing some disciplined individuality (which, guess what, has no life,

and I’m not just talking about the sperm on the wad of toilet paper floating with the rest of Philadelphia’s un-loved, un-wanted shit).

You are a survivalist.

You had to be, you suicidal Steppenwolf,

you invaluable child, you dwarf star.

You’re also a closet-case opportunist which is why you latch so smoothly and desperately onto the kingpin of justified suicidals,

Socrates. You man. You serious, principled man, you you

you wannabe father, you phony Jesus Christ, you devoted philosopher.

Yr no diegetic liver! Yr no self-aware leaf. Yr no sentient photon,

and life is no sunbeam, and yr time is no wave of light

and yr death is no one else’s heat.

Except it – you and life and death

and the rest- is

it is it

is this is

it is this

is

happening. Now

I’ve wasted more time than I’ve not wasted,

which was a stupid decision, but we know what we do with those.

We regret them.

I can change if I simply rearrange

everything in my mind. It’s not hard.

It’s impossible. What I do is the impossible trick,

what I’m going to do before your very eyes.

I’m gonna show you something, I’m gonna take a system,

a familiar everything, language, sound and vision, the venue through which

exist all my friends and all your favorite meanings,

and I’m gonna dance with it, seduce it with the song that shoots out of my loving part,

I’m gonna make love with the poet in your heart, impregnate her,

I’m gonna make you a father, son.

What you feel now is just the baby kicking inside you,

your heart thumping. A moment.

And another.

My mom asked me once to provide her with a pool when she gets older so that she can swim to stay “lucid” at 80. By that I imagine her to mean, if she’s still alive,

then she wants to keep her soul intact, to remain gloriously alive, spiritual. I don’t know how to segue to this, what to say, it’s just that I feel like that pool: empty, non-existent, an idea, abstracted,

a hazy hope for the future, that the little piece of the Soul of the Universe, which burns most brightly in us during youth, should not abandon us for the sake of generation, eternity.

You’ve been drowning in that pool, Erica, trying to live contented in something that doesn’t exist, in me, and meanwhile,

I’m looking at cheques on the ground, and looking back up at the sky, and back at the ground, and across at you lying nude in the bed, and then

closing my eyes, and expecting that, when I open them, my incredibly powerful, imaginative will will have turned the world into art; that

all those lost Greek songs will soar through the ancient air, and unite our city and every other and the whole earth, and show each of us our identities by shimmering to us our reflection in the Soul of the Universe, and we’ll see that we are one with the human soul.

This I quite seriously and gravely expect when I open my eyes and see you, Erica, and those cheques and the big sky. It’s true that when I walk to class,

I tend to see just the concrete below me and the clouds above, and not much else, especially if I have headphones on. If I’m in a building and I’m among people, it tends to go that I’m either

looking at you or looking at my professor, or the walls, or nothing I’ll ever remember. I’m doing so much work just looking at you, babe, learning

those things my professors can’t and never will teach me; that is, how to look at someone. I never know how to look at my Philosophy professor who, meaningfully, I have a Platonic crush on; at times, I’ve looked at her feet, and I’ve noticed her kick her foot up, scratch her shin, fumble about, suddenly self-conscious.

And at times I don’t look at you at all when I should, or I express some annoyance too soon, when it could wait, when it could use an accompanying touch, or something nice, a look. I always get self-conscious

when my professor gets self-conscious, or when I think she does; I think, look at her face, look at the board, look at her face, what the hell is she saying? What is Hobbes on about, exactly?? Sure, I understand it, but has it infiltrated my entire network of meaning; have I realized it? Work

harder, son! And I come right home instead of letting her teach me more stuff after class (which she is prone to do; it is her idol, Socrates, after all, who argues in ‘The Republic’, Book II, that the virtue of a craftsman is the degree to which he is able to benefit the subject of his, or her, craft — teaching not excluded), and then

we talk some, and live, and populate all this paid-for space with our bodies (the most un-broken parts being penis, vagina, fingers, lips, namely), our stuff, my abstract mind, your fragile heart, the music I’ve downloaded, your craftiness; and we listen:

It’s you and me, won’t be unhappy.

Come on, baby, come on, darling,

let me steal this moment from you now.

Come on, angel, come on, come on now, darling,

Let’s Exchange The Experience.

(if i only could, if i only….

i’d make a deal with god, and i’d get him to..

swap our places, be runnin up that up that road…

that hill…

with no problems…

I wait for the day I come home from the lonely past.

I look for the girl who has put up with all of my shit.

I never needed anyone for so long…

The other night you said you might try to kill yourself;

You are too strong for you; you are invincible….

I learn in your bed I’ve been gone for too long,

so I put in the time, but it’s too late to make me strong.

Now all I want is your pity.

All I want are your bitter tears.

But – but, but, but – it really, really

can’t be gone.

We’re still right here..

It took so long.

Can’t say we heard it all.

Limbs parallel, we stood so long we fell…

(We painted a song.

It started when we were young,

but now it is in our lungs).

I’ve been honing my intuition, been clumsily carving a man out of will, humanity, geist,

and calling it art – can you believe that? Been saying my life is in diegesis – like my life is

entirely of my own creation, like the art of living is the degree to which we steal our identities

back from our creators, like somewhere inside me is a child that wants to slap my parents and

say, “Don’t fucking tell me what to do!” Like my life isn’t endebted to every single person

I ever share time and space with, like I’m invulnerable, like there is no pain I know.

I put on ‘Alley Cats’ by Hot Chip, ‘All I Want’ by LCD Soundsystem, ’10 Mile Stereo’ by Beach House, Girlfriend,

not to oppress your space or to control your entire perceptual universe,

but because as Cormac McCarthy once wrote, “A man…can know his heart, but he dont

want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there.” I am but a human, a weak communicator,

flimsy with language, and only ever half-understanding of my true emotions,

so I say those things I’d rather say, feel those things

I’d rather feel, and I try to keep them as sincere as I can.

an arrangement i find appreciable, perhaps even in some way – to me – ideal.

1. Eden by Talk Talk; 2. I Walk the Earth by King Biscuit Time; 3. Things I did when I was Dead by No Age; 4. Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd; 5. Archangel by Burial; 6. Higher than the Sun by Primal Scream; 7. From Stardust to Sentience by High Places; 8. Suddenly by Herbert; 9. Together We are Beautiful by Fern Kinney; 10. Caecilia by Fennesz; 11. Never Content by Air France; 12. Don’t Fight it, Feel it by Primal Scream; 13. Soon by My Bloody Valentine

Ve-egetable, ve-egetable,

you’re all I eat these days.

Y’know you are what you eat –

that metaphor is clear and neat –

so you know what I’m talking ’bout.

I’m talking about lethargy;

I’m talking about all of the moments;

I’m talking about you and me.

I don’t like to think, don’t like to think of dead animals,

wasted perception, and do they see beauty?

But I am doing nothing, I’m doing nothing,

but eating my vegetables, insuring my innocence.

I’ve seen Seven Samurai (twice), I know that fighters don’t win,

but I’ve got to protect that innocence, at least before I swirl into sin,

at least before I have my babies, ’cause Larkin’s coastal shelf is deepinin’,

and I am getting busy

busy forgiving my mom and dad for just being.

Y’know you’ve got to just let them be

and then then then you’ll see

there’s no such thing as innocence; y’know it’s what we make it to be.

Gotta lose your virginity, gotta make real your divinity;

y’know you can’t live in the abstract, that that that’s a fact,

so chew on what you’re chewin’ on, believe in what you believe in.

It’s the only thing anyone can do, and when yr belief makes you

so blue, then try try try to change, cuz if you don’t,

then we know what you are.