Envelope

October 11, 2009

Maura:

The work I sent you most recently was indeed rough drafts and other bits and pieces I had floating around. I sent various friends small collections of my drafts because the drafts weren’t doing anything here with me and I figured it would be more beneficial to confuse/mystify/startle various recipients by doing something different. I guess it worked with the inquisitive you. The problem with sending out material like this, unmarked and appearing haphazard, is that it looks half-ass, and while the amount of effort that goes into stuffing an envelope filled with messy, crazy pieces of paper is not necessarily that great, I hoped you find it pleasurable anyway. I assure you the next creative work I mail to you will be up to par in its neat composure.

But how is Rhode Island? Is it still a sink hole? A stink pit? A nether realm? A beautiful coastal habitat? I rarely think about it these days, though I take note of it whenever it comes up in conversation with randoms. I think about you sometimes and wish I could see you as it’s been so long. Do you miss your friends from school in strange ways? To me Roger Williams is like a ghost town, like a refinery of spirits, fading but still out there, somewhere. A mist, if you like King references. Is it tragic? I do not know. Some days I contemplate the integrity of growing old and I get really sad. Following college life and that post-college-confused-glow, people really turn into those caricatures that show up on the big screen. Only now am I freaking out about it, breaking down about it. Strangely enough it wasn’t the first high school friend I noticed got married, or the first friend I noticed had a child, a baby, an offspring, an heir; rather, it’s the work and the relationships that are chaotic all around me that freak me out. People dating people they hardly know and have to start to get to know. It is a commodity of survival; and it seems false. And oddly enough, I think about the primal qualities in relationships from high school and early college, where people weren’t pretentious and prestigious and were just wild, sexual beings coming together for some raw energy appeal.

The obvious answer is in recreation. People can recreate their youthful heydays if they want to. But this recreation is the struggle everyone faces, and it’s a struggle. And it’s faced. This is error to me; this is denial and unwillingness. We do not know how to push forward but we do not care. Because time is always running out for the adult. I am waiting until that time where I become one of the millions who claim adult years go by so fast. I am scared sometimes. Some people take chemicals to recreate their childhood emotions and intelligences. The LSD-baby-vision-reformation-practice is what I mean. You have heard of this, I am sure? To be able to think on the same imaginative level as the young child who is still learning via full, wholesome emersion. I still engage in tripping on hallucinogens like acid but mostly I get really happy—really, really happy (because non-refined, utterly true blue happiness is early childhood for me), but then I get really sad, really critical, and subject to the great failures of my life thus far. For me failure is the most apposite affectation. It is a hump that can’t be retrieved; attempting to leap over such a hill becomes a new hill in its attempt. Do you ever think about storms? There’s an author who wrote about a storm. It was large and always on the horizon. It was terrifying. When it reaches you it sucks out your life, sucks it up, and gives you a new life. It’s a life that can’t be built or destroyed. We can only bear witness.

Storms are cruel mothers. Lightning; thunder; beauty; intensity. But it is just like that uncropped childhood block building. Storms are completely immense experiences. Unexplainable, no matter how hard we try. I think the greatest weapon in the world would be a storm that could be controlled; or a storm that didn’t end. Is this why weathers of disaster always come up in literature, film, and other modes of “entertainment”? We love death. Thanatos. We love fear. Phobias. Our anxiety keeps us on the edge of our seats. Then we dream of loves. People to be there with us; people who we want to understand us better than we can understand ourselves. This is a painful request for the self as it requires the suffering of admission. Admittance is never free: boundaries will pop up like bacteria. Small things that eat away at the whole. Do you ever dream of the blindness of a newborn? Sometimes I wish I was forever in that womb-ejected state. Fresh, warm, wet, screaming, the light everywhere. That first light. That infinite light. The light that comes before we learn to use our memory, before we learn to use our memory so we can start forgetting how to memorize, in order to protect ourselves, because all we really want is that first light.

Greg

***

11-09-07

I sat and watched you,
your ears were behind earphones,
spectacles spat to face,
the droning of so many songs.

Evil brightening before days,
yellow lights electric skyline
porous skyline put your boots on
take them off scrape off the mud

it must come off come off, it must.

little bird flying with little wings
sighing with little children as champs
behind billions of boxes, behind all of
those eyes ripple trickling water
trickling water,
torrential torpor
try this
try that
do something
do black under spotlight
do shirt of gold
under sparkling white teeth

tweet tweet tweet tweet

billboard burnt fuchsia
billboard burnt

the callers at the call centers, I can't
imagine them being very happy, I cannot
imagine them trying very hard--this is what
I do, do not try hard, the clown mask
is hilarious, as it is: many, many people
cornered by jaguar grins
and currency became teeth under old
spotlit
glamor glance billboard drums too
old!