Year’s end has a rush of force. The point of all my workings seems obscured, I boil over 5 times in a row with frustration. Short fits of agonized making, crack the whip emotions ending in malice, jealousy, disgust. Never more than a day goes though that I fight it because really, they latch right on. There are parasites oscillating inside your eye, beyond view, they attach and get hooks in deep as soon as you repeat their narcotic message. The dead grey tepid new winters support this, eternal November, brown and putrefying. I crave purifying frost.
Prolepse is narcotic, I read from my sister’s mind on the network. That’s our best embrace right now. I read that though and I choose to act, this is what I can do well, I am an instant actor, lightning-mercury. Make it last, this is my weakness. DO IT NOW, this is my strength. I glaze over streets with black lightning hell-eyes. Dare meet me pedestrian, I strike you down in my fury… there are waves of it beneath the lights of these eyes. I make fellow human animals bristle, a sphere of silent lightning comes from my brain. And also as I glaze the streets in black malice I learn that I have decided I am beyond enough to scream out loud. Get them, the parasites, the fuck off of you, friends, because they will become your new organs, steal your breath to bake bread for their own and their life will become a part of yours you accept. I yell and smash bottles and kick buildings, I smash my bright new fists with pale winter skin into singing steel columns. Bite the pain, do not submit, bite through fur and into blood.
I do this and walking animals stare, but I am old enough, I am beyond, I mean I need it, I’m one of you just like you but I decided I really really need these certain dreams to move in daylight and I can do them and I will yell on our public streets that we share together to get the things off the inside of me so I can on making. I’m like you but I decided. One of my deepest friends wells up like a comet, Clayton calling, calling on skins long cast off into the timewash. I take in his call in thee best ways, I open the right ears and we make each other new-better. No nostalgia but what’s enough to roll the wheels to a kickstart, this friendship is an engine, we’ve already made love so many bodiless times that there is just no need to imagine or pine for the weakness of the flesh. Wonderful weakness of the flesh.
Jump with a slam that knocks Dawn almost down in the bar, between our embrace, we crush in, knock down the dawn another night, drinking and talking and drinking and making new. We separate and dance through days, he is going to miss the solstice party. We talk intensely the last night, he sucks out the poison like only a good friend on a night drive can do, my body a frame installed in the gliding city, what speaks from behind it could be any one of us, so I do what we should do and examine this frame, life, desires. Step back in. I feel like Dawn and I are broken for me, not satisfying or just not providing something essential. It has to be said.
We all meet back at the company party, acquaintances getting shitfaced in earnest. Scream cackle flirt, ancillary babes to the restaurants’ galaxy swirling in, being all drinky slightly unwholesome and dark circle-eyed sinewy men whose ribs one could bite and creamy languid girls poured into sequiny Aeon-celebrating dresses, dresses crawling forcefully away from shoulders and cleavage: more more more. I mention something about Pop Rocks; One produces a pouch of them from her purse and gives them to me and an ellipsis with her trailing eyes, violently red lips. I help load wood into Sherwin and Emily’s station wagon for the party, Dawn comes up and pushes through the noise to me. She reads it all over my quickening face and not because this is a time in my life that I will not hide anything.
We need to go. Not now? When else. Now.
We walk in the falling snow and find a dark wooden staircase next to a bakery. A dark passage between places, street above, street below. Ocean wind howls by, lace phantoms curtain our circle. There is pain, exposure, clarity, definition, we lay it bare in the streetlight and peach blossom snow flakes. This muscle we make daily is five years long, it doesn’t just evaporate but I honestly do not know what she will feel. Pissed. Sad. To me, it is not fitting and yet we are both pursuing what we need, want, love. This is an honorable death and I am willing to go all out to get myself to where I want to be. I suspect she may want new patterns, but it is not relevant, it doesn’t need to equal out or be happy trails: I am dissatisfied. Go.
What ways can our love stretch? I ask her how she imagines the next months playing out and she answers. There is nothing that I truly need to do with my soul that violates the boundaries of the circuit she lays so lucidly down. It is perhaps not that I have forgotten how strong our love can be and the things we may choose to do with it but that I require it to be affirmed as my passion distills and morphs. Some new patience is in me.
But it is also that I forgot. And that pain from dreamcrushing in the summer blunted my clean slicing will. Without full devotion, master swords cannot slice through all obstacles in timewashes to ground out at dream necessity. Lightning bolts fill my heart and my eyes, then we lay in the snow on the brick and make snow angels, silhouettes of how we can move, divine aspects. And I do recall that truly mutual joyous detonation only last spring. When will commands you be gone, we happily fare thee well, we happily peel back our flesh and SCREAM GRIN, we joyously tear ourselves asunder for each other, when will commands we must and it is done for love, not absence.
I do believe this: when its real, you must both agree to break for that to be real. You will both know when it is done.
Clayton redirected before leaving: Tarthang Tulku in interview giving his opinion on Rahm Dass Be Here Now: Sure, that’s a
great idea except that most people do not know what being means, do not know where here is and do not understand when now is. He said he was going to try to fall asleep in a pile of women. I can only assume for the benefit of posterity that that happened, while Dawn, Sherwin and I did in fact and finally and necessarily end up all in his car driving to Turner at 2am, listening to Grails.
Black clouds veiled the total lunar eclipse on the shortest and this time darkest night of the entire year. Black gates opened through the moon and ships sailed out from within. The party was a city, I drank alcohol in many forms from sunset until sunrise and my body seemed to enjoy the fight. Snow poured down at dawn, we floated home in a cloud.
I jobbed my job. Dawn and I decided to tear apart the apartment and re-assemble it in a more efficient (for work), private (for both when desired / required) and awesome (all-action-inspiring) geometry. We wasted no time.
