buckwheat hair, I hide it well

Oxygen gasps, skin taut. That’s what I’m thinking of. I landed on the surface homeless and running. Check your balance, I thought, check your stride. It was a pun. Before this hundred pace book begins, I need to smile hard and develop a quick will. It might take an entire month to write this all out in human paper. Thirty days and a trip around the moon. A hot air example of summertime blues.

My stylus is scratching sound from a round disc of specially pressed memory, those old black things, before your time, I’m sure, but brought back into being by the trendy Ibiza boys, those Edinburgh saints of groove. Voice replies, back and forth. I wonder if I’ll ever get a telephone call, a crunched machine echo of a warm lovely taste synthesized as pleasure. Sixty cycles deep electric, an instrument of more than torture.

There’s an ease to this I missed. A glitter burst of putting words down. They don’t have to mean anything except to me. I fill my time with love letters, tiny particles of bits and bytes dreaming of a future where I can touch the sky and the stars are known to have planets it’s possible to visit. Recording everything would be impossible, but it doesn’t mean I don’t want to try. Stand on the lip of a seascape breeze and teach you all the meaning of that particular colour blue to the first people to have ever told a story about it. Photographs and moving pictures, add sound and protect the world by showing it off. Explaining why Barrakka beauty should be seen by more than art degrees. Spell out the memes of historical creation and cultural division.

Imagine a downloadable scrap of earth. A television history-scape of depth and vision with an insertable tactile interface. Install the ability to blink and hear the local traffic, the crowd sounds of a multitude of conversation. Even this little office would be of interest to somebody. A man in a net cafe somewhere over a tiny street, it’s late at night and he misses the lights that streetlights used to bring before someone went through with a gun and shot them all down, he might want to see me typing this. He might like to look out the window to my right and see an entirely new kind of tree or to my left and examine a production facility. The lack of pollution erosion is fascinating. The pink of the ice-cream shop is too garish, however, and so he flips to a woman making dinner in an outdoor market, somewhere arabic where he doesn’t speak the language. It could be a spelled end to destruction. In a optimistic view, the phrases in language would change. The media would drop it’s fear propaganda, unable to explain anymore that difference means danger. We would all be press students, members in an underground club that might even have it’s own secret handshake.

we speak of


poison oak
Originally uploaded by lightpainter.

Art-O-Mat, perhaps one of the most worthwhile ideas I’ve come across in a long time. Pimp it out, please. It deserves to pay the rent.

Never is a word you can outlive, in spite of it being so decidedly forever. It tastes like feathers, a black shimmer coating the tongue as oil covers puddles with wondering rainbows. I’ve been weak lately, drained of all confident measure I kept as true. The sky is no longer anything to look at, instead my head hangs, my eyes drop down to carefully look for the next step as my feet swing forward. It used to be that I trusted them, propelled by gravity and momentum, to step securely and find land, that solid ground from which I could move the world.

As I’ve been tagging all my entries in spare moments at work, from the first post onward, I’ve been discovering that reading my archives is strange. I spoke of certainty, of sanguine waters that I swam in, and I think, “There is such a difference in me now.” My teeth have been pulled. Since last fall I have lost so many core attributes that I feel like I must now be dying. I let myself be sublimated. I recognize it, because I’ve done it before. The easiest symptom to identify is doubt, for me it’s an echo of a ghost limb from where I’ve lost the hands I would reach with. It’s both easy to remember and hard because the evidence is behind me now, my love is no longer fierce. Only my sadness continues to be profound, and that has been dangerously mixed with frustration and hate. I need a cure and again, it’s not up to me. I carry the sickness, not the inoculation.