Within You, Without You

I say piss. Piss on your damaged mentality and piss on your filth ridden mouth so cluttered with syphilic vaginal debris and several rare strains of genital herpes. May you chance upon the festering bulbous remains of an elephant’s genitalia on your commute to self-destruction and may that said genitalia then penetrate your nostrils so violently that it single-handedly paves a fully functioning respiratory system no short of a medical miracle leading straight to the foul, uncleaned inner ring of your rectum so that you may continue talking out of your ass but with greater ease so as to alleviate yourself and us of the agony of having to see you struggle to grasp air in your currently vacuum packed anus. That is all I have to say to you.

Superheroes

We all believe that we’ve got superpowers. We all like to believe that there’s something inscribed inside all of our hearts that describe the mechanics of the ways we’re engineered to be different from each other. 

When I was 9, I thought I could control the weather. I believed I could raise my hands to the sky and make lightning flash where my mind told it to. The drops of rain that would fall after were the answers to the prayers I’d secretly whisper under my breath that would cut through the “weird fucks” and “fat pigs” that were thrown at me. I was my own class of superhero and in my comic strip, I moved hurricanes with my fists. I blinded the eyes of thunderstorms with the breaths coming out in between my lips. 

School children are cruel when they’re blinded by the deformity of the society that forms with every generation brought up with the concept of fitting a square into a square and a circle into a circle and believing that the blocks that didn’t fit properly into the holes just didn’t belong. 

But when we grow up, we get bored of the blocks. We get tired of shoving the same wooden square into the same wooden hole and the same wooden circle into the same safe hole. We get mad at ourselves because we didn’t become the supermen and the wonderwomen we thought we’d amount to be. In the circle of friends we stuck around with who nobody thought would ever amount to nothing, we shoot them down in our heads one by one till we were the only kings left with crowns tied down to our skulls.

We comfort ourselves by saying we do it because it’s safe. Because it’s steady, because having blemishes and dents made your block odd shaped and when you couldn’t fit in you’d carve yourself apart.

You’d stick scalpels through your cheeks and needles into your sides until you fit, you’d chop chips off the edges and sand them down to size to fit, you’d pour paint over your lips and ink around your eyes, file the nails on your fingertips and blew until they dried until you fit, you’d wrap gucci round your wrist and prada round your waist until you fit. You’d swallow cement to still your raging insides so you’d feel like you fit both inside and out. 

But we got bored of fitting. We got bored of the blocks. We got bored of chipping away our bold remarks. So we started searching for the chips we cut off and the edges we blunted that made us different. Collected the dust that we scraped off our hearts and rubbed chalk on the inscriptions of the words written all around our veins to try and understand the mechanics of this thing we call a human being. A human being being human being proven being woven inside out with the lose threads and split ends because we let go of our superpowers the day we tried to be human. The day we thought we were human. 

My myopic, arthritic, hypertension diabetic grandfather got diagnosed with cancer at 73. He lost all his hair and he never spoke the same way again but he dug up an old box he’d been looking for all his life, a box that kept the pieces of his blueprint that he cut away years ago and he pasted them back on with a smile. He smoked a pack a day, sipped bourbon at night and listened to jazz till he died. His storybook let him die a superhero and he fought every second till the last for the title. 

But we don’t need a bullet to our beds or a knife to our heads to be happy with breathing. Each and every single one of us is already as infinitely extraordinary as we can be and every day takes us another second closer to another page on our infinitely extraordinary storyboard because the seemingly ordinary can seem infinitely unordinary if you’d just decipher what you think is garbage floating to the surface. Don’t be afraid to let it in close enough to scrape your teeth, don’t be afraid to cut open your heart and stand up to let your veins spill like run on lines in a stanza, don’t be afraid to read the inscriptions inside and not understand it, don’t be afraid to let the pages of your soul flutter away into the distant hurricane so that you can stand in the mouth of god and catch the world in your fingers. So that you feel the weight of the world on your palms, feel it slither through the cracks and slip through your fingers as you stumble over your own feet grappling with the ideas of the supermen and the wonderwomen outfits you’ve been trying to squeeze into screaming “Am I going to become a superhero? Am I going to become a superhero?”

And the voice in your heart that whispers back “I already am and I always will be.”

I don’t hear the lights, I don’t see the sound. 

I am 100 bucks burning by the lamplight, 

I am a castle under siege,

Lock my throwaway statements and sweeping declarations

away so my heart never notices,

I am molten with frustration, 

I am ashen with despair,

My brain is at war with my tongue and my lips,

Falling back flanks with every drink that I sip, 

Our social graces burn in the fires of our soul,

I dampen the wreath placed around my neck with my hate,

with the poison I cling onto gingerly, gently. 

Gingerly gently.

Release the arrows and draw the bolts,

The end is near.

I remember when you were beautiful. To me, to the entire world. You were beautiful. I sketched galaxies with my verbs and coloured them in with my nouns. I painted pictures with my words that no brush stroke ever could. 

I’d go breathless for the fire in your eyes then flatline right after. Worlds formed in my mind and in my eyes, the entire universe became a kaleidoscope before me. A spectrum I could hold between my fingers. 

I walk a tightrope now suspended high above all you could ever think of. Stories of all the people I’ve encountered, the situations I’ve been in all compounded into the bottomless abyss that I hover above. Beyond my reach is a ladder that leads back to the ledge I jumped off from. 

Pull?

Pull.

Push?

Push.

Stuck?

Stuck.

Imaginery Frends

When I was a kid, I lived in a 3-room apartment by the sea. I used to look out the window at night, up into the universe that felt like the mouth of god opening itself to me. The ships would pass by and the stars would pull me into their rays and I’d sit there and feel the wind comb my hair for me and push the air through my nose and straight into my lungs almost as if it were helping me live. It felt like they were putting on a show for me.

The moon was Don Juan and the stars and the trees were the calafaire in the big opening number. I’d hook myself onto the grill of my window and watch until it was too late for little boys to be awake.

My mother would whisk me into my room and onto my bed and make sure I said my prayers before brushing my teeth before slipping under the sheets. But I’d sneak out of my pillowed prison to read Dahl by dim lamplight.

Every character in every book I picked up was my best friend and every night I’d walk with them through fields of cotton candy or factories with rivers of chocolate flowing right through its heart. I was the hero to every war they’d start and the catcher to every bullet they’d shoot.

I remember. I remember what it was like to grow up happy. I remember daydreams and nightmares and competitions with Frank, my imaginery frend who taught me how to spell but never did that good a job. He did his best as far as imaginery frends go and all he ever could be was all my mind could ever create. We were young and we were kings crossing the border of reality into the bliss of solitude.

We remember a lot of the things that happen to us when we were kids. Some bad, some good. Some embarrassing. Mostly embarrassing. We remember being alone in our thoughts but we don’t remember how we did it. We remember being content with loneliness and the safety of the voice inside your head that told you right from wrong but somewhere along our development, we forgot how to do that.

A kink in our psychology that turned our worlds around the moment we realized how much we enjoyed having like-minded people around us. People who we imagined getting along with as kids. Imaginery frends who suddenly became real people. People who could think on their own and feel on their own. 

And much like how you could no longer imagine the way they’d react, they too could no longer imagine the way you’d react. We are all somebody’s imaginery frend fleshed out to the blueprints. 

So we shed that side of us that still contained the stamp of information someone placed onto us the day we realized we were built to someone else’s idea of perfection. We hung that side of us behind sheets deep inside our cupboards and left it to collect the dust in the air until one day, we couldn’t find it anymore.

The bliss in solitude got drained away the day we settled for silence. The silence in our minds that stops the voices from telling you right from wrong. The silence that came from experienced learning. The logic that formed when we realized that magic is just undiscovered science, and science: discovered magic. We threw our thrones to the ground and cut the threads from our minds when our daydreams stopped making sense and when our nightmares started taking flight, and against all odds, dove deep into the future only to find yourself looking. Looking for that imaginery frend. 

You look in the mirror. You look. Take a look. Who you swingin at, champ? Who your fists gonna kiss? Who’re you battling? What contest do you plan on winning? Whose stamp are you searching for? Whose thumbs are you waiting on? You got problems? The world’s got problems. Problems got the world in his hand trying to crush it. Keep lookin’ down. Go ahead. Who you angry with? Keep skippin’ over that rope. 1, 2. 1,2. Keep counting. So your brothers made promises they can’t keep? Where’s your single on the radio? Where’s the fame you deserve? Where’s the recognition for this talent you keep so guarded? 30 years from now, what are you gonna be regretting? They’re not gonna help you. You want something, you go get it, champ. Get your back up off the ropes and go get it. Tempting? Magazine. Television. Radio. Newspaper. People talk about you like a superstar, follow every word you say like it’s gold. You want people to listen? That tempts you? You wanna be remembered? You wanna get into that rat race? Cos you know you’re not gonna stop. Once you’re in, you know you’d kill, champ. You know you’d kill. So they tell you you deserve recognition and do nothing about it. You mad? You frustrated? Your music is your soul, you wanna sell that for a dollar 99? Go ahead, kid. I dare you. Throw it away so you can be famous. Take your shorts off and wave your dick in their faces. I dare you. But you scared, see. Cos you can’t take a fall. You don’t want to fall. So bottle that hate, champ. Bottle that hate and keep dancing. Nothing to it. 1, 2. 1, 2. Keep dancing, champ.

Every night I walk on a fence line in some middle state of existence slipping in and out of this dream I believe I’ve created for myself. I have tea with an injured pheasant and it tells me I’m stepping on the 3rd beat with the wrong foot.

My daily rhythm is off time with the rest of the world is my excuse for tripping over social hurdles when I’m running backwards. The state of loneliness. Of needing only yourself for company. You can’t trust anyone else to complete your train of thought.

Embrace me while you use my shoulder to cry on, my shirt’s made of cotton and your tears will evaporate fast and we’ve got another 10 minutes before everyone else shows up. Let me into your world and let me let you into mine. 

Walk the fence with me and through this fire we started. The fire you started the day you let the matchbox fall. 20 times the fool, call me in like a monkey into a cage and watch the iron welds go sailing in the wind.

You can’t really read if you don’t really write. Simple as.