i’ve been told i should write more, that it’ll open up my upper faculties, and no matter how difficult that may be, it’s necessary. i agree.

it’s strange that i’m so much better at rambling disconsolately when i’m emo but now that i kinda have my head together, i struggle to find the words. i grope for them blind, not in perpetual darkness but in light which blocks out the shape of things. so my hands reach, gently run themselves across the surfaces and try to discern their shape by feel alone.

it’s surprising but i feel like i can almost make them out, if anything, i’m glad that they’re even still there, waiting.

like an old friend with the right bottle of whisky. like family. like love should be.

more on finding my way back to a more fulfilled and less insane place soon. and i mean it this time. no dennis the menace.

following thought strands up and down my brain, trying to make sense of it even as it tries to make sense of the world. how ridiculous doe that sound?

everything makes sense, because it doesn’t.

ill be jumping around. i’m sorry as a heads up, it’s just where my brain is right now.

music is so fucking clutch. i broke my earphones a bit back and hadn’t bought replacements for the longest time. having music, listening to it, vibing to it all the time, like i did for so long. i also got my hands on a 600 gig portable hard drive. which has made me reexplore music, looking for rando shit to fill up the drive and falling back in love with music, the sheer variety of good music once again. for the longest time i just listened to the same shit over and over again, but i realize life’s too short for that.

i’m a man, a boy, a human fucking being with so many faults. shit’s ridiculous. one of the many is an inclination to drink. the temptation to just say fuck it when things get bad, to jump feet first into the bottle and never look back gets overwhelming sometimes. alcohol is amazing cause it can do two things for the broken hearted soul, it can numb the hurt, make it go away for a short while. and sometimes, more importantly, it can let down the flood walls, allow one to give in to the overwhelming power of feeling, give up the fight temporarily and let the emotions flood through. and yes, this usually creates huge problems the next day, but i won’t lie and say it ain’t occasionally cathartic as hell.

and i can be an alcohol snob. fuck that, i am. but maybe thas so i don’t find myself buying a bottle of georgi and finding god at the bottom of it.

ok, im ending this before i get too maudlin. i’ll be back soon. i promise.

and if you believe that, you’re as deluded as anyone who’s ever loved me.

i think the process of growing up, truly growing up, is the process of reconstruction. admittedly, i’m talking out of me arse for the simple fact that i ain’t all that grown up. i’ve done a lot of living, sure, but that doesn’t mean i’ve grown up. i guess i’m thinking about this because i’m trying to consider what it means to be a man, to be a citizen, to try to be a person.

we’re taught all sorts of things when we’re really and truly young, in those formative years before we’ve developed enough of a brain to question our reality, to consider that anything we learn may be false. admittedly, not everything sticks, but not every drop of water stays in the sponge.

age is such bullshit measure of maturity.

and yes, that seems abrupt. my mind works that way these days, even more so than usual, jumping about. i’m on a bus, a few miles out of the city, watching this fucked up little scottish movie named hallam foe, considering god and life and adulthood and continuation and all those important things. in another window i’m putting together a list of things that a person should know how to do before he dies, obviously building offa heinlein’s list in time enough for love. it’s a meandering sort of journey i’m taking. there can’t be any other kind when you don’t know where yah going.

and though i’m speaking at least somewhat metaphorically, there’s such a desire in my heart to just say fuck it, pack a bag and hit the road. start walking or hitching or just going anywhere but here, change my name and be anyone but who i am, if only for a moment.

now as i blink the sunlight out of me eyes, trying to make out the words i’m typing or the movie i’m watching, i wish i had a anti-glare screen. but i don’t. so shit out of luck once again.

but back to construction and deconstruction and reconstruction. we construct our world, our understandings of it. and if critical thinking and college and all that shite has its way, we’ll deconstruct the same. consider them, work them over, try to sharpen their edges and examine our prejudices, wonder whether what we’re thinking is right or wrong or somewhere in between. whether we may be mistaken in how we interact with the world or whether we’re just affirming what we believe. but the point is to question, cause we, each of us, have different enough inputs and different enough processors that we’re likely as not to ever be able to get the same results. which is why we aren’t perfectly rational beings and all that.

i think most folks, for one reason or another don’t deconstruct, don’t question. it’s fucking difficult. and scary. because if we question the foundations that underpin our reality, what have we to stand on? let’s face it, the human soul, it fucking yearns for certainty, for something to believe in, something it can hold onto as the waves of life wrack and rage. so most people don’t. they can’t.

i believe that those who deconstruct, however, always attempt to reconstruct. and that’s where the broad majority of those critical few get stuck. because once you break something, even if you have all the pieces ,it’s damned hard if not impossible to put it back together again or even to make something new.

oh and btw, bloody hell sophia myles is gorgeous.

then again, it appears i’m inconsistent with most things in my life, so it shouldn’t be any surprise now eh? maybe drifting into and out of lucidity is how my life is ‘sposed to be. candles flicker, so doesn’t the sun. so what makes me so fucking special?

let me take this space to just write. i’m not saying any of what i write will be good. that’s a promise that i can’t make. hell, i’, not even going to try to promise to be consistent, because that would most likely be a lie.

what i will promise is that i will make at least an effort to be candid, to be truthful, to reveal of myself whatever i can.

fuck using this website as a place to tour and such.

let’s face it, i ain’t gigging nearly as much anymore and i don’t enjoy gigging any more. maybe i’ll slam or go to an open mic or sommat for old time’s sake, but while fun, it isn’t nearly as addictive as it once was. it’s almost passe. there isn’t the same excitement, the same connection.

maybe it’s me own fault. maybe i’ve grown callous. isn’t that what becoming an adult is about anyways? becoming more callous i mean? hiding the reality of emotion, both cruel and virtuous behind veneers of gentility that allow us to more easily interact with one another. it makes us numb, allows us to trample over others and ourselves. admittedly, kids do the same shit, but at least they’re honest about it.

i’m writing here because i can’t seem to write anywhere else. my ability to do homework is bloody non existent. it’s fucking horrible, because it’s so late in the season. i need to be operating at bloody peak efficiency, but that’s certainly not happening.

so i procrastinate like we all do.

drive myself up the wall.

i need to learn to let go. and bloody hell does that ever sound cheesy. there’s such an aversion in me to thinking and feeling in cliché, but the more i go about it, this growing up business, the more i realize that cliches are there for a reason. what i feel is not unique. or if it is unique, it is only unique in the sense that every snowflake, though it maybe chemically identical to every other, is different in some form or another, in its shape, its size, its depth.

fuck me, but i’m rambling. here’s a poem.

punching bag

i swung, like a marionette,
spine creaking after the beat
of fists against sides
jabs and crosses in rhythms of flesh
you walked away.

you’ve gone, left scars
scrapes, a hundred blemishes
across skin,
numerous like misplaced dreams, empty beer bottles
the blotches across my tears

patchwork, haphazardly sewn
with duct tape, scavenged leather
the tenderness in fingers i fell in love with, gentle
as your hands never are, always
tempestuous in their impotent frustrations

you held me, quiet
your cauliflower ears, your cheekbones
resting like gaunt knives
against the cracked softness of my chest
the only sounds, the subsiding
of your breathing into the spent silence,
the sweat dripping laconically;
my trembling

a handful of years you’ve had me
mute companion, ready vessel
for when the rage
or the unbearable bleakness of being
would slip its way from the laughter in your eyes
rise like hurricane winds, like thousands of voices
in supplication, like wildfires up mountains
to consume all that i was made to be

everything i am, you have
my flesh, an offering, my life
but for you
empty in this space, these times
we’ve created, my presence
unwavering through all, through the dark
and the day following
that confirms it’s not just a nightmare

i’ve given the good fight,
gotten in my licks, snatched scraps
when you weren’t looking
knocked you on your ass
for lack of respect, giving
and receiving, deserved or not
for someone else to decide

so tired now, the stuff
of my heart grown thin, barely any weight
within these battered confines
barely enough to hold your troubles, treasure
the tears that imprint themselves
like tattoos down my shoulders, seams
that hold me together

tonight, you say you’ved moved on
that it ends,
take me from my place, send me away
with only a final caress on some mark,
some flaw you left some
forgotten night ago, maybe
a rarely seen smile,

not enough.

i prefer writing on the computer… mostly because i can’t read my own handwriting. but there’s also such an impermanence to digital writing, even if, on another level, it’s the most immortal thing evar. cause once you save it on the internet, it’ll be floating around somewhere probably longer than you will be on this earth.

i like the malleability of digital writing, i feel like it’s more similar to the way a person thinks. there’s a constant give and take, an ability to change, to go over, to revise. there’s no permanence without change in this life, so why should there be in the form of writing?

jeebus. i wonder how long i can go without jits/working out without going quite nuts.

of course there’s the requisite play of moonlight over waves, but i see myself underwater when listening to it. i look skyward, see the palest ghost of a light dance across the water as all around me there is cold, watery darkness. but even here, there is movement, there is climax, denouement, a hundred dramas, a hundred ballets playing themselves within the eddying water.

there’ such tragic anguish at this depth. so much, so many remnants of past loves and past lives, such a murky morass of emotion with no clarity, but with such force, it cannot be denied. will not be. there’s loss and age. there’s the lack of hope except that one moon ray, so far as to be untouchable, almost mocking when one is this inundated in the weight of the world.

fuck man. that piece of music, even in recording, moves me to fucking tears. i walked out when i heard it in real life the first time. makes me wish i never gave up on playing an instrument.

i’m playing this as i write because i’m trying to think through a haze of emotions and exhaustion. it’s been a long night, a long few weeks, a long fucking few years where i’ve been more adrift than i know how to be.

i’m described constantly as frenetic, as too energetic, too talkative, too… much.

there’s so much though. inside me, i have this depth of emotion, this whirlwind that is its own ecosystem, dorothy’s tornado, a hundred worlds, each with its own version of me.

and my mind. always a cacophony of voices, a thousand pulls and tugs and thoughts like rushing subway trains on collisions. sometimes it becomes too much and i literally shut down. last year, i locked myself in my room for two weeks and just crashed. didn’t have anything left at that point. i’m always so anxious, or so i’ve come to understand that world, there’s such a constant torrent in my mind that i can never rest, it never shuts up, just keeps pulling for my attention. i think too fucking much.

and it comes out fucked up. i wish it didn’t. hell it annoys me, there’s just too much for me to keep inside. but then there’s that other part of myself…

i don’t have the metaphor for it. except maybe… it’s deep ocean currents that create hurricanes, or so i understand. movements down where light does not, cannot shine. faults in the earth, painful movements in the terrestrial crust. slow grinding that has lasted since the beginning and will never end. conflict that takes place over a million years, but expresses itself in monsoon force winds and tsunamis, in rushing sprays of water and maelstroms of emotion.

goddamn. this is emo.

i need to stop. i’m rambling. i do that alot. but there’s so much i realize i need to get out before it overwhelms me.

before i go. futilely attempt to quiet the beast so i can sleep…

let me just shout out the sulu series, shout out the performers that graced the stage sunday for our last show and for those who have ever blessed it and laid down an offering on that communal altar.

you helped to save me. or. maybe, you save me for another day. i dodn’t know.

it’s in your loss, like it always is in loss, that i realize how much you meant to me.

goddamn. good night.

come!

ok.

let me try to restate.

sipping on yet another glass of a passable red plonk, smoking my last cigarette before sleep, i can say with all the certainty of any other young man unsure of himself that i’ve been in love with two women in my life.

i’m thinking about this now, at the cusp of the witching hour because firstly, love, in all its forms holds such fascination for me, but even more so… the idea of being in love (and out of it) has been surrounding me for the past few days.

a friend of mine, cynical and as flippant as i am, fell in love, mad stupid irrational love recently, only to have his heart broken by the fundamentally tenuous nature of the situation. another who was once a directionless as i seem to be these days has discovered the condition, both for a woman and for a new city and has gotten so much joy, fulfillment and such an amazing sense of purpose out of it. another prides herself on having never been heartbroken, but only because, sadly (in my opinion) she’s never been in love in the first place. recently, i counseled another friend to break it off with a young gent because he was in that utterly selfish/less state, but she wasn’t and couldn’t be. another, virginal man-child who i got drunk for the first time with a long island iced tea shot and a shirley temple, doesn’t miss it, or sex, because he’s never experienced either, to his detriment (is it just me or is that like a blind man saying he doesn’t care about colors, because he’s never seen them?)

the last proto-relationship i was in, i broke it off because she was in love, and i wasn’t. couldn’t be. still too in love with the girl(s) that got away. hell, i still occasionally wake from dreaming, startled at the fact that her head is not resting beside mine, in the lopsided crook that my battered arms make.

love has such a fucking hold on me. like, i believe it does most people. i think it’s just poets who like to make a big deal out of it… both from traditional preoccupation/expectation and because we indulge in the masochistic unearthing of our feelings.

it’s been two years or more since the last girl i loved said goodbye.

and i don’t believe i’ll ever really stop loving her. not completely. am i ‘over’ her? as far as i know, i am. i’m ready to move into a “mature adult relationship.” but i think part of that readiness for sought after maturity is the acknowledgement that other people have claimed space in your heart.

i’ve bandied about the theory that we, as human beings, are made up more often than not from the impressions (or at least our understanding of) that others have left in our lives. we are the ultimate pictorial montages. every person that walks into and out of our lives leaves their mark, for good or for ill. a smudge marked by both presence and absence.

love, both romantic and otherwise, burns itself onto us. otherwise how could so many people be defined by love or the lack thereof? i don’t think it’s possible to no longer just stop having feelings for a person. or at least, it’s never happened in my life. sure, feelings can morph. love often does. infatuation burns so brightly that it either creates fallow ground for a deep abiding love to grow, or else it scorches the earth and truly leaves nothing behind for the foreseeable future.

now i’m going to be off.

two posts in a single day.

maggie, you must be proud.

now back to finishing this bottle and hoping somehow i can wake up early for class tomorrow. both jits and real world class.

hopefully, i’ll get up the chutzpah to write more tomorrow.

maybe ever post picatures.

probably not picatures.

but you never know.

oh and by the by, i am still in nyc full time for the folks asking. and can i just say… fuck broken keys on this keyboard.

oh, and as i go off to try to drunkenly talk someone out of their horribly mistimed depressive event… can i just say, it don’t rain but it fucking pours.

i’ve had a fucking long day running around trying to both get my class schedule and my head together. trying to figure out what direction my life is taking, if any.

at one point in my life, the fires of futile defiance, working class resentment and the ambition that only a cocky young man can have gave me direction, gave me a path on which to walk. as i’ve gotten older, learned to question my assumptions and myself, i’ve lost those motivating factors. self-examination really fucked me. ignorance is bliss and all that plonk.

the last year, year and a half have been their own special kind of hell for me. they’ve seen me in extraordinarily dismal depths. but more than that, more wretched is this sense that this is really and truly the long dark tea time of my soul. and interminable and desolate period wherein this constant weight hangs upon my being.

in short, it sucks. it’s a wretched depressive state that saps life from the limbs and spark from the eye.

and i don’t know how to fix it.

which makes it ever more frustrating.

sorry for being emo, but i am going to force myself to write about something, and what more appropriate to write about now that summer is dieing?

i’ll probably write again tonight. try to use this blog as a soundboard of some kind. better than falling back into whisky and wine, no matter how tempting that sounds.

yes i’ve been writing, though not as much as i want to. and ass i am constantly reminded by my ozzie friend maggie, i don’t post nearly enough here. i’m thinking i might just force myself into posting something small everyday in the hope that at least this mite of discipline will get the creative juices flowing again. it’s been a weird week. lost the jits tournament i had been prepping for last week, getting ready for the new school year and tournament season coming up. scary.

i’m rambling.

i know.

my mind does this alot. it moves like blue electric angels, twisting, turning and barely avoiding collision. thought strands that overlap and undercut and never stay on track.

but let me get back to the point of this post before i accidentally segue into more of my loopy ideation or even my scandalously sordid thought patterns (though how they could not be sordid, being a healthy 20 sommat male, i do not know).

by the by, my ‘d’ key is broken, so if’n you should see ‘d’s’ missing anywhere in my prose, i beg forgiveness. or as much as i ever beg.

i’ll be at this forever if’n i don’t make the effort to return to the point. it’s one of those nights.

so…

i’ll be performing at the last sulu series so let me just post the poster an be off.

it’ll be the 19th of september. hope to see some of yall there.

The Sulu Artist Network proudly presents:

THE SULU SERIES

September marks the 5th year anniversary of Sulu Series, and it also marks the last monthly show we will be doing. After this month we will be closing our doors (for now), but before we do that we have a great line-up for all of you. So please come on down for the finale of an amazing 5-year run.

This event is also a benefit for the 2011 APIA SPOKEN WORD & POETRY SUMMIT in Twin Cities, MN.

http://apiasummit.com/

Performing this month:

…::BAO PHI::..

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=14267359295&v=wall&ref=ts

…::SAYMOUKDA VONGSAY::…

http://www.refugenius.blogspot.com/

…::KOBA::…

http://www.MySpace.com/ModelMinority

…::KELLY TSAI::…

http://www.YellowGurl.com

…::YALINIDREAM::…

http://www.YaliniDream.com

…::JOHN-FLOR SISANTE (aka FOXFUR)::…

http://www.myspace.com/JohnFlor

…::ADRIEL LUIS::…

http://www.Drizzletron.com

…::ELIJAH KUAN WONG::…

http://www.myspace.com/ElijahKuanWong

…::RUBY VERIDIANO::…

http://RubyIsIll.com

…::JUSTIN WOO::…

http://JustinWoo.WordPress.com

…::SHAM-E-ALI AL-JAMIL::…

…::SNRG::…

http://facebook.com/SomeNeverReallyGet

…::JEN KWOK::…

http://jenkwok.net

…::VINH HUA::…

http://vinh-hua.com/

AND MORE!

SULU SERIES

http://www.myspace.com/suluseries

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=10942210157&ref=ts

Thank you to those who helped make Sulu Series happen: the artists who blessed the stage, the audience who came to share the experience, the organizations we’ve collaborated with and the Bowery Poetry Club staff that gave Sulu Series a home.

Until next time.

Doors open at 8PM

Cover:
$8 General Admission
$5 Students

THE BOWERY POETRY CLUB
308 Bowery
(Between Houston & Bleecker)
New York, NY 10012
212.614.0505

F-Train to 2nd Avenue
6-Train to Bleecker