With each day
Another brick
In your house
Of love and trust
But for me
Another floor
In my house
Of dream and dust.

At this depth
So far beyond
The reach of drug or drink
You either swim
Or learn to love
The freedom of the sink.

Unusually terrible, even for me, but I'm really beyond caring right now.

---

I'm done with writing
And saying my peace
And making flesh
From word
The shape I'm in
All poetry
Seems vulgar and
Absurd.

So instead
I bide my time
Not looking ahead
Or behind
Working instead
Towards some peace:
An empty heart and
Mind.

The rain kisses the roof, softly from where I'm sitting. As my thoughts scatter amidst that gentle percussion, I feel connected to something again. What do I want, really want out of this life? Everytime that melody plays, the answer seems so clear that I chide myself for ever forgetting -- a choice lyric, a song, a way to take the world and hold it aloft in my hand. The daily minutiae that seems so eager to absorb my mind, just let it go. It may take up most of my time, but not those of it which really matters. Let others choose how they wish to survive -- I know what my way is.

The party line on '04 was that it was a result of bad luck, bad habits and being overworked. A distinguishing feature was how seemingly without cause my swims in blue were -- I could never pinpoint why I sometimes felt so empty, or so devoid of energy for the simplest of social interactions. But it was overwhelming, and in part I found my way through it by conscious choice -- surely I wanted to not be so bound up in myself, and I did not want to live as a perpetual recluse. I consider that a personal success, of sorts, in that I found a way to make a perversely resistant thing (my mind) yield just the once for something that was good for it.

The point remains that I treated the cause for this episode as being absent. Just one of those things, an unlucky roll of the die, and so on. I've used it as a warning of what happens when you think and feel too much within -- apparently, my system is highly unstable in the absence of sufficient external intervention. In all, a dark period which to learn from, but not much more.

But lately, I must wonder if an alternate hypothesis is appropriate. Perhaps it was an intuiting of a truth I wasn't capable of fully understanding. Could it have been just that I didn't have the words, the experiences yet to quantify the fundamental bleakness of it all?

Just so you know, I'm likely to never stop churning these out.

---

If I could learn
How to forget
I might just live
A day;
But when memories
Are all that's left
They're hard to give
Away.

When at school
I wasn't taught
That life is not
The past;
Nor that there's
But one test
You mustn't finish
Last.

Any day that does not begin with serious consideration given to the question, "Is it time to utterly disconnect from society?", is one that runs the risk of a slow slide into delusion. Why do I even bother trying to get to know people? Each time I'm plagued by a moment (or month) of deep black, I get the same misguided thought that my malaise is because of my station on the fringes of society. I solemnly vow then to actively seek out other consciousness, and try to absorb its edges and cracks into my own. And then each time, I'm reminded of why I decided to recede in the first place. If I'm going to be mocked and bullied, I much prefer when it's by me. To think that I actually entertained thoughts of friendship once! No, I'm afraid to say I've quite had it with this world and its myopic inhabitants. From now I will simply survey from afar your actions, and your words will not be deigned with response or reaction. I'll remember better times, better people, and create a world I would like to live in. You are welcome to this one.

You said there'd be another
And so departed with a lie;
Some have use for goodwill
But I prefer goodbye.

At some point I must have lapsed into the Other, because I no longer feel this is my world anymore. Part of it is the realisation that I'm no longer young, but only part. I get a sense that society is moving and weaving in ways whose meaning and motivations I am incapable of understanding. I've become a passerby who occasionally glimpses at things sometimes repellent, sometimes fascinating, always alien. The world is bequeathed to people to whom I am a shadow. It doesn't help that I can't let go. CDs, books, blogs. I am surrounded by graveyards.