choose your own life

Sublime coffee shop chaos. Wet weather’s so thick I’m still picking up the wifi single from my house several blocks away. I finally slept, and dreamt last night dreams that seemed almost innocent and pulled from life compared to the others of late; sneaking into festivals, playing music with gypsies on rooftops, saving lovers and loosing them again, swimming through piles and piles of books. Dreams that don’t have to mean anything.

Last night finally watched "I Heart Huckabees." Someone’s been snooping around in my subconscious again. I thought my life was the existential detective comedy. Wait, or was it a tragedy? I can’t remember anymore. The meaningful interconnection of all things, vs. the inevitability of human drama. Does it even matter what is true? Only if we want it to. My dreams, the deer and the helicopters, picking up my collapsed bookshelf and finding that the two most prominently in the spot where everything fell apart were Crimethinc.’s anarchist cookbook "Recipes for Disaster," and a book on chaos theory, playing viola on the roof of that party and remembering that the first major role I acted in high school was in Fiddler on the Roof as Perchick the student revolutionary who upsets everyone’s simple lives and is banished to Siberia before everyone flees the pogroms, my family fleeing the pogroms in Russia centuries ago and me becoming an anarchist, the growing police state here and the war everywhere else, people asking for prayers that Hurricane Katrina doesn’t destroy New Orleans and everyone’s lives there but no one mentioning that it could destroy the oil and gas pipelines in the gulf that supply thirty percent of the country’s fuel, making new friends and wondering what their lives are like when I’m not around. Do these things matter, is their some subtle thread that connects them? Yes. No. Maybe.

Nothing is true unless we want it to be, everything is sacred unless we choose to ignore it, we are the only ones who can give ourselves permission to think or feel or act in any certain way. We are the authors of our own lives after all, and as some famous writer once said, what makes a story is not the plot or characters but the specific details that the author finds important enough to include, and the connections they make between them. What is important to the party and festival hoppers whose faerietale lives consist of getting drunk and laid as often as possible? What is important to the middle class Americans caught up in working to survive and wondering how come they are not rich and famous and important like all the politicians and pop icons? What is important to the artists and revolutionaries and all those who pay enough attention to the world that they feel driven to change it, even if in some small subtle way? What is important to you? Are you the hero of your own epic world-shaping story, or just a minor character in someone else’s cosmic barroom joke told so many times that it’s not even funny anymore? There is no such thing as fate, only giving up control and succumbing to random external events as if they mean nothing.

What adventures do you choose to live, what dreams do you choose to make real? When you reach that dark night at the end of your life will you be able to look back in satisfaction and say that it was the greatest story ever told? What about at the end of the day when you lay down to sleep, will all the trials and triumphs of a lifetime be crammed into those waking hours, crammed into just one hour, crammed into every single moment? This is your life after all. Are you living it?

verbal corrosives

I wrote a poem earlier. The first one in about a month now. It was ghastly, and terribly depressing. Then after a drastic change of mood, Neil Young's Deadman soundtrack, a fascinating essay on Chinese characters and the poetics of language that my twin brother sent me (whose going to be in town next week!), and the first few pages of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, I wrote a completely different poem, which is much more to the point, and thankfully not influenced by Joyce's more peculiar word choices (just what are bidimetoloves anyway?).

***

Dead men sense
raindrops on borrowed smiles.
Fall's first tears
joystrike midair explosions.
Feelings? Buried
under God's unmarked tomb,
hollow deer
flyby helicopter stoplights.
Radio tower stars
blink back yesteryear's blues,
whistle slick street
train tracks till tomorrow.

You never come,
home to hungry ghosts in time.
Halfmast eyes
peel off finite consuming:
wretched earth
spit sick break cycle breaths.
Laugh clench teeth
ride skincrash through brainshower,
crumble heavens
to concrete soaked dust prayers.

Taste one now
or never taste again.