.
i promise you, metaphysically.
i’ll be around when you think you need me.
lash at me, spit in my face,
and may i still love thee.
for/against
i swim increasingly furiously, but the ferocious and pitiless tides get all the more relentless. i want to give up, but i can’t, and all i can manage to do is to pedal faster, just to stay right where i am.
text for something
sometimes, something that is nothing can be more real that all the things that are something.
final nail in the imaginary coffin
being naturally attracted to pain is not exactly the smartest thing ever. right about now, i just want to keel over and die. but i have no casket. i have, though, a handful of well-rusted nails, each one hammered into my inexistent coffin with much euphoria. i scream under my breath as each nail penetrates lovingly through my brittle, comminuted bones.
this imaginary sarcophagus is proving difficult to escape. i can’t break free. i must break free.
Note to Self
Deadlines left:
5 Nov – Tennyson Presentation
6 Nov – Euro Lit Essay 2
11 Nov – 19c Test #2
12 Nov – Asian-American Lit Essay 2
13 Nov – Film and History Essay 5
13 Nov – School Ends
Time till school ends: 24 days
Things to do: 6
Average: 4 days each, assuming a non-stop work rate, cessation of all life and repression of all human desire for rest and relaxation.
Yay.
give me a lake that i can dive into
i’ve had enough. enough of these topsy-turvy nights, and yes, i want out. but then again that begs the questions, “out from where?”, and “what next?”
and these are questions that i am fatally unable to answer. because one, it is not logically possible to get out of nowhere; and two, if ‘next’ is necessarily defined as being ‘in relation to’ whatever comes before, and what comes before is nothing, the concept of ‘next’ is therefore untenable.
i turn and hide behind thought, in thinking and overanalysing, when the heart ceases to feel correctly. and i can find no answers to the questions i do not have and am silenced, what by i do not know, or maybe i do but cannot say, into not having a voice to ask you the questions i do.
Drummer Hodge, by Thomas Hardy
this poem took me through the first few weeks of army. :)
Drummer Hodge
They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
Uncoffined – just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
That breaks the veldt around;
And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound.Young Hodge the Drummer never knew -
Fresh from his Wessex home -
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
Strange stars amid the gloam.Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge forever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellation reign
His stars eternally.- Thomas Hardy
i can’t go on. no, i must.
as if connected by some metaphysical force, chelsea lose. first game in a fortnight, and it just about sums up my two weeks. plenty of opportunities created without much success. trying, trying, only to be knocked back. to be denied. it started out with a search for three points. then one. then having nothing left, just some pride.
i would love to be able to say, that like the great boxers always do, i will get right back up, like the cockroach that would not die, everytime i get knocked down. but i think i might lie here a little longer. to the chorus of jeers that ring in my ear.
the next game, the next conquest, it goes on. chelsea will go on. for me, i will go on, even if i don’t.
so two nights passed, the night’s dismay
Sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again. And then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me,
that when I waked, I cried to dream again
- Caliban, The Tempest, III.ii.130-137
it was just about the most cheesy scene. you were running away from me. and i was desperately calling out your name, my 20-year-old self barely managing to keep up. then you turned and came running back to me, and hugged me so tight it was as if you never left. there was a chapel. a cottage. very 18th century.
the frame of reference then switched then to where there was modern day architecture. the 21st century. myself, having now only aged minimally and without comprehension of anything from that earlier scene, compared paintings of the now with that of the previous scene. everything had changed, but the chapel had remained. and there was you and me. the movie’s great revelation at this point was how i discovered, cue oohs and awws, that we have been lovers all along.
yeah i know doesn’t make sense. but then dreams rarely do.
but for all that’s unreal and ridiculous, you really never did leave.
please don’t try so hard to say goodbye.
a little encouragement goes a long way. in school, at home, from a friend, from a stranger. have you encouraged someone today? say a kind word, will you?
my days are bleeding into one another. my nights run into the days, my days, still days. it seems as if night never comes for me, insofar as night is darkness, and darkness is rest, and rest is the absence of work, movement and thought. how critical to us is rest? and how grossly inappropriate then, for us then to define rest not in its own intrinsic right, but only in relation to another concept?
i dig my heels in, hoping and praying that my pain redeems me. but my unreligious throat remains slaked, my tongue can say no prayer. pain is the means to an end, and unwittingly the end in itself. i have distractions, and i have either had, or found, great friends for whom i am endlessly thankful for. but at the very end it seems like i love chasing that which has no end, that which has is elusive and intangible. because that which is elusive and intangible purports, by its very definition, no rest, no finish line, and no goodbyes.
i would bear all the pain in the world anew.
because pain will pass, but so will you.
picture by nicole, who does it better than i can ever introspectively do.
thought of the day
Grant me the courage to change the things I cannot accept, and the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Grant me the wisdom to hide the bodies of those people that I had to kill today because they pissed me off, and help me to be careful of the toes I step on today as they may well be connected to the ass that I will have to kiss tomorrow.
- from Dr. Pan’s office wall
waiting for godot
All cities are not eternal, that of this pensum is perhaps among the dead, and the station in ruins where I sit waiting, erect and rigid, hands on thighs, the tip of the ticket between finger and thumb, for a train that will never come, never go, natureward, or for day to break behind the locked door, through the glass black with the dust of ruin.
- Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing
