Posts
Jesse S. Mitchell
previous post, Picadura, Picadura, Picadura, here .
Believe in providence. Don’t tell lies. Respect your elders. Pull over for emergency vehicles. Make room on the pavement for others. Smile at the postman. Wave to the neighbors. Always chew your food.
Be kind. Be kind, babies, just be kind.
Here I am, a human being.
And in a split second it is all different. Everything changes. Look away. It is a long long story, sit still. Molecules breaking down, atoms smashing, I am not myself. Perhaps you have more words for these things, more to say. Life unwinding all around us, string by double helix string, unfathomable. Look away.
To be someone’s slow demise. To be the air leeching off this spinning world, roaming off into space.
Atmosphere
But here, to be two hands in front, empty.
Cracked and bleeding.
To be the odd pulling, the trouble staying, the words remaining.
This is the feeling of obsession.
Find the answers, beyond good and evil and further still, to the bigger bigger
Bigger
Questions.
I will have my world filled with saints. Genius saints, driven, on a mission. Ambitious men and women consumed with selflessness and compassion and brilliance. Then…
Then what?
You have to pull on yourself, question yourself. Why? Why am I even doing this? What secrets am I trying to uncover? And where to they reside?
Somewhere the ocean ends and the waves stop, breaking on some sandy shore and you have to emerge and walk slowly up that bank and breathe some air. Somewhere in all of this, the sea finishes, the winds calm and dry land has to stretch out…like a patient etherized on a table. But there must be an edge. Infinity is impossible. Perpetuity a ghost story. Eternity a myth. So, what at the boundaries? Me? Just me?
I don’t think so…
And whatever can collapse will collapse, and the fragile things will break (happens all the time), and whatever bleeds through the transparent skies will fall out, dropping like rain, deluge. I live in this flood. The water is in my blood.
There is something frantic in the decisions we make, the paths we take, our judgment is random.
Wait.
Seconds are ticking away. We are closer to death. Both of us, you and I, together.
Wait.
There is something in the air, some power, some overriding voice, grabs you by the lapels, shaking yelling, screaming in your face. Dead-deaf from the rushing water, the white noise wind tunnel. Evaporating, dissipating, disintegrating.
And whatever will collapse can collapse and could all along, it is your confidence in it that has failed you and nothing else.
We never hear a sound. But there isn’t any sound to hear. It is dead silent. We fill it with noise. It is our noise.
We are the din
We cannot raise above.
We are the drowning ocean
We cannot get out of…
Save ourselves.
Shut our mouths
Open our eyes.
The problem is, we don’t need any more revolutions, we don’t need any more revelations, no more epiphanies. We have all the information we need, we have wandered the wilderness long enough, and now we just have to settle down and get to work. Nothing flashy. Nothing instant. No parades and no speeches. But hard hard labor just being a real human animal in a great big beautiful aquarium, being the best and healthiest part of everything we can be…
But fragile things break. And shattering makes such a racket, causes ripples, such a commotion. Little cyclones of lonely clamor, the empty clatter we all trapped by, whipped by the whirlwind gravitational pull of guilt and want and starvation and gluttony. We are all just trying to make it. Survive. Clutching onto words like floatation devices, thoughts and flotsam, philosophies and old books we stole from someone else, ways of life, museum pieces, mothballs on the breath, perfectly preserved. Ten thousand million little life boats adrift on the open sea, following the currents and streams.
And I am a hurricane. And I can wreck anything.
Believe that…
Believe me because I am alive. The words I say are real. Anything could happen. We stand on the gnawing, bloodied-gum edge of all evolution. After us, the deluge.
And nothing moves, nothing budges not even a single bit. We sit still in the midst of everything.
Everything.
And here I am, in the painful process of ever expanding. A universe, edges speeding away, flinging myself out into the open, hoping to fill in the vacuum, the empty space. Rushing, like blistering wind, like coursing blood, like swelling, like increasing, like billowing thought.
And I contain everything. Multitudes. Contradictions. Disagreements.
Wendigo-souled eye stalks all covered in thin epidermis, flimsy. Two arms and two legs and one mind, but nothing to make us more human, nothing to make us more than any other animal. Savage. Driven to the ends of appetite. And then consumed. And not one step taken, not one move forward.
A jet plane inches itself way across the pale blue sky plastered across the horizon. I watch it for a few seconds, trying to decipher the code of the chem trails, imagining the destination of the passengers. Perhaps the thing is empty. Perhaps it is a ghost. Perhaps I never saw it in the first place and I just made it all up, but it remains real now. It is real now because I have made it real. I have given it flesh. I have laid my eyes upon it, noticed it, concerned myself with it. A dog barks, jars me, shakes my surroundings.
Onward
Further onward
Further onward towards the end of the world.
Hand in hand,
We begin again.
Chewing the tips of pencils off, gnawing up inkpens, crumpling paper, lifting brows, sweating blood. Eyes in front. Work mind, work. Sweaty palms.
The sun shines. God bless the sunshine. The soft nuclear glow, the thing that radiates around us. God bless the impassive love of nature and all the life sustaining things it accidentally causes. Breath taking.
To be so alive in the midst of so much chaos. To form something, anything, new out of the void, the warm comfortable void, magnificent. When it is so much easier to simply let the hollowness fold around everything, but to make instead the abyss, a cocoon. A thing to emerge out of it, a place of release, but not just escape but also creation, so when one does flee and take flight, it is as something other, recreated.
Do you hear me, little worms? We can do so much more. Chrysalis-creatures, cacophonous, break out exquisite.
But we are translucent, you and I…and everyone else alive or ever alive on this rotating rock of Earth. We are see through things and frail, whipping and shimmering in the breezes that blow from time, the changes in atmosphere and pressure that feed the fanning jumping flames, the things only growth can create. Helpless against it. Or we believe we are helpless against it, nothing but thoughts in our heads. There are always maleficent tunes playing on the winds blowing in lonely from future times, sweeping clumsily into our present fields, and we are are from day to day nothing but so much chaff, the slow decay reaping. And it is not as if we hear the sounds incorrectly but just not fully, as if impartiality means malfeasance. We are spoiled children. And nature and nothing around us, truly needs our culitvation, our care.
Swearing words like incantations, prayers and supplications. Witchcraft, industrialism, satin sheets, the body electric, cloudy skies, sun screen, automated traffic lights, power steering, incense censers, the grand Primate, Menzies and Curtain, end the war.
We are rolling rocks in an avalanche, everyone a boulder. We are cogs touching and turning the next, each other. We are rusted shut metal gates, flies in a swarm, army ants on the march, seconds ticking away from the minutes falling away like ash from the hours we collect. We are empty breath.
Radiant.
Close your eyes and see the light.
Radiant.
Flux.
The flowing back and forth. The sentences and heat of living blood, the conversation between body and mind, the candle fire almost smothered, struggling. The glowing growing fight inside. The lonely eyesight. Blind. Deaf. Mute.
Numb.
So, what can we do?
What can I do?
I abandon you. That’s what I can do. What we all can do. We abandon it all. All everything. All our ideas. All our stories, legends, mythologies, our alleyways, bridges, notions, automobiles, houses, railways, money, coins, folded paper, our gasoline, classification system, dot matrix, dewey decimal, life and death, AD, BC, CE, PM, morning, noon and night. Leave it all behind. Never look over our shoulders. It doesn’t matter how hard we have worked, what we’ve put in, first in, last out, seniority, the dues we have paid, we don’t need it anymore, any of it. It isn’t just unessential, it is added weight, slowing us down, poison deep in our veins. Killing us.
That is what we can do, forget it all. Never touch it again. Let it all fade away behind us like a rock dust vanishing trail. A comet burning.
So, when you lay awake at night losing sleep over the problems of the world…and the ’what can I do?’s and the ’what is one person?’s. Close your eyes, smile a little bit, and breathe a bit easier. The trouble is easy. It is you. And all you have to do, is leave it alone. Forget everything you know because obviously it is wrong. The world is wrong. We did that. So, stop doing what you have been doing and go to sleep. And sleep well, sleep good, there is quite a lot of work to do in the morning.
About eight thousand years worth.
My health is failing me.
Obviously.
Apparently.
Trees are beautiful. The ones outside my window, doubly so. Doubly so, I believe in part because I can see them, perceive them. There is a crazy power in that, evidently. If you can believe the theories of scientists, poets, painters, those kinds of people. People who make it their business to know things.
The branches, a dark coffee brown in spots with a peeling silver grey lacy caul, move in tiny bursts, creaking and then crackling, swaying gently afterward. They are telling me the wind is gusty, strong. The light is lemon yellow boiling up in pools on the surface of the thick clumps of dark green lobed leaves that bang into my window pane, scuffle and scrape down the that glacial glass and beat the window sill mercilessly in sheer frustration. It is hot. The sun unrelenting.
To be an Earthling. A native born monstrosity of this world. To be covered in skin and pores and sweat, eyeballs screwed in our heads. We can see around and we can feel and we tell what it is we observe, what we can change. What conditions can remain, what could make us more comfortable. We can move the sun. Stop the light. Start the rain. Warm the air and we can freeze the deserts. Atrophy the mountains and fill in the seas.
Nothing will last.
Don’t stand in our way.
My trees will seemingly never be able to invade my kitchen window with their abundance of growth, leaves, photosynthesizing bits, sturdy branches. I can keep it out indefinitely. But watch what happens one hundred years from now and I am dead. We will see who eats who.
Too many bones, the world has too many bones. Too many strings and wires, too many tangles, sticks and bricks and stones holding it up, too many moving parts. Too many things to rely on, to maintain, to many things to trust. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong or could possibly sometime go wrong. It is all too heavy, too much to keep on the mind. My god! The wind is blowing. The sun is shining. Why can’t it all slow down?
But we will see what happens.
Who eats who.
Try not to think too hard, difficulty only begets difficulty.
But perhaps annihilation is no kind of an answer, perhaps obliteration is too much to ask, after all destruction only begets destruction.
We sleep to dream. Or we dream to sleep. either way we all need a rest. A fresh bit of silence.
We live in a coffin. Way down in a deep and muddy open grave. We stare up into the universe-sky, telescopically, one hand on our heart, the other on the lid, pulling it closed. We can’t resist.
So all we bow-legged souls, brow-beaten, bend-back saints asleep under the tyranny of night, minds aflush with scores of schemes and republican dreams, find ourselves so helpless, impotent, the second the rising sun begins to gleam over our horizons.
Opportunity.
Possibility.
Paralyzes.
But don’t try to make sense of it, just keep moving, don’t let the rigor mortis set in. It creeps up numb and slow at first but then, frozen solid. Live a life.
Breathe the air.
Waste your time.
Watch the shadows on the wall.
previous post, Picadura, Picadura, Picadura, here .
Believe in providence. Don’t tell lies. Respect your elders. Pull over for emergency vehicles. Make room on the pavement for others. Smile at the postman. Wave to the neighbors. Always chew your food.
Be kind. Be kind, babies, just be kind.
Here I am, a human being.
And in a split second it is all different. Everything changes. Look away. It is a long long story, sit still. Molecules breaking down, atoms smashing, I am not myself. Perhaps you have more words for these things, more to say. Life unwinding all around us, string by double helix string, unfathomable. Look away.
To be someone’s slow demise. To be the air leeching off this spinning world, roaming off into space.
Atmosphere
But here, to be two hands in front, empty.
Cracked and bleeding.
To be the odd pulling, the trouble staying, the words remaining.
This is the feeling of obsession.
Find the answers, beyond good and evil and further still, to the bigger bigger
Bigger
Questions.
I will have my world filled with saints. Genius saints, driven, on a mission. Ambitious men and women consumed with selflessness and compassion and brilliance. Then…
Then what?
You have to pull on yourself, question yourself. Why? Why am I even doing this? What secrets am I trying to uncover? And where to they reside?
Somewhere the ocean ends and the waves stop, breaking on some sandy shore and you have to emerge and walk slowly up that bank and breathe some air. Somewhere in all of this, the sea finishes, the winds calm and dry land has to stretch out…like a patient etherized on a table. But there must be an edge. Infinity is impossible. Perpetuity a ghost story. Eternity a myth. So, what at the boundaries? Me? Just me?
I don’t think so…
And whatever can collapse will collapse, and the fragile things will break (happens all the time), and whatever bleeds through the transparent skies will fall out, dropping like rain, deluge. I live in this flood. The water is in my blood.
There is something frantic in the decisions we make, the paths we take, our judgment is random.
Wait.
Seconds are ticking away. We are closer to death. Both of us, you and I, together.
Wait.
There is something in the air, some power, some overriding voice, grabs you by the lapels, shaking yelling, screaming in your face. Dead-deaf from the rushing water, the white noise wind tunnel. Evaporating, dissipating, disintegrating.
And whatever will collapse can collapse and could all along, it is your confidence in it that has failed you and nothing else.
We never hear a sound. But there isn’t any sound to hear. It is dead silent. We fill it with noise. It is our noise.
We are the din
We cannot raise above.
We are the drowning ocean
We cannot get out of…
Save ourselves.
Shut our mouths
Open our eyes.
The problem is, we don’t need any more revolutions, we don’t need any more revelations, no more epiphanies. We have all the information we need, we have wandered the wilderness long enough, and now we just have to settle down and get to work. Nothing flashy. Nothing instant. No parades and no speeches. But hard hard labor just being a real human animal in a great big beautiful aquarium, being the best and healthiest part of everything we can be…
But fragile things break. And shattering makes such a racket, causes ripples, such a commotion. Little cyclones of lonely clamor, the empty clatter we all trapped by, whipped by the whirlwind gravitational pull of guilt and want and starvation and gluttony. We are all just trying to make it. Survive. Clutching onto words like floatation devices, thoughts and flotsam, philosophies and old books we stole from someone else, ways of life, museum pieces, mothballs on the breath, perfectly preserved. Ten thousand million little life boats adrift on the open sea, following the currents and streams.
And I am a hurricane. And I can wreck anything.
Believe that…
Believe me because I am alive. The words I say are real. Anything could happen. We stand on the gnawing, bloodied-gum edge of all evolution. After us, the deluge.
And nothing moves, nothing budges not even a single bit. We sit still in the midst of everything.
Everything.
And here I am, in the painful process of ever expanding. A universe, edges speeding away, flinging myself out into the open, hoping to fill in the vacuum, the empty space. Rushing, like blistering wind, like coursing blood, like swelling, like increasing, like billowing thought.
And I contain everything. Multitudes. Contradictions. Disagreements.
Wendigo-souled eye stalks all covered in thin epidermis, flimsy. Two arms and two legs and one mind, but nothing to make us more human, nothing to make us more than any other animal. Savage. Driven to the ends of appetite. And then consumed. And not one step taken, not one move forward.
A jet plane inches itself way across the pale blue sky plastered across the horizon. I watch it for a few seconds, trying to decipher the code of the chem trails, imagining the destination of the passengers. Perhaps the thing is empty. Perhaps it is a ghost. Perhaps I never saw it in the first place and I just made it all up, but it remains real now. It is real now because I have made it real. I have given it flesh. I have laid my eyes upon it, noticed it, concerned myself with it. A dog barks, jars me, shakes my surroundings.
Onward
Further onward
Further onward towards the end of the world.
Hand in hand,
We begin again.
Chewing the tips of pencils off, gnawing up inkpens, crumpling paper, lifting brows, sweating blood. Eyes in front. Work mind, work. Sweaty palms.
The sun shines. God bless the sunshine. The soft nuclear glow, the thing that radiates around us. God bless the impassive love of nature and all the life sustaining things it accidentally causes. Breath taking.
To be so alive in the midst of so much chaos. To form something, anything, new out of the void, the warm comfortable void, magnificent. When it is so much easier to simply let the hollowness fold around everything, but to make instead the abyss, a cocoon. A thing to emerge out of it, a place of release, but not just escape but also creation, so when one does flee and take flight, it is as something other, recreated.
Do you hear me, little worms? We can do so much more. Chrysalis-creatures, cacophonous, break out exquisite.
But we are translucent, you and I…and everyone else alive or ever alive on this rotating rock of Earth. We are see through things and frail, whipping and shimmering in the breezes that blow from time, the changes in atmosphere and pressure that feed the fanning jumping flames, the things only growth can create. Helpless against it. Or we believe we are helpless against it, nothing but thoughts in our heads. There are always maleficent tunes playing on the winds blowing in lonely from future times, sweeping clumsily into our present fields, and we are are from day to day nothing but so much chaff, the slow decay reaping. And it is not as if we hear the sounds incorrectly but just not fully, as if impartiality means malfeasance. We are spoiled children. And nature and nothing around us, truly needs our culitvation, our care.
Swearing words like incantations, prayers and supplications. Witchcraft, industrialism, satin sheets, the body electric, cloudy skies, sun screen, automated traffic lights, power steering, incense censers, the grand Primate, Menzies and Curtain, end the war.
We are rolling rocks in an avalanche, everyone a boulder. We are cogs touching and turning the next, each other. We are rusted shut metal gates, flies in a swarm, army ants on the march, seconds ticking away from the minutes falling away like ash from the hours we collect. We are empty breath.
Radiant.
Close your eyes and see the light.
Radiant.
Flux.
The flowing back and forth. The sentences and heat of living blood, the conversation between body and mind, the candle fire almost smothered, struggling. The glowing growing fight inside. The lonely eyesight. Blind. Deaf. Mute.
Numb.
So, what can we do?
What can I do?
I abandon you. That’s what I can do. What we all can do. We abandon it all. All everything. All our ideas. All our stories, legends, mythologies, our alleyways, bridges, notions, automobiles, houses, railways, money, coins, folded paper, our gasoline, classification system, dot matrix, dewey decimal, life and death, AD, BC, CE, PM, morning, noon and night. Leave it all behind. Never look over our shoulders. It doesn’t matter how hard we have worked, what we’ve put in, first in, last out, seniority, the dues we have paid, we don’t need it anymore, any of it. It isn’t just unessential, it is added weight, slowing us down, poison deep in our veins. Killing us.
That is what we can do, forget it all. Never touch it again. Let it all fade away behind us like a rock dust vanishing trail. A comet burning.
So, when you lay awake at night losing sleep over the problems of the world…and the ’what can I do?’s and the ’what is one person?’s. Close your eyes, smile a little bit, and breathe a bit easier. The trouble is easy. It is you. And all you have to do, is leave it alone. Forget everything you know because obviously it is wrong. The world is wrong. We did that. So, stop doing what you have been doing and go to sleep. And sleep well, sleep good, there is quite a lot of work to do in the morning.
About eight thousand years worth.
My health is failing me.
Obviously.
Apparently.
Trees are beautiful. The ones outside my window, doubly so. Doubly so, I believe in part because I can see them, perceive them. There is a crazy power in that, evidently. If you can believe the theories of scientists, poets, painters, those kinds of people. People who make it their business to know things.
The branches, a dark coffee brown in spots with a peeling silver grey lacy caul, move in tiny bursts, creaking and then crackling, swaying gently afterward. They are telling me the wind is gusty, strong. The light is lemon yellow boiling up in pools on the surface of the thick clumps of dark green lobed leaves that bang into my window pane, scuffle and scrape down the that glacial glass and beat the window sill mercilessly in sheer frustration. It is hot. The sun unrelenting.
To be an Earthling. A native born monstrosity of this world. To be covered in skin and pores and sweat, eyeballs screwed in our heads. We can see around and we can feel and we tell what it is we observe, what we can change. What conditions can remain, what could make us more comfortable. We can move the sun. Stop the light. Start the rain. Warm the air and we can freeze the deserts. Atrophy the mountains and fill in the seas.
Nothing will last.
Don’t stand in our way.
My trees will seemingly never be able to invade my kitchen window with their abundance of growth, leaves, photosynthesizing bits, sturdy branches. I can keep it out indefinitely. But watch what happens one hundred years from now and I am dead. We will see who eats who.
Too many bones, the world has too many bones. Too many strings and wires, too many tangles, sticks and bricks and stones holding it up, too many moving parts. Too many things to rely on, to maintain, to many things to trust. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong or could possibly sometime go wrong. It is all too heavy, too much to keep on the mind. My god! The wind is blowing. The sun is shining. Why can’t it all slow down?
But we will see what happens.
Who eats who.
Try not to think too hard, difficulty only begets difficulty.
But perhaps annihilation is no kind of an answer, perhaps obliteration is too much to ask, after all destruction only begets destruction.
We sleep to dream. Or we dream to sleep. either way we all need a rest. A fresh bit of silence.
We live in a coffin. Way down in a deep and muddy open grave. We stare up into the universe-sky, telescopically, one hand on our heart, the other on the lid, pulling it closed. We can’t resist.
So all we bow-legged souls, brow-beaten, bend-back saints asleep under the tyranny of night, minds aflush with scores of schemes and republican dreams, find ourselves so helpless, impotent, the second the rising sun begins to gleam over our horizons.
Opportunity.
Possibility.
Paralyzes.
But don’t try to make sense of it, just keep moving, don’t let the rigor mortis set in. It creeps up numb and slow at first but then, frozen solid. Live a life.
Breathe the air.
Waste your time.
Watch the shadows on the wall.
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