Moments.

Force it, it’s like a muscle. Like a muscle, it remembers. It remembers pain, it remembers growth, it remembers numbness, it remembers patterns, it remembers absence. It’s like a muscle. Use it or lose it, it’s like a muscle. Like a muscle, it forgets. It forgets paths, it forgets instructions, it forgets its own strength, it forgets trial, it forgets presence. It’s like a muscle.

So put a ring on it. Flex the power. Stretch the muscle from its gray root to a pale extremity. Force it if it’s not willing. Extract it if it won’t extend. Deprive it of the same breath that powers your real muscles if it won’t cooperate.

But the power, it is shared. It is yours to employ, but not yours to keep. It’s a loaner, a gracious donation, a team effort. Which does not exclude coercion from your utility belt. There are worlds to revise, people to possess, years upon years of backdated files to parse. You need all the power you can wield, you need every sword in your quiver to swing at the cobwebs, you need every copper in your purse to bribe the guards at the border, you need every favor called in and cashed in, you need every magic- and skill-based modifier applied to your THAC0 roll.

Because it will only turn into cancer if it stays inside of you. Because it is the only way to transform a bodiless horror into a palpable beauty. Because everything exists in cycles, everything dies as slowly as it lives, because today’s hot blood is tomorrow’s cold ichor. Because nothing lasts forever, because tomorrow never knows, because yesterday is the ashes of cash.

So you build the power, so you follow the memory of muscle, so you map out the patterns of indestructible organic energy and weightless electromagnetic messages from the future and ten-ton ideas of carbon steel from the past. You force it, you make a sword with your pen, you make a shield with your scroll, you make a helm of your hood and a glaive of your breath and a wing of your will.

Because you don’t want to die. Because anger is an energy, because balance is a lifting thermal, because passion is a tightrope. Because the world won’t wait, because the world will take the seat closest to the exit, because the world expects payment on the first and fifteenth, because the world has cancer; a cancer of numbers, a cancer of stillborn ideas, a cancer of ice.

You do what you have to in the moment. The moment is all that matters, because the moment never lasts.

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Scriptus Interruptus.

Lenny Bruce is “not afraid,” not “unafraid.”

What if you started something you couldn’t finish, but really couldn’t finish it, as in literally, couldn’t finish it, not like you started and stopped and then started again and stopped, then picked it back up again and stopped again, not like if you started and never finished because you kept on starting and stopping, and stopping is not equal to finishing, even though finishing is a kind of stopping, but what if you started something you couldn’t finish, how long could you last, how long would it take, what will would you have to possess to continue and continue and so on and so on and et cetera and et cetera and ad nauseum and ad nauseum until there was nothing more to give, nothing more to express, nothing more to contribute, nothing but the same and the old and the same old and the same old and the same old same old, how long until you start to eat your own tail?

And what are the consequences for stopping without finishing?

Some people don’t even know what to do with their own art when it gets away from them, when it grows too tall and lanky for the basketball team, when it gains too much bulk to play Twister on top of the teak dining room table any more, when it gets too corporeal and fleshly and opaque to get away with coupling in the master bedroom without attracting some kind of attention from the gentler species with ultrasonic hearing, without attracting metal shavings and ball bearings and other assorted ferrous knockoffs, without attracting the dire wrath of gravity.

Blue skies, red river, yellow eyes.

You know what it’s like, you’ve been through it, you’ve found yourself lost in the maze at the bottom of the topless hole before and had to feel your way out; you know what it’s like, you don’t need anyone to tell you again, you don’t need a pithy metaphor or a poignant simile or a boring anecdote that couldn’t possibly relate to you in the slightest, but you listen anyway, again and again, over and over, only cutting off the end of the story when you have to, when your bus arrives, when the kettle starts to whistle, when the baby mewls for its milk; but you make the executive decision slightly sooner the next time, and slightly sooner the next, sooner and sooner, like measuring and cutting the same piece of wood for a rapidly tilting house.

You know how it ends.

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Un Poisson, Deux Pêche, Les Poissons Rouges, Poissons Bleus.

Thanks for the reminder.

As if all the world was populated solely by celebrities, and a new newspaper opened its doors every day, skies littered with the husks of disposable airships that neither float away not quite sink back down to earth after they expire, like so many Persian arrows blotting out the sun if only for a moment, like a moment between heartbeats that extends into silent, quiet, temporary death, like a breath taken in, and in, and further in, expanding the lungs a little more, and a little more, stretching the alveoli so they touch the southern tips of the floating ribs, like a horn, like a tropic, like a wreck-in-the-making, proving once-and-future foolishness, trusting the wind to be your wings, gambling that fortune will favor the foolhardy, that fate will embrace the impish, the roguish, the saturnalian apex that any captain, any stardog, any dreamt-of servant of Pallas Athena held close and dear to their armored breast.

Replacements are hard to come by.

But remember not the Spartans, for they knew not the conundrum of teamwork, instead remember ladies in blue, but not ladies who swoon when the blues are crooned, or perhaps croon the blues so that others may swoon; rather, blue women with blue eyes and blue hair and blue lips and blue skin and blue nails and blue nipples and blue scabs on their blue knees and blue spinach between their blue teeth and blue stones on the blue rings caught under their blue knuckles and blue blood flushing their blue brains of any true blue truth; remember that, remember the blue woman, that one blue woman, perched on a perch, puzzlingly parading in a Paris pitch, plying in the park when a spark tears open the dark, and the night becomes to begin to become not unlike a thing not to be so much afraid of any more, not so much a bête noire or a bête bleu or a bête rouge but a thing not borne on the wispy smoke that wafts from the ears of overtaxed thinkers and overwrought dreamers and overburdened feelers who only yearn to feel less of other people’s stray thoughts and wayward emotions and bleedthrough ideas and feel more flesh through broken-in linen, through sandpaper denim, through a hundred thousand threadcounts, through heartbeats, through blinks and winks, through sighs of mint and hiccups of lavender and coughs of peppercorn; through to the marrow of the body.

Left to your own devices, you probably would.

But now in your own city, in your own backyard, in your own shoebox of cancelled stamps and expired flyers and crushed folded cranes, how does the crane rise, how does the stamp reclaim its throne, how does the flyer get recertified?

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Writer’s Blech.

So your queen Selene failed you. So your lord Ra ignores your labors. So your patron Anubis steals your ideas. So your sister Echo mocks you openly. So your conductor Charon lost his way, and thus, yours.

That the days are no more longer than the time it takes Typhon to exhale a single lung should be of some comfort. Take scale into account, factor in perspective, include distance and time and velocity into the equation. You see the whole as a one, but that precludes interpreting the one as a chess cake’s playing surface, as a fiddler crab’s miniature golf course, as the underside of Mount Olympus’ common room carpeting. Now duality sets in, followed by plurality; your vision takes on the characteristics of an insect in low evolution, with a slight overlap in borders, a slight degradation in focus, with a slight suggestion of additional aural input. Soon enuf, synesthesia begins to affect your senses, multiple and segmented frames of one element follow one after another like a silver oxide serpent stitched together with cellotape, the colors you thought you knew so well breaking apart like communion wafers under a wash of charcoal ash and disrobing into fractal shades of this voice and that olfactory memory and this umami pulse and that first, shivery, electric touch.

Just another day in the situation room that is the bone pantheon that is the house for the situation comedy of your golden ego, your obsidian id, your mercury superego. Such myths that exist as much as purple dragonflies, as opium hummingbirds, as dark matter butterflies never so much as darkened the door to your onion cellar, your coal closet, your curio cabinet of ceramic and cloisonné cats. Safe from harm, you subvocalize in your sleep, walking wounded, you mutter during your mantras, to oneself their own reward, you hypothesize while harmonizing the bits and pieces and corners and centers of the day of to-day and the day of to-morrow to come, because the big picture always succumbs at least a little bit to the old gray mare of gravity overnite.

And then, the swift and sweet and slippery oblivion of the approaching warm reboot that comes at the stroke of thirteen, at the sign of Diana’s swinging stolen scimitar, riding the careening edge of the evening orb’s rooster tail as it sketches a platinum scar across the belly of the sky that has no formal name, no sentient manifestation, no cardboard and particleboard altar baptized in its honor.

Sleep well, dive deep, and crave no breath until the end of the hidden hunt.

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Branded Delusions.

Hey, you were the one who suggested we put our unprotected heads inside your preheated oven.

Hey, you were the one who called your record Bad.

Hey, you were the one who wanted to stand in line for forty-five minutes, a half-hour of which was in direct sunlight, just for a stupid cheeseburger.

Hey, you were the one who bought that stack of faded comic books and then read them all in one sitting.

Hey, you were the one who became a doctor and then complained every time another dead body wheeled thru the doors.

Hey, you were the one who wanted to go to the reggae club.

We all revel in our own schizophrenia.

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