cutting great neck

these green trees greenest than green pour around my house like an insulating blanket. they're one solid dark green color that packs into this window like a thick liquid grime.




---



an old french song comes up on my itunes.

i miss a world i forget. i miss being five, traveling through europe with my family, those auburn stone-laden alleys, the blue july noons, so clear and distinctly airy, light.



i miss what i would never be able to do and be and have again. i miss those moments that seemed to wash away from me like water. i miss old friends, old houses, old lives; and the new ones that never came to be.

i'm lost in the wood.

this black world fills up like an empty jar in the rain.

i'm sitting here all alone in the darkness

and the emptiness--borne out of the black hole of this night--just squeezes the life out.



my eyes lock like chains.

drooping head, fingers dead.

i'm tired.




crumpling into this chair.

hotel california by gypsy kings, such a beautiful song.

now the night plies in strings across my room and forms a vast black web with thin, supple cords that swallow me.




i am so tired.

i did the ncte impromptu today. i feel like i did well--i wrote something about israel, something intimate and weird and yet strangely something i had never contemplated before.



good night. off to the warm bed.

we're so lucky to be here.

the sun on this side of the ocean is red and it sizzles on every green leafy tree that it binds to. the way the city is black and the smoke as thick and old and suffocating as the ocean and yet it is forevermore beautiful.



sometimes

i wonder how life came to be.

i don't believe in the idea of soul. how each one of us has a "wavering flame" that burns inside that pulsating, copper-crusted organ that tries to rip through our chest's pulmonary muscle like moses through the red sea. the existence of death contradicts the "soul."

soul:

scientific ember of life, residue from the eruption of god.

our soul is nothing but cells multiplying inside. neurons transmitting an action potential that jolts us into being--breathes "life" into us--and blows up, spews little green spinach sparks all over the place and with this electricity gives us the ability to

be

alive.

when flecks of the universe collided in the black nowhere where nothing was and nobody existed, something ruptured like a split vein and somewhere life spilled out.



burnt marshmallows that spray their pale pulp into the world like a mother giving birth. in spanish: dar a luz--bring, give to the light.

i'm scared. i'm frightened. there's nothing in me that burns and life is like a balloon that never stops swelling.

maybe i'll just burst one day.




it's like the universe that never stops expanding.
our universe.

have you ever thought where it could go?

where would all that empty space come from?

maybe,
we're just getting smaller

and smaller
and

freeing up some black space for the universe to edge into.

once i wanted to be the greatest.

i woke up one morning and set out into a new life. this is the moment when the main character: springs out into the world like a freed fetus brought to life, with the inky blue sky pulsating like a great big heart that fills out the world and the sun streaming like rain down it.

i was trembling with the fearlessness of wanting to be the greatest. it wasn’t courage but rather a naive un-knowing, a greenness that opens up like a flower in your veins, squirting out venom.



there i was: not knowing who i wanted to become, but knowing much, much more.

i had no vision of the future, only a vision of the present. i was the greatest, and still am to some degree; the only person whom i truly feel comfortable being, the only person whom i confide in incessantly, the only person whom i can totally, unapologetically relate to and rely on.

and the new life i set out into? it slowly weaved into the other lives i’ve led, and they had all become great.

great in the sense: complexity, so complex that they become simple.

and that’s life. that’s all life, yours and mine.



greatest i did not become, i am not. there are many more great people out there—so many more that i have let my innermost pompous dreams corrode like a rock against an ocean of superiority.




but now i am here, the rain pumping furiously against the black outside, through it, a rough fusty coat pouring around me and with hair matted by cool shower water, the yellow light like a playful insect leaping around corners in my room, and i feel... great.

i love sitting in the darkness.




it swallows you up. black and flowing, like a curtain that closes in all around you. but you can still run, still feel for miles all around you, as if you're standing blind in one of those midwestern great fields of grass that seems to expand every step you take. darkness is endless like that, and free.

infinite: you think your hand can reach its end, but it never will.



blue swirls of light slip into the darkness.

the light from the computer screen ebbs, licking wrinkled papers and the mugs and plates and the keyboard and my fingers typing endlessly.

outside the sky is purple, snowy purple like a liberal arts shirt tucked under someone's bed. wiry tree limbs seem to float upwards like balloons, almost rising towards the sky, roots like teeth flowing away from their gums.




i'm encased in this darkness like a bug trapped by amber. darkness is an amber sun; it spreads, its rays flooding everywhere, ubiqutous and beautiful and dangerous.

i'm frightened that my life is becoming more futile than i would have ever imagined. we're all trapped in this life, going nowhere, and yet the entire world keeps telling us that we are going somewhere. we seek the prestige and comfort of big names when we can achieve happiness with the familiar. how long will it be until kids could sleep at night without worrying about the most insignificant of things?

some very melancholy nostalgia:




you rise in me like a sun.



as night seeped into the crevices of the sidewalk, i stepped outside with my dog and traveled across meadows and concrete and long, black roads that blended into the infinite cavity of night. there was nothing to think about, nothing to know. music still wedged in time poured into my ears for the first time in a long time. i pulled on ginger and she resisted me and i pulled harder, and she finally gave. and i stumbled near a pole of light, stands on a yard in the corner of hampshire rd. and baker hill, that scaled across my eyes like a great big white sun floating in midair, and a huge white hole ripped open in my cornea and the blackness fell in and was trapped inside and all that was left was the writhing white bulb swelling all around me and then the night clasped in and.

how moving to new york changed my life?


"Am I angry about moving so much?

No--because these hardships, these infinite and infinitesmal moments of loneliness and melancholy and reminiscing and adapting to new, uncomfortable settings have shaped me in so many ways."



but they haven't, really.

and it's been a struggle, and a test. and now it's on the verge of being destroyed.