Postcard 56

Politics, ugh. What short-memoried hope. Does anything trickle down but fear and hate? Look to the person looked down upon: whom do they look down upon and why? The racist poor, misogyny, well groomed cul de sac households terrified of far off mud hut dwellers. 

The only thing I can hope with is love.  The only thing I have to will is love. The only bravery that can exist is love. Well then what the fuck is love? Its people are persons. Consider the corruption of power. I've always read that from within a group, that power leads to graft and fraud and violence, but those are all external actions that affect the group or the polis. What is really corrupt, like a worm gouged fruit, is a person. A person who, having achieved what they have sought, is pathetic in the insecurity of that false goal. Poor helpless sucker who must resort to ever more desperate, ever more corrupting shoring up of a crumbling edifice about them. If that sounds familiar, it should. On some level that is each of us. 

What the fuck is love? Read The Secret. Just kidding, don't read that crap. But understand it is an exploitation of a real and true and universal thing. Confirmation bias doesn't do it justice. That assumes we are always making judgements. I would say the secret is more of an input filter, a screen or strainer. The world is a horrible dangerous place. So it is, inarguably. The world is an interconnected web of symbiotes. True! The world is inexplicable spirit. Of course! The world is a series of chance probabilities. You are clearly right. But we see one and exclude the others and start rattling with cognitive dissonance like an old car going too fast down the highway. We are all fooling ourselves with certainty and its terrifying to not. 

What the fuck is love? Its right in front of you. Can you vote for it?

Postcard 55

I am reminded how I used to sit with all the characters I could stand to be:  Adam to Zenophon, Gilgamesh to the futurists. I slink low in my chair under the remembered weight. I pushed dull blades into my chest, trying to get at that wizened pit. I wondered at my parents, teachers, friends, schools, churches and books, and could not grasp a blame. I used to crux myself, as man, within the planned arc of man. I am reminded, recently, of all that.

One river may pollute the ocean and one mill may pollute the river, but it is the need for a mill on a river, and the need for that need. 

And now?

Well, I know that I am not a stone and not a tree. I am not really man. I am not the sea. 

I am the nameless, speechless thing that peers out. 

I cannot claim to matter, but also I am not an insignificant being. 

I am reminded of a pain that now recedes.

I am sitting in a coffee shop, surveying people and things: the plank tables glued or joined, solid and well milled, fresh and clean. But none is impervious and each will warp and bow and split with time, and in my attempts at being, at words and naming things, those boards remind me of you and me. And also, of what we are not, of what we relate to but are intrinsic to.

Like trees, we reach and root to desires. We attach.

Like the sea, we precipitate in moody flows and seasoned tides and gravity.

Like other beings,  we toss painfully and pleasurable at the beings we call 'me'.

Postcard 54

To see as a stone, a geolithic indifference. To know that heat will follow cold, that pain will crumble to the comforting pulse of annihilation. To sit and not to respond. Thrust up to grinding glacial peaks, rolled and split, a pit held between the teeth of water and air. To sit like a sage on the seafloor waiting without hope for the tides to recede. To love and lust for only one thing -- the strain of gravity.To only join with and to. To only join with other stones. Indifferent to dayless space, carelessly collecting, brilliantly discarding frosty dust, seeking only parabolic speed of pull. The only thing to hold is weight. The only pull is gravity. The only things are other stones: melted and fluid, vaporous and free, organized -- for moments -- and alive. To vaporize in the friction of pull. To impact and melt. 

To dissolve. 

To dissolve in the pulse between one pull and another. To dissolve in the freedom of weightlessness. To commune with solvent water. To commute in bloody tides and ichor currents. To be as stone harnessed and unharnessed. Harnessed by gravity; unharnessed in liquid suspension. To be as stone, itinerant traveler of days flickering by like film. To be as stone, witness impassive and unimpressed the gradual imminence of erosion. To be what is and only that and then to not, to falter and seam, to split and to tumble, to gather and release, to melt igneous, to seek and stack, to compress and granulate. To swallow chalky skeletons, to seek a mean, to dissolve and always -- above all -- gravity, To crystalize.

Postcard 53

She's got her boot on my face. Her boot's on my face; my vision is slim. My vision is the scuffed sound of her voice. My neck feels the twist of her laugh. Her nose is powder thin. With nothing but nylons and fuck you black, she hikes up and lets me swat once or twice, tangles up my legs in her arm and laughs -- isn't this just preamble? She is a misabused cathedral on old old land. She bucks against the chest of rattling drawers, and someone walks in. Running out, she laughs again, she knows these robes are stained glass shit. Her body, profaned, belongs naked in the rain. She's got her boot on my face, laughing coldly. She knows, terrified, who's whipping who. The last pagan prayer in this temple was to her. She's pushing up and rising damp, moving my heretical hands where she goes. Her laugh is choking and soundless like her scars and the red on her ass and her thighs. From the first brick, the cathedral was wrong, and wrong as temple and totem.. She was not a stone to hew. In blocks of wet-street smelling street, she rips out her tits and turns on me. Cut them and kiss me with the blood. She slaps me like her boot was on my face, no longer laughing that unlaughing laugh. You're a real man, she says. You're a real man, without even a smile. She should have been a half-buried stone, cusping the earth and laughing at her own tickling vibrations, not a cut and captured temple, a foot on the face cathedral.