Plug / Sequence / Drive / Abyss / Shadows

Plug Your Ears! The Truth Sings Us to Destruction

Burdened by the truth that as a great rock that may save one when the ocean rages,
It prevents one from funner waters,
Keeping one at bay near it.
Such that one from off a cliff would dive to it;
Such that one would wrack upon it. 

Should a soul devout to Life find Life pitched beyond its singing’s range? 
Must one worship Life or worship Death? 
Or worship Life dying; worship Life when dead; and in that chasm Death
Sing as well as ever sung Life?
Even bitterly sing of Life, just never sing of Death,
For you’ll sing unknowingly of worse. 

A Sequence on Suffering

     i.  Trying to Purpose Suffering

K. works at an internal affairs group that sets out to minimize happiness in order to preserve suffering. The process goes: create, create, create, suffer, suffer; suffer, suffer, create, create, create. The workers in the offices that distribute the suffering are those that suffered the most in their lifetime, who have now been rewarded with the ability to indiscriminately avenge until they're satisfied. Then they retire into something far off and galactic: a supernova close to going out; a candle that keeps splitting itself off, because the door in its proximity flutters back and forth as a pair of people slam and re-slam it. Those that they have caused injustice to replace them, realigning those maladies upon the peaceful, who now must hunt for an appeasement until they're allowed to retire and come upon the origin of their vicious treatment. Everyone that ultimately was damned who then sought vengeance by the destruction of another person, perpetuating the abuse and the noir of having sovereign deals, yet are force fed out, overborne with the manipulation of immediate and petty retributions eventually find themselves faced with the original sin which has caused their own; every spirit, every star, finds itself in the company of desperation, always wanting vengeance against a person out of reach, forced to spend eternity as the neighbor to the person who has wronged them, that they wronged. An unending hatred fueling space to burn and stars to burst. Everyone is as weak as the feelings they can't overcome.

     ii.  The Suffering of Love Lasts in the Afterlife

Someone, steamboat-looking, sails around the corner. Panting, he approaches K. Stops in front of him, sits down. K., a happiness surveyor for the Dharma Institute, is atmospheric. The living mistake him for an angel. The ruse of guardian angels. In life the flame of his life went out like this: he tormented himself into a cataclysm, disintegrated, burnt from the middle of the nerves in his feet outward; his feet sizzling and falling off into ashes in his bed as he slept; when he woke everything below his shoulders: dust. Now in the shape of wavelengths along the wall, painted by the fan above him.

     iii.  K. in Love

No one who is in love ever forgets. Love is clothes. Their unwashed, unchanged clothes. Sometimes those clothes look nicer than those outfits of who the un-in-love. Sometimes they're tattered and beaten, undomesticated, horrible. The rain plummets, breaks against things. Falling discontinuous. Love as a system is broken like this rain. People imagine themselves a fine enough universe. Sometimes love is good. There are people who are in love. Systems can break yet maintain great auroras. Those must be the people in the good love. K. had a bad love, and his soul withered away as someone's breath does when they laugh in the cold: a stone of smoke whose border dissipates; the cold air then tears into its heart, dragging it away in strands. 

On the Drive Home

And then I drove home,
Driving by
The split tires
That look like children
Cradling their knees
Steeped along
The freeway shoulders
That cars
Swerve
To keep their stories
Ignorant,
Tied garbage bags
Jutting limbs,
Amoebas
That look
To have swallowed
Babies,
Striped along the interstate;
The highway kids,
Having heard
That not everyone
Can be helped.
I didn't try to help.
These were the ones,
I figured,
That were beyond
Salvation.

The Abyss, the Light, and Death

The titanic hands
Of the Abyss
Enclose
As instantly
As the darkness
Of a room
When the switch
Is leveled.


Demonstrate that
There is Light
By splitting off
From the wrist
Your shadow.


The meandering
Requiem of Death
Forces meditation:
You, conscious,
Away from death;
A later thought,
You are neighbors.

On the Shadows in the Heart

A Heart
Without Sincerity
Endowed inside
Its own beliefs
Is a dismantled Rib
Being carried away
By a Buzzard.

God,
The universe
Is lonely.