the hurt goes too deep
i can’t reach it
it wounds me at the worst possible moments
leaving me speechless
the hurt makes all things painful
in an aching lonely sort of way
it never ceases and i can’t say more
without falling into tiny pieces
disappearing
into this hurt
i’m not blue
i’m not crying
i didn’t leave that message on your machine
i don’t feel like dyin’
i’m ok
i’m alright
i’m just fine
i’m not blue
i’m not crying
it made a lot of sense what you said to me
you had every right
of course you didn’t want to hurt my feelings
you’re good
i like the moon at this time of night
i feel pretty good
not sad at all
i like being alone
i’m not sad
i’m not crying
i’m not blue
not at all
no reason to worry
i would never think of dying
I am sitting right here
No tears
But I’m crying
The streets are empty tonight
No entertainment
No release
From this torture chamber
Called Life
I cannot cry
but I do
But tomorrow I expect to be blessed
With a sweet forgetfulness
and thank God for my shackles
and my ball and chain
And call it Life
No more crying
No more thought of dying
Just a dull ache in the center of my chest
I tossed myself up in the air
I didn’t think about the ground
Until I hit it
Unafraid
Until I hit it
Weary this morning
Won’t somebody help me up from the ground
I need to carry on with my life
So sore
From too damn much paradise
I wanted to be soaring up into space
Instead I bore deep down
Into a dark dank place
I want out
So so sad
this summer morning
all that I would
seems faded
history closes in
why can’t I get it up again?
and challenge the world
to be more?
Instead I pretend
and write poems to the wind
so so sad it is
when I have lost that spark
no interest, no heart
a shell of a man
what remains are only parts
held together by a fierce will
and a determined heart
so sad though
that this has come to be
once I sang brightly
my destiny urged me forward
and whispered in my ear every day
today I feel lonely
so sad so so so sad today
my path seems cloudy, windy, and grey
such is my state
as my body slowly reaches it’s fate
leaving my soul in sadness
so so sad
Everything is turning in a counterclockwise motion
Tearing me apart at the seams
I need so much to get it together and recapture my dreams
But these things escape me in the vicious undertow
What now? Where may I turn?
Is there a way to rectify this thing
Beyond the tipping point?
I feel confused and nothing seems right
What now? More deadly news?
More shattered dreams?
I can’t read any more of this useless crap
It doesn’t do a thing to get us out of this trap
What Now? Please tell me.
We all need to know what now
But all we hear is sorely lacking
I just got through reading the latest post on Margaret Cho’s Blog, It is at margaretcho.com. The post is titled ‘Lost” and it is just her thoughts about people who are missing, lost, and how that makes her feel. She mentions ‘In Search Of..” the old Leonard Nimoy series on creepy things, including people who are lost. I’m not conveying the feeling of that post very well. You really need to read it. Margaret Cho is one of the most honest individuals I have ever encountered. She is beautiful, and powerful. She served as the inspiration for this blog. I wanted to produce a blog as brutally honest and wonderful as hers. She is generally thought of as a comedian who focuses on gay, lesbian, transgender issues. But there is a lot more to Margaret Cho than that. I hope that she realizes that herself, because as I read her blog it seems as though she hasn’t come to terms with herself and her incredible power and ability to influence others. She just wants to be an ordinary person leading an ordinary life. That fact alone sets her apart from a lot of people involved in show business. When I first became aware of her by watching her on youTube back in November I was mesmerized and kind of fell in love with her. That infatuation has since cooled down, although she can still touch my heart and does frequently. I fell in love with her truth telling, her vulnerability, her fearlessness. Yes, she is both, therein lies much of the fascination. So check out her blog! If you like me, you will like her, I guarantee it! I have no idea if she is aware of this blog, but I often leave comments on her blog. Perhaps someday I will meet her. I guess you could say I am a bit starstruck, except she isn’t (according to her) a star. So I guess I am personstruck. Oh! and I almost forgot! She’s funny too!
Now I’d like to add my bit to what she wrote. There are people, a lot of people, actually more people than I care to think about, that are lost. Forget the milk carton kids, that is just the tip of the iceberg. It is shocking how many people are unaccounted for in this vast forsaken world. Where are they? They may be dead, or living a different sort of life under different names. They could be sex slaves, or something even more horrible could have been their fate. Who knows? Although I am quite visible, not at all difficult to find, I nevertheless feel lost. How many people really know that I am here. They get a glimpse, nothing more. I am a ghost. So much of me is lost. My hold upon my nearly empty shell is tenuous at best. A few people know my mind, my emotions, and perhaps a slight hint of my soul. But it is temporary. Seventy years or so is only a moment, one flash of light within an ocean of eternal darkness. That is lost. That is what lost means to me. Margaret Cho was right to feel scared as she contemplates the lost, for it is terrifying true. We are all lost to a degree, separated from each other and our world by something we feel but cannot understand. But it does seem to be of our own making, this lostness. The literally lost serve as a metaphor for our unbearable loneliness. Elvis Presley once said he felt lonely even in the middle of a crowd. It’s that kind of lonely street upon which we all dwell. I can understand why this affected Margaret Cho so much. She wants to love everyone in a direct, physical, overpowering way and is stymied by this loneliness. Now there are those who would describe this lostness as our unbearably painful separation from God, but I don’t feel qualified to offer an opinion about that. I prefer to stick to my own experience, than to philosophize with my keyboard. In my own experience I am plagued by ghosts. I see them in my dreams and sometimes they appear suddenly and shock me into lucidity. The past is lost, and this is where these ghosts dwell. As I grow older an entire world is lost to me, and becomes a poignant memory. Lost? Ask any elderly person about lost. Ask the mentally ill about lost. They know lost. They have lived lost. While I am frightened by lostness, I am also drawn into it. This is the essence of my nostalgia for a time before I was born. I would have loved to have been practicing magick with Aleister Crowley or painting with William Waterhouse. I’d have had a grand old time with Mark Twain. When contemplating the past, the distant past, like that of ancient Greece or Rome, I can be overwhelmed by what has been lost, and filled with a deep sadness. Lost is an inexhaustible subject for it’s depths lie beyond our reach. We can only shine our feeble torch into this abyss and report our meager findings.
In my comments on her post, I told Margaret that I was listening to a very powerful piece of music by Leyland Kirby entitled “Don’t Sleep I Am Not What I Seem, I Am A Quiet Storm” (which I have been listening to while writing this post as well). It captures perfectly the feeling of lostness, that unbearable loneliness. If I succeed in finding it on youTube I will include it here. I haven’t figured out how or if I can post a song from my iTunes library. If you don’t find it here, look for the album “Sadly, the Future Is No Longer What It Was” by Leyland Kirby. This post by Cho came at just the right time for me, for I had been feeling particularly lost today. I still have no job, although I have an interview Monday. I feel adrift on the sea of the unknown. My thoughts are of long ago. I posted about the pre-Raphaelites and Oscar Wilde. I feel at home in their world. They certainly understood what it meant to be lost. I have also passed into and out of an entirely imaginary relationship and am at a loss where to take this story now that the romance is no longer really there. I am haunted by my own creations. Margaret Cho however is very real. I hope she continues to produce thought provoking pieces for her blog for many more years. A part of me is frightened for her. I don’t want anything to ever happen to such a talented woman. Not that I think she is in danger, I’m just feeling unsettled in general and this spills over into how I feel about people I care about. Lost. Unsettled. Plagued by Ghosts. Sadly, the Future Is Not What It Was.
a distant echo
of a different life
invades my emptiness
a horrible mistake was made
and I can’t bear to think
of what it means
there’s an echo
and a sense
that something more exists
there has to be
i had it in my hand
but now it’s gone
but the echo still remains
Carnival lights in Mancora. Peru from http://www.karikuy.org/blog/2009/08/04/the-land-of-the-eternal-sun/
In spite of my recent posts, I am a hopeful person. In my last post regarding death I deliberately exposed the raw anger and anguish that I feel when I allow myself to really feel death. It may have been taken as an expression of my beliefs, but it wasn’t really. I wasn’t trying to incite an argument, or to insult or offend. It should be read as a poem, and probably should have been written in a kind of meter, so that the reader would better understand it’s purpose. My beliefs, when I am not caught up in a furious emotion, are positive and hopeful. Although I am religious in many ways, I prefer to keep my religion private. I believe that things do actually turn out all right in the end, although when I am afraid, running out of money, can’t pay my rent, I lose track of what I believe. I believe nothing, I just feel lonely, sad, and very angry. I am so glad that it doesn’t last.
If I were to describe poetically, which I am finding is perhaps my best voice, how I feel about God, Love, and the Truth, I would describe those feelings as brightly colored lights in the night. Even in the darkest despair something still shines, it beckons in the distance. I think that may account for the lonely, slightly sad, poignant, but beautiful feeling I get when I see Christmas lights, carnival lights, or the lights at Burning Man, at night. Something about that cheerfulness surrounded by darkness touches me. It serves as a metaphor for my feelings about life. I prefer to think those lights are real, but really I don’t even get caught up in questions of real, right, correct, etc. What I am talking about transcends all that. It is beyond language, philosophy, science, or religion, and no, beyond this signpost I cannot venture. I can only point to the twinkling colored lights in the night, in wonder. It is like a city, a wonderful city so far away, in which I will live one day. I don’t particularly want to know what this represents, to receive explanations of it’s religious or psychological significance. I only ask that you take a moment to contemplate what I am pointing to, and see if it resonates for you as well.
For me, I sometimes seek explanations, and want to delve into every nook and cranny of existence. But other times, like now, I don’t want anything explained to me. This is a time when life is a mystery, and to write about it almost seems an irreverence. Because it spoils the feeling. It fractures the moment, and you can’t gather it together again. This isn’t theology, philosophy, psychology, or biology, It is perhaps a poem of a moment.
Brightly Colored Lights in The Night
Brightly Burning
Brightly Yearning
Why does it seem so far?
I wrap myself in the arms of night
For the day has left me scarred
I wonder why such a sight should shine
While I feel broken and alone
Brightly Colored Lights in The Night
Could this be my home?
Brightly Burning
Brightly Yearning
Please let this be my home.
Why?
I don’t want to be overly coarse and harsh, so I choose to use asterisks for the title of this post. But my feelings are raw. It’s about Death. Death really pisses me off. Why Death? No. I mean, really! Why Death? What kind of sick trick is this? God is one sick f**k! We are brought into the world just to die. Think about it!! Whitney Houston is dead. Normally I would just feel badly and let it drift away into my already wounded subconscious. Not this time, though. I was already sad. I was already pissed. I did love the way the news announcer looked when she gave the news. It was like “Oh God do I really have to lay this one on them?” I mean she really didn’t want to give us that news. I could tell. It actually touched me. We are all victims on this pitiful Earth. Because we die. We get a brief glimpse of the divine only to die as an animal. It makes me angry. God is an a**hole!
Why all the asterisks you ask? Because if I let myself get into a rant it wouldn’t be fun to read, it would just be sad. So I temper my feelings just a little. So I can say what I really want to say. Why is it that we die? Who is responsible for this? I don’t want to hear all the usual metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. It fits into the grand scheme of things blah blah blah. I have done this stuff too, even in a very recent post. Maybe we will discover our own true nature. Yeah, right. Maybe we are just f**king dead! Dead meat. Maybe somebody f**ked up, and the results were dumped on some God forsaken planet in a God forsaken galaxy, We are somebody’s abortion. I swear I feel like an aborted fetus at times.
Death is an outrage!!! We should not be happy with it. We should not justify it. We should overcome it.
Now I can feel my sense of outrage subside and rationality setting in. That is how it works. Our reason serves as an anaesthetic, numbing us to the truth. Because the truth is sheer terror. A gaping maw of nothing. NOTHING Get your head around that! You can’t. So you rationalize. “It’s all so sad.” we say and of course it is inadequate. We can’t address this horror with words. I can remember vividly the horror, the outrage I felt when I was at my Mother’s funeral. The grotesque, surreal scene of my Mother’s body, an embalmed chunk of meat, lying in a coffin, surrounded by roses. What the hell is this? Somebody’s idea of a sick joke? She’s dead, and you stick her corpse out here for us to see? How sick is that? It felt like the entire fabrie of the world should be rent asunder. No, the wind is not allowed to blow, the birds are not allowed to sing, all must come crashing down and end. For my mother is dead. Nothing is right about that. Nothing is right about anything, it is all one flimsy prop on a rotting stage. A badly written, and even more badly performed joke. That is death. It rips away the polite facade and exposes this worst of crimes. There can be no justice, so long as there is death. I indict God as the arch criminal, No loving God would deliver such a curse.
I know there are other ways of looking at Death, but that does not concern me now. I am not rational. I am not sane. I am alone, facing my death with a defiant stare. You brought me into this world and now you take me out. I hate you with all of my righteous power. Death has no place in my universe. I refuse to grant you this authority. F**k you, God. The Lord of Deceit should be your name!
This is how we should address the whole issue of Death. Philosophy be damned!
russell5087 