What is the clear voice in the realm of the real.

Our speech is birthed of our privilege, our allotted perspective. View from the third, fourth, fifth, one hundredth floor, encapsulates all beginnings, middles, and ends. Neatly. Perfect bound. Embossed cover with gold foil stamp. Shelved unread in the sarcophagi breeding enduring bacterial growths of yellowing pages baking in the oven of time. Those seeded with the yeast of history slowly rising with time in significance, while those kneaded by trends continually oscillating high and low. All dying, withering. And we, on padded futons, lament the death of good friends while relishing the fragrance of their very rot. And of them, what did know? Their character, spirit, habits? Or did we bathe in their ephemera, failing to read the time, distracted by the tick tock tick tock.

To which replied the jester, or have we failed to hear the tick tock tick tock song, distracted as we were by our knowledge of time?

The court rolled in boisterous laughter. The monstrous powdered wig of a monstrous powdered lady fell to the ground.

The jester bowed low, strapped a rope to the banister, methodically demonstrated the tying of a noose, tightened it around his neck, and leapt from the window. His neck snapped like a cold twig and a moment later his left foot shuttered like a leaf in the wind. He pendulumed rhythmically just inches above the street. The street covered with black gum spots, spit, and oil slicks. The children were handed baseball bats. They swung and swung till he burst like a piñata showering trinkets and dime store candies into their hungry mouths.

What is our inheritance, but a rope by which to hang ourselves if we attempt to deny it? If we gaze upon the street and laud it as reality as reality. We have history and future in our hands. Where then do we hold now? In our photographs, remembered, in our books. If we are second livers, are we less real? Can we untie ourselves from that silver thread? The clarity of our greatest visionaries is as a child’s peering through the crack beneath his parent’s bedroom door.

In the coffee shop overheard:

‘I will never know not-myself,’ he said.

‘Does that frighten you?’

‘I will never know not-not-myself,’ he said.

‘Does that frighten you?’

‘I will never know not-not-not-myself,’ he said.

‘Does that frighten you?’

‘I will never know not-not-not-myself,’ he said.

Did he already know, I thought?

Words layed like bricks building a bridge to nowhereland

It would be wise I think to take a walk tonight. Step outside into the warm summer night and let the breeze lift these weary thoughts from my mind. Their hold on me is so loose, they would float away with a breath. A sigh. Yet their presence I find, oddly, comforting. A shadow of the Nathan I once knew. The boy so frightened of and paralyzed by his emotions that all he knew to do was write them down. Penned in frantic freeverse on scraps of internet paper. I’m an exhibitionist I suppose. Like so many of my generation. Important in our own universe. So desperate to have our voices heard, we’d whisper all our most secret secrets to any stranger who took the time to listen.

Now I will sit and write. Not for you to hear, or me to tell. But for me to write. The way I once did. To let out all that I am incapable of communicating to any person. It’s strange the fears that stiffen my fingers. The fraternal twins of rejection and apathy. How I can simultaneously believe that no one will read, and that I will still be rejected. Perhaps I fear those closest to me.

To those who believe they know you best, you can confess nothing. We stand before one another and stare into the distance, afraid of what we might see in each others eyes.

Just moments ago I felt the weight of self accusation. I made a list and frowned at my shortcomings. I sought some names to blame. To put faces to my guilt. I thought I would sit and write some confessions. Come clean. The way I used to when my heart was heavy. But I don’t feel it anymore. I went to the corner store to buy a cathartic pack of smokes and met the smile of a stranger. It said, “hello friend, I’m glad you came by.” And like that, the weight was gone. A haze lifted by a gentle breeze.

There are so many things I wish to write. But now the voice is gone.

I wanted to write about... something.

I met a boy the other day. He was about my age. In college. He said his dream was to be a director. I asked him what his major was. He said “Salary man.” I said, What? Your major is salary man?! What about your dream? He said, “That was just a dream. That was when I was a kid.” For that, I punched him in the arm.

I met a girl the other day and I wanted her to love me. She sent me a text message saying that she could not. I asked if I could see her tomorrow and she said that she could not. So I grabbed her hand and kissed her that night. She slapped me for that. And it was alright.

I don’t want to go to work. I don’t want to be so busy. I don’t want to know what I’m going to do tomorrow and the next day and the next day. It’s so sterilizing. It’s so numbing. I feel so little real emotion these days. And when I do it’s fleeting. I get up go to work come home go to bed. And repeat. I don’t want to stand in front of a dozen kids and do my best good-role-model impersonation. Yet I cannot help but feel responsible in front of those miniature eyes. I wonder how long it takes before your voice is forever changed.

I’m not a teacher, but I play one on the weekdays.

I want to read something challenging. I want to watch something controversial. I want to ponder life and it’s purpose. But I don’t have the time.

So I’ll just lie on the floor and pour music into my ears. Escape into a sonic wonderland for a few brief minutes and drift off into tomorrow.

On Words and Unicorns

I feel incapable of writing anything of merit lately. Or perhaps the problem is deeper than that. Perhaps I feel incapable of producing any thought of merit. True there are those brief halfconscious inspired tablets of clarity that dissolve into glass water dreams drunk late at night. They may imbed themselves in my subconscious. They may manifest themselves in my nightmares, in which I am constantly on the run for crimes I commit. But there they remain lodged behind my eyelids gates, behind my prison guard fingertips.

Perhaps it is the children that sop up my angst. Little mops of black hair dabbing at the puddles of my myriad reflections.

Perhaps it is because I stand before an audience all day long. Because I spend all day talking, on and on before a fishtank. Not saying anything of consequence, not hearing anything of consequence. Bellowing sentences into the chasm of linguistic oblivion. A hundred miniature echoes return to me. Shrill peaking squawks from the bop bopping mouths of fish-children swimming in water over their heads in a tank at the bottom of the canyon. I could easily go all week without any real conversation. Mistaking echoes for voices.

I offer up the suggestion that I am an obsessive person. In a purely singular sense for I am obviously not obsessive about my health or my environment or anything really. It only manifests itself when some fantasy lodges itself between my lens and retina and obscures all but my periferal vision.



As a child, I mistook this lens dust distortion for some sort of poetic romanticism. Mistook cataracts for clarity. Mistook blindness for vision. But now I believe it to be simply a coping mechanism. Just as some lash out at authority, some shrink into shells of self-doubt, some make mountains, some make molehills, some smoke cigarettes, some devour, and some deny. Some also fashion unicorns from ordinary horses and place them within the fenced in green pastures between the lens and the retina where they watch their fantasy gallop across the rolling hills of their unbridled imagination. Stopping atop the overlook, as the unicorn is want to do. Nostrils flared. Powerful lungs like canons pound. Mane bellowing like a sail in the wind. Eyes glassy with a carnal nobility forged in the time before time.

But unicorns are fickle creatures and will often flee in search of greener fields or will keel over and die in the cruel winter months.

Do not place your faith in a unicorn.

* * *

Jesters, storks, maidens wandering around in a nonsense world. Let's meet up sometime.