In all my days of begging, it's true that I never wanted much. It was always enough to get the small gains of each new day. No grand goals to hinder my movements, no overbearing desire to hold me to a course of action. Just a meal, a drink, and a fuck to keep me standing. But now I've grown old and am beginning to wonder just what it was that they were singing about back there in the days of whiskey and regret. Is there some larger stand to take that brings all of these tiny moments together? Do we, all of us tiny creatures, have an end to reach? Is it in us to become? It's a sore deal, this cycle of want and loss. Are we genuinely better than this want? It's all questions now with never an answer that rings true. How many days have I spent trying to deceive my love with a mask of laughter telling myself that it's an act of grace, the gift of apathy, the conditional habit of ignorance? I've seen men hanging from their balls, their livers, and their hearts.
Have you ever been to Kansas? Have you ever been to New Orleans? Have you sung the midnight down till dawn? Can you sing the sickness off your life in a clear, true voice? Do they believe you when you smile?
It's been a long time, but I know a hawk from a hand saw and I have seen the light. And this too is a lie.
See? Tricksy mind. Slipping up and going back into the old rants and ruts. Clinging like dried skin and feathers on the side of the road, desert dry and cooked to perfection. The perfect silence, the perfect meditative pose- ego finally dispensed with. But still waiting. What for now? It's only the remnants of habit. We wait in life, always, so when death calms us we'll keep waiting with a century long grin slowly spreading out on what remains. The revenant smile. Is it why we get sucked down river to this grave city where the dead will not stay under? Studying, we are. Trying to commit to some vague muscle memory that might outlast our flesh. Bone memory?
Festina lente. Make haste slowly. The dawning sun is the killers rose, set out on the curb with the piled high corpse dreams- another night without sleep and so many imagined cities aborted before conception. Struggling down through the seas of sleeping, but made buoyant with the misery of the day and yesterday, too. It bloats the heart, fills it with noxious gases. No sleep for you my dearest one, my own unremembered face pressed down into the stained pillow. The sun is coming for you again.
Lying here in the detritus of my death, laughing at my desire for love. For a lover. Who will be still beside me amidst the cigarette butts and ash. Carnival has ended, and now it's ash. I sleep in it, this bed of ash, if I sleep at all. I tell it stories and it returns them to me, quieter and more distant. Ashes, ashes. But already fallen, comfortable in broken repose. Waiting. This is not a suicide note, this is ash settling on the surfaces of my life.
It's becoming a story after all. A motionless tale of nothing. A waiting book. That's the whole story, yes? That all of this is wait. Crushing wait. Waiting without goal, waiting for nothing. Waiting for ashes to claim the last memory. Burning without light, without joy or sorrow either. Steady hands pressing back the memory of vision. Waiting for the story to begin so that we might work our way towards the end.The addiction has faded, only empty now but without hunger. I would like to see your face and hear your voice, but like old film, like talking to the TV in insomaniacal half dreams, the same movies every night without sleep or dream the rambling sentence of a life too long lived, waiting, waiting, waiting. This is not a biography, it's a killing of time, and time is suicide. Too much will surely kill us all. But we will not let it go, will not stop wallowing in it, collecting moments to measure our too long lives with. Comma, comma, pause, pause. Taking breaths and not returning them. This is not a song that can be easily sung. But I will try. See me dance to sound of my own voice, to all the voices inside and outside of my head that follow me while I sing too loudly and sometimes just speak to you out there in the streets by my lonesome? I would like to see you again, but safely. Don't get me wrong, I'm not waiting. Waiting, waiting. I'm only trying to not remember that there is a tomorrow after this and more and more and too many to count. Easily severed, these tomorrows. Festina lente. Hurry up and wait.
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