The dreams I had last night seem to have lodged themselves in my lower back. I cannot stand up straight. My head is listing to one side. It pulls me around the apartment in circles while I try to make coffee. The thought of going outside is unbearable, but the dog has that look on his face that reminds me how long it's been. And now the radio has begun it's daily attack- song after song piled up before me to call my faults and losses into the light.
I spent the last two hours in bed striving to stay in that liminal zone between this world and the other. The place of no roads, and all roads, skipping over and through each other suggesting solutions to the problems that plague my waking hours. If I could grab the end of the threads, even just one, and pull it through with me when my body finally forces me above the waves to tend to the idiot drives of the flesh. Piss, shit, coffee, masturbation, food.
Could I find some drug that would let me stay down there just below the ocean, watching the light from this world filter down softly in green and blues? I know of some. But the side affects are all the same. They will hold you there, half buoyant, for a while. But then of course the drug itself demands renewal, and demands it of the flesh, so ejects me from the sea to tend again to the processes, the dull algorithms of living.
I light a cigarette and stare out the half open curtains for a while. So this is loneliness?
I've already seen, and too many times, how the pain we have caused is returned to us. The sorrow and sadness we have given to those we love, out of selfishness or stupidity, come around again to hang like a stone from our necks where tender arms should reside. I know this part to the ends of knowing.
But when does the compassion come back to us? All of our tenderest loving kisses; every time we have sat and listened, absorbing someone's regret so that they may stand up and shake off their blue minded fears of death without redemption. When does all of this come back to us? Will these moments ever be wrapped again and re gifted, delivered to our doorsteps in the night while we shiver alone in our memories of days when there was a sun in the sky that was not a mocking laughter, a sneering reminder that we are lost now, and have most likely never ever been found?
It's these thoughts now in endless streaming chains that dance like hurricanes in my brain, my eyes pulled up against the too much light of the day. Colors so strong they render me deaf and dumb. I can see the ground slide away beneath my feet but I can not stop moving forwards into this decline. How full of my own stupid pain I must be to think that it matters. Cry for me world! See me on my cross and care! Oh, pull me down and see to my bruised heart with the love of a lapidary smoothing rough stones into precious gems. Fuck. Yes indeed, lovers, this is loneliness. And worse that, it is lonesome too.
There is no going away anymore. The road is over and this is where will stay. My exile on Main Street, across a too-high bridge. The bridge that brought me to this town by merit of being the place from which my brother stepped out of this world, swinging above the evening breeze and forgetting everything.
The cold outside has crept into the house. There's no firewood in here, and I'm too unsettled to go down to the porch to cut any.
The guitar remains untuned, crooked against the unpainted wall of my room. I stare at it and it stares at me, but we have nothing anymore to say to one another. Instead I sing tuneless words into the air and watch them fade beneath the bare bulb, the dripping sink a metronome, the wheezing in my lungs a barroom piano lurching in and out of imagined conversations. I am practicing, you see, for my big return.
The thought of dying does not bother me. It's the thought of dying alone.
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