this is my morning, hidden in the urban sprawl with sore
back and axle grease on my arms, the girl I love is asleep in our bed and I'm not with her
because I'm still trying to find a real voice, down here in the electromagnetic screen
limbo, trying to stir the energy, like Schauberger building spiral
flumes down an infinite river in his dreams, then waking up again broke and giggling in
America, just trying to catch a big wave in my mind and body and ride it the rest of my life, like all those friends who took me to parties and strange brown rooms in strange cities and got me high and watched me walk out of their lives again into some other future
this is my morning in a circle, on a train that rocks on silver tracks through foggy churchgrounds and pastures into a tunnel to the center of the earth. Some guys like to drink and fight and pass out, some guys like to fuck and forget, like starting fires in your own garden and then running away as a joke, like playing chicken with a brick wall. I like to look out the windows of my nightmare bus at the raindrops and contrails, or try to meditate squeezed tight between the woman with her walkman at max volume and the young guys smoking cigarettes and talking about death. They don't realize they're talking about death but I can hear it behind their voices.
I once wanted to change
and now I can't ever stop
it all
went too far and now I'm going to be sliding
for the rest of my life
and if you love me
you're coming with me
do you want that? You can say no
most people have.
in the evening when the kids have stopped cycling around the
concrete paths of the estate and the horizon is dark aquamarine and the air smells like
the air of a country I can't quite remember, but I know I must have been there - I can't
tell if the house is empty or full. I want to go upstairs and hold her and make her happy.
I want to write something down that when I read it again in the morning will remind me who
I am.
this is my morning that no one can take from me, 5 years old
again reading boy thrillers by the light of the landing and listening to my parents'
voices, connecting. I want to connect. The phone is always where I can reach it. Hook me
up, please, I'm like an island without a sea, I don't have anyone to tell me what to do
and that's how I wanted it but when there's no sound except rain water in the drainpipes
then I feel lonely and suddenly nothing fucking matters at all
pretty soon they'll bomb us where we stand, shred our skin
and smear our insides across the walls of the places we lived all our lives. They'll shell
the libraries and the schools and hide the dead children in the walls of the churches,
burn the oil fields for a hundred years and fill the mines with sulphur. They'll poison
the water and release viruses into the air, and for anyone left alive, shaking and singing
in the ruins of their homes, they will save their worst, they will tell them that there is
no life but this one.
this is my morning, locked in a white cell, masked and
gagged and running on a bone treadmill, surrounded by electricity, staggering, starting to
howl, as the lights flicker and the walls tremble and the machinery starts to speak - and
the machinery in me translates - don't turn us off - I wish I was a fish in a tank,
bobbing in the bubble column and hiding under the rocks, a fish tank in a happy
restaurant, where the lights would go out after midnight and I'd float in the dark without
a name, without understanding the concept of a name, without even understanding what a
life is. Just me, in my cold water chamber, dancing in the cooklights, the wok flames
reflecting in the glass
sleep is like a hand around my head, the voice comes and
goes and I'm still trying to tune myself in through the noise - obsessive phrases, song
lyrics, chess pieces blinking in and out of existence in patterns so familiar I can dream
about them. One day I'd like to open up my head and tip out everything I don't need, but
maybe that already happened and I was too crazy to notice. this is my morning and this is
me.