Simensis

What is, What knows

Luce — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 19:55:32 +0000

What sees is not what gives

We know because the mouths that form words are not the mouths that are hungry

but they may learn to parrot, en masse and en miglio

their cracked hearts darkling, to fill the void that grows outside their houses

the perversion of their vision

There is only enough air to breathe

for those of us whom happenstance has left apart; or those who like the birds know how

and when to move at the prickling cold.

The rest is a frenzy of confusion and pain,

as sticky and mute as the sickness of lost pressure

deep below the waters of the known,

where no light can see the horrors wrought of iron and ambition.

A Kind of Trouble

Luce — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 14:00:59 +0000

But realistically I guess he should have.

To any normative person, any reasonably observant or conscious human being raised under these conditions, that is to say in the United States at this time, in that type of family, with these influences, and all the knowing earmarks and affectations and afflictions that such a person labors under in order to be seen as a relatively conscious but sufficiently naive and ergo trustworthy john average in this week of this age – it would have struck a chord, somewhere, in the deeper medulla nigra, in the primitive and consistently on some level alert (if only recognized when stirred) thing that lives somewhere below and far away from the civil face.

The at once righteously vindicating and wrenchingly saddening part of this creature was his inability to feel such things.

Rare as it is to find something beautiful, sensitive and smart rarer still is it to find one aware and intact. It has been my life experience to realize, as many times in as short a period as is necessary to affix it to my ideologies intenuably, that very frequently and for the most part, no matter how a thing seems and for all the rhetoric and ephemeracy that we may forcibly apply, it will not return. That is to say, it will not be undone. With no value scale applied, things do not naturally revert. Let entropy be considered my axiom of choice, or listen to the lost existentialist who coined the slightly less trite phrase about injuring eternity. Not going back again. The brokenness of a thing may not be intrinsic to its nature, but a broken wing is not an applied value. I find it interesting and deeply troubling that of all the things I have done, none of them reflect my core belief that nothing is worth saving.

This is not a story about applied value.

This is a story about freezing ankles and tests of will that end with nothing. This is a story about drama on the tightly-stretched screens of men who will tolerate none, things that having assumed great size and tangible proportion pop and are gone without leaving a remnant to assure you that they were there to begin with. Even ball lightning leaves marks or dead kittens. This is the story about German Nightingales who have to sing at 96 decibels to be heard over the noise pollution, about whoever thought it was a good idea to grow lactoferrin in rice, about people who thank the government of the people-who-live-below for a stipend that comes from the erasure of their culture, raping of their resources and the Problem which has already robbed them of nutrition, home and livelihood and that those-below have the luxury of denying exists. Which is in turn related to the freezing ankles. And everything that happens after.

I made four people cry last month. I was caught by surprise every time. I didn’t know any of them very well or share anything remotely intimate. I was not offensive or frontal or even disagreeable. I’d like to say I did no harm.

But he didn’t. He kept walking as everything else looked up knowingly and let him pass. And even the cobblestone held its breath, for a moment, until things realigned. You’d think that by now he’d have noticed. What’s lost has always been, accordingly. He hadn’t.

Flavored Trees

Luce — Mon, 29 Nov 2004 01:16:47 +0000

Dreaming too much whilst awake, of late. Cornered a rain-slicked city under the eaves of so many similar but feeling houses that are only ever known or remembered by those inside illumed by the color (warm) of fire in a bottle. Found a wet goldfish in a wet plastic bag in the middle of the unearthly black street running with light and picked it up. Took it to one of those warm, fixed houses that it might live and handed it to a generic-faced man whose yellow domicile enfolded my mind for a time long after the algaeic door had closed off the light from my world and left me blurry and falsely secure in a wholly dark and forboding (though not lonely) city. The trees were alive (as trees are) and burning with cradled light and humming just below the threshold of my hearing before an overcast dawn of ambivalent repose whose comprehension I could only gu

…

[Interrupted]

Sometimes I worry that I may know what I’m doing.
I don’t like it.

Level 6

Luce — Wed, 16 Jun 2004 19:27:34 +0000

Waking is jarring. I’m being pulled from VR. Every time I’ve woken up in the past seven weeks there has been a moment of pure unadulterated phrenetic panic, coupled with a very profound feeling of the lost. But once every few days it’s more disorienting, more devastating, more complete. Having drywall chinked out from around your body slowly. The warm tickle of asbestos. I don’t know where I am, how I got here, where I belong, what’s going on. Who am I, what do I want, where am I from, am I dirty? What is this place? Worse, I hear sounds, sounds that I know can’t be resonating through this place that I’m starting to pin down loosely. It’s hollow halls can’t support this kind of power. I can feel things moving around me, less tangible every moment but more real than what my eyes betray. I can feel the slipstream of my rising body, hear the motives of those around me. Who? Dissipated.
Dreams are not the candid unforgiving reality of the sub and superconscious, I recognize that now. They’re what my brain does to keep me from being exposed to whatever is there. And suddenly I’m alone in a room I am supposed to be familiar with, gasping for breath and grappling for sense.

Hypnopompic, I’m sure, is what they would be called. But in that deeper and more innocent darkness surrounding whatever filament makes up my core I know truth when it’s inflicted upon me. I recognize those terrible sounds for what they are and perhaps there is a reason that I must be delirious, distrait, addled and worn-bloody before I can submit to sink into sleep.

But there is one element of the experience that distresses me more than the aggregate, touches me more deeply, commonly the vexation that can account for the pallor in my complexion.
The more tangible yet tacit indicia is the cast left on my mind.
Unable to shake the haze free, I emerge with a shadow that seeps over my vision. I awake, supposedly, and go about my duties but with profound and debilitating disorientation. Not only does it rend me weak and vulnerable to predatious animals, but it doesn’t amount to vertigo alone. This torpor is as the cutting of my corpus callosum. I feel as though I left part of my brain behind, my actions reflect it. Worsening, I can never outrun it even in the direst of circumstances. It takes an Earth-shattering revelation to quail and otherwise clings like the inky blackness of a satellite that limits my time and motion until somnambula clasps me again. Given it’s effects on me, I can’t help but wonder how many others it claims. I lived for a time of a year like this. It literally splits one’s vision. On the darkest of days I found myself leaping in the cold grey somber overcast for pleasure at witnessing my sight religned.

It has me now, as I write this. Searching with numb fingers for sanity hidden in the subtlety, in the nuance of the air that eddies around me. It’s too late for me to just ask the world to stop. Pain is a force that gives us meaning. I can only hope wherever I left it I can find my way again.

Breathe In

Luce — Sun, 09 May 2004 22:50:19 +0000

Crashing. From the tops of the Andes to the basin of Providence I am tired. My body has taken so much abuse, so much abuse, so much indescribable unprovoked abuse words can’t do justice to and never limit. I woke up sore. I in my life have fought, fought like a wolverine like the wind like hell on a Thursday and I have woken up tired but never sore, never so sore. You don’t kill and wake up this sore. Now, after Playa has finally finished (so much opportunity so much experience but so much stress so much danger and back-biting, bombs and politics as I excavate some of six hundred ancient native americans from their long rest, acutely aware of my intrusion my hand in a skull so old, disturbed so abruptly by back-hoes, much like the W-IIs and I have the entire archeological world at my fingertips, osteologists jumping at questions and forensic archeologists telling me how to hide bodies as just a few feet of dirt no one will ever see again slips lithe and dry, angry through my fingers) it’s time over my delerium subsiding as if it can and my work is beginning again, swimming over expectations but only due to valence, now I can move but not breathe.
If my body were not enough to stall my urgent heel my life’s paths have unfolded precariously, slowing my progress.
It is so trying, to coin another useless word to sink into this vacant repertoire trying, “trying”, so trying so aware I become when steelwool is used to make my nerves sing like strings trying, to be this way, sick so many seasons in a year. Knowing your prime too early? It is fate, my fear controls the body and it’s hate.
The physicality of flight has long transformed, my mind is all that runs to meet the wind. My will flees from this gathering of storms. My world in darkling skies is stranded high. Prevailing winds mark deep the sanguine sky. The timelines of my life are out of kilter. My revelations are supposed to match my state. It’s hard to watch a summer of life depart and feel no strength at the return of Spring. Autumn dances in my mind and on my wings.
I hope that you forget this as you read. I hope you never see a day in my steps. I pray for you, the citizens of this sphere. I pray your air improves. I pray it rains.
My path is one but I can see some four. They each bear names, the Frail, Quick, Lofty and the Moor. I see them as the landscapes of my dreams, semantics at odds with circumstance. The blank is what I know and what I don’t, I recognize the lapse but not the fill. I am finally free but drowning in cotton, still.
It is said that man fears what he does not know and so scrapes away at the edges of the darkness with fire. If time I knew I would know light to hours. The tide escapes me still. The season darkens.

A Bottle

Luce — Wed, 05 May 2004 21:46:07 +0000

Doesn’t make much sense to me to toss words into the abyss of digital media, a cacophony of silence. Journaling, I’ve been told, is something one does for oneself. The more reason not to broadcast one’s personal thoughts to the world under the misguided pretense of anonymity. The concept of tossing my mind’s contents to strangers is a laughable and dangerous one to me. However, as a hoarder of knowledge and as one buried too deep, I have oft taken advantage of this inexplicable cultural commodity. Knowing the minds of those around you while they maintain their sense of security is priceless. They are known after all only by the nameless and faceless few that throng or stumble to their thoughts, dreams and delusions. How could I be a threat? The end of this and many circles is within my sight, and so I offer this up to the chaos of the sea. As other such finds have granted me grace, if one is driven enough to find this as well, my hope it that it may answer the questions that never arose. A key to my daily enterprise and the encryption of my social interactions. If not, and I tell myself I hope not, I know not, then another piece of refuse diligently set adrift to mark a day in the age of ephemeracy. No time like the present to pollute the past. May your god grant you wings.