deathhasnomeaning-blog

[deathhasnomeaning-blog]

Even Celestial Bodies Wither in the Face of Eternity

     Maple leaves are swept into a cyclone in miniature with each gust of wind, the distillation of violence and disorder into something that might be mistaken for beauty. You can faintly make out the pained yelps of your neighbor’s 16 year-old bichon frise as it struggles to make it down a flight of stairs. Poor thing, you think. Maybe one day that’ll be me.

     It is October 27th, and the block on which you live is in repose, save for the neighbor’s dog, which suffers in solitude. But you can hear it, so is it really alone? you ask yourself. But what do we weigh more strongly when pondering the existence of loneliness: the mere presence of others, known or unknown to the self, or the degree to which these others are perceived as playing some role in our day-to-day? The dog doesn’t know that you can hear it. Your reality and its reality don’t intersect, at least not at this moment.

     But anyway, it is October 27th. The sun lurks behind the veil of cumulonimbus, as your block languishes in silence, supine in the face of its treachery. The din of machinery churns somewhere far beyond the hills that mark the end of your hometown. You can recall nights spent with friends in that abandoned factory district, which even now remains caught up in some sort of simulation of life, perpetually grinding along with no beginning or end. Your old friend Daniel, who you had known since the first grade, once accompanied you to the building that decades prior had been known as the L’Oreal Factory. You didn’t know what L’Oreal was, but you insisted that the two of you check it out regardless. So you snuck out of your homes, crept through side streets and alleyways, and eventually arrived at this brick-and-mortar mausoleum. The two of you not-so-nimbly made ingress via an empty window-frame.

     You found yourself in what used to be the product-testing room, not that you were aware of this. Most of the supplies were still there, frozen in time, waiting to be acted upon by a motley crew of frustrated chemists. Daniel and you took everything in, silently making note of any details that caught your interest. Satisfied that you had done this, you turned to him and caught him looking at you with such profound, tangible sadness. Do you remember what he said? He kept his gaze level with yours and told you that he had recently dreamed of his father’s house burning to a crisp. He was riding his violet mountain bike, coming home from baseball practice, choking on the foul tendrils of smoke before he even knew that something was amiss. Then suddenly, there it was. His father’s house, reduced to a fine black ash. Daniel said he couldn’t stop weeping or smiling, and that each response only magnified the other. He was visibly holding back tears as he told you this. You hesitated for a moment and then grabbed his hand before asking yourself whether that was appropriate, partly because you didn’t know what else to do and partly because you had been in love with him for so long, so very long. Four years later he drowned in the reservoir behind the local library. Love having faded into little more than unpredictable pangs of longing by then, you wanted to cry but couldn’t produce anything more than a whimper. Your closest friends apologized to you, as if you had suffered a great loss. In some ways, maybe you had.

     The weather where you live is all sorts of fucked up. It was 80 °F two weeks ago. Today saw a high of 48 °F with a substantial wind chill.

     Putrefied garbage litters the front porch of a semi-abandoned house down the street. Semi-abandoned in the sense that it is now occupied by a corpse. The cleaners don’t come until Monday. It is currently Thursday. You wonder how much temperature affects the decomposition process, if at all.

     In the room over, a light-bulb wavers in and out of existence. You look out the window and see rays of light briefly explode through holes in the clouds, and suddenly it dawns on you that you haven’t left the house in a year. And maybe that’s because there’s a real risk in that, walking down those steps and out your front door, because you know that once you leave you won’t be able to control the outcome. But how many times have you relied on that very same lack of control as a viable exit strategy? Our rationalizations are so malleable, wouldn’t you agree? They are wonderful evidence of our adaptability. They attract and repulse us in equal measure.

     To your left sits an orange spiral notebook, its pages a distinct Joycean yellow. Near the back rests your proudest moment. During the final weeks of your Junior year in college, after you had stopped taking Xanax and started running ten miles a day, you wrote a poem that linked the Nietzchean concepts of eternal recurrence and Amor Fati to the central tenets of Tantra Yoga, because you are an intellectual first and foremost. Your creative nonfiction professor loved the way it conveyed our need to take solace in our mortality. You loved that you stumbled upon a more academic way of writing about dying.

     After some gentle prodding on the part of your classmates, you submitted it to your school’s poetry journal. What was it called? The Tribune? Something like that, I think. As always, you both loved and loathed your creation, somehow convinced that a) in comparison to the fluffy nonsense your peers had submitted, your poem was an undeniable masterstroke of subtle brilliance, and b) it was the long-sought after piece of evidence that would finally reveal you for the fraud you always suspected you were.

     The truth typically residing somewhere in the middle, what ended up happening was 25 or so of your peers picked up that copy of The Tribune(?!?), skimmed through it once, and promptly forgot about it. Everyone expect one student that is, a trans woman named Marcie who will one day go on to become a well-respected writer and activist. She read your poem night after night, lost in the throes of staggering depression and dysphoria, letting every syllable linger on her lips the way one glides their fingers across the back of a lover that is drifting off to sleep. You will never know that Marcie exists, and surely enough, one week after first reading your poem she couldn’t even remember your name. So maybe you were right all along. Maybe your intuition was spot on, and you’re really a fraud. But Marcie, the only person in the history of the universe that will ever commit your words to memory, would beg to differ.

     By now the sky has grown a dark, somber shade of blue. The lights from the nearby city ensure that you will never be lost in that perfect darkness you desire. Didn’t one of your teammates on the tennis team say something to that effect? It was late one evening, if memory serves. You were walking home from practice. You were standing on the corner of Valley and Styles, waiting for the light to turn red, when they observed that you seek a perfect darkness in which to submerge yourself. You looked at them with what I’ll call feigned surprise. They knew what it was too, because they continued, saying that nothing less than perfect darkness will ever do. Of course, you know damn well that nothing of that caliber will ever truly manifest, because in the innermost recesses of your consciousness you will always be scared to die. But what did they know? you ask yourself while staring at the branches of your neighbor’s evergreen. They moved to California after saving up money that they had earned working at the local food court, only to die a week later when their brakes gave out on the highway.

     Our rationalizations attract and repulse us in equal measure, but at all times they are just a form of system justification. The self, being a system first and foremost, and a fragile one at that, must remain properly insulated at all times, lest the universe tear it to shreds.

     You think about this for a moment. You pour yourself into something that you hope will be remembered as a work of beauty. Like all acts of creation, this process involves a mixture of performance and genuine out-of-body flow, and...well, maybe it isn’t entirely fair to paint the creative process with such broad strokes. But if creativity is an extension of the self, and the self is a constantly generated performance, why would it be unfair to characterize creation as, at the very least, a somewhat performative thing? And at any rate, if........but anyway, you spend all this time cultivating a very particular product, expecting - well, expecting what, exactly? Should people hold their breath because you’ve created something? Might the noosphere become a unified consciousness that subsequently anoints you its sole philosophical and artistic voice?

     No. No, things limp forward as always. And fuck, even if something did happen, then what? Will that make any difference when your body starts breaking down? You put something into the world. Well, what about it? Sooner or later you will die, regardless of whatever faux-profound drivel you deliriously dredge up. You never had any control. Before you know it, all traces of your existence will make their bed amongst the stars. And that is but a temporary state, for even celestial bodies wither in the face of eternity.

     A motorcycle tears down your street like an elemental force. Concrete melts away, revealing a profound, unending void where the core of the world ought to be. Now the houses aren’t connected to anything. They just hover, seemingly untouched by the passing of time. The moon presides over all of this, but only partially. It is utterly disinterested. You wish you could be such an impartial observer.

      Across the way there emerges a simple chord progression. ii-V7-IV-vi7, or something like that - your ear was never the best. But your ears perk up nevertheless, and now the drums are coming in with a steady beat. The synth is playing a familiar melody. A voice intones something in a language you don’t understand, but for the love of god you feel like you know what’s being said.

     What do you think this voice is saying? It’s saying you never had any control, and you never will, but there’s a hell of a gap between domination and passive observance. You don’t want either of these things. You know that life is nothing but a series of potentialities. Though it is tempting to believe that these potentialities can only be realized under strict conditions, the truth is we only believe this because we know these conditions will likely never come to pass. And we don’t want them to. Anything less than perfect won’t do, and perfection is an artificial construct. Comfortable with these facts, we sit stock still and don’t do a god damn thing because we are scared. You are fucking terrified of putting yourself out there because you want to preserve this image of yourself that you didn’t do shit to earn. You pay lip service to perfection and cling to the chaos that keeps it from being, because that lack of control shields you from the sting of failure, even as it opens you up to the much longer-lasting pain of regret. Maybe you want to believe that you won’t become that person whose final days are consumed by an endless litany of what if’s. But that will be you. Rest assured, if you continue to sit still that will almost certainly be you.

     So you take a deep breath and stand up. The quarter note pulse of the drums shakes the walls of your bedroom. You stand up, brace yourself, and leap out the window because by now the ground has disintegrated completely and there’s no longer such a thing as gravity. You float above that infinite void, that imperfect darkness, and before you know it the music has become a cyclone in miniature that envelops you. One year removed since you last left your house, you swear it feels like your flesh is being stripped off the bone. The air is toxic. With every breath you burn from the inside-out. But the music doesn’t mind this. Each chord cuts through the toxicity. So what do you do? You dance. For the first time in your life you dance like you are truly comfortable with yourself. There won’t be many moments like this going forward, though truth be told, there will be more of them than you probably expect. The beat persists and you keep dancing, hovering above the imperfect darkness while the sliver of moon impassively looks on, a truly impartial observer.

[deathhasnomeaning-blog]

The Liminal Space // Dead Language (Lyrics)

Floating through a sickly grey. The remnants of a barren cityscape, coated in ash. Myrtle grows through fissures in the concrete. Dilapidated monoliths penetrate low-hanging clouds, the atoms of which act as mnemonic devices bursting with treachery.

Lost in the liminal space between invention and recollection, I feel the residual of your touch. It lingers over me like dew on the early-morning grass, or perhaps like the roar of passing jets, drowning out the chorus of cardinals that once perched on our windowpane. The telltale signal that a new day was upon us.

Dusk. Distant footsteps come to me as the faintest suggestions of life. A quiet cacophony. Hushed intimations. The sad fate of peripheral meaning.

I press on regardless, beset by some unknowable obligation. And yet there they are. The foul tendrils. Dendritic branches slithering down my body, tenacious and psychotic, or maybe just resigned, castigating a form that’s not all there.

In this stupor I am met with an image. What could it be but that which most defines me? The atrophied limb. The vestigial skin. Calloused and calcified. Tumescent and putrefied. It festers in the crumbling darkness, fetid, overflowing with bile, carrying with it the memory of satin, a pale violet mass awash in that familiar orange glow.

A sleepy hello. A restful smile. Loving eyes peering through interlocked fingers.

Was I not the fool who spoke too much? Spoke so much yet said so little. But for a time, we traded stories using little more than subtle gestures, conducted symphonies with nothing but sideways glances. And yet I still let you believe that it was only you who couldn’t sleep alone, the death rattle of an ego in denial.

One year removed and I’m sleepless still, lost in the liminal space between rest and exhaustion, recollecting tall tales passed down in a dead language, a dense tapestry of symbols built by and for two. It grows more faded as our worlds continue to pull apart, further, further, further still.

And though it brings me no solace, against my better judgment I can’t help but wonder: Do you still speak it?

[deathhasnomeaning-blog]

Before I knew what was happening, this turned into a love poem

We are nameless ageless thrust into the tempest Overwhelmed and out of breath bronchioles constricted Wading through a World Without Weight rocks once destined for windows line the insides of our jackets

Unrepentant killer smiling in my dreams chasing the lingering sent of youth and the promises therein Featureless Faces against a static white screen Unknowable and therefore everlasting

In my exhaustion, I now welcome the malleability of language Selecting syllables to do my bidding All that is meant is all left unsaid In the throes of this reduction I do nothing Mouth filled with blood raw and scabbed over at the touch of my own hand I’m recoiling

Possible failure begets inevitable shame Beguiled and beguiling, nerves standing on end, On call, On guard, Onward forward march to the cove I once glimpsed on the back of a card

Maybe there I will exit this form and fall unto you porous, amorphous, gliding through the air like a song

[deathhasnomeaning-blog]

Danse Macabre

Quiver

Tremble underneath a crescent moon your figure buttressed by the warm orange glow

Grass tendrils snake up your legs Dirt cakes between your toes This is you at your most free

Shake the birds from their perches Stomp until the leaves fall

Quiver

[deathhasnomeaning-blog]

Anticipatory Regret

1: “Memory is nothing if not the manipulation of time”

2: “A title for this phenomenon: Perpetual Rebirth or The Projection of the Differentiated Self in All Directions at Once

For all timelines intersect when held in consciousness”

1: “But if this is true, can we be said to exist together? Do we even know what that means?”

C: A strung out twenty-something clad in 3rd generation formal wear smokes a cigarette in the shadowy undergrowth of suburban New Jersey

1: “I want to touch that face, run my fingers along those cheeks, if only to ensure that for but one moment we occupy the same space

2: “But can you fathom how that feels?

Do you even know what that means?”

“I’ll take the illusion of an intersubjective sphere over the incessant whirring of a ceiling fan I’ll take the faint feint of the eye over constellations formed of non-operational satellites”

[deathhasnomeaning-blog]

I thought I saw your image through the fog

we gazed upon a foul death

it ripped through us like a tear in the fabric of time

it is a presence that lingers...

in the margins of our words                                         

                             in the folds of our flesh                                                   

                                           in the sight that derelict house

Deafened by the roar of passing cars your voice -sweetly sonorous- becomes a low hum in the distance

a silent nocturne for the sleepless eve

[deathhasnomeaning-blog]

In the Desolate Night, I Could Feel My Spirit Melt Away

Bifurcated self The jailer and the prisoner as one A fissured visage culled from the margins of a dream

Gentle hum of passing cars Music of the spheres distinct, yet interchangeable A chasm, everlasting

Perceptual disturbance A hymn in arcane tongue Impenetrable discordance Tangential realities

Holographic contact Simulated longing Sleepless in separate beds Infinite incongruity

Oh, but that this “I” could be subsumed into a universal consciousness an incandescence formed of everyone we love

What it must be like to feel the warm glow to close these heavy eyelids and rest

[deathhasnomeaning-blog]

We Were Children Together, Years Ago

A vision of the park where we once played. I see it now as a ripple in time. Cast in plaster, dipped in wax, simplicity, long since forgotten.

And what of you, old friend? Has it really been years since we whispered our desires? For yours have turned to hate, an ethnocentric fervor, the lustful embrace of a past washed in blood.

The brightness of your eyes, the exuberance of your voice, dulled by the lies your father screamed after work. In the dark of the night, when you were pliable and trusting, he told tales of the white man’s displacement.

Now those tales have become the scripture you swear by the light by which you march, the idol for which you are prostrate.   You are a stuck pig that doesn’t know it’s bleeding. The fascist, found dead, fully robed.

I see your outline chase flies through the evergreens, before dissolving into the brittle air. It is a spectral presence. The echo of a dream.

[deathhasnomeaning-blog]

Untitled

Hovering over the freeway, the wind effortlessly passes through you.

In the distance, self-driving cars vanish from the face of the Earth.

“This is it,” I hear you say, with arms outstretched like telephone wires that bisect the city.

[deathhasnomeaning-blog]

The Cover of Night

Sources of pleasure become objects of disgust.

Having once tantalized, these eyes now coldly scrutinize.

I hide this body, formerly liberated now scarlet with shame.

[deathhasnomeaning-blog]

Paris, Texas

I dissociate the parts of me that were shaped by you, until this fragmentary essence coalesces into a whole that I can destroy. Let our love be nothing more than a fugue state. I packed my things and spent three years living as someone else.

[deathhasnomeaning-blog]

The Poetry of Physics

Across oceans and landscapes our voices project, such that we are never truly separate. But the poetry of physics can’t dull the pain of seeing dust collect upon your photograph.

[deathhasnomeaning-blog]

Janus

Floating in a dreamscape, wherein our bodies transcend the limitations of language, we still manage to destroy each other with unknowable gestures.