Free-writing: Rehab July 2013

I’m supposed to prepare and serve meals that don’t have any truth in them. They want to eat organic with a fast food appetite. They ask for boxes to be checked off but want multiple choice answers to complete it so they can just put it through their scan-tron. I hear them saying they want what’s best for me. How can they know. They know what the book says. We’re all falling down a hole. Gliding past each other, some falling faster or in different directions, but we all hit the bottom eventually. Spreading our arms out; we’re running, flying, flapping our arms and spinning in circles, searching. Your tight lipped optimism hasn’t even lived enough to understand where my path has lead. You can’t see where I’m going by watching a TV show about my life. Tiny little beady eyes squinting at the truth you can’t know. You aren’t responsible enough for the honesty of a breath. Your breath, your [Starbucks branded] morning oxygen, eating a jelly doughnut squeezed full of your expectations. You feed an appetite of simplicity and storybook endings. There’s no template that does more than provide a shape, an outline, a shadow. We’re all swirling around in this insanity. The more of us there are, the more insanely vibrant it becomes. It’s worse than black and white. It’s option. Our eyes see what they see, but our brain casts shades of various pigments into the sands blowing across this easel bound canvas. Tears streak across, rolling down, under vibrations of voices. [We mute] each other, like white noise. We’re all static that amplifies each other’s propagated signals. It’s an electromagnetic spiral tumbling through the crowded vacuum. Each colliding back and forth. Close your mouth. Your lips aren’t ears.

They fill me with delicious empty promises. A cornucopia spilling onto a wide spread table. A feast for the eyes and ears. Nectar of mother hummingbirds fed to their hatchlings. When did I choose this diet and do I serve it to my guests? Am I deeply rooted in my own guts, deep enough that when I feed another it takes a portion of my being, flowing into them like water drawn from the earth by plants. By trees and bushes and flowers and weeds. When we till the garden, do we prepare for a certain harvest or are we planting a garden of sharing? There’s clouds of sexy mosquitoes, landing on open skin by invitation. We’re constantly donating plasma.

This is a picture of words contained in freedom about a series of emotions that were collected in a cup and spilled onto paper. They all happened. They’re all happening and not all of them are here. Maybe there is a medium for collecting them all and maybe there is a device for displaying them. Mustn’t the machine first decipher and interpret its content before projecting a translation of what it has gathered? Everything is a series of shadow impressions. Multi-colored scapes traced on the mush of grey surfaces. Wrinkling sense into a confusion we think to understand. Why are we there in that place tracing our thoughts with stencils of reality? Which shapes which? What is being sculpted and is it ever finished? When does it start? Where is anything going? We eat to feed these questions with understanding that comes from inquiries made into that dark which has been created by light’s absence. It’s a hallway of footsteps echoing with undetermined resonance. The structure of straight lines aims to guide but it confines. There is safety in that structure. To move out of it in the chaos of concentric circles stirs a centrifugal force holding liquid thoughts to an ever moving gravity. We’re a liquid rock in David’s sling, running for the giants head. Spilling across his thoughts. Washing his eyes, of worry or tears. Blanketing him in the cold darkness that is brought by a sheets warmth, engulfing him in an obstinate serenity that I avoid but do not openly fear or welcome. Watch that giant lay down, and we know the story tells us who is the hero, but stories are told for the author. Characters are an author’s ego. Words are his militant construction workers. Spilling in foot-powered droves over various walls, cascading into emptiness and obstacles alike. Building the author’s desire of the reader’s question. The mind is its own prisoner. Selling itself to the warden. It’s a series of faces, all powered by the same person. We’re all playing the roles. We lead with different characters but we all close [the same]. The path that leads [us] there, and how long it takes, may vary but in the end, before we’re that last second Kodak, the flash of light leaves a technicolor impression, closing our eyes to what the rest will see of us in rest.