Magic Hour

This features me. Emotional cripple that I am; a semantical cripple. I'll get into that when the flow really begins. But here's the background: some people learn visaully. Their ideas come as unbidden arabesques in colours they can't describe, which float in finely apportioned points in space, some abstract mutating pulsars that turn into dozens of ancient language scripts. And I am obsessed with the script; I would brood and miss the shining colours of the symbols because I could not understand what they signified. I would ignore the cat screaming in the alley at night because it didn't have a fucking Broca's area. Some people have exquisite hearing, but I never found the perfect pitch: I liked the patterns of music. I never played a score that wasn't laid out in some smooth comforting way, nuts to how it sounded. Don't even get me started on tonalities and timbres. Reaching magic hour now: shaking because of churning knots in my stomach, pounding the music into the headphones so as not to wake the roomates, trying to hold onto a bright pit of anger before it turns into a flaccid despair. Despair at the flight of the muse I built in my head with visions that sometimes came and sometimes were induced. Despair that will make me lie in bed for three hours in the morning looking at motes of dust in the sunbeam reaching my pillow. Better to have terminal priapism than to walk the streets in shuffling pants unoccupied. The fucking muse! We could have lain together and watched the dust and I would talk: we would find patterns and constellations, words and teleologies in the particulate matter biting our lungs in this room: and the dream would bounce from discussion to affirmation. We'd find constellations and make the stories that bind them in memory, and then break the stories at will, punctuate them with Deus ex Machinas like Swiss fucking cheese. But that won't happen, and I'd rather this uncontrollable shaking were anger than the shaking that exposed a lie: the muse is drunk on a comedy of near-misses, and she does not cry; no, she dances, but the dance is meant only to intimidate, like some cocksure strut, like an orderly in an early 20th century mental institution (Lenny from Of Mice and Men petting an experimental colony of little rodents in his mind) walking his beat, the sunbeams breaking in through the tiny windows of a facility called Ashhaven, or Maplethorn, or Rockwell. It's magic hour. It's unbroken strength and primal disappointment. It's resignation: finally crazy in the brain, crazy in the membrane. Mark this date. Tell your kids how the dancing little monkey clown made a mountain out of a molehill. Tell them how he was replaced by a doppelganger and nobody was ever the wiser. Tell them he only looked to get away for a few days, but had to settle for visits to a park ravine. Tell them he was in no way wise: that he wanted to make homself feel, to wake up some atavistic continuity, but failed because he hedged his bets on something that failed based on contingency. Tell them he was never a very visual person, so Gestalts always bothered him: his brain just didn't work like that. It was only recognition of a beautiful face that brought the same body state and mind-state, never just the semanticized memory, dulled and worn smoot by tellings and retellings around the collapsing birch frame of what used to be a sweat lodge. Light me my glowglobes and show me all your figure paintings, strange absentee muse. We could have lain together; we could have flicked the kaliedoscope; we could have worked our own modifications into that one owful sand mandala, or that awful box of an apartment building. You could have mercilessly edited my poems; you could have burned most of them, I would not have cared. You could have taken the opals and amethysts and flicked them out of my balcony without provocation, and I would never have held it against you. Take any fucking thing you want, just give me back the power to do this: this therapy, this effusiveness, this thing I'll regret tomorrow, but regrets need to seriously fall by the wayside. You could have been in a rotating partnership with me, but I was intimidated as hell. Take the roots of my succulent plants! Entangle my piano wires around my neck! Grind the hundred foodstuffs in the fridge and smear it ritualistically across me; make me shiver in this ritualistic symbolism stretching back minutes, this psychopath attempt to carve out new values on tablets made of ground-up and pasty food. Smash these goddamn windows! The spring is upon us, and there's no need for these prisons of silicon. Lockers can go, and traffic signs, and satellite photographs! The whole fucking mess! Why this endless parade of near-misses? Is my mind just prediposed to arrange meaning and realize relevance in such a way? Fuck inspiration: no magazine ever held me, and none really should. Nobody wants to publish the rantings of an inward-looking monkey clown with something between anger and utter weariness gnawing his stomach. Maybe tears of release will fix this fucking mess. I'd go so far as to watch a romantic comedy and consume vast quantities of comfort foods and cry. Good night.

Consider: "There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse; as I have found in travelling in a stage-coach, that it is often a comfort to shift one’s position and be bruised in a new place."