Tuesday 28 June 2011

the extent of my needs


in their precocious browns the leaves -
in precious golds  - they shoot thru the air
like messengers of seasons in the making
another layer flaking off the tablet of time
 and heading groundwards
for to feed bugs of today,
grass blades of next week and
making me
a bed of dirt for when the carousel runs no more
and i upgrade to a raft on lethe

it’s a saturday,
sky diaphanous seemingly devoid of atmosphere
we recline and showcase our best symposium etiquette under the delicate weight of how elegantly we dip lentil balls in hummus
- how comfortably we share secrets, perhaps because for strangers
blabbing out the truth is the only way to carve radiance out of the dark of anonymity
or
because in our history of no more than an hour we’ve already unearthed hidden affinities
that accelerated intimacy somehow, adding an element of
fate to what was gonna be but a triple x date

like the fact that both of our names contain, in different languages,
the word for people
or that despite a shared love for autumn in melbourne,
neither of us is ready for this one yet



oxytocins dance like sufis in the aura of this our first meet
hormones parade like a springtime fair and
whenever I go to roll a cigarette you ask ‘want some dope in there?’
and each time my reply is ‘why not…’

until the green grass acts on my behalf and
spills my beans for me, figuring honesty will buy me your love,
or something along those lines

‘kiss me’, i say
‘but we’re not fucking tonight’

i am on the hunt for a narrative - a tale to take home
not just your smell on my skin,
not just a palette of bodily fluids
the gay business card…

even though fuck only knows
the extent of my need for touch
i could map it out for you, unroll it in the shape of a lust-red carpet for you to pace upon,
and man, you’d catwalk a long while,

from here to satisfaction the path is infinite and the trajectory divine-abolical
especially if you, like me, set out to travel it anyway,
disregarding
the compass of the humble and wise that warns:

beware! the stomach of want will always be ravenous
you’d better learn to go hungry and pretend you couldn’t possibly
take another morsel, be it a bit of art, of ass or grass, human heat, or god’s touch

so be my guest, feel my unrest
not just my cock thru these denim pants,
because i never thought i’d ever beg and plea for less flesh and more soul
less feeling up and more feeling full stop

but I am

shame you have to be my first nay
after so many aye’s
spat out with automatic eagerness,

pity, really, that the ultimatum of the heart that feels left out and claims his share
should land on your ears, that the hand unwelcomed should be yours,
a gentleman’s hand

Saturday 25 June 2011

a true rant.

 Today I endeavoured to offer myself as a vassal to the ambition of naivety which seems to me to be the founding protein of happiness. I tried to moult and halt halfway, shed layers of skin without coming up with a newer one, not feeling the need for it, I tried the road of immediacy, arm wrestling between the hardest cynicism and an open lily smelling still of hope… are we perhaps ascetics? Buffoons? Or normal people? Us, normal people?

But then who, what are we? Human beings? I’d rather go for unhuman becomings: a more pertinent, more honest definition. Still, becoming and being must be one and the same thing, must they not? Being is just as imperfect, if we may put it that way, as becoming, for if the Idea were more perfect than its phenotype, it would certainly be able to manifest itself incorruptible, eternal. Who would dare to believe really – and that is: to stretch this faith to its ultimate philosophical consequences – in a divine that doesn’t keep its promise of transcendence even, or especially in the immanent, simply in virtue of its ability to do so? who would want to be so nihilist as to believe in a god whose cruelty condemns his sentient creatures to the chronic, chromosomal imperfection of the universe that he himself created? Is our free will negated by the free will of the creator?
Such cruelty, if mistaken for holy nectar trickling down from whoever spills it up there, condemns the believer who believes in it to a pessimism that far outgoes the presumed frightful solitude and aimlessness of the practising atheist. We must refuse a priori to fall in the trap of the apple held out conspicuously by who knows whom at the centre of a paradise on earth which is, by name and by fact, an irrelevant oxymoron, a croak of shit a la walt Disney that nobody would have fallen for if the church hadn’t had the grandest and most diabolical mis en scene at unified networks, a spiderweb, that is, and moreover a two thousand year old apple, all dried out and putrifying, eternity my balls! No, with my shiny sword hissing and dressed in skin alone, if that, I must defend myself from the fascism of religion, from the mafia of monotheism, this industrial oligarchy that produces replicants of sinners series by series, and I must invent myself to give myself a meaning. An antihuman sentiment, an unhuman love to enrage pope and showgirls, opus dei and parties, I must posit myself only as I am: lonely, and beautiful of ambiguity. Intelligence versus force, rationalist doubt versus omnipotent dictatorial dogma, an attitude that leads to extreme consequences, one of them being turning down the whole if even one portion of it is rotten, a metonymy of civic coherence – and that lily with its guard still kept high unfolds opens obscene and incorruptible til death do it wilt…

We are not mystics, visions and conversions on the way of Damascus, of capitol hill, of a fixed post, that stuff doesn’t make our mouths water, it makes us sick. Still the most spirit lifting news is, listen people, that such visions I have by the thousands, the more than legitimate fruit of the abnegation with which I conduct myself beyond the song of such sirens. My scepticism is repaid with interests by a psyche devoid of the flatterings of 'salvation' behind chastity or charity or a party membership, a psyche that regurgitates the very thing it denies itself. If it is true that good luck comes to those who don’t expect it, then the recompense of the honourable and virtuous citizen – the prize to the man who knows and is himself – is the opportunity to supply a reason to be here rather than taking on one that’s second hand and ready-made. Our foundations are solid, invisible, yet solid. Our ridgepoles and our concrete are not the illegitimate outcome of a fraudulent tender bid, but undeniable rings of a trunk that thickens with us, beyond that ‘beyond’ that we don’t ever buy into, least of all when offered at a knockdown price.

The being alone and in bad company of church-goers betrays the lack of imagination of the human being who is one for the sake of being it. Living life doesn’t coincide with giving it a purpose, and  giving it up to a higher good is, in any case, a weakness. Life certainly doesn’t need a ‘life after’ to be justified before, and not even a premature death in order that we enjoy it in full. The meaning of life is to accept that there is none, yet to insist in embellishing it to dispense a revenge out of our own pocket. The style we endeavour to find in the page and swimming in the tide of time is an added value created out of nothingness, something that reduces the rules of physics and of matter to an abacus in short circuit, where entropy is for us to establish, where nothing means anything in particular but every lash that shuts and opens, each word, comma, square centimetre of skin is symbol and metaphore of an impalpable quid at everybody’s hands, including those who decide to do away with limbs altogether…

Today i offered myself to simplicity, and look where it's gotten me.

Sunday 19 June 2011

puff, sigh, ouch

with disquieting seriousness i took up smoking again. it  seems like the only way for me to deal with the weakness intrinsic to addiction is to transfigure it, to transpose it onto a new level of commitment. if i can't beat the morbid desire for tobacco, i embrace it wholeheartedly.

i wonder what the difference is between such a damaging (and deadly) resolution and the resolution to its exact opposite. after all, i do not think of myself as a nihilist, i don't long for dissolution in nothingness (assuming death is that)... yet the reality of my habits would suggest otherwise. so why should one be so much harder to enact than the other? why is the appeal of what's wrong more appealing than that of what's right? transgression easier than discipline?

the courting of one's own fragility and mortality in the form of rolling, sparking and sucking a cigarette to the very last puff, the one that burns fingers and lips and reminds one that one literally is playing with fire responds in a twisted way to a promethean instinct, the vocation for autonomy and free will.

self sacrifice is a big word, yet the punishing the body through vices that have no redeming sides whatever is nothing but a form of asceticism. it is with a mystical devotion and a sick - but nonetheless real - joy that i inhale on a cigarette. it is with a fear of the unknown in the universe, with a terror for the unknown in human affairs, it is with a sense of safety in loss that i approach the pouch, that i search my pockets, that i expand my lungs. with enormous sadness and denial to match.

but after all, if i dig deeper in the soil of my motives, far beneath the surface where my smoking habits have the appearance of something so idiotic as a physical addiction, i meet the me that smokes metaphysically. i meet the me who smokes because i can. every fag is a declaration of independence, an anthem, a chant... if i can do so much as to hurt myself, no one can possibly debate the existence of free will.

how fucking dumb is that?

Saturday 18 June 2011

bubbles

an old appliance had to be put to sleep last week, in my home. it wasn't broken in toto, but it leaked everywhere on the bench on several occasions, to the point that its incontinence outwayed the convenience of what had become wavering performances.

that's how i rediscovered the pleasure and fascination of watching water reach boiling point in a pot. from zero to one and on to one hundred degrees that we named and numbered, all without the rumble of an electric kettle.
accompanied by the elegant hiss of gas trapped and released, the magic happened before my eyes. with invisible strength and... mechanical will... matter acted.

the first night.

a little prologue... to kick start the game of words. who is the player? well, me, i'd say at first thought. yet a game generally entails a competitor. the possibility of defeat and the prospect of success. there is a set of rules according to which one plays and the experience is soaked in something we identify with a sort of chivalry, the spirit of sport. healthy competition. en enactment if you will of the struggle for survival, almost a primitive form of... art?

should i maybe say: a little prologue... the first stroke of the brush, the first chord strummed? but i would like to blurry the lines. to be art and artist. psychologist and patient. i would like to be the subject of the study as much as the head of the lab. the head, and the heart.

to know myself. a journey. an exploration. to monitor my sensations and my desires, to become intimate with my coin, both sides: the neediness and the autonomy. to acquaint myself - and listen to - the inner dialogue, that i may penetrate the mind of my characters. wait... characters? so theere is more than one me in me, so it is a game after all?

then let's play.