Death

“You are afraid to die, and you’re afraid to live. What a way to exist.”
Neale Donald Walsch

~

They got it all wrong. But I see things for how they truly are. That's what most tell themselves in secret, in-between breath and breath, in repressed silence. We all fail to notice the most integral part of reality, that we see nothing, nothing but ourselves, deformed.

They got it all wrong. And as they engage in thought while recurrently failing to pause the grand game of delusion and blind trickery, they also fail to notice that no matter how deep the intellect digs, the finite hole and its neighboring treasures will never account for infinite weakness.

They got it all wrong. And though it's admirable that they can see in the curls of simple letters old particles of dust dancing in fresh yellow sunlight, they still fail to recognize the music. And I fail miserably just the same to rescue the timeless tempo of the soul drowning in this ink.

They got it all wrong. And their pale figures are like beautiful old buildings tainted with the cheap paint of modernity and a touch of make-up to hide the battle scars. They left the castle and paved the circular road to vanity with expensive clothes, walking naked in copies of shoes as polished and tarnished as their faces.

I got it all wrong. I got it all wrong because I buried anger in the deepest layer of my being. And the calm silence that ensued continuously reminded me to forget that all these people were going in and out of my house faster than this lucky smoke I'm breathing out.

I got it all wrong because I write about temporary failures because I am both temporary and a failure. And I write this nonsense down as these words words fall from my eyes onto paper in a blink. So here's one for the upcoming death of my parents. And here's two for the people I love the most, since they're already dead. But that's okay. It's okay because we all paint death in broad daylight with the letters our lips draw - little bits of earth that align, layer upon layer, above our cold and motionless bodies beneath the gravestone that invisibly reads: How soon is now? 

Everyone you love is going to die. And that's okay because death is a good thing. For while the doors of life are a rite of passage from one lie to another, death is the gateway to truth and justice.

To be fair, there are some things here that are worth delaying death for. By 'some' I mean 'two', Love and the Human Spirit - Love and Art for short. And if by any nonrandom chance you manage to add purpose to the recipe, I have a feeling that death would take the long way home to listen to what kind of music you can make.

Now, things here are either for rent or immaterial. And all that is immaterial is either a well concealed lie or a mostly forgotten truth. Now the cool thing about mostly forgotten truths is that they're right there in front of your face resonating with the vibrations propagating across your shirt. And the coolest mostly forgotten truth is that other people are wearing shirts too.

My heartbeat is not for rent.
And my voice is my voice.
Great performances unfold in dramatic monologues. Yet memorable ones write future history in and with brief moments of mixed frequencies, voices that team up against life for the sake of an honorable death.

So run. Run toward death with your favorite soundtrack beating inside your invisible headphones. Run toward death and touch every heart you meet with grace. Run toward death and give it the parts you really want dead. And then, with whatever remains of you, run through.

~

“To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.” 
J.K. Rowling

Wind

“There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns."
Chuch Palahniuk

~

I need to get this out.

This silent wind I breathe in is sharpening its heated nails with my lungs, scraping blackened red paint off the wall that falls for no one. So I light up one more lucky cigarette to fight fire with smoke. We all depend on things to make it through the night.

Whatever truly carries your breath and allows your mind to traverse this multiverse of lies, make sure you're going in the right direction. And whatever you push back onto the world with your lips and feet, go for watery brushstrokes of Art, on the right pages of earth and wind.

It's still there and I can't get it out.

The music fades like a vanishing painting and I don't know the spell to bring it back. What I know is that the rhyme is lost to me because the heart I once knew had its drums punctured over time. So what happens now? We light up one more for the sake of ancient fire.

There are two kinds of people. There are those who write the song title first and those who write the artist's name first. There are those who are busy in the race to become the best slave in the system and those who are busy becoming the best person they can be.

What if nothing comes out?

Ring the doorbell and break the wall. There are no doors beyond this smoke. You fall in the well, the well you sow, the well you sow before you broke. This reddish dawn is drawn with blood. And this rain is the ash of all your drugs. So with flooded lungs and shattered drums, reap the pain on which you choke. Breathe in hell,

The presence of missing links underlines a meaningful absence of coherence. What eventually comes out is thus unsound at best and, at worst, me. But the resounding question remains: Who are you? Perhaps you project what you miss onto the blank spaces I leave between the lines, here, and, in-between words and letters which, there, fail to materialize.

The first rule is to partially respect chaos. The second is to find meaning in the song. The third is to allow yourself to get lost in the melody. The fourth is to let go of the parts that don't belong. The fifth is to stop counting rules that don't make sense. And the last rule is to devote your life to understanding the constituents of the glue that stitches rules onto chaos.

The hazy daze is spraying crazed footprints in my head and the stranded pen is stuck in the shadowy circle it sketched to project and protect itself. And I don't know. I don't know anything. Maybe the way for better days is coded in musical notes. Maybe it's in the key under the blind illiterate mat that reads Hope in Old English Text below the nonexistent door on the wall I couldn't break. And maybe there's nothing here. Maybe there's nothing here.

In a state of chaos, there seems to be neither cause nor purpose. In a state of chaos, there are multiple patterns and a single question. And the question shines in multicolored layers in your eyes:

What do you see in the wind?

~

“Words are wind.” 
George R.R. Martin

Imagination

"Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird

That cannot fly."
Langston Hughes

~

A drum-roll is composed of two beats.

I fell asleep to the vague image these words put in my head. And perhaps, I never woke up.

Ever since I was a kid, I've been trying to reduce life to a system of ideas. Meanwhile, I also attempted to develop a system of principles for the purpose of ethical navigation. Over time, the two systems became entangled like two pairs of shoelaces fused together, joining the two right feet of an enigmatic human being who can only walk in circles.

In my head, the systems are invincible. Also, in my head, reality and fiction are knit together into the same mask I hide in the world of mirrors.

I don't know who this is or why he's writing with a particular shade of purple. I don't know if these words are the blood of dawn extracted from an afflicted horizon, above the sea of doubt, and below the sky of hope. Maybe they're just modern make-up for a play with no real script, a demonic game between the voices in your head.

In my heart, there is, to the best of my knowledge, nothing.

So why would you take a worn-out and empty container?

There are two nights in this ink. One of them is mine and the other is, naturally, yours. Now each night contains a vision, with a dream lying there underneath. In mine, I walk and run, and walk and run, and walk, and run. And then I stop and stand still. And as the deep dark dream pretends to be me, I pretend that I'm okay, and that nothing's wrong, closing my eyes to the idea that taking this deep breath will fix the broken dawn. Yet I know, deep down, that I'm dissecting the constituents of that air I'm breathing in, looking for a scented trace of life as my feet step on the guts of the dreams that committed suicide in my head.

That was one of the voices in the play.

Now it's your turn. So are you watching closely?

Are you running or walking?

How dark is your night?

And how dead is your dream?

Is the map beneath your feet a circle?

Is this all confused fiction in a real mirror or is it the purest reality in a fictional mirror?

Do you know what a mental drum-roll sounds like when the drummer's eyes are closed?

Close. 

Play. 

Listen.

What do you see? What do you smell?

Are you watching closely?

A drum-roll is composed of two beats.

~

"We sat in the car

& the night dropped

down until the

only words were

the crickets &

the dance of our voices.

& for a moment 

the world became

small enough to

roll back & forth

between us."

Brian Andreas