The Formula
A million guitars drip cool melodies into the heat of the afternoon. Elusive as smoke – intangible – yet always there: the vibrating heartbeat of the city. You open the door. The absence of sound engulfs you. Only pulsating after images remain, hovering in the air, and what’s left of the music is a shimmering shadow dancing on the inside of your eyelids. Sit down and sink slowly into the cool current of the same conversation we always have.
The point. The point’s never to become unfocused. Blurriness. It happens to most people. You and I have both seen it happen. When your edges lose their sharpness; the mind dissolves into drifting mist torn into tufts by the lightest touch, like cotton.
The loss of focus begins with the eyes. Your eyes, they’re fountains: whispering stories in the forgotten tongue of deep, dark caverns sprawling under mountains of blood and gold. They’re sharp, and cold as a wild stream which carries your soul into the sunlight on its bubbling back. When your eyes grow blind, the tales die.
So little time, so much
to feel.
I’ve become so sharp I can cut
the night
in half
like a silver blade.
In the murky darkness traffic lights – silent dandelions – unfold. Measuring movement, they sway rhythmically nodding their swollen electric heads. What else is there to do but wander the streets at night; run your fingers along the rough skins of buildings radiating the day's sweaty heat. In sleepless restlessness, to get lost in the maze of yourself; follow the squinting eyes of street lamps into sweet nowhere. Here, or there, or elsewhere. Indefinable. Unattached. Unmoving. In the center of your
searching
self.
We’re prisoners of repeated patterns. Stories compelled to weave themselves relentlessly into the same knot till they tell themselves out. Over and over again, we swish through the air on the purple wings of the same windmill. With a little luck, one of us will have the guts to let go, and in that brief moment
– when they unfold like a butterfly’s wing,
before their bones shatter against the ground –
they’ll know what it’s like to be free. They don’t come back to tell the tale. Silence is freedom’s shadow, sprawled on the wall behind its back; a juicy spider living in its ivy crown. Each new story of freedom places the china bowl of the universe dangerously close to the edge of understanding, and gives it
a good
push.
I find that you and I are very much alike. Without trying to create a pretentious sense of spiritual union, I nevertheless recognize myself in you. Magnified in a curious way: shamelessly and nakedly exposed. An unsettling image of all that is vile in me breeding in you as well – rotting away on soggy earth among bones sucked dry by disturbed consciousness. My flaws have failed to make me unique. Beating my powdered wings against the design of things – a moth thrashing in an overturned glass – I hereby question the route that has led us here.
A glass of steaming wine has a somewhat soothing effect on the ripples of upset nerves. Pearls of sweat trickle down my back, translucently. It’s important not to move, allowing the boiling air to drift slowly by. The boiling world passes by: wave after shimmering wave. Stand by the road and watch the faces you know roll away towards the thin red lips of the horizon. Squeaking. Grunting. You do not follow. The yellow dust will settle on your eyelids, and blind you to their journey. You’ll stay here, by the trail, watching. Then. You will open your arms to embrace the silence that comes with the settling dust.
For we have come to the conclusion that among many kinds of loneliness, the most acute one, by far, is loneliness in a crowd. The agony of squeezing words out of a dry throat; gasping for breath in a sea of familiar faces as waves of bodies crush into you with a deafening roar. There’s so much more to the act of conversation than merely staying afloat. It is drowning in the shallows that we fear. What guides us to shore is not the warm comfort of a burning fire: it is moonlight reflected
in the polished surface
of an axe.
Paper kites of my desires flutter on the wind. Before I cut them free. Let them swish through air like black commas of swallows, whirling against the sun. As I walk barefoot among the moist pearls of dew at dusk, I want nothing. Assume nothing. I cut each cord with careful precision until the fluttering fades into silence, and there is nothing disturbing
the perfect stillness
of myself.
A million guitars drip cool melodies into the heat of the afternoon. Elusive as smoke – intangible – yet always there: the vibrating heartbeat of the city. You open the door. The absence of sound engulfs you. Only pulsating after images remain, hovering in the air, and what’s left of the music is a shimmering shadow dancing on the inside of your eyelids. Sit down and sink slowly into the cool current of the same conversation we always have.
The point. The point’s never to become unfocused. Blurriness. It happens to most people. You and I have both seen it happen. When your edges lose their sharpness; the mind dissolves into drifting mist torn into tufts by the lightest touch, like cotton.
The loss of focus begins with the eyes. Your eyes, they’re fountains: whispering stories in the forgotten tongue of deep, dark caverns sprawling under mountains of blood and gold. They’re sharp, and cold as a wild stream which carries your soul into the sunlight on its bubbling back. When your eyes grow blind, the tales die.
So little time, so much
to feel.
I’ve become so sharp I can cut
the night
in half
like a silver blade.
In the murky darkness traffic lights – silent dandelions – unfold. Measuring movement, they sway rhythmically nodding their swollen electric heads. What else is there to do but wander the streets at night; run your fingers along the rough skins of buildings radiating the day's sweaty heat. In sleepless restlessness, to get lost in the maze of yourself; follow the squinting eyes of street lamps into sweet nowhere. Here, or there, or elsewhere. Indefinable. Unattached. Unmoving. In the center of your
searching
self.
We’re prisoners of repeated patterns. Stories compelled to weave themselves relentlessly into the same knot till they tell themselves out. Over and over again, we swish through the air on the purple wings of the same windmill. With a little luck, one of us will have the guts to let go, and in that brief moment
– when they unfold like a butterfly’s wing,
before their bones shatter against the ground –
they’ll know what it’s like to be free. They don’t come back to tell the tale. Silence is freedom’s shadow, sprawled on the wall behind its back; a juicy spider living in its ivy crown. Each new story of freedom places the china bowl of the universe dangerously close to the edge of understanding, and gives it
a good
push.
I find that you and I are very much alike. Without trying to create a pretentious sense of spiritual union, I nevertheless recognize myself in you. Magnified in a curious way: shamelessly and nakedly exposed. An unsettling image of all that is vile in me breeding in you as well – rotting away on soggy earth among bones sucked dry by disturbed consciousness. My flaws have failed to make me unique. Beating my powdered wings against the design of things – a moth thrashing in an overturned glass – I hereby question the route that has led us here.
A glass of steaming wine has a somewhat soothing effect on the ripples of upset nerves. Pearls of sweat trickle down my back, translucently. It’s important not to move, allowing the boiling air to drift slowly by. The boiling world passes by: wave after shimmering wave. Stand by the road and watch the faces you know roll away towards the thin red lips of the horizon. Squeaking. Grunting. You do not follow. The yellow dust will settle on your eyelids, and blind you to their journey. You’ll stay here, by the trail, watching. Then. You will open your arms to embrace the silence that comes with the settling dust.
For we have come to the conclusion that among many kinds of loneliness, the most acute one, by far, is loneliness in a crowd. The agony of squeezing words out of a dry throat; gasping for breath in a sea of familiar faces as waves of bodies crush into you with a deafening roar. There’s so much more to the act of conversation than merely staying afloat. It is drowning in the shallows that we fear. What guides us to shore is not the warm comfort of a burning fire: it is moonlight reflected
in the polished surface
of an axe.
Paper kites of my desires flutter on the wind. Before I cut them free. Let them swish through air like black commas of swallows, whirling against the sun. As I walk barefoot among the moist pearls of dew at dusk, I want nothing. Assume nothing. I cut each cord with careful precision until the fluttering fades into silence, and there is nothing disturbing
the perfect stillness
of myself.
