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There was a time when words were fun.
I'm talking straight up amusement park status shit—
the write combination of letters come together
would shoot a thrill through me like no other.
And that was even when thrills were part of the weekly scene.
word
Let's talk about the
world.
The world is a word,
words
the
world.
I don't mean capital-planet-Earth. Nah,
I'm talking the world you in-habit,
that lonely corner of the planet
your blood-born habitat,
(That shit's pretty
permanent, huh?)
the landscape that exists somewhere in the midst
of all those motions
you're
going
through.
Let's talk about the motions.
This blue and green orb of ours
goes through them all the time, yeah?
on
itself
without
ever
really
getting
any
where
—
that's
nature,
right?
on
itself
without
ever
really
getting
any
where
—
that's
nature,
right?
Where are we going? Oh, right.
We're talking loops.
We're getting somewhere.
Rooted blind in our patterns, strapped in
to this barreling ball of gas and rock,
building one con-structure after another,
an ever expanding monument
at the altar of abstraction—
HERE WE ARE.
What are humans, anyway, but skilled technicians
in the art of superimposition?
(They call it reflection because
to do so is to recognize that the world
mirrors you in every conceivable way.)
WE ARE WHAT WE SEE!!
What we project is what we get, but first
we must learn to see through the projection.
What are humans, anyway, but endlessly unconscious
of their own deception?
We jump from one phase into the next, from expectation to idea,
collecting lenses of events past and to be until it's impossible to see,
and building momentum and compulsion in equal measures.
I'm telling you, it's our propensity for language that has us enslaved in mindlessness.
That incarceration and enculturation vibe at the same frequency is no surprise to me.
I used to revel in the feel of words,
tangible on my tongue, brushing up
beside one another the perfect
embodiment of all those things
previously inexpressible.
But then I met the projection, slashed at it
with a tongue of barbed wire and found
that it bled in great gushes of words.
Do you know the stillness?
There exists the silence of simply doing,
unique only to when the story isn't surging forward.
(Maybe if I send a bit more noise your way
it'll break your sound barrier.)
This isn't the
world
word.
It's the universal truth.
Let's try it this way. What are we taught, what is it that we absorb, from a young age?
This is better than that, have more of this and less of that, be this but never that.
Be an idea. Be an idea. BE AN IDEA.
From good student to girlfriend, grad student to profession, husband to parent—
make some thing of yourself!
Be acceptable. Be formidable. Be unstoppable.
Who am I?
Am I no more than a concept?
What if I just want to be me?
And what the fuck does that even mean?
How could it ever occur to me to ask this
of myself when no one ever asks this of me?
What if I were to do no more than be thoroughly truthful with myself?
What if I did things simply from a place of sincerity?
Wouldn't all the distinctions and dualities cease to be?
And aren't these the very things that feed into and fuel the most perpetuated idea of all—
that we must make a life
for ourselves
as if somehow we are not
ourselves already life?
I'm telling you, I'm so damn over it—
people throwing words in each other's faces
like any of it means anything,
asking after each other's names
as if they haven't already assigned one another
some sort of identity.
People, they don't want to meet people so much as they want to script people.
They don't want names so much as they want the titles, the accolades, the offenses
that make up some socially recognized being—a character.
All these people running around
with names like loaded guns...
but I don't want to know what
you do or what you're called!
I WANT TO KNOW WHO YOU ARE!