Monday, December 5, 2011
::Tick and Tock::
Time is the maker. The days spill forward and we move out. There is this eternal tick and tock. It silently rattles at the tips of the fingers. It links around each toe and makes the eyes at once heavy and yet awake. I've never been good at keeping time. I've never been good at keeping things close to my chest. My fingers get cold at the tips.They tuck themselves into a set of pockets and with a shoulder lift they press in close to the body and are moved on. Lead forward by the toe connected foot, with the ankle turning sideways or plainly away from things that fail to stay warm. The passage of time is bewildering. I can feel the change, feel my motivations in some areas get stronger and others just fall away unimportant. I've never been quite sure what it is I am capable of. I am good at stretching myself out and testing things.
I test their solidity. I test their verve. Their resolve. I envelope around the faces and facts I find interesting or amusing. As a child I tinkered with the ideas and consciousness of others. I whispered temptations in their ear, dared them to jump fire ropes and lead them anywhere they'd seemed afraid to go. I feared others then. I feared the world around me. I found myself trapped in an arena of youth with very little to play with and very little that seemed in my control. I grew upwards as we all do. I stopped playing. I grew quiet. I disappeared. I left myself, my head, my own consciousness. I was haunted by shapes and shades with no will or resolve of my own. I became a survivalist. I spent my nights hunting realities that weren't real and weren't mine.
Time passes always ticking the nerves...I can't live in delusion so somehow I wake myself up. I find myself in a place of lack. I lack identity. I lack substance. I lack my own verve. I begin again. Plodding through shades and shadows of me I can't remember or don't recognize. I spend my days drowning and alone. I martyred myself then. Threw myself into demonstrating and giving and constancy in giving and spreading and being for others because I had no spirit for myself. I had no solid self to be. I become a mimic. I become a mime. I paint my face with the colors of others because it's easy to play pretend. It's easy to sleep alone when tranquilized. It's easy to bury yourself when your time in body is graven and empty.
Time becomes a tomb. Existing in pieces easily broken up by wild nights and drugs and dreams of things so simple that you can't be touched by truth. One day an alarm goes off. You wake up again. Somehow you're ready. Sometime when you weren't looking you filled yourself up and you breathe into yourself and feel you breathing. Feel you being, and at this point you know nothing is the same...but you play pretend some more because you aren't ready to get up. You frighten yourself. Your possibilities are frightening. So you let yourself be a slave to the experience of others to take the time away...to waste the time. You cover up your fullness and you get taken. You get taken advantage of. Someone comes with a soft sided glove to make you close your eyes. Then their iron fist breaks itself deep on your heart and takes your choices away.
As the chest piece caves itself in I wake up again. I abandon my body, my broken heart, my empty choices and the shattered mask I still can't put down. I cultivated nothing but my own aloneness. I learn how to avoid leaning on anyone. I learn how to give and withhold and love and be loved with my hand up dictating the arms length distance I always keep. I learn the beauty of tears and the pleasures of being hazy. I learn to wear a veil. I let the world see through to the surface because I know I need it. I need it to exist, but I can't love it fully. My heart becomes wrapped in steely tension lines. Cold and thorny and pressing into the flesh continually to remind me not to trust. Not to let go. Not to open up.
I become a bubble thing. Insulated by the pleasures of separation and the slight ability for genius on a reachable level to operate automatically in the world around and about me but never let it in. Never let it into my own. I don't know if it is time that made it. I don't know if I innately was always making this world so rich, and deep, and endless that I am sometimes scared to sleep because I think it will swallow me whole. That I won't come back. That I won't wake up and never have given myself the chance to cultivate something outside of my endlessness. If time is a reconciler it is quite tricksy.
The past is an easy map to maneuver because it's already happened. The future is so far removed that I barely think on it but the present unwraps itself everyday. Unfolding surprises we don't expect because we feel we are fully under our own control. Something happens. A click, a whistle, a tick and tock inside that punches holes in our stories and sticks pins through our patterns. We wake up again. I never felt lucky when this happens because there is always a loss. A loss of an identifier we became used to. The loss of a story we liked to live by. We lose a sense of what is absolute.
For me, sometimes those losses seem huge because I have given up my identity so many times that I hold what I know very close to me. I have a hard time keeping things close to my chest once there has been a turn around. Though this turn brings out my blueness and melancholic tendency I rattle at the bones and find a way to move forwards. Perhaps this is time as desire. Letting go of my old skins and dreams for newer realities and temperatures.
There is a fear here. Deep and wide and seemingly endless, like the world I've made at the core of me. I dig my hands deep in my pockets, I look upward and out and silently hope to myself to stay awake this time as I move forward. Afraid of others or afraid of me or afraid of the world as it were, but if I can keep my dreaming self even half awake I might just cultivate that reality I so desire to have. Something I can look back on whenever my time begins to run out and see it's full beauty and the endlessness beneath and to be pleased to know that it truly was all mine.
I test their solidity. I test their verve. Their resolve. I envelope around the faces and facts I find interesting or amusing. As a child I tinkered with the ideas and consciousness of others. I whispered temptations in their ear, dared them to jump fire ropes and lead them anywhere they'd seemed afraid to go. I feared others then. I feared the world around me. I found myself trapped in an arena of youth with very little to play with and very little that seemed in my control. I grew upwards as we all do. I stopped playing. I grew quiet. I disappeared. I left myself, my head, my own consciousness. I was haunted by shapes and shades with no will or resolve of my own. I became a survivalist. I spent my nights hunting realities that weren't real and weren't mine.
Time passes always ticking the nerves...I can't live in delusion so somehow I wake myself up. I find myself in a place of lack. I lack identity. I lack substance. I lack my own verve. I begin again. Plodding through shades and shadows of me I can't remember or don't recognize. I spend my days drowning and alone. I martyred myself then. Threw myself into demonstrating and giving and constancy in giving and spreading and being for others because I had no spirit for myself. I had no solid self to be. I become a mimic. I become a mime. I paint my face with the colors of others because it's easy to play pretend. It's easy to sleep alone when tranquilized. It's easy to bury yourself when your time in body is graven and empty.
Time becomes a tomb. Existing in pieces easily broken up by wild nights and drugs and dreams of things so simple that you can't be touched by truth. One day an alarm goes off. You wake up again. Somehow you're ready. Sometime when you weren't looking you filled yourself up and you breathe into yourself and feel you breathing. Feel you being, and at this point you know nothing is the same...but you play pretend some more because you aren't ready to get up. You frighten yourself. Your possibilities are frightening. So you let yourself be a slave to the experience of others to take the time away...to waste the time. You cover up your fullness and you get taken. You get taken advantage of. Someone comes with a soft sided glove to make you close your eyes. Then their iron fist breaks itself deep on your heart and takes your choices away.
As the chest piece caves itself in I wake up again. I abandon my body, my broken heart, my empty choices and the shattered mask I still can't put down. I cultivated nothing but my own aloneness. I learn how to avoid leaning on anyone. I learn how to give and withhold and love and be loved with my hand up dictating the arms length distance I always keep. I learn the beauty of tears and the pleasures of being hazy. I learn to wear a veil. I let the world see through to the surface because I know I need it. I need it to exist, but I can't love it fully. My heart becomes wrapped in steely tension lines. Cold and thorny and pressing into the flesh continually to remind me not to trust. Not to let go. Not to open up.
I become a bubble thing. Insulated by the pleasures of separation and the slight ability for genius on a reachable level to operate automatically in the world around and about me but never let it in. Never let it into my own. I don't know if it is time that made it. I don't know if I innately was always making this world so rich, and deep, and endless that I am sometimes scared to sleep because I think it will swallow me whole. That I won't come back. That I won't wake up and never have given myself the chance to cultivate something outside of my endlessness. If time is a reconciler it is quite tricksy.
The past is an easy map to maneuver because it's already happened. The future is so far removed that I barely think on it but the present unwraps itself everyday. Unfolding surprises we don't expect because we feel we are fully under our own control. Something happens. A click, a whistle, a tick and tock inside that punches holes in our stories and sticks pins through our patterns. We wake up again. I never felt lucky when this happens because there is always a loss. A loss of an identifier we became used to. The loss of a story we liked to live by. We lose a sense of what is absolute.
For me, sometimes those losses seem huge because I have given up my identity so many times that I hold what I know very close to me. I have a hard time keeping things close to my chest once there has been a turn around. Though this turn brings out my blueness and melancholic tendency I rattle at the bones and find a way to move forwards. Perhaps this is time as desire. Letting go of my old skins and dreams for newer realities and temperatures.
There is a fear here. Deep and wide and seemingly endless, like the world I've made at the core of me. I dig my hands deep in my pockets, I look upward and out and silently hope to myself to stay awake this time as I move forward. Afraid of others or afraid of me or afraid of the world as it were, but if I can keep my dreaming self even half awake I might just cultivate that reality I so desire to have. Something I can look back on whenever my time begins to run out and see it's full beauty and the endlessness beneath and to be pleased to know that it truly was all mine.
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