inreaction

of, and upon, stars and skies
i loved, crazed, wished, and thrived.
morning and light i despised and decried.
now i see darkness’s damning lies.

where pleasant hid, plain and yet worse abound.
change has come but not yet gone,
despite how the weak come to fawn.
upon this, pain still wound.

like time told by the warm sundial
do vice and more traits abhorrent
grow steadily and evermore apparent,
so too does this pen’s ink turn green with bile.

days may stay bright with sun,
but night no more for this one.

nite is sunflower red

i thought about god today.

i was walking to the gym listening to a song that, upon considering it, reeks of religious overtones. it was, in effect, an address to deity thinly veiled under the auspices of an ever replicated cry for love. for the purposes of a more centered train of thought, the following words (non-inspiring lines skipped).

My hands are searching for you
My arms are outstretched towards you
I feel you on my fingertips
My tongue dances behind my lips for you
I can feel you all around me
Thickening the air I’m breathing
Holding on to what I’m feeling
Savoring this heart that’s healing
My hands float up above me
And you whisper you love me
I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive
Take my hand I give it you
Now you own me, All I am
You said you would never leave me
I believe you, I believe

there are a few phrases that stick out to me. aside from the cymbal crashes and effortlessly smooth bridge, there is a certain ethereal aspect to the imagery produced by the lyrics themselves. “My tongue dances behind my lips for you” and “thickening the air I’m breathing” are the best examples of this sort of nonsensical balladry. the latter quotation is what started this line of thought.

most interesting is how “you whisper you love me” and “now you own me, all i am” can coexist. but that’s what it is, isn’t it? that’s what we’re asked to subscribe to when we enter into a contract not with deity but with shadows of it in the form of clerics–bearded or shrouded in black, one and the same. that’s why i looked up to the few shiny speckles that still pierce the ungodly clouds that dome over the lights we’ve built to guide our walks when i imagined what a conversation with god would be like.

as it is, faith would have one not engage in any understanding of nontemporal experiences, because to do so would inherently have one find another man’s reason to be more divine than his own. faith would not ask us to divide the world, because the deity that faith is associated with is supposedly the patriarch of all we know, from the dirt scuffing new white vans to the stillborn baby to the gracefully aged wine to the bitter old woman. there is no “more faithful” person than the other–to live is to engage in faith, to believe that this is living without caring as to what could be (or what may be after it has ended)

the most faithful person lives without imagining a world beyond that which they know.

to enter into a discourse of imagination is to presuppose the intellect that the religious should not, if they care for a holy consistency.

holding onto “what i’m feeling” may bring me to the belief that something greater exists, and it does. i do think something greater exists, i just don’t think it is my role to consider it, to quantify or gender-fy or worship it. i don’t think it cares at all about my sins and accomplishments, and i don’t think it begs for capitalization or linguistic interpretations. i don’t think it’s found only in steeple-topped shacks, nor do i find it to be exclusive to geometrically-pattern-tiled domes. i don’t think kneeling can bring me closer to it, and i’ll never feel closer to anything than my own conscience.

that is, deity is us. i’m not speaking of atheist “people power” or even a strictly non-religious context. to say deity is us is to say that the voice inside of us–the one that can drive us not only to do great good, but to great weakness–is divine. for one to be sent to hell for not believing is such an inane notion to me–there is no way that a deity worthy of thousands of pages of fictionalized narratives could give a lightning bolt about the actions of anyone (especially one that is worthless enough, according to such notions, to live in fear of its judgment).

there is nothing particularly new to this notion, but it is something i oft describe but wonder if i believe. but i do, and today i’m keenly aware of it. somewhere between studies of the most famous martyr of all time and countless unsatisfying conversations, i’ve found the strength to admit that i do. i don’t think that there is any sense in someone dying for my sins, but me still being a sinner that will be sent to burn if i die without repenting to an idea that we could be made to believe like we believe in brand names. i believe, very strongly and sacrosanctly, that we are graced with divinity (not created in the image of it). that we are given a compass from somewhere, and that we should use it with as much accuracy as possible. i believe that this compass should be shielded from those of others if these others which us to bend our north to their south, if they want us to fear what’s below and crave what their compass (or book) tells them what’s above. i believe that it is fantastically ignorant to ask us to turn off the intellectual faculties that are so inherent in this compass, for us to find the two words “mysterious ways” equivalent with great faith. words will never touch deity–nor will stories, sacraments, oppositions, or judgments.

we are what we have, and we should use it all to every means possible. i believe, wholeheartedly, that one’s religion is one’s personality. one’s religion is what one turns to when troubled, when overwhelmed, when in need of some greater story to dull the realities that face us. let my religion, then, be as such; let me face what is in front of me in vivid strokes of pain, beauty, and humanity; let me not turn to anything or anyone to distract myself from what is in favor of mysteries of the past or gross misjudgments of the future; let me not claim to know god, let me not find myself concerned with its nature, let me neither repent–nor care for allegiance–to any structure beyond myself and those and those principles that i love.

i suppose i’m alive after all.

there are certain moments in the experiences of the adventurous at which the libertine finds himself unable to remember the name of his latest dalliance, conquest, or fall (the tone of the story always dependent upon her appearance). for whatever reason–liquids, poor memory, painkillers–the name of one’s muse may be forgotten with minimal effort, especially if the acrobatics the two engage in are far from fluid.

this was not one of those times.

as it was, this girl came at an interesting time. he was not so much in-between relationships but in-between a series of concurrent relations; she was not so much a rebound as much as he imagined she would simply be another replay of his current circus of turn-taking floozies.

they met, unlike most seedy stories would have us believe, in the elevator of a high rise that staggered 57 stories over the sun bowl that is the LA valley–an ironically phallic symbol given the pathetically plain flavor of the story that would unfold between the two, an ironically cold structure given how they would unknowingly be fastened together in a painfully affectionate, life interrupting way.

the details are not pertinent: dinner at the ivy, brunch at his westside apartment (brunch only because it was two before they could unfasten themselves from the lazy comfort of the sheets), work called-in sick, chinese called in dinner.

and each night, he would be beside himself not with pleasure but with a far more disconcerting sentiment: he was falling.

it was hard for him not because she was faceless but because her face meant so much to him. illicit, careless, rough–all of the notions that characterized their trysts were starting to bear down on him in a manner not much unlike the pressure the bed springs fell victim to.

victim–that’s what he was afterall. a victim of her effortless sensuality, her challenging smile, her biting asides and careful teeth. of her tender words and articulate caresses, of her hand behind her back and his arm behind her neck, of her head on the intersection of his chest and shoulder, of the subtle curve of her waist when she laid on her side, knee on top of knee. he was falling for her every movement, for the moments not in which they were one, but the moments at which her hand would graze his as they walked from one would-be romantic locale to another in their nameless journey…a journey which was turning to be far more characterized by a refusal to give into love than by rough, indistinct instances of contact.

but, as it was, she had to go.

two years later, he tried to remember her name as he woke, tried to remember it all.

after all, he needed something to satisfy his desire to put the story in the “nonfiction” area of his cerebral collection of love-quests, something to hold as above the release of bodily fluids he engaged in with everyone else.

++also see http://catherineishellatight.blogspot.com/2008/03/faceless-sex.html
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