everything is art

part of my theory is that everything is art; any decent argument i’ve heard against this comes from our primitive need to classify and sort and make sense of the world. otherwise, everything is very interesting just as it is, and any creation of any kind is a contribution to what is—which is art, all of it.

time tricks

when i’m not with you
i want time to go faster 
when we’re together
i want time to move slower  

i want time to do all these tricks for me 
like speed up and slow down,
dance around and stop and start again 
when the great trick of all is it consistency 
and it’s me that screws it up by not playing along

appeal of drunkenness

sitting on my bed in my apartment in San Francisco at 4:40pm on Thanksgiving day, I understand the appeal of drunkenness specifically for the effect of not being yourself for a while.

going in a circle

it is in the passing
from one moment to the next
each of which i fill
with the results of my desires.

the desires themselves, 
however, 
i can never remember;
only the results of them.

so when i end up in a mess
and feel the desire to change it
i can’t remember
if it was that same desire for change
that got me here in the first place.

look out more

can i resist doing drugs when i’m bored? i test myself. my poetry continues to be egotistical. look out more, i tell myself. forget about yourself.

we are all fishing

we are all fishing. the world is globular and all water. all over, we speckle the surface, in our boats. some with different lures and others with longer lines, all fishing.

our bobbers on the surface tell us a shallow and single-pointed story of the beast beneath pulling on the other end of the line.

what we don’t know, at the center of it all, is the same big fish. it will pull you out of your boat and under and swallow you whole.

old man

aging,
old man
looking back
remembering
pulling forward;
old man, what for?

things are different now;
you are different now.

what you wish for isn’t here, 
can’t be; it’s there, always.

with the same powers 
that you look backwards, 
look here; this is it.

what you long for, it is here. 
in the same way that you were you, 
meeting what was; again, you are you, 
here and now, meeting what is.

your desires and abilities, 
your hopes and fears; 
they have changed, yes. 
but still you have them. 

and what does it matter 
what they actually are? 
so long as you have them, 
and are still alive.

there is still a game to be played. 
the rules have changed slightly. 
you have gained some skills 
and lost others. 
play on, old man.

Sunshine with rain

After several sooty weeks, overcast with ash from the fires up north, it rained today and cleared away the smoke in the air that was indistinguishable from the fog in San Francisco.

During lunch I went out for a sandwich; it was still raining. I brought an umbrella and enjoyed breathing clean air. I met the rain as a bringer of good news, like I imagine it is for the farmers in a drought. It was the same to us unable to breathe because of the smoke from the fires, like I said.

Now sitting in our office chairs on the ninth floor, the sunshine is coming out. We haven’t seen sunshine in weeks, either because we leave the office too late, or the smoke has covered it, or the permanent cloud in San Francisco. Now the sunshine comes through after the rain. Thanksgiving is tomorrow. I’m excited to leave the office in a couple hours and breathe the air.

The right way

All around me are traps and snares and only one way is the right one and it’s not straight so always I must keep my eyes wide open and awake or I’ll move when I’m supposed to stay put or turn left when it’s the other way and just stopping or not going forward aren’t options until that’s what the right way tells me.

Dishwasher music

Yesterday I took an eighth of a tab. I was lying on my bed with my eyes closed and my hands folded across my chest. I had turned on the speakers before I laid down and was listening to some classical music, Strauss, I think. It was so beautiful and I was seeing great visuals with my eyes closed and all together coming into the peak of the trip, I thought. For some reason, I don’t remember why, I opened my eyes and got up.

When I walked over to the stereo system, it wasn’t on. My first thought was, what the heck? I thought I turned this on. And my second thought was, well that’s odd, what symphony have I been listening to this whole time then? That I’ve been enjoying so much. And I realized, it was my dishwasher! The only other noise happening in my apartment. I either had forgotten to turn on the stereo or it had shut off on its own at some point and I was laying on my bed and hearing such a beautiful sound coming from the mechanics and the splashing of water and dishes.

A hundred poems

I wrote a hundred poems and tried to have meaning in every one but there’s just not that much meaning in the world; so I learned to write about ordinary things and inanimate objects and wouldn’t you know I found all the missing meaning.

The first plateau of meditation

I know I’ve arrived when the black behind my eyelids spreads out beyond my field of vision and occupies a space wider than my skull. This is consciousness opening up; I exist in it for a moment, without my senses.

saturdays

saturdays are for art, you don’t have to maintain your self, this is the day to let yourself go and see what you discover, you can worry about everything else during the work week, on saturday just be happy and marvel at everything no matter what it is

thinking about Jeanette leaving

it is what it was. no need to add on anything extra now after the fact. remember me like you do. hold onto the hue of my character we created under the pretense that you wouldn’t ever leave. even if i could bear to let you know how much i’ll miss you, i wouldn’t want to, unless i knew it’d make a difference. go on then, get, i’m bitter already.

i’m just gonna start putting them in here like i type them on my iphone

i seem to have all these needs; but i don’t really, have any of them. so when i get a start and move on in the general direction i’m happy enough watching the scenes go by but soon enough i’ve no idea where i’m from or where i’m going and no real actual driving needs to really force me to keep going so then i get all confused and look around and ask some bystanders where the heck am i and they shrug me off and pick up their things to keep going in their own direction; they seem to have needs at least, they walk so serious with their heads down, they must. but me no not me, so i pick up the things i don’t have and head off in all directions at once.

everything is art

all that you have is here and now, no matter what elsewhere or when

all i’ve ever written is the same thing said different ways

everything is art, it happens like this where i have no ability to edit my own work because it all seems great to me; everything seems great, even that cardboard box over there i wonder if i could break it down flat and frame it and hang it on my wall

Can’t get enough

It’s got to be something you can’t get enough of; if there’s an end to it you’ll be frustrated. If there’s not an end to it, you’ll still be frustrated, but at least you’ll carry on.

Bomb off

Go ahead and bomb off you’re gonna be alright, everything is safe and okay here, you needn’t worry, what you need you have: there is food in the fridge and tea in your cup, you have a safe bed right there and the door is locked and nobody’s around.

Go ahead and bomb off, just don’t think of anything outside this room and if you start then remember to breathe, you’ll be alright, you great big baby you’ll be fine

Go ahead and bomb off, cover up the clocks and don’t think about time and just act thankful as hell and hang out in the apartment like your own world apart from everything else.

Go ahead and bomb off, today is your day, bomb off, it’s alright, read this if you get worried, everything is okay, breathe if you start to think, don’t think about your identity or your conception of yourself; just think of what your senses are taking in

Go ahead and bomb off you’ll be alright, when you come back you’ll still be yourself and pick up right where you left off and might not even remember but the thing is you’ll remember it now and it’ll be you for as long as it lasts.

Edges that cut

All around us sharp edges were breaking down our motivations to be anything that might bleed past the cuts. Most of us didn’t have the guts to try but if we would’ve we’d have known that the edges weren’t real, or at least not permanent in their places. They weren’t like normal kitchen knives that would cut you for sure but instead more like prickles on a pineapple or the needles on a porcupine—full of dynamic life and happy to have a conversation with you about their place in the world if you’d only ask. But we never ask most of the time because each of us has had our slip with a kitchen knife and shudders not only to remember the cut and the pain but moreso the drop of blood in the stew that the whole family was counting on so that our pain is twofold and only the first is selfish whereas the second has to do with our place in society and even if we were to brave the pain we wouldn’t want to be outcasted beyond the edges.

Groceries on Thursday

At the grocery store at 10:41 in the morning on a Thursday I wonder about who is here and who isn’t and who is being prodded along on the trodden track. I’m one of those normal. Look at all the open space and quiet here in a place designed for the heights of the mad rush after work or on a Sunday evening when chores are done according to the norms. But what a place built for so much with so little.

Double negative

I forget what I can’t do nothing with until I catch myself in the double negative and remember it’s good for something and scramble in my sieve brain for a trace just to get on the right track or it’ll really eat me up for having tossed out such a sweet save.

What is not

Now I know I always come back. Nothing seems so bad anymore knowing there’s always a bounce instead of a crash at the end of these falls. Like I imagine it is to jump out of a plane that’s very high up. Terror in the beginning, yes. But then boredom. And after boredom, interest in the air around you and what you can see and what it is like to fall now that the fear and pain of it is commonplace. So I’m sick with dread and a split head but really just thinking what is it for a head to split while I wait for everything to put itself back together and redeliver me to the paradise I can only stand for some time until the same effect takes over and it’s no longer a paradise but just a place where I think of what it is for a para to dice. Nothing is anything really, at least to you, until you make of what it isn’t.

The next scare

I don’t suppose there was anything really like that where we came from so when we saw it we were scared but not just two minutes later we were looking past it and not even noticing anything other than the next thing to scare us.

Alien high

I wish we could have come and gone with the wind without the kite strings higher and higher until there wasn’t any turning back and we were lower to another planet than we were high from earth and so began a weird alien life where as we got farther away from five fingers and oxygen we got closer to another life we didn’t recognize but this was the risk we ran when we cut our kite strings so we swallowed our situation and put on our aliens suits to play along.

Young ones grow up

At the height of it I wish you could have seen what wasn’t ever less than the bright flashing that we couldn’t close our eyes from when we were kids and thought to ourselves that someday we would get there to what the adults do in their private hours and against the rules that are seemingly only to protect us young ones that can’t protect ourselves until we grow up and it’s all there laid out and some take too much all at once and don’t make it but others can balance and come back again and again.

Lists of three

Concerning lists, don’t feel the need to make it three, if the marginal add of the third, is less than the net loss distracting from the first two.

Affecting consciousness

It’s all to affect your consciousness—whether by moving about in physical space to change the inputs available to your senses; or closing your eyes and plugging your ears and nose to ignore the outside and focus on what goes on silently inside; or taking drugs to create something that otherwise wouldn’t be there or to affect the way your senses perceive.

If you’re not satisfied with the consciousness that exists just laying in bed in your apartment so you get up and go for a walk (your consciousness takes in the stretching of your muscles) and you get to the park and take in the greenery that surrounds the trail (your nose smells the damp November leaves and you even bend down to let your fingertips feel them)—you’ve chosen how to affect your consciousness with all the physical possibilities available to you.

Or, take the same situation where you’re alone in your apartment and not enjoying it, you could also escape it by departing mentally while remaining there physically, if you were to crawl off your bed and sit into meditation on the floor. Focus on your breath, forget the feeling of lethargy, forget everything else your senses are telling you. Go to a memory if you’d like, go to a created fantasy world, or go nowhere, to nothingness.

Still another option, in the apartment, you could crawl out of bed and take the bong off the counter and, without having to do much work yourself, let drugs artificially take you somewhere else.

Alone on the main road

Some several weeks pass when all I’m doing is ignoring like a horse with blinders, walking straight down the main road and past forks, trails in the snow that lead nowhere, I just put my head down and pull my collar around my neck and walk all alone against the wind even though some of the false paths seem to lead somewhere sunny and warm, I’ve got to keep on the main road and move forward not sideways until I get to the real turn where the main road itself bends in a direction and then I’ll know for sure that’s the way. But the longer I trek the more promising each of these premature paths appear, sometimes I even try and trick myself into not seeing that the main road continues any further and this false bend is really the one. Though I know I’d kick myself if I ever turned off and got lost going the wrong way. So I pull up my collar and press on against the wind on the main road.

I’ve got one

I say that has meaning but am timid for what I’ve called out before that didn’t mean much so I let it pass but it persists and tugs like a child on my pant leg and cries or coos or otherwise says, look at me, I matter. Still, I shake it out of my head to make space for what might come with real meaning—something that other people will read and say, ah, yes, yes indeed, that means something. But on the third time as I try to push it out I find it has put down roots and not only is it still there but now it’s grown. So I scramble for my pen and paper like a fisherman with one on the line, cursing and murmuring to myself—I’ve got one, this one means something.

Sidewalk pirate

I watched a man with an eyepatch light a cigarette as he walked on the sidewalk. The sun was setting so I could see the light illuminate his good eye.

If we knew

Imagine if we did have certainty and knew exactly what to do. How boring life would be. If we knew not only what we wanted but also how to get it. Then it would be like looking at a map and seeing the path drawn out so clearly that you’ve almost already traveled it and see little point in leaving home.

Original art

I don’t mean to manipulate your attention by editing my experience; that seems to be more like mass-production than art. I have to keep it the way it appears to me, you see, otherwise it ceases to be mine and might as well be anything else. There is only hope that you would wander after it all alone and unguided and stumble upon what you might not have otherwise and then feel at first the pang of surprise and then second a joy at having found something that you are rather fond of.

But we must trade the possibility of never stumbling upon it in the first place for the guarantee that if you do happen to stumble upon something it will not have been placed there in your track—this is the manipulation. Instead, let art be unfettered and it’s offspring be more art, or else if we manipulate it from the start then we will only have derivations that are increasingly far from anything truly original.

Mental garage

If I don’t take time to stop and think and write things down, my mind get cluttered, like a garage where you throw all the extra stuff that you don’t want in your front living but you’re not quite ready to throw away in the trash.

At some point it will become unmanageable where you can’t even open the garage door or the garage just becomes a part of the house where you don’t go anymore and start to miss the whole point of having a purgatory in your mind where you can save some ideas that might be good when you look at them later, but if you just let it build into a clutter that you’ll never go through then you’d be better off just throwing everything out in the first place and focusing more on the simple and superficial living room.

My parents

My parents were for me certainty and steadfastness. It didn’t matter that, as I later discovered, they weren’t right. I needed to learn how to keep with the same principles and remain loyal. It gave me a worldview that I could hold onto, a sense of identity and belonging.

Obey

Doing what you’re told can be useful practice for when you start telling yourself.

Metaphysics of individualism

There are two forces. One that wants me to dissolve, and one that wants me to stay glued together. Both have bearing on how I am to understand that word “me.” My metaphysics are either that I am an individual, in some way distinct and apart from everything else, or that I am a dynamic part, my molecules intermingling and only temporarily belonging to the body and mind that I call my own.

You can see how each of these metaphysical views have great bearing on how we behave as individuals as well as in society. For example, a capitalist model makes more sense if we are actually individuals and our gains are the losses of someone else, and vice-versa. On the other hand, a more socialist model makes sense if we consider that we all partake in the same Source and all gains and losses are counted only as part of the net for all humans (or all beings, depending on who you consider to belong to the Source) such that actions taken for personal gain are simply irrational if they result in a net loss for the whole.

Some people and not others

Standing in line at a coffee shop, I watch the barista take orders and talk to customers. Her hair is dyed electric yellow and she has her septum pierced. Her eyes are glossed over like she might be high. She is perfect to me, in this moment on a Saturday morning when everyone is still a little sleepy and waiting for their coffee. She is not really that attractive. In fact, she looks like a boy, round in the face, and dresses like one too, with a long-sleeve cotton button-up. Still, I wouldn’t take anyone else in the world in her place right now.

It makes me think about our standards for people. We require them to be sexually attractive or economically productive or otherwise useful to us in order to deem them worthy of our approval or admiration. I wonder what would happen without those standards. I wonder what would a human being turn out to be. If we could be whatever we wanted, err, not even “wanted,” because that want is subjected to those standards.

So what I really wonder is what a human would be if we could be whatever, whatever at all. For one generation, it would be a fantastic display of art. But then for the next, sexual selection would be all disordered and economic progress might stall and even violence might break out. So the price we pay for our safety, progress, and order is to select some people and not others. On the whole, everyone seems satisfied enough with this. As for me and a few others, I want to run around congratulating and complimenting and loving those others.

Losing myself to the system

Anytime I drink a coffee to stay awake, fall in with friends to not feel alone, drink to lose myself and have a good time—I lose a little more control myself and start to depend on the system. Each has their corollary; The later I stay up at night, the more coffee I need in the morning. So I lean farther and farther into the system until none of the energies are coming from my own natural body and mind. I want to keep the powers within myself. But alone, I am weak. I must wield my environment to achieve more than I’m capable of alone. It is a subtle balance before my environment starts to wield me.

Forge your chains

Forge your own chains, bind yourself to something, work in fields and reap what you sew for yourself. In order to work toward a point in space, you must be confined and bordered. Let those constructions be your own. Point yourself. Build the banks on the sides of your own river. You will flow no matter what. Whether it is all over and indiscriminate, or driven with all the force of a flood; that is up to you.

Three rivers

The input will always be there as long as you keep going. There will always be enough to come in through the windows; the key is deciding to draw the blinds at the right times. Who you are moving forward depends on what you let in and what you keep.

If I am a river, I am three: stagnant, overflowing, and dammed. The third is preferred to the second, and the second to the third.

There is so much out there, welcome it in, this is the start. Drink from ocean, fall into a sky, hold up the weight of the world. The beginning is to grab for it, invite it in. To start, you just have to do something, anything. Like a sculptor, you first have to get some clay, before you can start to shave and cut and refine down.

Next is to discern. You have got enough to start getting rid of extra. Act as a sieve. Let water and anything else that is abundant and not the finest, let it pass through. Retain only the best, and place it in the miner’s pocket. You are the miner’s pocket, where he adds his gold.

Most make the mistake of never even stepping into the river. They stay safe and secure, but stagnant and dry, on the shore. The next few, who are still better off, thrash about in the water. They grow strong from swimming every which way, even against the current. They learn a great deal from their experience. But they are directionless. The best among us learn to move with the waves, traveling far and wide with the water’s natural power at their backs.

No vacancy

It felt like I was trying to add my piece to the puzzle only to find it didn’t fit and the puzzle was already completed.

Separate physically, together spiritually

I believe that we are each separate, physically. But we are motivated by the same universal Will, share in the same One soul, or have a fragment of one God like Brahman.

This is either spiritually true in ways that we can’t yet verify certainly, or it is physically true in the sense that there was a beginning that set everything into motion and we are now just sharing in the causal aftermath of that beginning, linked to it and part of it.