(questions)

XVI.

         I never run out of things to write. It’s like the act of living is an act of witching thoughts, into existence; an almost unequivalence to the loss of things in the universe. Unless to think, itself, is to lose; in itself, thinking, perhaps, may be nothing. In a person, perhaps creation; in time, perhaps transition. Questions at Any Where are always lost, always dying. Questions, these lonesome thoughts, halfway and full of life, are not over for as long as they are questions. So full of life and with time. With time, questions render death and loss---they are dying all the time. Always moving closer, to an answer, to a death, whether the answer is right or not. Because truth does not really lie in anything, is like a potential energy in all things, and arises between things, so that Truth can really stand alone and eternal, by itself, and still be Not to others. Questions, too, can be eternal, perhaps may never die; the answer that tries to bring a question to its end may not be right, or answer enough. From another perspective; perhaps from another world. It’s an emergent phenomenon, this business of living and death, questions and Truth.

Some days I can feel the balance and the paradox, although usually it happens chronologically. I see one side of the coin, and not long after I discover the other, and rarely I feel both at once and nothing changes. And everything does, because something does and it affects everything. And there is no question. 

         One always conceives itself then quickly dies, of its own. As though my mind were the parent; yet it's always the child.

Is to be this way, to be alive, to falsely deem the Experience a continuous line, and discover, at a consecutive point, that it is not a line? Why do I never need an answer? Do I continue to live this unquestionable Experience the way I am? Could more insight change anything? I never ask these things, I conceive them and never give them life. But then, what is life? I abort this question too. All my answers lie in continuity, even when I see death die. Anything goes, Everything.

(pain)

XIII.

         My migraines begin with no beginning. When a migraine starts, when it finds me; well there is no place, no point when it's found me for sure. Like the horizon in a gradient, like the birth of gray from the death of black and white. Because when I suddenly get a migraine, I suddenly feel pain the way it's always been there. In fact, there is only one migraine, I've never had more than one migraine, and it is always there, but not always beginning. Like a person you know: all of the person you know, your whole experience of that person, things about that person, is all of who you know you know, and all of that's inside you, always is. It somehow never leaves you, never stays in you, and you forget and you experience again and again; as soon as you see the person again, you know them again. And then life goes on and they are not physically present, and you forget until you remember. My migraine begins in a realm like halfway-asleep, a realm that exists in both asleep and awake, but not between. A No Place when anything could be, where nothing begins and nothing's eternal, and everything confusing can be seen confusing in all clarity, and things that start are not starting when they start. I don't know when my migraine finds me. Perhaps it's my head in orbit to the mass of potential that everything physical and experiential passes into: the chest of the body. And perhaps my head eternally undergoes phases, and in certain phases my head can be seen from the migraine that lives in the chest, and that's where it finds me.

         Pain is a funny thing because there are several ways it can hurt and several ways it can heal and several ways it can be happening and not hurt. It can afflict, it can teach, it can put you to sleep; it can wake you, ruin you, strengthen you, and drive you to a place when nothing makes sense and yet you experience the all-nonsense with all of your senses, and it's so clearly neither-either that suddenly you understand with an understanding that feels like it never began.

         There is physical pain, emotional pain, lonely pain; the pain of inseparability, the pain of winter, the pain of spring, the pain of transience and the pain of For Good. There is a pain for difficulty and a pain for simplicity. Pain can be tiny and inconsiderable, nagging and subconscious, undiscovered. It can be tremendous and sensational, it can carry you away to a sadness you don't want to be parted from, it can raise flags of blood and purpose that inspire waxing wind into your sails. It can steal your sails and leave you drifting to no purpose, it can cycle like fear and paranoia until you feel so alive from suffering that being close to death could not make you feel more alive. Pain can be the decay that fertilizes the soil, that nurtures things that grow. Pain can parent love, and hate, and indifference. It can be felt in every part of the body, of the chest, of the mind and heart, it can be felt it in places that don't exist and it can start and never start, kindle and douse fires. Pain can die while it's living, it can die and still be pain, hammering and aching and breathing in your head. Because pain is a funny thing; pain is both a thing separate from you and your experience of it. Pain knows the death of death as well as the death of life, and if it's seems closer to death it's because you are far from both death and life, which are always close together. Which are always found in each other, which are always like friends we know and we touch and we friend and we leave and we live. There is a No Point when pain becomes the death to your life, and the same No Point is where pain becomes the life to your death. Pain calls me back to my body, like a force that I can trust it brings my head to my chest, and there is water and air, and I can see the water and I can feel the air.

         Sometimes the pain is like a bowl of water; this is how the pain is separate from me. Sometimes when it's there the bowl seems really full, and if I am sitting and holding the very full bowl it means that I can't stand up without spilling it; this is how the pain is my experience of the pain that is separate from me. Sometimes the pain of not being able to stand up without spilling is water, more water put in the bowl such that a single breath would make it spill; this is a point where somehow the pain of the experience becomes the experience of pain. And it's a point where pain that is separate from me becomes a part of me, which is the start of the death of pain while it continues to live and be.

         Suddenly, I don't need the pain of pain, and it needs to be embraced. I can shove it away, bury it but the pain continues to be, and the pain of the pain continues to be. It can't be fought and killed---anyone with headaches must know that fighting headache pain makes it worse, and even medicine doesn't kill it. That if a headache dies after taking medicine, it was because of healing and not fighting, because a thing can be healed to its death. And pain of pain is very similar to the pain; it can be healed to its death, and then the pain still lives, but the feeling of pain has changed. The way all deaths are changes and not losses and not gains and not neither and not change. So I embrace it and I change, and the pain of pain is the part of me that changes, and the pain stays the same but I am living; for my head and my chest the pain becomes life, becomes a part of it, becomes a part of me like a bone in my body. Another sensation to live, another feeling to wake me up, to be awake so I am feeling the No Point that is always there that we don't always feel. The Point that our heads can't touch without our chest, that words don't touch, that's so essential it can't be described, is too complex, too simple to understand without knowing by feeling and can only be lived: the horizon between life and death, the line that makes our heads feel we are alive, and our chests know it.

(melancholia)

III.

With a heave I unlace the delicate closure

And unbutton eyehooks quick as I can

So I can let out my stomach and draw in a fresh breath of

Mind to unlatch the ivory clasps

Throw open the heavy ceiling

Of my green-glassed red-wood wrought-iron chest.

An unfocused stare into its chasm

provokes images of calm waters,

soon agitated into a good-natured choppiness

by salty winds swelling from my throat.

And as I peer down,

My head becomes the moon to this private ocean,

And my breathing, now a pull; I brought the tide.

While my head hangs in the sky,

My hands grope to find the rim of known space,

the wooden lips of the world I'm leaving.

And for an eternity, I'm transfixed,

unintently,

In an utterly blank stare;

Eyes glued cemently to the surface of water.

Finally, Anyone speaks and breaks

eternity, like an egg,

on the side of a metal mixing bowl.

I am pulled from everything back into one thing, with a gravity;

My vision thaws, my skull resounds with the bowl's ring,

but I do not recover the tide quick enough to care

who or why or when what was said.

But my fingers feel the outside again,

my eyes drag across the water, now able to sip.

Drink

Its clarity.

I can see straight down to where it must be close to the bottom.

Eons away, but clearly visible―

its measure irrelevant.

Identifiable by lucid, lyrical blues.

The place is a rhythm steadier than my tide,

its cycle simpler than my moon's.

My feet twitch.

I peel off my socks and sweep my legs over the side,

making sure that a knee collides with one of the latches

to deliver a pang to the most echoic corners of my chest,

to send a metallic quiver through my walls

and the acoustic space between.

(places)

I.

          There is a place in me, when I shake household lamps, any lamp-like containers within sight and reach, hoping to wake up a genie, wishing more for the magic than for the three wishes. When I give it up, if only because the genies are simply out-of-commission. When I am more skeptical about reason, not seeing a benefit of the Doubt.

          There is a place in me, when it stops raining, when I go outside and pace the wet street on my bicycle, for hours. Dreaming. When I stop, beneath dark chandeliers of glass globes and spindly pine needles, clocks of pale needles spraying towards the sky, towards me, towards the ground. Fanning outwards from the limbs of sloth Giants, who bow to children and their doggy friends and bend their bristly arms into upside down arches—upside down because their round elbows bowl downwards towards the ground, form the base of a half circle that the light and the rain and the wind fall through. Their slow hands sway in a great noble reach to the clouds, which leaves the children and dog-children in awe, and when the wind shows up, the great boughs shake small magic all over the dog-eared believers; glass worlds of flipped children, so small you can frame them with your thumb and index finger.

          When I stop there, and the trees send extra wet splashes to my scalp, and I can feel the round shape of the drops before they break in my hair.

          When I take the chance of looking up, see how long it takes before a raindrop falls in my eye, see what the rain looks like when you look straight up into it, to where it's falling from. When a close call closes my right eye with a force, turns my face downwards to the damp dirt that cakes the edge of the cracked cement, to the potholes and dips that house wide open puddles, when I gaze into a puddle and it's transparent, and I see the hole in the street underneath which is a girl gazing up at the sky beneath her.

          When I try to imagine the point where our two worlds meet, somewhere in the surface of the puddle. When there is no stable plane for the horizon between the two, there is no place to go to be between, except the place in each world where both meet.

          When I find my feet, and the hard wet surface that they fall to, when the toe of my sneakered foot flicks the kickstand, flicks it up flicks it down in a half circle motion, and I back up the bicycle so the pedals are ready for me to take off with rocket power; right pedal up, at the top of its cycle, left pedal down, a half cycle away.

          There is a place in me when my feet tread the air, so far above the clouds that my tangled hair drags dirt and leaves along the wood-chipped ceiling. When I see with my eyes that I'm a helium balloon that anyone let go of, that's finding the ceiling, floating up with a force that feels as heavy as my body, as strong as my feet touching ground, the pull that brings them to the ground. When I'm a helium balloon suspended an arm's length from the ceiling, caught against a band of black rubber, the opposite of a seat, between two pinchy chains of oil-black links.

          When I swing there, a million miles of blue and white air below my feet, the drop so far that I can't see any ground, and I am lucky that as I pump my legs and swing in a half cycle back and forth, I'm falling up.

          There's a very long, very small since between here and that place in me when I walk the nothingness above the ceilings of my house, stepping carefully over the rises in every doorway.

          Between here and that place when I'm breathlessly uncomfortable, caught against my giant brother's shoulder with the strongest force, strong as the heaviest weight of my body, falling me up like magic, like the anchored lamps that fall up and shed light down.

          When my giant brother calls me a Sack O' Potatoes, when he flips the world upside down and walks with his feet way above, touching the shoe-worn lusterless wood and unvaccuumed carpets, sprinkled with debris from outside and bits of yarn, the surface above me. The floor way below my feet is bright and blank, with an occasional spider that sticks out black against white, attracting my eye like a beacon. It's otherwise clean and lonely, repelling furniture feet, the feet of my friends and family, the feet of my giant brother magnetically, til they're unbudgingly far away and untouchable, like the light that falls up and sheds light down, like the anchored lamps lit with Sadly, the speedless magic of For Good.

          And through the long, small since stretches a freeway with alongside ditches, where muskrat guts and raccoon skulls and hollow squirrel carcasses go. And all the crows of my lifetime that got into the garbage on brisk Monday mornings decompose there. They were sentenced to decompose there the moment I set eyes on them and forgot, lost them to tear open their huge black presents, wrapped with hefty black plastic and perfumed with rotting peels and rancid pulp and wet paper, tied off at the top in a knot, or in a stretched plastic bow, or in stretched red knots. Mystery prizes dragged out to the street by the mailbox just for them, collections of lost and discarded and forgotten smelly pieces for the crows, who sleep on their collections of lost things in huge itchy nests by the wastewater runoffs that lead to the lake.

          All those crows of my lifetime go as masters of the lost to the alongside ditches and decompose there; they bring treasures like pipe caps that We As Children hopped on to throw the question, Water Gas Or Nothing?

          And they forget---except the one crow who's two wings and left foot are captured Somewhere, in seven frames of some unknowing someone's home video. That crow stays unsolid, Barely but remembered in the camera of my eye, like every eyelash I've shed and picked off my cheek and wished upon, wishing nowhere, to a question, whispering in my head because the direction of the wish is so unsure. Like every leaf of grass, shaft of wheat, stalk of corn, wild grass, every individual plant that passed me by at sixty miles an hour, that passed my window and was recorded by the camera of my eye, seen and forgotten, found and lost, the kind of block that builds Familiar. Along the freeway between here and that place in me; all of the since of growing like a bean, awkward and twisted and natural and steady.

          I think I'm moving through a space when the freeway is a place in me, instead of an unimaginable horizon between. When growing is a place that doesn't exist between a child's world and an adult's, but rather a place in each world when the two worlds meet.