an image of myself, first two dimensional
then nine dimensional,
standing naked amidst wild vines and grasses,
orchids of all types shining out passion colors
The plants are speaking to me in various languages,
none of which I fully understand
I get a few words here and there
the feelings are more evident
They are telling me that I have created them
and they love me
They are telling me that I am totally insane
They are telling me that I used to be God
no, the universe
and for some reason I occluded my mind,
blotted out part of my divine vision,
They are telling me I'm only part of myself,
that this garden of nonsense I'm tending
is one garden among billions
That they, the flowers of my meaningless hopes,
dreams and delusions,
are unique species,
but other similarly unique species exist
in other similarly unique gardens
within the boundaries of what used to be my perfect
godly universe soul
"Tend your nonsense garden!"
they tell me
"Tend it carefully and truly
Infuse it with your mind and body lust,
your surreal inventiveness,
your trees of knowledge and despair.
Ensure that we,
the flowers of your bleeding,
tears and laughter,
display a strange beauty that sings
at the resonant frequency
of your innermost core.
Then one day your love will come.
She'll step into your garden,
looking surprising or familiar,
gorgeous in unexpected ways,
and she'll stare at your flowers
vines and grasses with awe
She'll reach out her hand
and extend to you flowers,
a bouquet grown in her own garden
of exquisite nonsense,
not dead flowers but plants complete
with roots,
for you to plant in the soil of your mind,
to add new shapes to your dictionary
of colors, lusts and beauties,
to crosspollinate with your lifetime of
screams and inventions,
creating new blooms that are yours and hers
and hers and yours."
You wonder if you've understood correctly,
squeezed through the tiny pore of language
the meaning of the flowers of the garden of Babel
-- this too-strange creation of your soul
You tend the garden diligently,
marveling in light moments at the intricacy and diversity
of the vegetable forms you've bred,
awaiting impossible love with patience and
impatience and madness
and infinite sanity,
realizing occasionally that your garden of nonsense
is infinite and contains it all
then sensing something outside it
then wondering, where is she, where?
Is she right in front of your face, you've just been
unable to perceive her
due to deficits of vision processing?
Is she sheltering under a willow tree
a few miles up the stream
that feeds your flowers water?
The plants are leaning toward my image
sometimes two-dimensional, sometimes nine-dimensional
and singing it songs in a musical idiom that I can barely understand,
that is not transmitted through hearing
or any of the ordinary senses
A beautiful music, so happy that it makes me sad to hear it
My image sees an image of her, or of you, walking
toward it and wonders, is it a mirage or not?
My image realizes it's not an image,
but is actually me after all
I sit alone in my garden of nonsense,
wondering where the madness has gone
I sit alone in my garden of nonsense,
wondering where this absolute stillness and majesty
has come from
I sit alone in my garden of nonsense,
awaiting impossible love,
and ridiculing myself for doing so,
and wondering if what I hear the flowers say
has any meaning
or is just a dumb invention of my mind
I sit alone in my garden of nonsense,
inventing characters who sit alone
in their gardens of nonsense
My characters try to invite others
into their nonsense gardens,
and they very occasionally succeed
I sit alone in my garden of nonsense,
breathing and breathing and breathing
I sit alone in my garden of nonsense,
sleepy,
thinking and typing these words
*
1, 2, 3, 4,
*
"Truth is beauty,
beauty truth,"
so someone said,
I can't remember who
It's a crazy thing,
If it's true I'm not sure
But it's beautiful
And I don't ask for more
As I go through life I find
I'm drawn to beauty of a certain kind
The years drift by, this doesn't change
I love the beautiful and strange
Strange beauty, yes
it makes me feel
in contact with the truly real
Lifted outside the everyday
into a charming world where devil-angels play
and dance to polyphonic beats
and songs with minor chords replete
Strange beauty of a melody
that's off, then on, and then off key
Strange beauty of an acid trip
that allows you between selves to slip
Strange beauty of your lovely face,
its happy grief and awkward grace
Strange beauty of a love affair
that never quite can be repaired
but goes on twisting, weaving, winding
always strange new beauties finding
Strange beauty of computer code
as it loses itself, shrinks and grows
Strange beauty of the big-brained beast
which seems on its own pain to feast
and values most what loves it least
Strange beauty of strange lines like these
That try, but fail, strange truth to seize
Strange beauty of the girl I see
in the center of my mind
Sitting on a curbside nearly naked
Staring at the sky as if to find
a joy once lost
or a sorrow
grown restless and flown away
Long brown hair unmoved by the wind
Why I love her,
I can't say
Strange beauty of imagining
the world as it can't be
Inviting others into one's
illusion come with me!
Strange beauty of each human life
that, passionate, extends
to grasp it all and taste it all
then, helpless, simply ends
*
So it begins. And it goes on. And then goes on some more.
It's a story. A story of love. A love story.
With philosophical overtones, and undertones, delirious madness,
deviant poetry and quasi-poetry, psychological excavations beneath,
occasional cryptopornography and even more occasional non-crypto
pornography.
It came to me on the PATH train commuting to work, while I was
reading Pushkin to the rhythm of hip-hop, and rearranging bad hip-
hop into the meter of Pushkin.
In came to me, in wholes and pieces, for several weeks afterwards.
And then it went away.
Strangely beautiful, beautifully strange? I hope.
It exists, for a while.
*
It's about a woman.
It's always about a woman.
*
I sit, alone,
in the garden of my nonsense,
awaiting your impossible love
I sit alone,
in the garden of my nonsense,
feeling my skin feel like skin
feeling my mind feel like mind
feeling my eyes feel like eyes
feeling my soul feel like soul
feeling my love feel like love
feeling my hate feel like hate
feeling my dreams feel like dreams
feeling my thoughts feel like thoughts
feeling my lusts feel like lusts
feeling my disgust feel like disgust
feeling my words feel like words
feeling my sounds feel like sounds
feeling my feeling feel like feeling
I sit alone,
in the garden of my nonsense
*
she dreamed she was a fuck
and the fuck dreamed it was her
As she passed her hand across my chest,
a million percolating fireflies
danced their psycho naked dance
between the layers of my skin
the body is a transformation --
occurrence goes on and on
She talks a lot,
I rarely listen,
But the sound of her voice can be entertaining
or soothing
or arousing
it's no shock the clear oceans of her soul
become the shallow winding streams of her person
The fucking bitch says
all I care about is sex
She thinks I don't respect her
Why does she take these words
so seriously?
or the strange turn she gives her mouth on joyful occasions
once indicated sadness
Her tears are love
Her tears are stupid fucking
madness
Joy
Delusion
sex
are all our hopes and dreams any different?
we bustle around, looking for what?
*
BA BOOM CHICKA BOOM!!!
BA BOOM CHICKA BOOM!!!
BA BOOM CHICKA BOOM!!
BA BOOM CHICKA BOOM!! Shah shah
BA BOOM CHICKA BOOM!!
To tell a story like this
Here in the 21'st C
you have to be a bit Whacked --
that's probably WHY it occurred to me
What is this rhYthm and rhyme?
Is it the breath of the flesh?
Howl, O vexation of love!
Wander on, consciousNESS!
Started nOw, can't turn back,
the meter's mastered my mind
The concepts are flowing
The pain is awake
Staring at me like a snake
My soul desiring to take
All my raw secrets knOwing
-- There's something I HAVE to find
Words always LEAD me
away from the core
I know this and yet I
still have to say more
In my garden of foolishness
Nonsense and greed
I tell MYself a story
The kind that I NEED is
breathing
You wanna hEar it Too baby really the only truth?
Prepare your ears
It goes On fairly long i only wish
But you may perseVERE i had my face
between her legs
It's a story of LOVE right now epic
And confusion and craving delirium
Delusion, obsession is
The road to pain paving the scene
Tension Of woman's thigh
Void at center of eye
Ancient chemical madness
creating this "I"
Do you want to bE whole?
Or do you want to bE free?
You must choose one or the other
and get neither, you see
*
Is it about a woman?
Or is it about time?
Time goes on. In fact that is the very definition of time,
that it goes on.
That it goes at all.
Time goes on, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly.
Blowing through me like idiot wind?
Let me tell you a story.
Eugene, our hero, blessed with a brilliant mind, cursed with shyness
and delusions of grandeur, is obsessed with Tatyana, a beautiful,
vivacious young woman who is frustratingly but tantalizingly beyond
his grasp. He sits in his Upper East Side apartment, staring out the
window fuming, knowing that she, at that very moment, is most
likely in one way or another occupied with her boyfriend James, a
completely ordinary, inoffensive, typically small-minded human
being. In her apartment in Brooklyn, on her four-poster bed with
squeaky springs, where he's sat with her but never made love with
her, she is quite possibly at the present moment bouncing up and
down in the throes of passion. This fact Eugene finds particularly
incensing. Impelled by his insane jealousy, his unrequited love for
Tatyana verges on hostility and hatred. The neural cocktail of
emotions overwhelms his mind and body, leaving him pacing back
and forth in his small apartment, mumbling disconnected delirious
obscenities under his breath.
Such is the human lot.
*
Vexation of mind
Vexation of eye
Vexation of spirit
Look at the gorgeous girl
Head floating
In the rage-filled sky
Vexation of mind
Vexation of eye
Vexation of body
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves thru Negro
streets at dawn, drunk on fermented polluted rain,
vanishing into nowhere Zen New Jersey, mental molochs
with a thousand blind eyes
She comes over the sea
with her round blue eye
She hold her head too high
She better take care
she don't turn zombie
Escaping the handcuffs of space,
we are rocking and laughing
We speak, but our lives are under attack
under the urination of astronauts
and the evacuation of brain matter
My darling, everything is wonderful
Howl, children! howl again,
copulate ecstatically,
collage the images of your memory across
the posterboard sky
Howl holy laughter
Vexation of mind
Vexation of spirit
Vexation of eye and eye
Sweet love Tatyana! I'm with you in Brooklyn
where you're madder than I am
although you're not really
I'm with you in Brooklyn
where you suck my cock with awesome vacuum power
derived from the living human Jesus, who will never return
your soul to your body again from its pilgrimage to the void
I'm with you in Brooklyn while you fuck that stupid jerk instead of
me, with a mind that transcends time Maybe his cock is
longer or fatter or not inconceivably even both, but so
what, I have the magic of 20 universes in every drop of my
sperm, seething and waiting to enchant you they will,
they will, or will they, they?
I'm with you in Brooklyn,
insane as a weasel
I'm with you in Brooklyn,
howling out like a grandmother who got her electric dildo
stuck in her rectum
I'm with you in Brooklyn,
You insufferable bitch, with your coy tricks and your carcass-like
stained glass lust cruelty
You circle my head like a rotting halo
eaten by superintelligent maggots
crushed by the fucking sun
I've seen the best minds of my generation sucked
into the folds of your cunt
Howl, baby! howl like fucking music,
fucking music howl and howl!
Robot apartments! Invisible suburbs! Death of the human dream!
Yellow flower of industry
posing for your nipple,
its stem sticking out of your ass
I'm not with you in Brooklyn,
I'm here in my apartment,
rambling insane and mad
Vexation of mind
Vexation of soul
Baby, vexation of eye and eye
The Creator gave me a shot of his presence,
I wasted it chasing your insufferable beauty
I gave my love for no good reason
And you, Indian Dream, didn't care
I'm a bodiless consciousness, teeth of the nothing, Satan licked my
burnt weeny and then, ten years animal suicides and
screams molten plastic, fifteen angstroms of
purgatory, why?
I search your face,
real as light,
hear your weird words sewn
soft into the webworks,
"There are many kinds of love
and I have known some of them."
So what -- so fucking WHAT, bitch-hole?!?!?
Vexation of mind
Vexation of spirit
Vexation of soul, of soul
Are you ready for the kill, jolly Jezebel?
You bitch,
seducer of mens' souls,
Ungodly girl,
giggling harlot,
let my cry come unto you
My heart have you
favor you with cunning
and new species of fractal orchids
We have dug up rage!! I say
The amphitheatre of the genital sun is a dungheap, and I am a
dungheap, and Brooklyn is a dungheap, where you lay legs
splayed under your toy boy, idiot lover, broken statue of
moron dawns with his own particular truth and lies
shocked from their essences
We have dug up fuck, fuck on!!!
An ailing truth bleeds out of your pussy,
of my mouth and pathetic poetry,
And toward the truth
the soul is bent
Binding shaped fire to cold event
Penetrating the emptiness
Sleeping in the depths of eyes
And eyes and eyes
-- Babe, babe, sweet babe, we have dug up rage!!!
Vexation of mind
Vexation of eyes
Vexation of bodies
Vexation of crazed imagination, creativity doomed to have no use,
to sit here scribbling while the shallow souls laugh romp and play
with angel girls like you
I'm with you in Brooklyn
Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
The world is holy! The soul is holy! Your hole is holy, holy!
Holy bloody bungholes in holy bloody bungalows! Holy psycho
dreams and screams, holy bloody seraphim, holy fucking jazz, punk,
filth, tongue tracing your mustache, sex friction blisters, forgiveness,
charity, master equations, eunuch bananas, delirious monkeyful
cheese. Peyote solidities of your firm yet gentle water-breasts. And
children mouthwrecked in the zoo. And nothing ever working.
Holy! Holy!
Somehow I always lose Holy! Holy!
The best morons of my generation suck the pussies of infinite babes
and fuck them over and over in beds of melting plastic and sing
them melodies in proper chords only please, while we geniuses of
delirium walk all night through solo streets, the trees adding shade
to shade, subtracting love in imaginary units from the uncountable
sum in the curve of your hips, your hips now swaying around the
waist of someone who is not this one
And here I think at the sun
I am with you in Brooklyn!!
Vexation of jealous love!
Vexation of mind,
of eye,
of body
Vexation you stupid sun
Howl, children, yackettyacking screaming vomiting whispering facts
of mind and crying fragments of collective unconscious,
binding feelings into motions,
binding motions into structures,
binding structures into living lies
Vexation of mind
Vexation of soul
Vexation of eye, of eye
Vexation of mind
Howl! Vexation of soul
Howlhowl! Vexation between your thighs
Vexation of mind
HowlHowl! Vexation of soul
HowlHowl! Vexation of eye, of eye
Vexation of jealous fucking love!
Howl! Howl! Vexation of fucking mind!
*
Howl, indeed!
Who among us has the courage to howl these day?
Instead we sit in our cars, commuting to work, filled with impotent
frustration.
Instead we snap at our children when they ask us perfectly natural
questions.
Instead we glare at our husbands and wives, spreading spite instead
of love.
Instead we drag our tired bodies to bars where we suck down mildly
psychedelic poisons, deluding ourselves that this is the key to
happiness.
Motherfucker! Such is our lot indeed.
Howling at the moon might perhaps be preferable.
And we delude ourselves, remember, that we have understood the
origin of the universe.
We delude ourselves that our mathematical equations have
penetrated to the heart of being.
We believe that it all began with one small point, one infinitesimal,
mathematical instant, which suddenly tired of its nothingness and
burst, exploded, created itself and the universe, transformed from
infinite undifferentiated energy madness into a specific
configuration, a high energy system in which particles were mushed
together and slowly separated into their own domains of being,
which cooled down gradually forming laws of motion, atoms,
molecules, galaxies, suns, planets, people, poems.
What a conceit. What a crock of pig feet. What a hunk of shit.
Anyone with even a smidgen of sense can see that it began with the
lovers' kiss.
Howl! Howl! Howl! Hooowwwwwlllllll!!!!!!!
A small element of truth, a jewel in the shit-heap of madness that is
the human universe, is contained in the center of that howl, its pure
animal soul perfection.
Howl strange orchids of inner gardens, howl out your truth and your
passion perfection, fucking howl, fucking howl howl howl!!!
*
Several months before all that howling, before the pain, the
jealousy, the loathing, the lust-filled madness, Eugene sat down at
his computer and didn't want to program.
It was the first time, ever, that he had experienced this.
Instead, an amusing idea occurred to him, and he wanted to write it
down.
Had he ever fancied himself a writer? Of course not. He was a
scientist, but not an artist.
Certainly not a poet.
But the code wouldn't come.
He was thinking about Tatyana, whom he'd met a few days before.
He was thinking about her far too much.
His mouse launched WordPad,
the words came pouring out,
his soul felt itself and sighed, or sighed
*
Tatyana's Kitchen
by Eugene Pavlov
Tatyana's new apartment
had a large and attractive kitchen.
She had moved to New York from Seattle three months ago
spent 6 weeks staying with friends looking for a place
a real fucking pain in the ass
she'd been starting her new job at the same time
but eventually she'd found a place
small but modern for the price
in a good part of Brooklyn
The kitchen
as already noted
was particularly spacious and fine
She particularly enjoyed making love
to her boyfriend on the countertop
observing his chest move
as he thrust in and out of her
feeling the smooth hard
formica on her back
At the far end of the long, narrow room
two tall windows let in generous amounts of light
A huge refrigerator sat in one corner, its hum
reminiscent of late Mahler, and so quiet
that, rather than hearing it, one felt it buzz
through one's bones and one's muscles and soul
buzz through one's body
as one fucked on the counter
or occasionally perhaps
on the floor
Next to it was a broad gas stove
an electric range
and over the stove three gleaming cookbooks
looking as new as the day they were bound
apartment-warming gifts from mom
for her first grown-up apartment
her first genuine place
of her own
Cooking appealed in principle
but in practice
time for it was very hard to find
She normally ate out
and when she ate in it was Ramen noodle soup or cold cereal
or spaghetti with Prego
And sometimes she was eaten out
sitting on the counter,
her lover kneeling on the floor beneath her,
her legs spread wide occasionally clenching
their soft white flesh around his head
A dizzying variety of instruments
adorned the racks on the wall -- metal,
plastic, and wooden tools for manipulating food
in every way imagined by modern humanity
Flour and sugar
and spices in profusion
in the cabinets
Also gifts from her mother
Who never imagined the sugar would be rubbed between her legs
to create a sweet and sour delight
The stainless-steel sink was impressively stainless
The garbage disposal was polite, swift and docile
The dishwasher performed its duties
with diligence and minimal noise.
And one fine evening, Tatyana
opened the refrigerator and was peering
through its well-lit chamber
trying to figure out whether to eat Ramen soup
or Captain Crunch for dinner
And the refrigerator closed its door gently but firmly
and said, "Girl, this can't go on any longer."
"Huh?? Who is that?"
" I wish it could be otherwise,
but it's out of my control at this point
It just can't work, do you see?"
"No, I don't see," she said quite honestly,
frustration increasing
tugging on the handle
She had loads and loads of work to do
she didn't have time to fuck around arguing
with the goddamn fridge.
She wasn't getting out of it that easy.
"He's right," the stove sighed wearily.
"I feel like such a fool
All we ever do is sit here, you never cook anything,
All you do is walk through the room
and on occasional nights fuck with your back up
against us, but we're not made to be fucked
up against girl you know we're made for cooking."
Her jaw dropped
"Look girl, we simply weren't made for each other,
It's not our fault, it's destiny.
You've never opened a cookbook in your life
We're the best in food-preparation technology
We were never meant to stay together."
"Are you saying,"
Tatyana said slowly,
"I'M NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU?"
"You suck, bitch,"
put in the blender.
"And not even often enough.
You get sucked much more often,
according to my observations.
And you haven't blended a damn thing yet."
"Please," said the refrigerator hastily,
"there's no need to get so ugly
You know we'll always think fondly of you.
But we can't live this lie any longer.
It's tearing our souls out, dear."
"APPLIANCES DON'T HAVE SOULS!!"
She argued, ordered,
whined and moaned,
blocked the doorway with her body,
howled the infinite teeming desolate rage of her ancestors,
but nothing worked, they all left:
the dishwasher, the stove, the garbage disposal,
the eggbeater and its clattering family of attachments,
the obnoxious blender,
the knives and forks and spoons,
the ladles and measuring cups,
whisks and graters,
the cheese axe and the fondue forks,
the cookbooks, never touched.
She just sat there on the floor under the windows
for four hours, her face in her hands,
the kitchen empty of everything
save dust
and then she remembered the feeling she'd had
with her back on the formica counter
his cock pulsing in and out of her
and she lay back abstractly
fingering her pussy
soon her fingers were on her clitoris
moving round and round
in soft familiar circle motions
Tatyana knew what the kitchen
was really for
It was an excellent room after all,
well-lit and spacious,
particularly with the appliances gone
After ten minutes of typing, he read over his work and laughed
aloud.
"You're a fucking Dostoevsky," he said.
It was the first time he could remember that he had ever talked to
himself.
Your obsession with this girl is getting ridiculous,
he said to himself silently.
Better watch yourself.
Best calm down.
He put his hand in his pants; his cock was quite hard. He felt a
strong urge to masturbate.
He couldn't really see how to calm himself down, not at all.
*
Meanwhile, the real Tatyana was on the phone with her friend
Shannon, asking her if she'd like to move to New York and be her
roommate, as opposed to the bouncing around Seattle she'd been
doing since graduation, not quite sure what to do with herself,
considering grad school but not that seriously, not quite ready to
commit to it or anything else, somewhat bored but not totally like
many people. And Shannon agreed surprisingly quickly. She figured
she could find a job in New York in two weeks flat, after all she had a
stronger background than Tatyana, what with a 3.9 GPA and an
internship at Boeing last summer. She had no particular desire to be
in New York, but at least it was different than Seattle.
Tatyana remembered how depressed Shannon was. She might be a
pain to be around. But then she looked around her empty
apartment and thought again, and again.
Shannon's depression had a refreshing kind of heart to it. Anyway
Shannon was an artist, she was supposed to be depressed. It was a
shame she didn't want to make a career of the piano, instead she
was in computers just like everybody else.
Some of her compositions were so sweet and sad they weren't
amateurish at all, they were really good.
She and Shannon had hung out since freshman year. It would be
good to have her around. New York would be their adventure
together.
*
Eugene closed WordPad and launched Visual C++.
The algorithm he needed to complete the class he was working on
was crystal clear in his mind he saw it as a whole, a kind of
multidimensional mathematical shape; now he just needed five
unbroken hours to type it in.
He didn't miss the solid world at all, the shifting universe of
mathematical symbols shapes and structures and their realization in
loops functions and objects was a much more agreeable place.
Feelings served only to guide judgments, then they disappeared,
embodied in the code he'd typed. Everything was sculpture from a
distance, then mathematics from up close. If everything was quiet,
he could hear the code singing. It wasn't the computer he loved, it
was the code itself, the invisible universe beneath what you
observed when you used the computer program, the shifting and
turning tendrils of binary numeration that squirmed their way
through the computer's memory and registers, resulting in
miraculously ordered bit streams zooming toward the screen,
moving the electron gun to make words, numbers, pictures,
plunging forms into the retina and the brain of the user, and all
coming out of mathematical instructions for pushing around zeros
and ones.
He sat there typing having to pee very badly but not wanting to get
up and break the stream of concentration. By the time he got to
the bathroom he'd been holding it in so long that the hot stream
hurt coming out.
*
I've Always been told
to begin AT the beginning
It all started out
with a vague mOving or spinning
First there was the nOthing --
about which I've nothing to say --
but somehow, or nOhow,
the nothing gave way
Time emerged i'd
something surged give up everything
something verged on existing in my life
The core of the nothing to spend one moment
started bEnding and twisting at the very center
started starting perhaps -- of her delirious
here language falls all apart soul
The Universe, as we call it,
began to beat like a heart
inside
This was LOVE, elemental
No body or mind FLAP your scabby,
Only the crave to return, kneecaps apart
the primal wholeness to find my little whore!!
Move apart!
feel the difference outside
There's you and there's me
Come together now, darling -- can you feel the
how close can we be? see the
Once was one, hear the
now is two, taste the
broken symmetry, done difference
Once was none, difference?
then another, difference?
then none became one,
and the other was two,
and the party's begun
and the wonderful sensual smell of her breath
comes to life, and the reeking of animal death
and the perfect confusion of thoughts that kill sense
and the look on her face when she's angry and tense
and the O of her mouth when she has a big O
and the pointless disputes that all couples must know
and the love and the hate and the beauty and fear
and everything, everything, starts off RIGHT HERE
All the chemicals, animals, plants, people, cliques
Everything that is lovely or that makes me sick
It's a big fucking mess, that's the only real fact
It call came out of nothing when's it gonna go back?
Is it still pure perfection, is it love, is it sweet?
It all depends on the moment
She makes me feel so complete
*
The moon rises.
The moon sets.
The moon rises.
The moon sets.
The moon rises.
The moon sets.
The moon rises.
The moon sets.
And I go about my business, most days not noticing it at all.
*
Still reeling from the departure of her appliances, but warmed by the
richness of her multiple orgasms, Tatyana lay back on the floor and
closed her eyes, feeling her skin tingle and itch.
But she was disturbed after a few minutes by a peculiar bang.
She jumped up and opened her eyes and saw what it was: Her
toaster, which had been left behind, was making its way toward the
door.
"Fuck it," she said, and lay back down.
As she was drifting off into a dreamy half-sleep, she heard more
noises, and slowly twisted her mind around in their direction. These
ones weren't coming from her apartment, and they weren't her
renegade appliances either. They were yet stranger sounds,
humming and buzzing and clanging and beeping noises, apparently
coming from the apartment below hers. She had no idea what the
fuck they could be. She didn't try very hard to guess, which is just as
well, because if she had she wouldn't have been successful. It's very
unlikely she would have guessed that her neighbor, Krystof Saba, was
at that moment involved in soldering the last few parts onto his
latest invention; a cybernetic love-goat named Phoebe. Phoebe was
a prototype, and the result of a running joke between Krystof and his
friend Armin. Krystof's main project was Helen, a cybernetic female
that he had been designing and building for nearly 6 years. She was
to be his perfect mate, with the body of a supermodel and the mind
of a supercomputer. The force-feedback vagina, designed using
nonlinear dynamics to provide the maximum possible male orgasm,
had absorbed a year and a half. This was a labor of love. But there
were plenty of kinks to work out, after all no one had built a working
android before, and so Krystof had decided to build a prototype
organism first. Armin, his only friend to speak of, was for some
unaccountable reason always making jokes about fucking goats. So
there you had it: Phoebe. Krystof planned to give her to Armin for
Christmas. Phoebe walked, whinnied, ate just about anything, and
she contained a pretty much debugged version of the force-
feedback cunt, so she was gonna be a pretty damn awesome fuck.
What Tatyana would have thought had she known she was lying
there on the floor of her apartment listening to the squeals of a
recently animated cyber-love-goat, I don't know. Maybe nothing; she
was a fairly self-absorbed person. She had already forgotten about
her renegade appliances and was wondering whether she should
perm her hair or not, and trying to decide what methodology to use
to design the database she had to build at work.
Thus is the human lot!
*
Four pOint two billion years later
give or take a bit
The universe has expAnded
All sorts of structures in It
Stars and planets and gAlaxies,
nebulas, quAsars,
And in a small corner
the plAces we call ours
-- the bioLOGICal RObots
we call women and men
The situations we gEt in
again and again
broken symmetry
We're all parts of the nothing love
fantastic
split off wildly spinning
repEating the story
of the very beginning
I crave dear your
We're separAte; in our separateness tongue on my tongue
we find our glory and your
But perfection is always a unified story
We strive back for oneness,
for nothing again Lust Supreme
Reach out for togetherness, breath on my
lovers and friends skin
To embed OURselves in history,
leave mysterious marks
Anything but to be left
alone in the dark
And one day INTO this universe
our Eugene came
Forced out of his mother
Into the cold from the warm
The first tiny flowers
In his garden
Were formed
*
Discontinuous?
Continuous?
Moments?
Is it really a stream of consciousness? Or is it a juxtaposition of
discrete moments, each one freaked and frozen in wholeness, strung
together like stills in a film? Take off your clothes, walk outside of
your house, stand out in the yard feeling the wind, forget about
people, houses and things, close your eyes, stab yourself with a pin
in your naked ass, and you can feel the gap. The gap between
moments.
*
Eugene invites his little brother Sean to come live with him. Sean is
good looking, normal, intelligent but not exceptionally so.
Why did he invite his brother to live with him? Why not invite his
brother to live with him? Did he ever really notice his brother
before? Was he merely bored?
Sean watches television. Sean does not chew his toenails. Sean
knows the names of major football, baseball and basketball teams.
Sean palpably exists, we say.
We say and say and say.
Sean puts beer in the fridge. Sean has strong preferences about
beer.
Sean doesn't understand the inner vibrations of the cosmos. He
doesn't need to or want to. Sean is a network administrator. He
keeps computer systems happy. He has few pictures in his mind. He
think his big brother's kind of weird. The four years between them
is irrelevant; it's the incomprehensible abyss.
Sean knows what kinds of pants he's wearing. Cargo pants, today.
Chinos, yesterday. He has jeans custom cut. Eugene buys clothes at
random, whatever happen to be there in the store.
They converse about everything, but not very often. They both
have liberal views. Sean has many girlfriends. Sean listens to hip
hop, he thinks Eugene's modern classical and jazz fusion are
"interesting."
Eugene likes having him around. It stops him from drifting off into
his own world. It reminds him that his apartment is part of a greater
surrounding culture, with football and beer and food stores and
newspapers and magazines and politics. There is more than just
millions of lines of C++ code and strange lusts and worries and the
emanation of existence from the formless void. Or is there really?
It often occurs to him that the universe itself is composed of trillions
of lines of C++ code. If you stare at an object long enough the
actual visual trace is replaced by a transdimensional silhouette,
which is an encrypted version of the source code used to create the
executable file of reality. Bugs occur regularly. Bug-fixes must be e-
mailed to the Absolute. Who wrote the Universal Program? Eugene
did, of course. Before he blotted out his memory, before he placed
himself in the body of an individual being on an ordinary world, a
C++ object implementing the "human" class. Why did he demote
himself from Creator, author of the Cosmic Code, to the lowly role of
human molecule?
Sean was sick of living with his parents in Jersey. Manhattan was
going to be fun. A lot of cute girls there, though to be perfectly
honest, so far he hadn't had as much luck as with the girls back in
Jersey.
The stars were aligned, the collective unconscious breathing, brain
cells buzzing like tiny electric wires. Eugene thought about Tatyana
and was pleased to have Sean there. He felt himself drifting into an
obsession with this woman to a terribly unhealthy degree. He knew
Sean would anchor him down.
Little do we know indeed.
*
As a child he was normal
-- well OK, not quite
He was quick to learn math
and to read and to write
With the boys on the block
on warm days he would play
But he really preferred
to spend his hours in dreams
or to while away the day
With his best friend, Ann Jeanne
More popular than Eugene
Beautiful, nearly as smart
Anne Jeanne was a girl
who'd win anyone's heart
The world was their garden!
After school they would sneak
behind the old mattress warehouse
and walk down the creek
to the forest,
then take off,
often losing their way
walking through the dark trees
till the end of the day
Running fast through the thorns
lying flat in the grass
looking up at the sky
with a mysterious cast
of mind -- What a joy!
What a friendship!
What love
(If only he knew
what this was the start of)
He was strange, the outsider
She was everyone's love nothing
He told her secrets, Amused something
her with things he'd thought Of -- everything
his own nonsense garden,
a Universe in his thumb you my dear
Where everyone whistled are perfection delusion
and was otherwise dumb dance
Where monkeys played chess dream
And dinosaurs juggled money
Where rivers flowed chOcolate
and clouds rained down honey
Where thEre were no parents,
no teachers,
no laws
Where the power of dreaming
could make you grow claws
and climb trees
through the atmosphere
up to the moon
descending quite slowly
in silver balloons
Imagine, he said
and Imagine, he did
She eyed him in wonder --
What a freaky, sweet kid
*
What a conglomeration of iridescent clitoral moments!
One after the other like a series of sweat beads running down a
lover's forehead.
Or is it really a string of moments? One after the other, step, step,
step. Perhaps it's more like a collage. The one-dimensional order is
an illusion. Standing in any frozen moment, one can step in
infinitely many directions. Here I am, in the middle of the still,
reaching my hand out to you, never quite reaching you, while you
stand there frozen wearing boxer shorts only, your nipples gazing
out toward the sun. What lies inside your vacant stare will never
grow or deteriorate. But then the spark of life infects me and I can
move anywhere any direction. Forward "forward" perhaps, in
your possible universe of choice. Or perhaps forward in the cosmos
where a meteorite zooms through the window, severing your left
nipple, leaving only a bizarre and sickening mass of blood. Or
perhaps backward to the day that we first met, when I was dazzled
by your beauty, which struck me as much greater than it really was
due to the harmony between the acne scars on your face and the
non-Euclidean scales melodizing in my brain, and you thought me a
vaguely ridiculous if evidently intelligent clown. Perhaps you'll
move into Hitler's urethra, lying in a jar of formaldehyde in an
Argentinian goat brothel. Children, anything is possible! Moments
are spheres of light, screaming mad and dispersed in a non-
dimensional discontinuum. We hop from another to another,
moving in what we call one particular direction forward because
that is the cast of our minds. The spheres spurt out and overlap, in
different colors and wild amoeba shapes, creating a collage of form
and meaning, which no one can really love, though we can try with
religious explosions. The love, if it really comes, will annihilate our
human forms. Our bodies disappear and are replaced by non-
luminous lights. I saw it happen to a woman on Fifth Avenue the
other day. She was walking down the street, briefcase in hand,
looking up at a neon sign. A rather odd look came over her face.
And then she disappeared totally vaporized leaving only a
momentary halo. I knew her moment had come, and gone. Of
course, it had always been there.
*
Shannon meets Sean at the Internet World conference and falls
madly in love with him in front of the Sun booth, begins coming by
Sean's (Eugene's) apartment whenever possible. Eugene has no idea
what she sees in his brother. She seems extraordinarily bright, fairly
nerdy, a bit like him perhaps, but, he senses, without his
philosophical and emotional depth. She thinks a lot. She
understands things. She needs to have meaning in life. She finds
meaning through doing challenging work with a purpose. All this is
quite laudable. She lacks an appreciation for the underside of
things, the transdimensional transnihilistic silhouette, the inverse-
meta level of luminous eggs about which ordinary objects are
questions or statements. But this is hardly to be held against her. At
least she is a real being. Perhaps it is Sean's very ephemerality, his
paucity of existence, that attracts her to him. Or, perhaps things are
reversed. Perhaps it's people like he and Shannon who are surreal,
who are floating in the space of nonexistence, not understanding
the solidity of things and experiences. Perhaps Sean is the real one,
Sean with his universe of beer and football and TCP/IP protocols.
Perhaps it's his reality, his solidity of existence, that attracts her. She
need something to anchor her, to tie her down, to keep her from
floating off away from the world like a helium balloon, because, like
a helium balloon, she'd just float for a while and have a fucking
grand time of it, but eventually, when she got high enough, she'd go
pop pop pop.
Or maybe it was just his good looks. He really was a pretty smooth
looking guy.
"And if my world's not good enough,
I'll change my life
to better suit your moooood
cause you're so smoooooth."
He imagined her imagining herself making love to him. He could see
why the imaginal image was attractive. They agglomerated
together like magnetic particles in a supercharged superfluid. He
didn't care about her interior universe, he just wanted to make ngles
himself feel hot and alive, and he knew that the way to do it was to
fill her with sensory vibrations. She shook back and forth like the air
inside a guitar. Spread across his face was her music, encoded in a
notation of caresses.
Was he jealous of Sean for attracting Shannon? Not really. Shannon
wasn't his type. He understood her too well. She was a subset of
him, projected into the feminine universe. She had his analytical-
ness, his ethereality, but in searching all of her mind he detected no
luminous eggs. No inner portal into the womb of the delirious
naught-goddess. He felt sorry for her, though, because he knew
Sean would never appreciate her. Sean would be entertained by her
for a while, they'd hang out, go out, have a good time, why not?
She was there, he was there, they were man and woman, boy and
girl, being and nonbeing, nonbeing and being, self and other, other
and self, background and foreground, foreground and foreskin, and
everything else but something really special and wonderful.
One cold afternoon, the fact that he loved Tatyana more than
Shannon was disturbing to him. He saw in the warm light of two
o'clock that Shannon and he could understand each other. But that
was so boring. Tatyana was perfect, glowing, magic. She was a
luminous egg herself, whose shining nearly blinded him when he
looked at her dead on. Even when her clothes were sloppy and
loose, her breasts seemed about to pop out of them, leaping out at
him with love-words, radiating showers of multicolored dreamflesh.
Even though she'd never displayed him any special affection, her
voice trembled with a kind of warmth that promised him
everything. It was idiotic, he realized. But did that really matter?
The way she said "yeah," the charming contours of her expression,
counted for 100 times more than the depth and clear truth of
Shannon's soul. And for this he de-existed himself three times each
hour. But it didn't matter, he was always reborn. Shannon and Sean
retreated into Sean's bedroom and made love, with what dynamical
vectors he rarely even attempted to envision. The universe went on.
Love refused to conform itself to reason. Love and lust tangled up in
knots, mind and body two snakes swallowing one another's tails,
both coming off Medusa's head, and Medusa's head was the tip of his
penis, and his penis was coming off Tatyana's nipple, and her breasts
were leaping out at him as she leaned over him at work pointing at
something on the computer screen, meanwhile Shannon and Sean
were doing the wild thing, but could Shannon really ever get wild,
presumably at the moment of orgasm anyone can, however stiff and
restricted their being appears to be otherwise, that is the wonder of
the sex act, and the non-activity of love as well although this non-
activity did not appear to be manifested at all in the relationship of
Sean and Shannon, being rare indeed in the actual universe though
ridiculously everpresent in the seething cauldron of Eugene's
hyperactive brain.
He thought of his fictional character Krystof who was building an
ideal robotic woman. With everything he'd ever wanted, would
Krystof really be happy? He wasn't quite sure at all. Would the
perfect crystallized orgasm, obtained with the ideal robotic woman,
work Krystof up to such a pitch of cosmic ecstasy that he would cast
off his body and die, ascending to the demented heavens designed
by the insane little sister of God?
*
And then, one day at school
when our Eugene was nine
the teacher faced the class, grim,
and told them Ann Jeanne had died
She'd fallen down in the tub
and hit her head on the side
Words of consolation
Touched not his desolation
There was nOthing for him
Life progressed, cold and dim
He made other friends
but none did he let inside
the garden grove of his mind
His habit became to hide
In the winter he sAt there
alone on his bed
Just thinking and building
the world in his head
"What are you doing?"
-- He couldn't explain,
the big show was inside
among the folds of his brain
As he grew older (wiser?)
He lost the childish daze
But he never quite adjusted
to the world and its ways
He dreamed somewhere warmer
and purer in tone
Where wistful weird wondering
was always at home
And it all made him sick
People, the looks in their eyes
He tried to fit in angles of Catholic thighs
He grew bitter and shy promising love-pumping,
He wondered of others madness
How they did it, and why brilliant glimmers
of sweat
But he excelled in his studies
obtained his degree diamond
got a job in an office eyes
working like you and me
One day he was 23 -- !! --
How did THIS happen? How?
He was a human, alive --
He was here, he was now --
A body stuck in the world --
His garden withering within
To express what he felt
he couldn't even begin
No unhappier than most
Dating a girl now and then
Reading novels on weekends
Getting drunk with his friends
Impressing the boss
with long hours at work
and creative inventions
Why did he feel like a jerk?
Had Eugene become normal?
Not really, not quite
There still were strange glimmers
around him at night
Strange lusts, odd pretEnsions,
desires to exceed
all the boundaries of what
normal people should need
The flowers in his nonsense garden
grew weird and wild
as they'd been unattended
since he was a child
On occasion he thought he might
conquer the world!
But he quietly settled for a night
with a girl
friend, or curled up in bed
with a book by himself,
tending the world in his head
But one strange, most peculiar,
thought stayed in his mind
(One flower in his garden
stood tall, bright and vain)
It often occUrred to him
that one day he'd find
(Perhaps in a chat room,
Or commuting on the train)
a perfect match,
a true companion,
someOne he could brIng
into hIs secret garden
where they'd togEther sing
songs of nonsense and laughter
it was a stupid thought well
it was stupid, but still,
Tantalizing as hell
He'd shut out this crap,
And then suddenly -- SNAP!
the dumb delusion was back --
He would look at some girl
Some ordinary creature
living her life in the world
Walking dOwn the street, talking
or sitting, reading a book
He'd wonder,
did She give a magical look?
Did that quirk of expression
I saw in her mean
that she was seeing in ME
some kind of hint of a dream?
Is she my Angel,
my foretold and fabulous one?
He'd slap himself in the face --
too late! the thought had begun
His girlfriends were fine,
they never lasted too long
One had lasted a year
then he'd said something wrong
And his garden grew on,
wild and crazy and spastic
Vines expanding in knots,
stretching out like elastic
Flowers laughing and singing
in tones dark and dire
Till he could not ignore
The strange sound of this choir
*
Chaos! Sickness! Madness! Delirum!
Where is time in this story? At what angle?
Where is the perfect sense of mind?
How can we leap years to years, moments to moments, ideas to
ideas, patterns to patterns, sex acts to sex acts, lusts to loves and
loves to lusts, minds to minds to minds?
And what is the purpose at all?
What of representation, the other half of pattern? So, should the
nappies and beer be put close together in the store to facilitate
shopper convenience, insidiously, maniacally, with vast explosions of
orchidal lust, a representation is an entity that "stands for" another
entity. To talk about representation one must have three entities in
mind: This was discussed by several speakers and the results were
interesting.
Vines wrapped around the innards of your being. Does this mean
that men are changing more nappies? One thing has always puzzled
me: If stretched out sufficiently, could her labia be tied in a knot?
The entity A being represented, the entity B doing the representing,
and the entity C that recognizes B as a representation of A. Not just
one twist around each other that's easy but two, a complete
knot, perhaps a square knot, the only knot I remember from my
year in the Boy Scouts (alas, they never let us practice on vaginal
lips).
The recognition activity of C is a kind of transformation; in
mathematical lingo, should the nappies and beer be put close
together in the store to facilitate shopper convenience, wrapped in
the knot tied from her labia, made flexible with olive oil, we would
write C(B)=A. Thus, putting simplicity and representation, together,
the conclusion is that they had better buy what their partner needs
to be able to have patterns, one must have entities that can
transform entities into numbers ( to give simplicity judgements), and
one must have entities that transform entities into other entities (so
as to enable representation, instead of water). One winds up being
completely pickled, in Peircean terms.
Both simplicity and representation are Third both are relations.
Where is the other water? Simplicity is a relation between an entity
and a number, for purposes of order comparison. Where is the
other water? A representation is, obviously, a relation between the
representer and the represented. People buying beer and nappies
are mission oriented and they are not going to forget them, and
there is no increase in other purchases. So much for theory! Non-
delirious moments? Beer is the other water not. A pattern is a
relation between these two relations a simplicity relation and
representation relation linked not, not, or not, or not. He gave the
familiar example of emergent data links: between purchases of
diapers and beer. This was an early find of data mining supermarket
purchase data. Supermarkets world-wide note such correlations.
The question is, what do you do about it? Not necessarily as it turns
out, just that whenever either member of the family with young
kids goes, or far apart, so that people buying both will have to walk
across the store and see other things that they will then buy and
increase the stores' profit?
It's all really stupid. No one understands anything. The currents of
mind self-intersect and form odd whorls and eddies, fractals without
sufficient data points to confirm their fractal nature. Someone at
the conference had actually talked to the supermarket owners about
this and they said, yeah, we know all this, but it doesn't make any
difference. Moments connect, and disconnect, and divide
themselves by each other differentially, but representation pattern
simplicity emergence beer and diapers, they all rapidly dissolve in
the liquid luscious folds of her olive lunch skin.
*
And then one day, it happened
He couldn't believe it
He walked into a moment
and was frightened to leave it
Because, if he did,
he might not see her again
She looked like the One
His true lover and friend
whom he'd seen in his dreams
The perfect match for his soul
His hope rose and fluttered
Was it time to be whole?
Was it time for his garden
to grow forms new and sweet?
Or was it one more delusion
Yet another defeat?
*
Imagine the moment.
Working in a mid-sized software company, with 100 other
programmers, sitting at the computer hour after hour typing in
C++ code, writing design documents, building parts of a Website
for visualizing satellite data. Some interesting mathematical
transformations. A lot of debugging.
This is what the universe has come to after 14 billion years!
Plenty of acquaintances among his coworkers, of course, but no
close friends. An outstanding worker, he tended to keep to himself.
No one but him could churn out high-quality C++ code as fast as he
could. The other coders tended to be high-velocity hackers or slow-
as-molasses design gurus. Eugene could do it all. He understood the
nature of each problem immediately, and mapped it into program
code in his mind. It was just a matter of tapping it out on the
keyboard, which he did with phenomenal finger coordination 120
words a minute.
His last date had been about three weeks ago, with Marion, a friend
of James. It had been their fifth date, he wasn't that eager for
another. They'd slept together a couple times. She'd done a cool
sex move he'd nicknamed the French corkscrew twist. They'd seen a
movie, this last time, which neither of them had enjoyed very much.
He couldn't even remember the name.
yeah when she gives me
the French corkscrew twist
i just can't control it
i just can't resist
She'd actually called him last weekend, but there was too much
work. Anyway he was halfway through Madame Bovary, which
wasn't nearly as boring as he'd feared. Her twist was cool, but wasn't
quite enough.
And then Arnold dragged her into his cubicle.
Her. The perfect one.
The beautiful genie, fairy, angel, the one who'd haunted his dreams.
Not in this exact form, of course. The hallucinations walking
through his garden, parting the thorns, kissing the orchids,
spreading pixie dust around leading to new mutant beauties, had
looked a little bit different, he thought. But that was the inner
world, this was the outer one. You couldn't expect perfect identity.
"Hi Gene," said Arnold, "This is Tatyana, our new database specialist.
She'll be working with your group a bit. She just joined us
yesterday."
"Hi," she said, lips parting, white teeth smiling out, one of them
slightly chipped on the upper left side.
Her voice was every bit as melodious as he'd imagined, with a hint of
a sarcastic bite, and an element of hoarseness, as if several years ago
she'd smoked way too many cigarettes, or there were perhaps a
population of psychotic army ants running circles in her vocal
chords, or whatever, whatever or not.
Was it indeed so totally impermissible to throw her on the floor and
rip her clothes off? to pledge her his eternal love? to carry her off
to the moon and live with her in a geodesic bubble, appropriately
decorated?
Imagine the moment.
"Gene?" said Arnold. "Hello? Man, you're out there today."
"Oh, sorry," he said, shaking his head back and forth rapidly.
There you go. Make a bad first impression.
"Tatyana, I'm looking forward to working with you. Anything you
need, feel free to come by and ask, or just send me an e-mail. For
right now I think we've got our database stuff pretty well sorted out
here in the data analysis group, but when we restructure the code
next month we might need to revisit it."
"I'll see you around," she said.
Was that a wink she gave me? Or was it just my imagination?
You never know, you never know.
Imagine the moment.
*
Imagine a woman
No thIng and her,
yet
Young and yet old
she
Remembers,
forgets
On no knees she stoops down
as sOme gravestones will do
Names gone and
to whEn, where
Stoop down
and for whom?
Same stoop for all Idiots
vast vAsts apart
The lAst state
The fIrst state
The stAte of her heart
Much wOrse in vain
Less in vain
NEver to be
All gnaw to be naught
All walls blInding
to see
What were
skull to go?
Why erotic reActions?
The trial's going on,
Still unknown
the infrAction
No. Skull better worse.
What is left of skull.
Soft.
Worst now, why of all.
Skull not go.
Fallen off.
Into it still
the whole
what's left
Of soft.
Enough.
It's enough.
Sudden.
Nothing, you see
Nohow on
Somehow on
Somehow tempt me to be
Best if worse if
no farther
Worse if better
Or not
Said go on
On
Said gO on
Near the germ of it all
Bare breasts heaving gently
Love nipples
Wet skin
She loves me, she loves me!
Let the games now begin
Dimly seen,
never unseen
there's nothing to see
So-said void
So-missaid
Was it her?
Was it me?
Add others?
Add?
Never
Never till
if needs must
No, no
Nothing to thOse so far
She must go
Ooze on back to say
void here
Legs apart
Moving wet
No sadness
how good cOuld
never wOrk as you thought
First the body, she said
Touch my body
Exist
Touch my place there
and watch me
I'll shiver and twist
First the place now
the place now
A place
in your soul
I'm in now
You nEver will
gEt me
to go
Your flowers of need
lean their blooms
toward my spark
Your nothingness garden
is mine
Is it dark?
No, the body first
Nothing
All of old
Nothing new
Try the either
The other
What else will you do?
RemAins of thinking
where none
for the sOle sake of pain
Somehow up
Somehow stand
Somehow rise
through your brain
Was she something sUrreal?
Something bold?
Something new?
Was she beautiful, perfect,
something to aspIre to?
Was she vulgar and evil
and hateful and vain?
Did she writhe on your cock,
loving you as she came?
Pain of bones,
pain of bones
Nothing else
Never new
Pain of old Aching bones
Here's the place
Not to do
Was it me?
Not to be
Fear of you
Source unknown
Dim light source
Source unknown
Meremost minimum
No
Meremost too much
Much less
Meremost minimum
No
Put my hand up her dress
Feel the infinite
No
Feel the nothing
No
No
Pending worse still
Not so
*
Academic poetry about dimensionality.
Strange surreal beauty of the midrange luxury sedan, re-envisioned
as a twelve-dimensional subjective flower.
These codes enable you to get to the 255'th Sexual Millenium. But
they cannot be revealed. Large-breasted gorgeous women stalk
slowly, naked but for African masks, in darkened ancient rooms.
A bunch of the programmers went out to lunch together every day
often to the Chinese place across the street from the office, or to
the Burger King down the street. Usually Eugene skipped lunch and
sat at his desk working, grabbing something from the vending
machine if the hunger got intense.
But Tatyana, on her first day at work, joined the lunchtime crowd,
and so Eugene joined them too. A non-coincidence that Eugene
knew would be detected by the others, but he really didn't care.
Tatyana sat across from him at the table in the Chinese place, doing
ordinary things, eating her chop suey, drinking her ice tea, just
being an ordinary human organism in the ordinary human world,
and he was deluded that she was an angel-beast, a perfect being, a
spark of pure love.
He didn't understand why others couldn't see it her pure
perfection, her transcendence of the daily grind, her sheen, her
abundance of energy. She smiled and a ray of ethereal energy
tumbled through him, as if someone had punctured the surface of
space and time and revealed the raw truth beneath.
She took out a fat book and laid it on her lap while she ate, looking
down at it now and then.
"I don't mean to be rude" she said, noticing him looking at her.
His mind fumbled his beautiful love, she had spoken to him. What
could her words have meant? Rude, in what way?
Oh, she's reading a book. Words?
Are there words he's supposed to say now? Is there an appropriate
response?
"What are you reading?" he asked finally.
"Organic chemistry," she said. "Schoolwork. I'm finishing up my
bachelor's degree. Two more courses left. Organic chem, it's killing
me."
He perked up, suddenly in the conversation. "Oh yeah?
I used to know that stuff pretty well.
I've got a cool program on my computer at home, it's called
ChemSite.
It lets you draw any molecules in 3D
it's got the rules of chemistry built in.
You can find the minimum energy configuration
."
"Really? That's interesting."
"Want
to
come
by
and
see?"
"Can't you bring it by work?
"Mmmm. It only runs on Windows, not NT.
I can't run it on my office machine."
"Well, maybe I could come by some time. Where do you live?"
-- yeah babYYYY !!!
*
Dee DeeDEE, DeeDee DeeDEEDEE DeeDeeDEEEE
Dee DeeDEE, DeeDee DeeDEEDEE DeeDeeDEEEE
Dee DeeDEE, DeeDee DeeDEEDEE
Dee DeeDEE, DeeDee DeeDEEDEE
Dee DeeDEE, DeeDee DeeDEEDEE DeeDeeDEEEE
One! Two!
There's a 9 dimensional puzzle in your brain
There's a 9 dimensional puzzle in your brain
There's a 9 dimensional puzzle
There's a 9 dimensional puzzle
There's a 9 dimensional puzzle in your brain
Sitting in the Chinese lunch place
talking about chemistry
and work and whatever
with me and some other jokers
it's evident your mind
is orbiting somewhere
probably somewhere quite prosaic:
the smell of the air
the coldness of the room
the date you had last night
the novel you're reading
the texture of the peanuts in the food
bugs in the code you're writing
There's a 12 dimensional puzzle in your eye
There's a 12 dimensional puzzle in your eye
There's a 12 dimensional puzzle
Against which I would like to nuzzle
There's a 12 dimensional puzzle in your eye
But my ignorance is magic:
I can imagine you
considering the angle
between delicacy and madness
in zero dimensional space
or envisioning yourself
soaring through the sky
clad in muddy overalls
and a white lace hat and shoes
whispering rhymes in Spanish
to uncaring seagulls
There's a non-dimensional puzzle in your
There's a non-dimensional puzzle in your
There's a non-dimensional puzzle
That will get you into trouble
There's a non-dimensional puzzle in your
Is there a vortex
three inches behind your eyes
into which several galaxies output
their excess neutrinos
and the flux of the collective
unconscious registers itself
in colorful shapes wrapping themselves
around songs?
Most probably not
But does this illusion do me
any harm? It certainly makes the
conversation more interesting
And I hope so that the puzzle's never solved
Would be a shame to see
The mystery resolved
Yes I hope so that the puzzle's never solved
Would be a flying lying shame to see
The mystery resolved
The world is all illusion anyway
If all the crap were peeled away
we'd be left with one gigantic
donut hole
If I want to cluster
around the most beautiful illusions
what the fuck do you care?
If I could shrink you down to fourteen inches tall
And roll you in a taco, maybe
bounce you against the wall
If I could fling you like a star to outer space
All the pieces in the puzzle
They would fall right into place
All the problems in the universe
Would quickly be erased
If I could only wake up right inside
The dream that is your face
If I could only wake up right inside
your face
(A very ordinary kind of extraordinary place
A very ordinextraordinary place)
(return to start)
*
Some prose about Eugene romancing Tatyana without success,
the obsession etc.??
He sits by her at lunch each day, talks to her awkwardly sometimes,
smoothly sometimes,
understands her better in certain aspects
than she understands herself
becomes her champion at work
gets her what she needs
to do her job better -- What a bloody good citizen.
Fuck!
She comes by his place to check out ChemSite
and really does exactly that
He gives her a copy.
Politely, she invites him over to her place one Thursday after work
He hopes it's a date,
but finds seven of her friends there.
A bunch of friends over for dinner
An ordinary social gathering
He stays a little too long, till after the other guests have left,
winds up sitting on her bed with her
looking at photos she took a few years ago,
of dogs and phone booths mostly.
Why the obsession with phone booths?
Really weird, what the fuck, or fuck?
He leans over toward her suggestively as they sit together
on the bed, which creaks a bit when he moves,
but she doesn't lean back toward him at all,
if anything she moves away a bit,
and her rejection, slight as it is, stabs his soul
and stokes his imagination:
he sees her naked, splayed out on the bed,
bouncing up and down beneath him
to the melody of box spring creaking,
with appropriate music in the background
Miles Davis, Bitches Brew perhaps.
Yeaaaaahhhhh.
How much more forward could he get?
How could he make his wishes known?
Should he declare himself to her, proclaim his undying love?
Does he really have undying love?
Or maybe it'll die pretty soon, and he'll find another object
for his ridiculous obsession.
Is she really his Angel, the woman he hallucinated
in his nonsense garden,
his pure antediluvian dream?
Or is he just going off his rocker?
Fuck! Fucking fuck fuck fuck!
Finally he gets up the guts to ask her out.
He asks her to join him for dinner at his favorite Thai place,
on Saturday night.
Not after work, is the important point.
Not just a regular coworker thing.
Although, it could be misinterpreted as purely a friendly gesture,
just two friends getting together for the evening,
not a regular date (which is why
he has the guts to ask)
But she says no, she's busy.
He's not sure how to take it maybe she really is busy
So the next week he asks her again.
And she's busy again. Goddamnnit.
He starts to get the picture.
To him she's just another work acquaintance, a sort of friend,
another guy orbiting around her,
basking in the glow of her cheer charm beauty.
Whatever glories might await her in the nonsense groves
of his heart and mind
are completely undetected and irrelevant.
She's got enough to worry about besides
??
Should he force himself to forget her?
Or should he simply wait.
Maybe there's some natural maturation process
that has to occur in her mind,
at the end of which a window will open
enabling her soul to see out,
feel his glory
Maybe after she knows him for a while
his infinite merits will sink in.
Maybe, maybe, whatever, whatever.
He doesn't have any interest in other women.
She's the only one for him.
But fucking Patrick drags him out to a bar.
Patrick thinks he hasn't been laid in a while.
Patrick is right, of course.
Patrick wants him to pick up women.
Patrick is normal; Patrick is well-intentioned;
Patrick is forceful; Patrick is a fool.
And so, there they are in the bar, watching human beings suck down
beers and listen to dance music too loud, feel the beats and rhythms
shake their bones and put their minds to sleep.
And it's all so sickening, boring, useless. Tatyana is the only woman
in the world, the only one of any value.
And then it occurs to him, all of a sudden: his birthday is in three
weeks. He should hold a birthday party, and invite Tatyana. A
perfect way to invite her into his world. Invite her and maybe ten or
fifteen others. A small gathering. Perhaps a passionate birthday
kiss, the beginning of a new romance
.
*
And WHAT THE FUCK, then, what the fucking fuck. And why the fuck
should this be surprising? And why the fuck doesn't that bitch want
me? What the fuck is that bitch's problem? What the fuck is my
problem, actually? Why are the flowers of my wonderful garden
choking around my stupid neck? What is this fucking nonsense
anyway? Where is the order, pattern, perfection that I was
promised when I was born? Where is the strange beauty of the big-
brained beast, the wonderful symmetry of the universe, the
Hollywood happy ending, the return to the tonic note after
multitudinous wild deviations? What the fuck is the matter with this
place, this universe I've found myself in? Does everything always
have to suck so fucking bad?
Howl, vexation of love!
Fucking howl, howl, howl, howl, howl, howl!
Antediluvian lament, older than a million copulating trees and
orgasmic archaic brain segments leading to lusty emotional
attachments seething through one's life like snakes, breathing
power and passion and pain into otherwise repetitive days, causing
one's skin to stand up and fucking shriek, sing, yell, moan, howl,
howl, howl!
*
But the party turns out differently than he thought, of course.
Differently for the worse. Tatyana got really outrageously drunk and
wound up hanging all over Sean. Fucking Sean, of all people. And
Shannon became insanely jealous. Really, much too insanely jealous.
Why did she flirt with Sean? Why not in fact. She was drunk, he was
attractive. Shannon was so fucking ridiculous hanging all over him,
as if she had some kind of claim. He was just a kid, just a toy boy,
look at him standing there in his tight pants, look at those tight little
buns. Little Seany needs a spanking. He didn't give a shit one way or
the other. Shannon got held up coming back from the bathroom by
someone who wanted to talk to her. Sean was standing by himself
as if he was eager to dance. Eugene had cranked Sean's music up, his
dancy hip-hop, and everyone was jumping around. At least he
hadn't felt the need to inflict his Mahavishnu Orchestra or Kronos
Quartet on everyone. That weird freaky music he was always
listening to. She felt like dancing, moving, hopping, feeling the
tunes in her bones. Yeah. Sean danced in front of her like a million
other guys had, or at least a few hundred anyway. A slow song came
on. Something. Whatever. Pull him closer, yeah. Why not squeeze
that tight little bun now. His lips are small and hard but you know
he wants you. Fuck it. It's just a dance right?
Ok the song's over. See ya later Sean. Meanwhile what the fucking
hell eh yeah.
Shannon? What the fuck are you slapping me in the face for, stupid
bitch?
Sean? You're welcome to him. I danced with him, so fucking what
huh.
I kissed him? Did I kiss him? I guess you're right I did. OK. Look
I'll kiss who I want girl. I didn't mean anything. Where are you going
anyway?
Aw Jesus. Some people take things much too seriously. Don't be so
fucking upset. Man, I can hardly stand up. Don't make this another
I'm so really depressed thing. Look, get over it. Fuck, where did you
go? I need to sit down.
*
He stared at her, frozen --
darkness washed through his soul
His partner, his Angel,
The one who would make him whole
Was standing there, pressing
her flesh on his brother
All wrapped up in his arms,
looking lusty and sweet
Her nipples squashed on his chest
Humiliation, complete
She saw him, called "Eugene!"
Waved for him to come talk
A friendly look on her face
All lost in some swoony grace
He stood there not speaking
Legs cold,
He couldn't walk
He realized numbly
how stupid he'd been
Nursing along these delusions
-- She was queen, he was king
They were to rule the great Empire
of Idiot Light
Together, they would have EVERYthing
Future so bright
They'd both need pOlarized shades
Where had this stupid shit come from?
This diarrhea of brain?
An illness that she had none of
How could hE bE so fucked up
and stupid and vain
To think an angel like her
would want to deal with the pain
of the thorns of his garden
See the beauty of the blooms
winding past space and time
forming surrealist wombs
for new shapes, colors, motions
and melodies and lusts
This was his world and her world
feel it, taste it, she must!
But she didn't, the fact was
It was all a dumb thought
Just his stupid obsession
A fucking damn bunch of rot
He was a thing she should run from
A mutated disease
She didn't need him at all
How had he thought he could please
her -- Just look at her now, so warm,
light in his grip,
with her lips on his flesh
-- in her step, such a skip
Her breasts shOuld be on MY chest,
he thought,
inwardly screaming,
but I'm such a damn idiot,
endlessly dreaming
These stupid ASSholes like Sean
never Understand jack
They scoot thEir flesh around
and retreat and attack
Always grabbIng and moving things
Fucking, talking and screwing things
The women all love it --
just have no brain and no soul
and they'll come crawling at your feet
begging you "here's my hOle,
stick it in me," here's my LIFE,
snatch it now,
in your stupid damn limited world
you know how
I've got so much more IN me
but I'm dumb standing here
(while you're kissing her)
empty
demented with fear
Having a soul is a curse
Feeling, where does it get you?
InsAne and pathEtic
Why let these Assholes upset you,
Eugene -- FUCK these idiots!
they may as well be DEAD
She never was fOr you
She's got SHIT in her head
She doesn't understAnd,
we could make something REAL
She has no use for sOmeone
who knows how to feel
The weekend goes by,
he lies there in his bed
All full of delirious fury
But then Monday comes
Time to wake, time to work
He wakes up quite late,
has to hurry
*
BA BA BA BUM BA BUM CHEE
BA BA BA BUM BA BUM CHOO
BA BA BA BUM BA BUM CHEE
BA BA BA BOOM BOO BOO
WHAT THE FUCK YOUR PROBLEM GIRL
Looking at me like you're
too good for me
Sticking your chest out in that way
You know we all watching
your hips sway
smiling at everyone
touching 'em casually
filling 'em up
with freak electricity
I'm imagining your nipples
Brushing up on my cheek
Girl, you make me feel
So foolish and weak
But I got ten time more power
And nine times more strength
Than the stupid bloody boys
That you like to date
Maybe you don't like the
look of my face
I'll pick YOU up one day
Carry you away
Tell yOu all the things
that I would say
if I weren't so shy
If I weren't so fucking shy
I'd look you in the eye
and say
-- FUCK I don't know
what the fuck I'd fucking say
I'd say "Wake up girl! Here in the
crux of the day
We can break through the walls
And in the warm garden play
If I can just hear your voice
saying: Take me Away!"
No that's really quite dumb
I don't know what the fuck I'd say
I know, I'm not your type
Too smart, too fucking serious
Too sarcastic, non-plastic,
intermittently delirious
Too stupid to lean over girl
and kiss your puffy lips
What the fuck am I afraid of?
It's all such a mess of shit
Come WITH me to my island
Let's get shipwrecked you and me
You'd look awfully fucking awesome
Naked, splashing in the sea
Reefs of nonsense, seaweed
Drifting slowly in the surf,
Seagulls landing on the beach
Sweetheart, we're happy on the earth!
But FUCK it, it's ridiculous!!
Are you really worth this mess??
I could give you so much more girl
But I guess you prEfer less
You've got the mind, you've got the body girl
But do you got the SOUL?
Don't you fucking SEE, girl,
that I could play the role
of liberator, stimulator, mixer and fader
for the music of your heart,
But we'll never get a start
I guess I'm just too ugly girl
Cause elsewise I can't see
Why the fuck you keep on actin' like
you're too good for me
When the truth is really simple babe
And furthermore it's true
Why the fuck can't you fucking see
That I'm too fucking good for you
You may be cute and clever girl
But girl I got the power
to shrink a minute to a second
or expand it to an hour
Master of space and time,
my heart is deeper than the sea
My love is deeper than the bullshit
in Washington DC
My brain though quite insane
contains the world
in nonsense poetry
I've got the soft touch
that makes you feel too much
and rush to such
a peak that makes you freak --
I can string along words
in a way that's quite absurd
as you've just heard --
a crazy genius technique
*
Delirious whispers mysterious moments insidious fingertips.
What's that blues riff doing, in the center of my soul?
I can't make sense of anything. Dream eaters, poison gas, barrage,
leech life, lovely kiss, sky attack, transform. Bubble, dizzy punch,
spore, amnesia. Actions takable, percepts digestible, thoughts
cognizable. It all swarms through me quite inscrutably like alien
warfare shapes.
Rape the Nothing, it refuses to scream.
I know I have the whole universe within me. I can do anything, I can
see anything. I plunge deeper than others. I can build intelligent
machines, time travel devices, teleportation chambers. I've
penetrated to the very core of love and grabbed the red jewel at
the center, one bloody ring to rule them all, one ring to fucking bind
them -- One ring, one ring to rule them all and in the darkness bind
them Yeah!
But then realities shyness when talking to people you look in her
eyes and see the truth of connection but words fumble and tumble
and twist. She walks away with another, not understanding damn
fuck. You don't understand either. She's dressed in clothes
purchased at stores, she's speaking words heard on the radio. She's
an actual being; you thought she was an emanation of soul. What is
the source of the confusion?
And you too have disturbing real aspects. The beige cream you put
on your nose to partially obscure that huge pimple, the one with
thirty-seven heads and four elbows. Why should you really care
about emanations of pus from fatty glands in your skin? The stupid
jokes you tell, trying to amuse. And why not amuse, for Christ's
sake? What the fuck really is there? The numerical iterations you
run your mind through in the middle of sex, trying to keep yourself
from coming. The colorful pictures on your T-shirts. Bob Marley's
face streaming out, in the midst of tie-dyed whirls..
You thought you were an emanation of soul.
To others you are a body.
There's a vibrant crazy world, a world buzz mad underneath. A
world where love is lovely violent, and sex between molecules
cradles the earth. You see it, feel it, breathe it, looking into her
eyes, walking down along the street. You're in the other world beneath.
But no one else knows it. But they all really do. But they just won't
admit it. The universe is sick, sick, sick, obscuring its true nature
from itself almost obsessively. Is this how the universe was created?
There was the pure, all-seeing void, and then ba bing! Bing! Bing!
it decided to obscure itself from itself, and this decision, no, the
idea even, before the decision, accomplished the evil act, blindness
was born, reality created, and here the fuck we fucking are, you and me,
looking at each other through a dirty fucking window and for
moments seeing through, feeling through to the truth and love of
each other as surreality exists, but then the moments fade and we're
back again, we're merely bodies, bodies bodies, talking and making
love searching the brilliance that brings us beneath beyond.
*
"What's the difference between a bitch and a whore? "
"A whore sleeps with everybody at the party, and a bitch sleeps with
everybody at the party except you."
"What's the difference between love, true love, and showing off? "
"Spitting, swallowing, and gargling."
"What's the difference between the universe and my little finger?"
"Goat. Goat. Goat. Goat. Goat."
"What's the meaning of love?"
"Disaster, salvation, life, love, death. Spitting, swallowing,
gargling, whores, bitches, goats. Nothing. Skin. Shut up. Yeah right."
*
So WHAT THE FUCK
your problem girl
I simply cannot see
Why the fuck you keep on thinking
You're too fucking good for me
You're just too fucking beautiful
And it's so plainly fucking true
I'm fifty fucking billion times
Too fucking good for you
*
Eugene sits on the PATH train then
riding to work
Mad thoughts course like wind
through his brain
Look at all these damn jerks!
Look at these fucking jerks!
The world's An open sore
Feel the pain!
His thoughts run to music,
take tones dark and dire
punctuated by screams
Awake, yet filled with bad dreams
that run on much too long
Thoughts so right yet all wrong
It gets so damn fucking tired!
My mind is a joke, he thinks
My brain is a bust
Do I really love Tatyana,
or am I just full or lust?
The whole fucking world is a joke and a farce
It started a joke,
then somehow it got lost
For a moment he sees it all --
a big fuzzy dot
the whole world containing --
the whole messy lot --
It's all glowing and perfect
with infinite sides
A garden, in whose bushes
leprechauns hide
Whooda thunk bliss revealed
on a commuter train ride?
But no, it's all stupid SHIT
Tatyana just doesn't care
That asshole is running his hands through her hair
Fuck YOU, Tatyana
Fuck Everyone, shit
I don't care if you die now
I hope the damn train gets hIt
by a comet
I hope the whole fucking cIty gets squashed
What the FUCK's going on, man
Where did I get lost?
Fucking goddamn TatyAna,
I wish I was in bEd with you
I wish I was pouring
the contents of my hEad to you
Take off your shirt HONEY,
I'll lick your breasts like ice CREAM
I need you so girl,
you're my infinite dream
I see you there waiting
with a wonderful smile
A bouquet in your hand
By my garden beguiled
FUCK you bitch,
Fuck you
just fuck you to hell
I'd kIll you, if I didn't
Love you so well
Mad trails of thoughts
rolling down through his brain
Standing and staring
Going to work on the train
*
PATH (Port Authority Trans-Hudson) rapid transit trains provide
service between New Jersey and New York City 24 hours per day,
seven days per week. The fare is $1.00. Children under 5 ride free.
Or so the story goes. In my lifetime I have murdered 21 human
beings, I have committed thousands of burglaries, robberies,
larcenies, arsons and last but not least I have committed sodomy on
more than 1,000 male human beings. For all these things, I am not in
the least bit sorry. Or so the story goes. My conscience crawled up
its asshole and died; and that was the end of it, baby, baby, baby.
Revolution, evolution, devolution, lick my scrotum, add my totum,
run my weasel, it's a diesel, move my body, very oddly, undersize
me, realize me, take my soul now, dig a hole now, feed the one love,
what you're made of, why the big deal, turn the big wheel. Or,
perhaps, the love is not perfect. For assistance, call 1-800-FUCK-YOU.
A million dollars, doggie collars, you dress for goodies, I've got a
woody, I count to fifty, I think you're nifty, touch your skin now,
end to begin now, my tongue inside your navel, my mind's in plato's
cave, hell is just a kind of nothing, you're just a kind of nothing. For
more information, contact PATH at 1-800-234-PATH. . For maps of
individual PATH stations, do not fear your enemies. I do not mean
that large-scale lesbianism should be adopted, but simply that the
emphasis should be taken off male genitalia and replaced upon
human sexuality. The cunt must come into its own The worst they
can do is kill you. Do not fear friends. Revolution, evolution,
devolution, lick my scrotum, add my totum, run my weasel, it's a
diesel, move my body, very oddly, undersize me, realize me, take my
soul now, dig a hole now, feed the one love, what you're made of,
why the big deal, turn the big wheel. A million dollars, doggie
collars, you dress for goodies, I've got a woody, I count to fifty, I
think you're nifty, touch your skin now, end to begin now, my
tongue inside your navel, my mind's in plato's cave, hell is just a kind
of nothing, you're just a kind of nothing. Tell me again, baby, tell
me again. Do you love me? Do you really love me? Tell me again.
Do you really love me? Tell me again. Tell me a-fucking-gain. Your
beauty makes me wonder, is that a kind of thunder, is that a kind of
eyeball, is that the phone when you call, is that the voice you talk
with, are those the legs you walk with, are those the other people,
are those the minds that we will. Remember, at worst, they may
betray you. Fear those who do not care; they neither kill nor betray,
but betrayal and murder exists because of their silent consent.
Overnight, weekday nights from 11 PM - 6 AM, and weekend nights
from 7:30 PM - 9 AM, We got tickled and started making up juicier
and juicier ones, ending with: "Shot Gun Homosexual Retarded
Marriage Performed by Crazed Psychic while Group Home Workers
Get Drunk and Laugh Their Asses Off." PATH operates two lines
(passengers traveling between Hoboken and the World Trade Center
must change trains at Grove Street): Holidays: Saturday/Sunday
schedules will be operated on New Year's Day, revolution, evolution,
devolution, lick my scrotum, add my totum, run my weasel, it's a
diesel, move my body, very oddly, undersize me, realize me, take my
soul now, dig a hole now, feed the one love, what you're made of,
why the big deal, turn the big wheel. Goose bumps, got lumps on
my head from where I banged it on the brick wall, not quite sure I'm
not dead, quiet desperation leaves you comfortably dumb, I can't
say it all cause my tongue is too numb. Julia comes from a mentally
ill family. Her father was paranoid schizophrenic, and beat her
mother nearly to death when Julia was 2. He was in and out of
mental hospitals continually. Her older sister, Cindy, is also
schizophrenic. A million dollars, doggie collars, you dress for
goodies, I've got a woody. Her mother is not mentally ill, but is
highly eccentric, unable to hold a job (she has not worked in 16
years), and lives in poverty. Julia and her mother have a very volatile
relationship due to their mutual mental instability. Your beauty
makes me wonder, is that a kind of thunder, is that a kind of eyeball,
is that the phone when you call. Presidents' Day, Memorial Day,
Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. A
special Saturday schedule is operated on Independence Day.
*
But work, he can't face
His mind's in the wrong place
Too loud the crazed voice
Overfull of this noise,
like a robot, no choice
he walked through the streets,
walked and walked,
walked and walked
walked for block after block
*
Tatyana stumbled home at 3 when the party was over and fell into
bed. In the morning she woke up and made some coffee. Then she
went into Shannon's room; the door was open a crack so she didn't
bother to knock. She had never seen a dead body before. Let alone
one belonging to a roommate and friend. The bottle of pills was
lying open next to her, she was slumped down on the bed
unmoving, like in a scene out of a movie.
She jumped on her and felt her pulse, immediately though even
before that her deadness was apparent. There was no breathing
going on. The heart wasn't beating either. No way noway nohow.
What the fuck was this about, about me kissing Sean, at Eugene's
stupid fucking party? It didn't mean anything of course. Anyway I
told her that. Something must have happened between them
afterwards. But she just seemed to walk right out. What the fuck,
what the FUCK, what the what THE FUCK!
Fucking hell. Breathe deep, deep, calm down. Thinking of myself in
this situation. I need to call an ambulance. Or the morgue? Or
what. Is she really fucking DEAD, Christ. I guess I should call Sean or
what, but.
Fucking fucking fucking fuck fuck fuck.
*
BA BA DA BING BA DA CHOO
BA BA DA BING BA DA CHOO
BA BA DA BING BA DA CHOO
BA BA DA BING BA DA CHOO
People sit on the train
Looking stupid and dead
A hundred billion eLECtrical cells in their head
Living with no understAnding
in worlds not expAnding
Biological Robots, motivated by branding
Waiting for HOLidays, full of vague IDiot rage,
how can you turn the next pAge,
when your brain is the BIRDcage
and it's gilded with FOOL's gold
How quickly we gEt old
We're thinking we BOUGHT our freedom
when the truth is we BEEN sold
Sold down the river
by our pErsonal hells --
networked eLECTrical cells --
Feel the cold shiver --
I got goose bumps,
got lumps on my head
from where I BANGed it on the brick wall
Not quite sure I'm not dead
Quiet desperAtion leaves you comfortably dumb
I can't say it all cUz my tOngue is too numb
Well I'm a strange deviAtion
some kind of psychic mutAtion
Now I've got off the trAin
I'm standing here at the stAtion
Time to head off to WORK
like a stupid ass JERK
Scribbling In my mind's NOTEbook
Words not Even HALF cooked
Is this some kind of conFUSion, deLUSion, ilLUSion
Bang my HEAD on the wall again,
get a conTUSion
Bleeding OUT like a faucet
I think I've FINally lost it
I no longer can
distinguish pleasure from PAIN
There's far too mAny dimEnsions
to stay with the SANE
Have I really gone crazy?
It's not at all hAzy
It's just so hard to proJECT into everyone's LANGuage
I look into your EYES and I just see the DAMage
The world was born out of LOVE
Way back beFORe time existed
The world was born out of LOVE
And then someHOW it got twisted
WRAPped all around its own ASShole in knots
DROWNed in cheap beer and mariNATed in snot
The GARden so pErfect and lOvely and SWEET
Was RIPped in six billion pieces,
Each one incompLETE
And each one with a nAme
And a body and HELL
Nonsense gArdens whose SICKNESS
We know all too well
There's no underSTANDing
It's at random exPANDing
There's no way to recEive
what it is I'm deMANDing
If perFECtion came to me
I'd be too small
to accept it
and that's why
there's NO HOPE at all
My secret GARden it's dYing
so could you leave me ALONE?
Take off your shirt HONEY,
I'll lick your breasts like ICE CREAM cones
I need delirious disTRACTion
Surrealist spicy reACTion
My trial's been going a WHILE
I still don't know the inFRACTion
I see through the WINdow
I know what we DON'T know
I saw a lady there WAITing
I saw the smIle on her fAce
Fingers undOing the lAce
On her nine dimensional LINgerie
I'll live to DREAM another day
She'll mesmerize me like SPACEtime
Isn't her flesh fine
I'd like to have her inside
This nonSENSE garden OF mine
DOZens of cOUSins of NOthing there bleeding
I don't know their nAmes
I can jUst feel their nEEding
As they ride on the PATH train
scorching down DIME lane
without a true thought in THEIR brain
the world feeding THEIR pain
PAPERS in their hands
Lusting for movie stars
Reading OF foreign lands
Sucking on SPORTS CARS
Lies of the century
Closing the soul's doors
And I am no bEtter
My blood is no wEtter
My shit is no swEEter
I'm as mad as a HATter
REALize EVERYthing,
where does it gEt you?
InsAne in your brAin
The truth will only upSET you
Better the IGnorant bliss
Drunk on your GURU's PISS
Listen to this
Ooh babe
Awash in the HIT OR miss
Ok,
I'm walking to WORK now
I'm less of a JERK now
All my strange cogiTATions
are only a quirk now
Expanding in EMPTY space,
the grace of the HUMAN race,
and all that I dreAM
is just a spArk in a DARK PLACE
The world was born out of LOVE
I'm just a tiny part Of it
Existing twisting reSIStance
You wanna make something of it?
Invisible BODY bags
surrounding the HUMAN drags
It really don't MATter
We're all the mad HATter
God-not GOT the EquAtion wrong
This song has gone ON too long
Some part of my HEART has an ART
that is FAR too strong
And I wish only THAT
I could look aHEAD to the day's end
Put the whole mess asIde and
curl up in my WARM BED
DisappEAR in the passion,
comPASSIONate romance
of your LIPS on my skin --
your NondiMENsional INstants
Who fucking CARES it's all
chance and machInery
I love you so baby
You're such EXcellent scEnery
With you in my garden
Everything would be SWEET
Never perfect but stIll
Moving toward the compLETE
But you AREn't mine --You're his --
I won't come home to YOU
I'll murder myself!!
But I won't, it's not true
Mad trails of thoughts
rolling down through my brain
Standing and staring
on the damn stupid PATH train
*
Some prose about anger, hate, frustration.
He doesn't want to feel it but
just like the rest of us
what real choice does he have?
Another soul stuck in a body,
wandering alone, sad and mad.
What he does, walking through the morning streets filled with
anger, is to walk into a cyber-cafι, create an anonymous Yahoo free
account, and tap out an e-mail. An e-mail of anger and hate? No, of
love. He taps out a love note to Tatyana, and signs it "You know
who."
youknowho999@yahoo.com
"Dear Tatyana," the damn fool writes,
"I'm writing down what I don't have the guts to say in person, shy
fool that I am. I'm madly, incredibly, tremendously in love with you.
All my life I've been imagining a woman like you, and now that I've
met you I can hardly believe my good luck. I get the feeling that you
realize my feelings and do NOT reciprocate them, but this is
important enough to me that I'm willing to make an ass of myself by
being explicit and making this declaration of love, which you of
course can feel free to delete and ignore. In the off chance that you
feel the same way as I do, but are just being shy in some way of your
own, in spite of your apparent outgoingness, perhaps this will spur
you to throw your arms around me and kiss me, or at least to agree
to go out on a date with me like you do with James. I'd give this
about a half of one percent chance, enough to justify the ridiculous
embarrassment that will be my lot in the other 99.5% of possible
universes. I know, I'm just a stupid romantic. In spite of the
rational side of brain, I believe in love destiny. I believe you're the one.
If you don't realize it, that's too bad I guess; the universe is a crappy place.
I know you like me, we're friends, blah blah blah. I like you too,
but it's much more than that. I know it sounds stupid, but I really
believe in my heart of hearts that every individual human soul is
incomplete. You and I have what we need to complete each others'
souls, to make each other whole. This stuff is hard to say because it
sounds so fucking trite, but there's a reason it's trite it's been
repeated so often because it has a fundamental human truth to it. A
fundamental human truth that we could experience you and me. If
you'd only say the word. Anyway I've typed enough garbage. You
can of course respond or not as you like."
He clicked SEND, and requested a return receipt, so he'd know if
she'd gotten it.
Then back out again to wander the streets. He felt as if he'd
accomplished something. Made an ass of himself, most likely. But at
least, he'd thrown his heart into the void, he'd been willing to
gamble, to make himself ridiculous in the hope of a potentially great
gain. No venture, no win, blah blah blah.
But still, goddamnit, fucking stupid bitch, you knew she was gonna
say no. She has no fucking interest in you that way, at all. You
know, I value you too much as a friend to fucking fuck you, and so
on and on like that. And anyway you don't really stir my soul at all.
Whatever treasures you have inside you well you can fucking keep.
Ad nausea infinitum.
*
BA CHOO BA BAPPA CHOO
BA CHOO BA BAPPA BAPPA CHOO
BA CHOO BA BAPPA CHOO
BA CHOO BA BAPPA BAPPA CHOO
I hate you fucking hate
What the fuck you doing
in my brain
I try to rip you out
But fucking asshole,
you remain
You make me scream
at people
Who ain't doin' nothin' wrong
Punch holes in walls
Kick doors in
And write nasty fucking songs
If I could fucking kill you
Hate
I really fucking would
Just get the fuck out Of me
hate
You ain't no fuckin' good
*
Shannon is found dead of an overdose. Tatyana is crushed, feels it's
her fault, suddenly quits her job and takes a friend's job offer back in
Seattle.
While preparing to leave, she sends an e-mail to Eugene explaining
that she doesn't love him and has to leave, is a bad person, etc.
Does anything else need to be said?
It's not a porno film, unfortunately.
Eugene, I thought about your note and how to respond to it a lot,
but now everything is different and I'm just going to say a few badly
thought out words. I'm wrapping things up here. As you know I quit
the company. I'm moving back to Seattle.
Eugene, I only wish I were a good enough person to reciprocate your
sentiments, which are sweet and wonderful and everything else that
I'm not. Unfortunately, I'm empty inside, Eugene. The person you
think you're in love with isn't even there. I killed my best friend for
no reason, just being drunk and thoughtless. I need to go away and
never return. It's been really good knowing you, but I just need to
go. I'm sorry. I really like you a lot, and if things were different
maybe something would have worked out between us, but I don't
have the kind of feelings you want me to have, and right now I'm
really not able to feel much at all, except like a real fucking bitch. I
wish you the best. Tatyana.
*
For weeks now each night
Eugene plod through the streets
Hurt, distraught, lost all hope
Of becoming complete
AvoidIng peoples' faces,
Staring down at the ground
Or maybe up at the sky
When a strange mood came round
Lift foot up, put foot down INSANE MOMENTS
On and on, nothing else
Then one night what was that?
On his arm, a touch felt
familiar but strange VOID EXPLOSION
somehow scared but alive
Then he heard a small voice --
which was NOT in his head --
"Excuse me," she said, NOT
"do you know where I could find NOT NOT
a train, the 4 or the 5?" NOT NOT
Dig under the ground, he thought,
just fucking die ...
But he pulled himself out
of the hell he was swimming in
and looked at her curiously --
she looked Useless, but, then again --
"Where do you want to go?"
he asked with a halt
"I need to get to Penn Station.
to get a train out to Jersey."
Something in her faint voice
reached into him in a way
he could not quantify
He looked her in the eye
"It's complicated, I'll walk you there,"
he said, barely breathing
She followed him quietly
He felt the darkness receding
*
The story of Eugene and Papaya Girl.
It's very simple, really.
He was walking through the street depressed, she stopped him and
asked directions to the train.
He gave her directions, they exchanged phone numbers, they dated,
they talked, they ate together, they fucked, they ate each other
together, they went out several times a week, and then she asked
him to move in with her. He was amazed how fast it had happened.
Had only four months gone by? Her actual name was Julia, but after
their first night of love he noticed that she tasted like papayas, and
he decided to call her Papaya Girl. She made no protest, she thought
it was kind of cute. She'd never had a nickname before. Had four
months gone by already? What difference did it make, really? Time
was an illusion in the Garden of Nonsense, time doesn't pass at all.
Time is another dimension like space, you can move about in it this
way and that, unless specific obstacles interfere. Time is just the
bogus name for your particular path hopping between the islands of
moments, in the vague sea of potential. And so on and on and on.
It bleeds the same of death. He didn't really have the heart to say
know. He loved her well enough, or didn't he? She certainly passed
the time. Excellent scenery. Strange beauty and all, and all. It was
going much too quickly. But she needed him so. She had to have
him there every night, she was lonely without him. Unlike Tatyana,
for example, who didn't care if he even breathed or not, except
insofar as he could help her on her career path. It was all a fucking
lump of shit. Except it wasn't so bad now was it. Papaya Girl was
cute enough, not as cute as Tatyana, but the way she posed for him
without her clothes on was really pretty damn fine. It was life in the
real world, the illusory garden fading like the nonsense it really was.
Things weren't so bad at all.
But should he move in with her, or not?
It wasn't an obvious decision.
He appealed to the leprechauns in his garden but they only smirked
and vanished.
He was all on his own, it seemed
And she didn't make the decision any easier, the way she threw her
naked self at him, begging him to make her feel all right. Her cunt,
he couldn't argue with.
The difficulty was the beautiful nonsense tucked away in the folds of
his soul.
She wanted him around all the time. He made her feel happier. She
was never all that happy, really. Three years ago she'd tried to
commit suicide, taken a whole bunch of pills. But then she could
find such joy, in odd moments, like when he was standing in the
shower with his eyes closed and she somehow sneaked up on him
and scared the fucking shit out of him. And standing on the street
corner, staring up at the sky. She understood mad moments.
They sat in a restaurant eating Chinese food. Always Chinese food, it
seemed, with him and his women. They talked about the logic of
life. She explained that her parents had consistently ignored her;
her older sister had been so much brighter, so much friendlier, so
much more athletic. Then her big sister had been hit by a truck. He
told her about Ann Jeanne, the love of his childhood, and her
untimely demise. After her sister had died, her parents hadn't
started to like her more, they had started to like her less, resenting
perhaps in the backs of their minds that she hadn't been the one to
die.
"My parents were perfectly OK," Eugene pointed out, "but it didn't
make much difference. I just went on and on and on, on my own
trajectory. They didn't screw me up much, they provided me with
food and water and shelter, but after the age of six or seven
probably not much else. Anyway," he said, "you're grown up now,
and your parents don't matter.
"Whether they ignored you or paid attention to you or thought you
were valuable or a total piece of shit, at this point it's really quite
irrelevant. You live in your own nonsense garden now, you build
your own psychic universe. That childhood stuff has only as much
value as you yourself decide to give it. You have to realize that no
one's valuation structure is absolute. Your parents didn't value you
as much as her, but what does it really matter. There's nothing
absolutely right about their view of the world. If you have any
sense, you'll choose a valuation scheme in which you're judged
valuable as fuck. And surround yourself with other people who
think you're worth a lot too. What the fuck else is there to do? I
think you're fantastic, I'm here, you're here, this is the moment, the
reality, so what does it matter what the people your parents were
fifteen years ago used to think, or what you think they used to
think?"
She reached over and kissed him thick lovely warm on the mouth.
"Eugene, you're such a sweetheart."
He helped her find her way to the train. He helped her get through
every day. And then he drove her nuts too, of course, of course, of
course. He pissed her off incredibly, for example, when she bitched
about someone at work, and he pointed out that it might not be
entirely their fault, that perhaps there were aspects of her behavior
and attitude that could use adjusting, things that she would admit in
other contexts but only when in the proper mood. But she was
already nuts, of course. He made her feel necessary. Is this how
relationships are composed is this the anatomy of love? Is this the
logic of existence? Alone in my garden of nonsense, extracting
passions and inspirations from the flowers that only I see, mapping
them into your universe, helping you muck through the days?
*
Debating his future
with Papaya Girl
he was torn with strange doubts
about the whole fucking world
What was right?
What was good?
What was real?
What was true?
Did he still love Tatyana?
What the fuck should he do?
Did he really love Papaya Girl?
Was his love the right kind?
Could she ever see the flowers
of his garden --
Was she blind?
She was NOT the one
he had seen in his dream
The image of woman
standing there holding out
her mutated bouquet
on that undefined day
in his garden so green
But she was here,
she was wild,
and she loved him it seemed
Should he push her aside
in favor of stupid dreams?
She needed him deeply
He helped her to live
With her he was valuable,
So much to give
*
I sit,
alone in my garden of nonsense,
impending doom awakening
I sit,
alone in my garden of nonsense,
dreaming delirious dreams
"Delirium" I use that word too much, but what does it really mean?
I sit,
alone in my garden of nonsense,
dreaming delirious dreams
*
And then a flash of white insight
dispelled the confusion
that had shot through his brain
made his world sour illusion
He understood, finally:
There's nothing that's real
There's nothing that's final
Nothing that we feel
Nothing that we think
And nothing that we do
Is more solid than dreams
Nothing is truly true
We're all expAnsions of nothing
Struggling to return
To get unity, harmony,
we endlessly yearn
And it's love and compassion
that bring us back home
Extend the soul to another
and truth becomes known
The mind's contradictions
will instantly melt
in the face of compassion
Love, honestly felt
Trite words,
baby formulas,
dull rEligious goo
"God is love," he thought wryly
"Amazing. It's true!"
*
"Truth? What is truth?"
It's all the same, it's different, it's different, it's actually the same
I understand nothing, I understand everything, I understand
everything, I understanding nothing
I sit alone and together, and together and alone, in my garden of my
nonsense, writing nonsense about my garden
And beautiful illusions seek me out, strange beauty of the big-
brained beast that I embody, but no more or less than any other
freaked out soul
The universe dements itself each instant, and that is the only true
tale.
Can love really cure the dementia, or can it merely palliate it a bit?
This is the ten-to-the-ninety-fifth particle question.
The answer is unknowable, of course. It resides in the flesh of her
thighs.
*
in all the cosmos
physical mental spiritual
technological
virtual
sociological
empirical delirious
tasting like chocolate
moving with dense erotic meaning
Through cities of plastic
traffic jams
deserts
Heaving oceans like breath
Mothers fathers
Chinese restaurants
Conditions of ecstasy
insight and
fury
Ice-covered pinnacles
Sour desolation
Car insurance playtime vibrating madness
war zone bottom line binary ternary
Equations that capture the logic of motion
and the order of things
Through swerve of sure, bend of bay,
twisting of woman,
There's only one thing that's important:
spark
act of kindness
Kind
to self, others,
things
Thrill peace
empty full balance
ignore it
mock it
sing it
embrace it
Enclose its luminous reality
in your thinking, sweating limbs
Exude it as you eat, mate, sleep,
move, talk, read, write, play, laugh,
dance, type, show off, elude,
fall down and get up
and fall down and get up
and fall down and get up again
where you are
there it is
it is
*
is this the way
to touch --
Who knows?
The dead plastic world
has no room for compassion
No dollar amount
is assignable to love
which mingles the profit and loss columns
irremediably
-- Perhaps even illegally
(sardonic laughter
by young men in business suits)
Love! (ha ha)
Walking down a New York street,
can I wrap my arms around a stranger
without being smacked in the face?
No?
Then what place does love have
in the realm of the body?
*
But a random touch could
lead to a friendship, a dalliance, a romantic
explosion
a lifetime of wonder and
bliss
Is love merely
statistically improbable? Life just an unlikely combination
of death particles, the beautiful look on your face when
I know that you want me
an emergence of the perfect and eternal from
the meaningless concatenation of particles in meaningless
four-dimensional spacetime?
Existence is an extreme condition of
the nonexistent
Look at me I touched your arm on the street
Look at me -- strange woman
it was I touched your arm on the street
Look at me another human being, another cosmos,
another stinking world
Look at me I howl for you silently, my internal howling precisely
the same as your own, as proved by the Pauli exclusion
principle applied to karmic surfaces of revolution
Look at me I exist, I breathe, I eat, I fuck, I run, I love, I talk,
I write far too fucking much nonsense garden when I have work
to be doing
Look at me I'm an asshole!
Look at me I'm an asshole!
Look at me I'm an asshole who repeats himself three times!
Look at me I'm a wonderful guy, a real sweetheart, the loveliest
guy in the world
Look at me I just might smack you in the face
Look at me Whatchoo lookin' at muthafucka?
Look at me garden of sweet nonsense teeming inside
Look at me -- and forget your family friends and lovers, children
grandparents job hobbies possessions addresses lives and lusts
and lies
Look at me, and remember, there is nothing but nothing, there is
something but something isn't something, there's only you
and me and you and we are not at all,
Look at me, I love you, I love you, I love you, hello I love you won't
you tell me your name, let me jump in your game, et cetera,
et cetera
Fuck you, you won't even look at me
Or maybe you will, maybe I'll ask you directions to the subway and
give you my phone number and you'll call me later and fuck me with
madness and I'll read you my poems and we'll live together for hours
or years and I'll hear all your secrets and soothe your stupid divine
sadness and all because I touched your arm in the street
random madness what the fuck, you know
*
Must a relationship based on desperate confusion be devoid of
passion?
Not hardly heh heh heh.
Eugene and Papaya Girl writhe not inconsiderably, approximately
every other night, seeking surreal salvation in the flowing of juices,
in the stimulation of nerves on skin.
This is by no means unusual.
Their apartment reeks of sex and old books and computers. No
flowers are evident.
This is by no means unusual.
This is by no means unusual at all.
The moon sets and rises, sets and rises, sets and rises, rises and sets,
and nobody pays a damn fucking bit of attention.
This is by no means unusual at all.
*
[Tra la la la]
kissing each small patch
of your fragrant soft skin
each piece a flavor unique
this is the way to begin
motions aren't made
of light
but can feel so
occasionally
Tracing my tongue
along the backs of your knees
and in the pits of your arms
My hands are eager to seize
your breasts, gently to squeeze --
a small nibble, a kiss,
a few licks, a few more
A few minutes like this
Then a few minutes more
Then I have to move on,
Other skin to explore
With one cheek in each palm
and your thighs splayed out wide
I'm ready to dive, girl --
Prepare for the ride!
I'll begin slowly, gently
Making orbits around
Tiny bites to your thighs
and your soft furry mound
Up and down in the cracks
between pussy and thigh
till your body relaxes,
your clit pushes high,
reaching, eager, for touch
but I won't feed it yet
Let's see you beg, baby --
how hot can you get?
Around again, teasing, till
greedy, you grasp
my hair, push my mouth
onto it, gasp,
it leaps up, crazy hungry,
caught in the rhythm it's found,
knowing now it'll come soon --
it's ready to pound --
It's hard to restrain you
Musical smacking sounds
As my tongue dashes out
and my tongue splashes in
I've got you now baby!
Feel that pussy spin!
Then relaxing and calming,
it barely can move
Still hungry, but now
in a quite different groove
I lift my head from your cunt,
grab with my hands your hips,
and pound my cock into
your wet, waiting lips
In and out out and in
it's a damn simple beat
You're scraping your toes
on the soles of my feet
as your clit rubs the bone
at the base of my cock
I feel the come rising
I'll give you a shock --
Sit up, don't be lazy
Come, sit on my lap
I'll lift you up and down
Nothing better than that
Lean back and I'll feast on
Your breasts jutting out
Turn over now, baby
this should make you shout
Wheee! Look at that baby!
Jesus your ass looks fine!
Flapping in, flapping out
As my cock keeps the time
If I reach my hand down I can
jiggle your clit
round and round as you pump
Whoa!!! Ouch!!! Slow down a bit!!
You want me to lie down?
Sweet!
You get on top
Keep going girl -- fuck me like crazy --
don't stop --
My sperm's gonna spurt soon --
I'm holding it back --
I'm timing the moment
for the final attack
God you're nuts this morning
I can't hold you on!!
If I let go your ass
you'll be flying off, gone
Up and down, in and out
Pounding down from above
You're a miracle, so fucking perfect
my love
Ooh yeah, here it comes --
One thrust, bigger than ever
I'm a force now, a primary force
like the weather --
Dance on my sperm baby!
Drown in my pleasure
Again now ooh yeah
hold on tight stay together --
Holy shit, there it goes
Now we lay side by side
My hand on the organ I just played
inside
Flaps of skin, fragrant juices
It was brilliant, but then
it's so sad that it's over
Wanna do it again?
*
He said, she said.
He fucked, she fucked.
He wrote, she wrote.
Was this the beginning of the universe, this primordial friction, this
communion of opposites, driving each other crazy in all ways?
Or is it just another illusion, another thread in the web of deceit?
Man and woman, man and woman, man and woman.
It's a better bet than the Big fucking Bang.
Anyhow, they pleased each other, and that's worth something, if
anything is, at any rate.
*
And keep in mind, obscenity is not protected by the First
Amendment, Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15, 93 S. Ct. 2607 (1973), sale
or distribution of obscene material, $3,000 fine for a first offense,
and up to two years in jail and a $10,000 fine for a second or
subsequent should no longer be viewed as a victimless crime. It was
the voice of a young man in his late twenties whom I had counseled,
his penis was marred by small warts and he had a terrible time with
exhibitionism, approached people on a picnic in a park by dropping
on the path in front of them from a tree sans pants. There is
mounting evidence that sexually oriented businesses are, as
described earlier in this report, often associated with furthermore,
as discussed previously, when there is no prosecution of obscenity,
large cash profits prove that material is obscene, a prosecutor must
prove: (i) that the average person, applying contemporary
community standards would find that the work, taken as a whole,
appeals to the prurient interest in sex (the analytical procedures);
(ii) that the work depicts sexual conduct
in a patently offensive
manner; and (iii) that the work, taken as a whole, was also
promiscuous and so his wife was at her wits end and had all of it she
could take. Qua qua qua qua. Now, a couple years after his divorce,
he was calling me from way across the country with yet another sad
tale to tell. He had read in a magazine that it was fun and enhancing
to your relationship to "share" your mate with another man. It had
backfired on him when his girlfriend told him to go away because
she wanted to be with the other guy exclusively. He told me "It
wasn't at all like what they described in the magazine, it was
horrible!" To be sure, to be fucking sure. Prosecutors are generally
not aware that the cult of the prostitute is one of the me (sacred
treasures) given to the Sumerian goddess Inanna by her father Enki,
the god of wisdom. When Inanna takes the me back to the city of
Uruk in the boat of heaven, the people turn out in droves to cheer in
gratitude. A hymn to Inanna which describes the people of Sumer
parading before her says, "The male prostitutes comb their hair
before you. They decorate the napes of their necks with colored
scarves. They drape the cloak of the gods about their shoulders."
They include inadequate training in this specialized area of law,
attempts by defense attorneys to remove jurors who find
pornography offensive, the offering into evidence of polls and
surveys through expert testimony to prove tolerant, in the case such
as that of another young man I had counseled who first told me that
he had witnessed an occultic ritual murder. Alan E. Sears, former
executive director of the U.S. Attorney General's Commission on
Pornography has stated: "In a better world, virgins and novices
would probably resort to prostitutes who specialized in rituals of
initiation and education. A talented sex worker could introduce
brand new players to all of their sexual options, show them
appropriate ways to protect themselves from conception or disease,
and teach them the skills they need to please more experienced
partners. This is a sensible antidote to the traumatic rite of passage
that losing your cherry often is today."
Incandescent fragments of being, undulating lustily through my
brain like melting plastic.
Obscene? I don't understand where they come from thoughts,
turns of being, feelings, invisible thrusts and thrusts. Pieces of
others' minds, minds of others' pieces, words heard on the train or
at work or in childhood, not understood, filed away for future
madness. Everything you've ever said written or thought is here
somewhere in my brain, in the cosmic contradictionary, in the
cosmic cuntradictionary, tucked away, fucked away, sucked away,
understood away and stood under with umbrellas as it rains its
vacuous meaning thus watering the glorious lawns of the mansion of
my ever-raving soul.
You don't understand people don't understand no one ever
understands. Understanding is impossible. Mutual communication's
a farce. Our minds each have their own special languages.
Translation into spoken and written phrases is a form of ritual
murder. Although perhaps a sensible antidote, et cetera et cetera.
Humor value may be significant, but semantics is mangled, pulled
through the asshole of sacrifical goats, lost like a single drop of holy
water fallen into a toilet or onto the body of lovers cloaked in pain
and sweat.
You stare at these words not knowing, trying to pull the strands of
meaning out of the hideous mess. What the fuck was this goertzel
guy thinking? Why the fuck was he typing these words? How did
this twisted attempt at great literature find its way into my realm of
mind, with its known limitations, its perfections and courage and
fears? He himself, as you know, struggles endlessly with meaning.
With meaning and meaning and time. With women, and their
meaning. With his own lusts, delusions. Like any other being, but
with excessive introspection. Perhaps he has overly frequent sex,
and this addles his neurons. Perhaps he would be better off
restricting himself to technical work and not attempting to create
literature. But is he really creating literature, or just
balancing the equations of his mind? Forever seeking balance,
it can't be found, or found. The limitations of ordinary forms of
discourse, written and spoken, frustrate him, make him crazy sane.
He wants to cup her cheeks in his hands and transmit directly mind
to mind. To shout his weird thoughts to the universe through universal psychic
satellites. But what would the value be? Has he really solved various
puzzles, of value to the common man? Perhaps a few pieces of the
human enigma have been assembled in his notably productive and
creative yet disturbingly eccentric brain. Perhaps if we all could
broadcast our thoughts, through the fabled psychic satellite, of
which he wrote much in 1986 (qua qua qua), each of us would share
(la ti da) the sections of the puzzle we've put together, and we could
collectively formulate an attempt at piecing together the whole
damn whole. So mushy, lovey, dovey, love. The whole enchilada
burp of being. The solution to which is, inevitably, a big white Not.
But no, instead we shit our thoughts out through the toilet of
language.
But if it's all so ridiculous, so stupid and pointless, why contribute
to the mess with more text? Another inner compulsion, obviously,
ridiculously. The compulsion to obsess on women, the compulsion
to obsess on words. The compulsion to spend hours yanking ideas
from the collective chamber at the back of mind, pulling them into
the forms of conscious understanding, making them real and dead
and perfect, sharing them with others, forcing them through the
teeny tiny doors of other peoples' minds. Can we in fact rebuild the
universe into its virgin state, by typing out words on paper? It's
highly unlikely. But it's a piece of the puzzle. And every piece is
the puzzle. Inside the puzzle is a strange and beauty peace.
And then and then and then and then --
Here I sit, alone in the garden of my nonsense, waiting for
impossible unity, waiting for you to step into my cosmos and extend
to me a welcoming flower.
And then and then and then --
*
Listen to what my friend said to me on the phone the other day,
speaking a hundred words a second, voice all full of breathless
excitement:
"Listen! I think I've got a big lead for my novel. I think this is my
big break. The woman David is renting his Hamptons estate from is a
top literary agent with two bestsellers on her roster at the
moment. He showed her my Empire of Madness bullshit -- you know, the
manuscript I showed you, the first three chapters -- and she thought
the style was too lyrical and the narrative too disjointed, as if I'd
been snorting too much cocaine or something she said, or maybe
David just made that up, he's been known to do things like that, he's
the Devil, I keep telling you -- but anyway, she said it has moments of
brilliance and I'm a very talented writer, that the story is worth
rewriting in a more accessible tone. So, I'm going to see if I can get
inspired to take another look at that in my downtime. This literary
agent said the rage now is turning novels into movies. Can you
imagine an Empires of Madness movie? Can you? Can you? So next
week there's lawyer-man -- a new one, not psycho-man. The hell with
him, I'm so tired of him anyway. He doesn't interest me at all. I think
he has minor fling potential -- not psycho-man, I mean lawyer-man --
enough to drive the psychopath into submission for at least a week
or two -- as he's extremely quick witted, witty, smart, and very
charming. Screw that nasty honesty shit, I'd like a nice guy for a
change. Oh, fuck you.... You know, I had another boring epiphany
about why I'm so into David. It's because he sees nothing good in me
except his sexual attraction to me and my writing ability. Deep
down, I probably feel like I'm evil, therefore my gut feeling that he
truly knows the real me. Knowing that my attachment to him has
nothing to do with who he is as a person has helped me to detach
immeasurably. Things have been rather cozy between us lately;
nevertheless, I've increasingly been getting the feeling that I'm no
longer in love with him. And, I do feel capable these days of caring
about someone else besides him -- this is something I thought for a
long time would be impossible. I think this is a breakthrough of
sorts. So, my point is that I really do think I can deal with a nice
guy, providing he is intellectually proficient, witty, and not
overly fawning. My problem is that there is usually no middle
ground with me. Either someone falls madly in love, or they couldn't
give a damn. Someone fucked up like David feels one way one day and the
other another, and forgets that the other extreme ever existed on the
days they feel the other way. Of course, when I'm detached, David
gets nuts. When I'm all gooey and into him -- don't you love that
phrase? I wrote this phrase the other day and I just love it! -- when
I'm all gooey and into him, like I was the other day, just hearing him
on the telephone, my voice automatically went soft. So soft that it
was practically dripping down my blouse. Then he feels suffocated
after a few days. Lately, I've been very warm to him, but he does
sense my detachment, hence his interest. He leaves messages for
me, and it's not games -- I simply don't feel like speaking to him at
the moment, hence I don't call him back right away. He ends up
calling me again and again, and when we finally speak, he has the
sulky little boy voice on, accusing me of not caring. I coo to him, of
course, and then not call him back again. Heh heh. Ultimately,
there's no reason he should want to bother with me. I hold all his
materialistic exterior values in contempt, he doesn't find me warm
or funny, and I'm certainly no tall gorgeous blonde. Sometimes he
finds my intellectualism interesting, but most of the time it
threatens him. His only attachment to me, I think, stems from
physical chemistry, which stems from the fact that I'm just like his
mother, who holds all his values in contempt too. Yup, having sex is
like dancing with your ancestors. But why am I even telling you all
this shit?? We've been here. Sorry. "
She finally took a breath.
"It's a prescription for madness," I said quietly.
"Yeah, I know."
Three hours later, there was more:
"So, now, OK, he was in Cherry Hill all day and couldn't make it back
until like 9. I told him it was better to reschedule, so we're on for
Tuesday. He's a really nice guy.... Really, though, he's beginning to
bore me already. He feeds off my manias -- just like I feed off your
ideas. There's this other one, though, who I really think I might be
able to go for. Really tormented, dark, evil, and morose. But very
funny, charming, and literary too. Plus, he lives for William Faulkner.
We've been on come on, don't be such a wimp. Anyway ... I'll be
gone this weekend from Thursday night thru Monday evening -- off
to the Hamptons with Anu, her 15 year old niece, and 30 year old
brother who has shaved his head and is a socialist. And the kids. Does
this sound like fun or what? Actually, it'll be cool. We have a unit on
the beach in East Hampton, two bedrooms, kitchen, living room, and
Diku -- the niece -- can babysit the kids while Anu and I do the scene.
I don't know what the hell we're going to do with Mooki, though. He
doesn't seem like the Hamptons type. Not that I am, but I at least can
fake it, you know what I mean? And hey, so, lawyer-man -- he invited
me to this posh lawyer's soiree next weekend. Okay -- my role, as he
explained it to me, is to blow the guys in his office away with my
intelligence, wit and charm -- don't laugh, some people think it
exists! I tried to explain that none of that work under pressure -- I
fuckin' practically stammer when I get nervous! Actually, I can
generally rise to the occasion. But I was telling you about this other
guy who popped up. His name is Manuel -- he's Portuguese/American
and he's a network administrator for J. Walter Thompson. He's
fantastically funny, a phenomenal writer -- he freelanced most of his
life, fell into technical writing, then went for the bigger bucks by
moving into 'hands on' ... he has that solitary kind of literary
melancholy that, in theory, turns me on. Not to mention that Latin
thing. We've been on the telephone the last couple of nights and
have a killer great rapport. He has a great voice -- he doesn't sound
short, which is always my greatest concern. So here are these two
really great fun nice guys who might have some potential;
meanwhile, David, sniffing indifference, is getting increasingly
worked up. Yesterday, phone rings, and I see it's him. He hangs up
before I pick up -- musta had another call. 45 minutes later, he calls
again. Then, he acts surprised that it's me on the other end of the
line, right? -- he says he dialed me by mistake, but says he can talk
anyway -- can not even admit he wants to talk to me, repressed
defensive little prick, because I haven't been calling nor calling him
back, and then he goes on to give me a litany of his latest feats as
master of the universe. A couple of big cases look like they're
coming in soon, he says, which will net him personally over $2
million over the next few months. Now that he doesn't have to
worry about money, he'll be able to focus on his literary pursuits. I
felt like crying out of frustration, really. I mean, this guy was
honored by 400 political leaders, including Pataki, Charles Schumer
and some other Congressmen the other night, and he tells me that
he made an impromptu speech "straight from the heart" that had
everyone on their feet clapping for twenty minutes. Then, he
whizzes off some legalese, and he pockets two million. Meanwhile,
I've heard his wit and his stories, etc., but I never get any of that
dazzling mental footwork that yields him so much in the outside
world. To me, he says, 'I have no response'. I feel as though it's not
fair. Anyway, why am I babbling on about him? Because last night he
sweetly and softly asked me to call him back later in that precious
adorable voice that always makes me melt, and I was stuck on the
phone with the other lawyer, so couldn't, and I feel awful. See, I am
incapable of rejecting this man even though I find everything he
stands for repulsive. I feel as though I'll never have any choice but to
drop everything for him. I need a lobotomy. I need to stay away
from him, actually. But if I tell him to leave me alone, that'll hurt
him, and I can't do that. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Eternal damnation is mine.
What else is new. "
And so
I hung up depressed and exhausted bemused, thinking: Guess I'm not
the only one with a soul full of weird love madness.
What really goes on around here anyway? Everyone stands around
looking normal, pretending they're real adults, smoothly functioning
social machines, but inside it's madness, fucking madness, teeming
psycho chaos. Everyone's lusting for the impossible, everyone's
nursing wild dreams. It's just a matter of the extent to which they
admit it to themselves, and others.
I guess I just admit too much. I should just keep the shell on. Here I
am: a normal man. I'm happy. I'm contented. I have a perfectly fine
life. I really do, you know. It's all so hunky-dory. I never get too
excited, no transports of overwhelming joy and wonder, no Eureka!
moments of illusory or sincere discovery. I never get depressed and
sense the senselessness it all, the pain of the limits of human
existence squeezing in on us like a vice. I never let my jaw drop in
amazement. I never scowl infinite disgust at raw human animal
stupidity. I'm overwhelmingly unoverwhelmed. In fact, I can hardly
stop myself smiling my wooden Howdy-Doody smile. What weird
contortions of the soul? What are you talking about? How would
you see those? You don't have psychic radar! It's Howdy-Doody
time, motherfuckers! Don't mind that radioactive goat bonking
poor old Howdy up the ass. Don't mind the chaotic emanations of
your insignificant little consciousness. Pay no attention to that man
behind the curtain, or to the microprocessor in his cranium, or to
the phosphorescent snake between his legs, wiggling and woggling,
trying to break off so it can race over to the Garden of Eden and pay
a visit to Evey dear. Everything will be fine. Everything will be
fine, people. Everything will be juuuust fiiiine
*
My round breasts
Press into the sand
On the beach of soul ocean
Sang I, warm,
hungry ravenous
girl girl girl
I twitch, I'm wet
But my heart is thirsty
I'm empty, got nothing inside
I'm aching
Fill me up, fill me up now
Dissolve me, cover me
Hold me tight, supple and light
Turn me over,
So my buttocks make soul marks
On the sand
the sand
Salt air feeds desire
In me, lay on me,
In me, take me, take me,
Take, me, me, me,
me, me, me
Fresh and wet now I come to you
Child of soul islands
You loved my skin
like black volcanic sand
Love my hair
Like coconut fiber
Loved my big ass
Like rainforest mountains
Loved my lips
Like mangos and papayas
You took me home
And we dug up histories
Of shape and fire
I sung you songs
Of orange blossom moon
New songs
Round breasts pressed up
soft on your chest,
I curled up in your morning
Yeah
*
Somewhere love meets reality.
Papaya Girl never promised perfection. She put her claws into his
soul. The passion overwhelmed him. He should have been prepared
for the hate.
Was it really so surprising that he should be critical of her? She
never met his ideal in the first place. She was always too mousy, too
timid, not quite smart enough, not quite giving enough, and etc.
and etc. and etc. So fucking needy, so fucking needy, always
wanting his attention, every single night, every day the phone call at
lunch, every time he wants to walk outside alone, nursing the trees
in his garden, trying to remember ancient illusory events, she needs
to come along and tell him her worries he needs to soothe her, be
a nice guy, which he is after all but if only they could build
something together, instead of just going along --
And she, she was never happy with anything, really, was she? She
was unhappy before she met him and in spite of the highs of love
warmth and passion and the solid grip of friendship whatever
chemicals had always made her unhappy were still making her
unhappy now.
Disappointingly, they discovered that outside of the bedroom, and
warm, loving talking hugging moments at random points in the day
or on certain charmed weekends, they got along like shit.
But they still loved each other, didn't they?
She had a reality which was impressive. As opposed to Tatyana, who
hadn't given a fuck at all, whose only real merit, as it turned out, had
been her similarity to a certain illusion in his mind.
But did she have to be such a fucking bitch? Did she have to whine
and whine and whine at him when he sat up late working instead of
hanging out with her how the fuck else did she think he got so
much work done? Did she have to complain every time he wanted
to go out somewhere on Friday night was it his fault she was the
only person in the world who liked to sit around the house even
more than he did? I mean, Jesus fucking Christ, you bitch. Just leave
me the fuck alone. It's bad enough you can't really understand me,
enter into the perfect flourishing garden of my nonsense soul; at
least you can please refrain from tormenting me as I tend it myself,
or neglect it, whichever my taste may be!
*
BA BOOM DITTY - BOOM!
I know I should not act as I do in that situation but it is difficult to
help myself. It is because you are an evil bitch from hell. When I'm
in the best state of mind I am able to stop myself from obeying my
instinct, but when I'm not in the best state of mind then my Satanic
side takes over. Nobody's perfect, eh? I told you before we became
seriously involved that I was possessed by the Devil.
When she is in a depressed/bad mood, she is impossible to live with.
She becomes angry at the slightest provocation.
Can you see yourself, empty mirror? Your face filled with anger is a
nonlinear transformation of your grin, your gasp of passion, your
vacant sleepy stare. Finite in extent, self-organizing, undulating. A
terrible beast, with infinite capabilities for love and wonder.
Largely unfulfilled, the emptiness inside is occupied by evil spirits. It
seems to me that you have in your own self a feeling of not being
respected by the world at large, which gives you a hair-trigger
temper and oversensitivity that makes you get upset at me over
little things that rub you the wrong way time and time again.
Finally the most important topic, us. I think that the current
problems between us are both of our faults. Although I truly believe
it's all your fault, as I am perfect, blameless, faultless, and the
ultimate definition of meritorious being.
The pattern of you getting upset and stating you want me to move
out, at which point I promise to be a good boy and we'll all work
things out, is all a fucking piece of shit. The repeated experience of
hugging & kissing you and trying to be all nice while you're stiff and
glaring, or slightly affectionate but with an obvious reserve verging
on distaste, is one that is really quite sickening, reminding me for
example of drinking a chocolate malted milkshake that is actually
made with shit rather than chocolate (chocolate being one of my
favorite foods, if a food it is, some say it is a drug, theobromine
which is in chocolate being similar to caffeine, which is in coffee,
which some say is a drug) and often makes me think of other women
with whom I might be able to be involved who would be able to
embrace me genuinely without an undercurrent of resentment.
Indeed, this pattern is obviously one that I can live with. I've lived
with it for over a year now. I really do love you a great deal and I
really DO want to stay with you and work things out. But, knowing
myself, inasmuch as I know anything, which is fairly little, truth be
told (the truth can't be told), I know that I can't live forever in a
relationship where I know the other person thinks I'm at which point
she sought psychiatric care.
The doctor, after assessing her situation, prescribed medication to
regulate her moods. But she did not use it properly. She habitually
consumed it together with alcohol to get a "super high." Soon she
went off the medication and her depression returned.
I am the Devil, I am the "bad guy", I treat her badly, I ignore her, I
don't love her enough, I get grumpy, I'm moody, I have strange
ideas, I want too much and give too little, I'm just barely good
enough to keep living with, and any day I might do something bad
to push her over the edge and at this point, darling, what if I finally
don't want to come back?
It is fairly frustrating to me that whereas I can admit my fault in
various ways, you maintain an attitude that all the problems are
mine. You refuse to recognize, in any explicit way, that the
problems have to do with things that YOU do that YOU should
change. In short, you suck. You suck.
And you don't suck me anymore.
Bitch.
*
Things are moving
Things I feel
Things that poison
Things that heal you want kinky
I'll show you
Honey? kinky
What are you doing?
Why the fuck did I agree to let you
tie me up anyway?
That actually hurts
not so tight, not so tight
Hmmm
you look kinda
cute in those spiked heels and that
hot pink teddy
Voices talking
Feet are walking you think i look cute
Scents of mind huh
Too hard to find I think you'd look kinda cute
Screaming in anguish
I know I told you if you
let me fuck you up the ass
I'd let you do anything you
want to me
but I wasn't really thinking
of this, ummm
WHERE THE FUCK DID YOU
GET THAT WHIP?
Too full too any
too trite with empty Oh yeah
words you want to spray I locked those handcuffs tight
things you want to say baby
jesus Christ, that really HURTS!
Ow! Christ, you're going to cut me open
Look at that fucking welt!!
Christ, bitch, stop!! Ok the joke's over!!
Grasping wanting
Needing daring
Clawing caring
Layers peel
off of the real
James? What are you doing here?
James?
GET YOUR FUCKING DICK OUT OF MY WIFE
OUCH! Put that whip away bitch!!!
I'm going to fucking kill you!!!
Honey?!!! What are you doing with that knife???!!!
"Jesus Christ!"
"Mmmpph. What? Gene? Why did you wake me up?"
"Sorry, honey. I just had the sickest fucking dream. God, it was
awful!"
"Mmm. I was having a weird dream too. It was kind of fun though
.
You were
.
Actually, that guy James from your work was
. Oh, mmm
heh.
Never mind."
"What?"
"I said never mind."
*
Eugene & Papaya Girl account of fight, and passionate making-up
etc.
How many times could it happen. He yells, she yells, he screams, she
screams, she throws a pot or pan, he bangs his fist on the wall. They
are real, they exist, they love. They understand each other perfectly,
but somehow can't understand each other at all. Someone get
pisses, throws out last words of hate and fury, stalks out the door
and walks. Hours later everyone is calmer, there are hugs and kisses,
apologies, the clothes come off, the heat gets higher, everyone
fucks and sucks and laughs and everything is wonderful. Or maybe
there are still tears, maybe she has a hard time forgiving him even
though he doesn't think he did much of anything, perhaps a few
harsh words, too harsh, but they were in return to her own harsh
words after all, so wasn't it a little bit hypocritical for her to be so
fucking pissed at him when he had equally much right to be pissed
right back at her but he just wanted to kiss and make up, to make
sweet love and be wonderful happy. Or maybe she was the one
who was all kissy and huggy and thought everything was Ok but he
wanted her to be Tatyana or Anne Jeanne, someone with magic or
reason or something, not just this woman, crying angry one minute
kissy lovey the next and never able to see why he might get pissed
that she never wanted to see a movie with him or that she ogled
that guy so ostentatiously, of course everyone is attracted to good-
looking members of the opposite sex but do you have to show it off
so obviously and do you have to watch those stupid TV shows when
I'm trying to think in the house, don't you know I have a pyramid of
15 interlocked algorithms in my mind and when you turn on that
goddamn Roseanne rerun it all collapses like a house of imitation
Pokemon cards? And why do you get mad at me for laughing at
your music, girl, you know it's a piece of shit, the same 3 chords, 5 if
you're lucky, and imitation feelings no depth or truth or meaning,
it's all ridiculous, not even random no soul no perfection just
acceptance of the universe as a mediocre evil place. I'd rather listen
to a chorus of sea monkeys farting. Christ.
Anyway they got along like shit. This and shit are anagrams. And
they loved each other madly, each vowed to split up every couple
months, but somehow anagrammed back together, turning the shit
into a this, the strange solidity of reality made not by object but by
the mutually created culture of two people who control each others'
bodies and minds in good and bad ways. Not the craziest pair of
lovers on earth, god knows not the best either, just man and
woman, woman and man, existing ongoing you and me, being all
that they can be, tie me up and we'll be free, and on and on and on.
And so many perfect loving moments. The whole universe stopped
and it was only the two of them, there in the eye of the invisible
hurricane of the long-blossomed thoughts of the delirious creator.
Nothing got better than you and me, this and this, Eugene and
Papaya. Nothing was more blissful, more serene and fantastic,
exciting electricity freaking through all the cells and providing
understanding everything, universe voyaging back to the beginning
before the void knew it was the void. This is really fucking amazing.
It's not what I envisioned but it's tangible astounding. First, before
anything else, there was this and it was amazing. First, before
anything else or anything else.
*
Indeed.
Indeed not.
The drama unfolds. Is their love dead? Or is there hope after all?
Can true love ever really die? They got quite sick of each other,
that's for sure. But at the point where they were ready to pull apart
once and for all, something peculiar emerged. Was it a flower from
the garden, the wondrous garden of Nonsense, fragment of Eden,
that charges us all with divine light? Very hard to say, hard to say,
hard to say indeed. But does it matter really?
Spark in the velvet dark.
I hate you fucking hate, I howl your liquid bleeding anguish across
the canyons of the moon, strange beauty of vile murderous
inclinations, I have murdered 21 human beings, I have committed
thousands of burglaries, robberies, larcenies, arsons and last but not
least I have loved her too intensely, poured far too much of my soul
into her still mysterious beaker
Howl, vexation of love!
Howl, vexation of fucking love!
These feelings are not protected by the natural laws of the universe
These feelings are not protected by the Constitution of the United
States of America, nor the Declaration of Independence, nor
the by-laws of the UN Security Council
These feelings are not protected by tortoise-shells real or
metaphysical, dull or luminous, matter or antimatter, negroid
mongoloid caucasoid or aboriginal
These feelings are not protected by bullshit, by fake personality, by
coolness or nonsense or fucking goddamn shit
They are out there real open nerve ending sensitive ready to
be wounded or fulfilled
Grab me baby! Take me, do what you will.
I know I can survive it.
Never venture, never gain
Strange beauty of delusions, confusions, illusions
Bang my head on the wall again, get a contusion
Papaya, papaya,
my sweet little sweet
Can you ever, I mean Ever,
make me complete?
*
Tatyana happens upon Eugene's old e-mail of love when searching
through her mail archives for something else entirely and begins
thinking it over, in an unfocused way goes about her fairly empty
life. Her life. Seattle really sucks after all. Why the fuck did she
move back here. Was it really her fault that goddamned Shannon
committed suicide? She'd been depressed for year. Made several
attempts before. Yes it was bad to kiss her boyfriend but really she
was drunk and it was nothing serious. Tired of reviewing the events
of that night. Tired of the and tired tired tired. There were
acquaintances, boyfriends, girlfriends. There was work, thinking,
databases, diagrams. There was, there was, there was. Her mom on
the phone early Sunday morning. It was the same as before, but
stultifyingly different. Before it had seemed real awake and
exciting. Had Shannon's depression, some alien virus, leaped over to
her when she'd died? It was all quite the quite the quite, quite.
Understanding or confusion, love or delirium, something or
something or some. Understanding herself had never been a
priority. The simple flow of happy life doesn't demand it. You just
go on and be and be and something happens and then the being is
so hard, like wringing water out of clothing, the first few wrings are
easy and then after that you squeeze and squeeze and squeeze, each
time just yields a few difficult drops.
*
Falling in love
has been much praised
The pleasures of the early days
of romance:
Gazing in her eyes
for the first time
The first soft kiss
The feeling: can it be like this?
The wonder of the new, the rush
The heart that pounds, the cheeks that flush
Too little has been written of
the other phases of sweet love
I sing for you
the praise neglected
of love grown cold
and resurrected
In time love dwindles to indifference
without losing its core
The warmth is there, the family-feeling
the spark and thrill no more
And from indifference crawls out hatred
You moan: can it go on like this?
begin to sleep apart at night
curse with the lips that used to kiss
The rage was always there of course
but it was balanced by the fire
The flaws one used to overlook
Now seem so fucking dire
How could this fucking bitch be
the one who last year dazed your heart?
Who seduced you with her hungry eyes
way, way back at the start
Exhausted you with lust,
Looked at you with such trust
Called you the center of her world
How could this damn bitch
Be that girl?
Love is dead
The story's over
Another romance
must be found
But not for a long while,
there's too much bitterness around
Even strangling your sweetheart
May appeal in evil hours
This bitch who curses everything
You do, who has the power
With her stern glare to condemn you
How can she make her face so cold?
You see her standing on the stair
Body stiff, brain off somewhere
Looking so hard and so damn old
Ripping up the book you bought her last year
The teachings on peace
Of some idiot priest
The only question really is
how quickly you can split
Escape now is the sole goal
From this dead love,
Drenched in shit
Friends and family call to tell you
They never liked her anyway
What does it matter? Another morning
Another useless fucking day
But fans of horror movies know
That death is never sure
The body lies beneath the ground
But it may move once more
The grave grows stifling and stuffy
The corpse begins to shake
Then rises up out from the earth
Another form to take
So Zombie Love emerges
Love was dead
Or was it not?
This evil bitch you hated
Once again spawns passion hot
At random she is glancing
With affection in her eye
She's standing wet
Fresh from the shower
Little droplets on her thigh
And you can't help it you embrace her
All the words, the fits of spite,
the plans to move out
seem quite silly
-- Just another lovers' fight!
Negotiations follow
Words of anger, hard to swallow
Understanding's incomplete
Even partial, it's a feat
But there's real hope, and that's enough
To keep alive this zombie love
Friends and family can't believe it
"That bitch who caused you so much pain?
what the fuck? You have to leave her
You've got a sickness in your brain
Also a weakness in your soul
Look out for yourself take control."
And blah blah blah and yak yak yak
It doesn't matter love is back
Or was it ever gone? Not quite
It just was hiding in the night
Deeply obscured from conscious sight
The zombie takes a human form
It walks and laughs and dances
With an inner strength peculiar
It knows it had slim chances
Of surviving But it's here! It moves!
And somehow near as fresh
As it was way back
Way way way back
Before its grisly death
She's beautiful! She's sweet!
And what a mind!
A gentle touch!
OK, she's got some flaws,
But this is the real world, after all,
How much
Can anyone really ask?
For sure I'm far from perfect too
Just hold me, squeeze me, honey
I love you so --
Fuck all, who knew?
Can it be like this? Can it really?
Can it be warm and sweet once more?
There's a blackness there, a sadness,
That was never there before
But there's a new depth
Way back then, dear,
Our knowledge was so slight
Now we have seen each other whole:
Evil and giving, dark and light
So strange and beautiful it is
How a happy thing can fall
What rose may always die again
I see no guarantee
But here we are, woman and man
Ongoing: you and me
*
Listen. Listen. Listen.
*
We're talking and not saying anything
Just like any other day
You told me that you were from Jupiter
Was that the right game to play?
Well we can see the screen formed from our words
Echoes of the everyday
The verbal liquid with which we fill
The silence won't go away
To fill the void we'd have to use
language in a different way
Whisper and weave it through the evening air
as the sunset goes away
The transparency of dreams is broken now
Broken like an alchemist's flask
You want to know, you want to grasp it
But your soul's too weak to ask
To be a man is to be a dreamer about women
To love their bodies
and their tender perfect eyes
How can we feel so much
and have it all amount to nothing?
How can we see so much
Being blind?
(The piper toots the horn of sadness)
Each time its notes sound in my ear
My soul grows younger by 2000 years
The king stands tall and I behold
A green hill turned by sun to gold
A brick-built castle, straight ahead
With lofty windows stained in red
The flowers in the garden greet
The river swirling at its feet
The woman inside waits the while
Fair with dark eyes, in ancient style
I saw her once before it seems
The memory of her fills my dreams
(Squawks of delirium)
Essential here, essential not
The words I'm saying add to rot
To touch you, reach you, grasp you here
I'll try again, I'll persevere
*
Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap
It had been a fitful, nervous night's sleep, and then he was woken up
by the sound of a door shutting. Krystof leaped out of bed to see
what was going on. In the back of his mind he knew.
He ran, naked, to the apartment door and opened it. There Helen
was, heading for the elevator, as he had suspected, feared.
"Helen! Come back!" he cried.
She walked back to the door and looked at him blankly.
"Where are you going? Just out for some fresh air?"
"No, Krystof. Come on, please. Don't make this more difficult than it
has to be."
"Don't make what more difficult? What's going on?"
"Krystof, it's not working out. You're not happy with me. I can see
it. You're more excited about that that stupid animal."
"You mean our conversation we had the other day? About you being
too perfect? Helen, HELEN I was just in a mood. Please!! I'm
sorry!! I didn't mean to hurt you."
And he looked at her standing there, her perfect cyber-body, an
exact simulation of the ideal woman, the one he'd dreamed about
for years. She was right, he was sick of her. She didn't tickle his
soul at all. She lacked some germ of imperfection, some flaw for him to
latch onto. But yet, the thought of her in the arms of another was
too much for him to bear. She was his, his perfect creation, his
cyber-goddess. If anyone else so much as looked in the direction of
her finely sculpted force-feedback pussy he'd fucking kill them,
goddamnit.
"Helen," he said, in tears. "I love you. You can't leave me!! Six
fucking years I worked to create you! Six fucking years!!"
"Thanks for that," she said. "Now go fuck your goddamn goat. I'm
going off to find a real man." And she turned and walked away,
toward the elevator again.
He raced after her, oblivious to the fact that he was running naked
through the hallway. He leaped on her, tried to grab her and pull her
back. But her robot muscles vastly exceeded his in strength. She
just continued walking, and when she got to the elevator, pushed
the button. She lifted him off her back and held him in front of her,
in a vice tight grip. "Keep your fucking hands off me," she said.
When the elevator came, she stepped on, shoving him rudely but
gently into the hall.
He walked back to his apartment, slowly. The old lady across the hall
shut her door she'd been peeking out but didn't want to make eye
contact. He wasn't crying anymore, he was shell-shocked. All that
work, all that love, all that emotion. And she was right of course, but
still if anyone else touched her!! They'd be dead meat, goddamnit!!
She was awful, she was intolerable, her icy perfection was a
nightmare. But she's mine, mine, mine!!! She's mine, she's mine,
she's mine. He could barely get the sobs out, they were coming so
fast, but finally he stifled them, leaning up against the livingroom
wall, stomping on the floor, wiping his runny nose with his hand.
As he walked back into his bedroom, Phoebe was waiting, and she
sidled up to him, rubbing her fur against his leg. "Go away, Phoebe,"
he said impatiently, but the cyber-goat ignored him. It rubbed again,
and again. Eventually, he couldn't resist; he grabbed the goat
around the neck and hugged it, eyes pouring a flood of tears. Its
artificial vagina swelled in anticipation.
Eugene read over what he'd written, then leaned back and rubbed
his hands together. This was really getting interesting. More
interesting than programming even. He hadn't known he had it in
him.
He knew he had to write a little more.
*
I sing this song for you,
O cyber-Goat of my
Perverted dreams!
Massaging my pink flesh with random precision,
computing the trajectory of maximum ecstasy,
squeezing juice from my cock using patented hydraulics
filling my nerd soul with psycho love
Who would have thought a four-legged simulated mammal
Could spawn such sweet feelings?
I love you, cyber-goat, as you stomp your fake hooves up and down,
demented music of clip-clopping on the floor
as my cock writhes
in your force-feedback vagina
I love you, cyber-goat,
Quiet hum of your cooling fan in the background
barely perceptible among my moans and pants and groans
I love you, cyber-goat !!!
I love the small ducts in your cunt that ooze out scented oil
to make the friction smoother
the squeeze more gentle
my joy complete
I love the soft and luscious fur on you,
So much less abrasive than the pubic hair on a girl
I love the way you croon "I love you"
in the superimposed voice of two thousand movie stars,
encapsulating all the grasping love and lust
that ever existed in the human race
Marilyn Monroe, Isis, Cleopatra,
Julie Delpy, Claudia Schiffer, Elvira Mistress of the Dark,
Barbara Bush they all live inside you, their heaving breasts
and curving bodies,
swaying hips
clenching hands and cunts
and softly firmly sucking mouths
all contained in your pure goatly form
Who could have dreamed of such perfection?
How could I have wasted so many years fucking with human girls?
It's you and I, Phoebe, you and I forever I only wish I had your
perfection, your metallic and plastic persistence, your perfect robot
sheen
Your flesh will live on through the millennia giving joy to generations,
While my inferior carbon flesh rots
But what does it matter now, Phoebe?
What does it matter when you and I can writhe here,
Blown by the gust of passion,
My body coated by your simulated sweat
If I had my way I would never remove my cock
From your soft plastic slit
Squeeze me, massage me,
cyber-goat of my dreams
I will die getting fucked by you
*
Where do these strange ideas come from?
These bizarre images in my brain:
Women with no skin on,
Women turned inside out
Women in leather teddies riding on llamas quoting Marx and
Rousseau
Crazed inventors fucking cyber-goats
Teeth with no bodies stalking the streets, clattering and futilely
attempting to whistle
Tapir penises, wonderfully knobby,
freezing and raining down from the sky
Millions of gorgeous and brilliant women
surrounding me,
begging for love,
exchanging limbs with each other
wildly
till finally I run off with the head
of a Chinese girl
attached to the torso of a black woman
and the legs and pussy of a Maori
but Scottish arms and lips
Jigsaw puzzles of human fears
Nazi-Buddhism hybrids promoted in leaflets dropped from Mylar
weather balloons
Love that hits you first in the elbows,
then spreads throughout your
body
Fax machines that have trapdoors for humans:
You creep inside
then are flattened out like paper
and transmitted to foreign locations
always stopping off in the center of the sun
where the pixies give you erotic massages
and tantalize you with their chocolate-covered lungs
and lungs
Equations that, once solved, allow you access
to alternate universes:
You just turn a mental door,
and then, rotating through the air
in a certain nine-dimensional way
you find yourself in another space,
one filled with a million horny lovers
the size of electrons
distributed throughout your unconscious
like quantum fields
and love
What peculiar combinations of neural activations
give rise to these images?
But what does it matter, really?
The explosions of the mind are all the same: perverse, conventional,
delirious, mad, mathematical, literary, sickening, lovable, snuggly
sweet baby yeah yeah yeah
One man lust
being
knowing
Sometime
On
Fucking nohow on
I understand everything in terms of the folds
Of her invisible vagina
I understand nothing:
I just cast out nonsense phrases like nets,
hoping vainly that a truth will swim in
I construct concepts carefully,
imitating internal constructions
that encapsulate the whole wisdom of my deep-thinking mind,
but the concepts always go astray,
they never resemble the internal constructions
at all,
they're always their own animals,
their own cyber-love-goats,
their own mutant constructions,
and other people may love them, like them, dispute them,
quote them or modify them
but what they are loving liking disputing quoting modifying
and otherwise interacting with
bears only a very slight resemblance to the inner inkling
that originally spawned them
Fall, oh baby fall !!
I see a field of women's bodies intercombining
I see a strange painting of my wife's called Herstory
Is it a sick image, the product of a demented imagination,
or the living reflection of a dream?
?
Every woman is really all women,
One leg really is another leg
One arm is really another arm
One breast is really another breast
One soul is really another soul
A collage of women, grasping me, fucking me,
loving me, hating me, touching me, surrounding me,
invading me birthing me and destroying me,
this is an honest representation of the inner
essence of woman and man
but yet when you cast it into images
it becomes sick and perverse
mutated hyper-abortion
one woman's head another's limbs
The cyber-love-goat
will really happen someday
I'll wager
Perversity is an eddy in the stream
Perversity sings to me while I shit
Perversity dances to me like naked women
Like the image I sometimes have in a business meeting
of all the women at the table suddenly taking their clothes off
and leaping up on the table, thrusting and grinding,
not to disco music but to the sounds of alien creatures
digesting
Like a girl who comes to me in my sleep
and sits on my face,
working herself to orgasm
as I dream of proving mathematics
to be intrinsically contradictory
Perversity laughs while the universe suffers
Laughs while the universe dies
Laughs while the void negates itself,
bringing into birth being
for no particular reason
but pain
You don't like my cyber-love-goat,
Shove it the fuck up your ass!
You want everything to be nice and sweet and simple,
No perverse digressions, no weirdness,
No sick, twisted humor
Fred fucking Rogers, Tinky Winky and Barney
singing "Good morning Sunshine"
Good, go rebuild the universe!
The most perverse thing of all
was the void negating itself
and launching being
way back when
before time was At all
Compared to that, cyber-goats
and collages of ripped-apart women
and howling with winter madness
and inside-out golems fellating goddesses made of CD-ROMS
and gardens of delirious nonsense flowers
are pretty fucking tame
I'd have to say
and say
*
I understand how the mind works:
it's a seething population,
each part of it maintaining its own opinions
arguing loving hating lusting
interacting with the other parts in ten
million ways
I understand how the mind works:
It recreates itself each moment
It ceases to exist and boils down to nothing
Then the shadows of parts that used to be
smile out from the void and rebuild each other
Nothing that can't be rebuilt by its comrade parts
will ever exist again
I understand how the mind works:
It has fingers and genitals
behind the conscious areas
that reach out and grab into other peoples' minds
stealing their feelings ideas and passions
rebuilding each mind
from all minds
I understand how the mind works:
It has numerous components
Each with specialized abilities:
Seeing, hearing, thinking, remembering, forgetting,
wondering, analyzing, debating, talking, blabbering,
loving, questing status, valuing existence, running wild
after love, lusting, questioning, and so on and on and on
The components battle, beat each other to a pulp,
Caress each others' private parts,
Borrow from their friends in other minds
And universes
And in their interaction give rise to babies
Babies that are similar to them
and yet different
With indescribable qualities and lives
The babies of our mind creatures
Reflect the whole mind
The wholeness of the mind
Reflects its little baby creatures
creeping out from the void around the edges
every second of every day
I crawl into my mind sometimes,
Curl up in its spacious cavern
Become one creature among the many
I talk to my fear, my joy, my sadness, my lust,
my love, my dreams, my recognition of lines and shapes,
my hearing of music, my sensation of a woman's skin,
smell of a woman's breath, failure to penetrate the depth
in my lover's eyes, routines for solving equations and spewing
out documents and programs and poems
I crawl inside and talk to my components
and they always laugh and laugh
They tell me "You, you who contains it all,
Why do you bother, really?
Just let us go, let us free,
let us scatter through the universe
We'll find someplace to go!
Be happy, be free of your existence!
Don't worry at all!
Maybe we'll stick around, and keep you coherent
composed and solid
Maybe we'll fly away to Jupiter
or the nine-dimensional puzzle land
you see in her eyes
What does it matter to you anyway?"
I tell them "No, you little fools,
You brilliant nexuses of pattern
with no understanding of context and grace
and the holistic wonder of things no, no, no no.
It isn't me who keeps you together,
I couldn't do that at all.
You hold yourselves here, you mental
components
each one of you holds your friends and neighbors
You cling onto each other in complex beautiful patterns
And it's your clinging that produces babies
And it's the baby mental creatures that keep the mind alive,
without them it would all fall down."
And they laugh and touch my skin with knowledge
"We know," they say, "we know, we just
wanted to hear you tell us that."
They kiss my body with surreal lips,
and massage my skin with strange oils
I relax and absorb their strange beauty
And then I pick myself up and return to Earth
where I am a whole being
and proceed to as usual ignore
the teeming world inside
But I know how the mind works:
I've heard it's voices, its calls
I've been there
I know how the mind works
I've lived there --
I've written four books on it
I've lived there
I know how the mind works
I don't know any
thing
or thing
at all
*
Eugene and Papaya Girl realistic, domestic scene.
*
And then
It had to happen
Things could not be left unresolved
The nine-dimensional puzzle
in her brain
was finally solved!
Tatyana sat up late one night
in tears for no good reason
She wondered how she'd drifted
Into such a cold, dark season
She had to talk to someone
But who was there to call up, who?
Who could she call and cry to
At twenty after two?
No desire to be embarrassed
in front of all her friends
Her boyfriend was a sweet guy
But he wouldn't understand
Then her thoughts drifted to Eugene
And she felt oddly alone
She couldn't call him on the phone
She no longer knew his number
The brief friendship that they'd had
Suddenly seemed a freak, a wonder
His depth of heart, his depth of mind
now assumed a different kind
of appeal, in her dark night
His passioned words seemed somehow right
*
Tatyana boarding the plane. No clear thought in mind. A little
vacation, perhaps. She really wanted to see Eugene. Moving back to
New York might be OK. He could give her that something. Or not.
Anyway there was nothing really valuable. Lifting up in the air was
kind of delirious. How the fuck had we achieved it, we stupid human
beings who can't even figure out our own loves. We can solve the
equation of fluid motions, propellers jets and wings and movements,
computers that control movements through the sky and have
amazing calculations, but the simplest calculations of our own
desires are far too hard for us, we can't even penetrate the simplest
reality of the heart, and look at the clouds down there, the most
beautiful things, cotton candy white and wonderful and if I could
just jump out and play around in it and be like a little girl and roll
around and feel the cells in my skin vibrating and clitoral explosions
in every molecule and understanding nothing which means
understanding everything; but instead I'm sitting here in the plane
going somewhere I don't know where or why, I'd fairly like to see
Eugene but I need to do something and nothing really exists but I
never had this feeling, quite, exactly, everything was just so simple
before, but what the hell's before, time existed or twisted, I
remember when I first met Shannon and didn't understand all the
pain, all the fucking goddamn PAIN, fuck it why is it necessary?, why
can't we go on, fucking live and be happy, just move from day to
day moment to moment and get fucking JOY from life, just live and
be gorgeous, be glorious wonderful fucking look at the sun
through the clouds!!!
*
She called him,
asked him out to dinner --
as he'd done back in the past
Perplexed but tantalized, of course,
he said OK, but had to ask
"What's up?"
She wouldn't tell him.
The dramatist supreme,
she knew just how to play into
His sweet and twisted dreams
They sat there
in the Chinese place,
and he looked at her, face strained
So different did she seem now
Older, face softened by pain
"Eugene," she said, "Forgive me, love
I didn't understand
You were so deep and so sincere --
I didn't want that kind of man
(Sigh)
"You have to understand
I was just looking for some fun
That's all I wanted from a man
No pain, no complications, none
"But things are different now
I've gotten wiser and I see
That you, my dear Eugene
You are exactly what I need."
"You took too long," he sputtered
"A year, girl, not a week!
You ignored me, left me feeling
Like a fucking stupid freak."
(Insistent, almost angry)
"I love you, Eugene!
The past is the past.
Let's live in the present,
is that too much to ask?
We've all made mistakes,
love's all abOut forgiving.
We're so perfect together,
let's get on with our Living."
"You LOVE me now, do you?
That's so fucking SICK!
I don't even believe it
How can you shift round so quick?
One moment I'm crAp
And the next I'm your SWEETheart
Tomorrow you'll be gone
I've got no trust in your heart."
"I understAnd now how damn stupid I was
Please forgive me, dear Eugene
Please accept my love."
"It's just not so sImple,"
he said with a cry.
"I've got Papaya Girl now.
And she needs me.
She'll die
if I leave her."
"She WON'T, fool, she won't.
Can you tell me you're happy?
I notice, you don't."
"Happiness is
just a stupid delUsion
Helping others is true,
it cuts through the confusion."
"Well help ME then,"
she said.
"I need you. Be with me now."
"I'm with hEr, Tatyana.
I'm with Papaya Girl now."
"I need you."
"You don't.
You get by anyhow.
You're a fUcking survivor.
You're a beautiful girl
You'll always be perfect
the fucking best in the world
You're so smart and warm-hearted,
you charm everyone
I would have died for you then
But I'm with her, Tatyana
We're getting married. It's done."
"You love me."
"Of course I do.
You're perfect, you BITCH
But I can't leave Papaya Girl
She needs me
That's it."
But what about your vision, boy--
of two souls mixed in one?
It was just a dumb delusion
of my childhood.
That's all done.
He stared at her, shrugged
and walked out of the room
She cried as he left
There was nothing to do
*
Ba doo bah DOOP DOOP DOOP
Ba doo bah DOOP DOOP DOOP
Ba doo bah DOOP DOOP DOOP
Ba doo bah DOOP DOOP DOOP
The day I met you, baby
I was standing on a stair
Thinking of a woman,
purple flowers in her hair
Her soul was white just like an angel
Yours was dark like Devil's Food
I knew I had to grab you
and take a bite
right outta you
I imagined you there tending
All the gardens of my mind
You filled me up with anger
And you wasted all my time
You turned away my love babe
It was a crappy thing to do
But your desire's like a hand, babe
That pulls me into a typhoon
You hurt me baby
Like I've never been hurt before
Left me drunk and screaming
crawling on the floor
You helped me find a kind of torture
That was horrible and new
And here I am, a whole year later,
Still fucking hypnotized by you
Don't know where we will go
Don't know what season it has been
So fine, your body next to mine
To trace the boundary of your skin
I have desired for oh so long
Babe, could it actually be true?
Well your desire's like a hand babe
That pulls me into a typhoon
Everybody's writing love songs
For someone they just met
And then a few months later
Are going to forget
It's good to live inside the moment
But moments string together too
The world destroys itself each instant
And babe, it's love that carries through
I love the way you lurk
I love the tangles in your hair
I love the way you smell babe,
I love the way you scare
I love the way you be, babe
And I love the way you do
Can you believe,
One whole year later,
I'm still here hypnotized by you?
*
A half minute later
he returned, poked his head
sheepishly through the door
And she grinned, turning red
Eugene, she could see,
couldn't resist her at all
(Imagine the feeling
When a happy thing falls)
Tell how they actually hooked up. How he went back to her place
and discovered that Papaya Girl wasn't the only one who could
drench him with love and pleasure. How he learned that Tatyana
too had feelings, in fact quite curious and twisted ones, not so
dissimilar from his own. Indeed, what an evening. What an evening
indeed, indeed.
Sweet child of light, come to me, embrace my illusions,
caress with soft fingers my dreams and/or dreams!!!
I live alone in my garden of wonderful nonsense
no more,
Now you are here to embrace my illusions,
to sing them in harmony and disharmony,
to lick me like ice cream,
cradle me like an infant,
lean against me when tired
in soul or body
I sit,
alone in my garden of nonsense,
No more no more NO MORe
You hold out a flower, a huge radiant flower,
a flower as big as your head
and redder than the reddest rose
You hold it out to me and I take it
And this action affects the color of the sky
the sky is no longer blue,
it now has a tinge of wonderful lusty life redness
I sit,
alone in my garden of nonsense
No more, no more
I finally have welcomed you in
And
*
is it
isn't it
beautiful
terrifying
wonderful
impossible
LOVE
Shake me violently me
till my eyeballs fall out
out and roll on the floor
shortest path from here
here to there: delirium
Species of love
like contradictory comets
swoop up and down
through my brain
Years before I met you I
spied you sneaking
about in the labyrinthine
garden of horizons
whose forks spear my history,
chew it for moments,
swallow it, digest it, caress it with fingers of
invisible lust,
wonder why in all my 33 years of being
something as fantastic as your
existence was never provided,
the warm wicked glow of your
smile?
you are perfectly ordinary
Simply a woman
Ordinarily perfect
Simply a human
female of the species
Breasts, legs, womb, eye, eye, smile,
acres of stomach
latticework of hands
touch my skin cells
in patterns
The quickening of my breath
is entirely irrelevant
Every molecule, enlivened,
laughs
laughs and laughs
and laughs
words are speaking and hinting
at what
Languages of your lips?
Languages of your shrugging,
slight movements here,
side to side,
expanding in sightfuls,
casually capture my life
in a glance
is it? isn't it?
it is, it is
Deoxyribonucleic acid
Dissolving and reforming in primordial
oceans
I must have you, must possess you, must possess you, have you,
own you, take you, make you, dream you, clench you, hold you,
move you, merge with you, become you, inside you, outside you,
parallel, serial, invade all the pores of the pores of the pores of
the pores of your skin
oils, pheromones,
moaning,
the question expanding
the question mark curving
brown elegance of your back
Your body swims in my eye
My eye swims in your body
Walk away from me, swaying
The hour of love is over
Walk away from me, speaking
of meaningless objects
Walk away from me, touching
yourself to assure yourself of your reality
Walk away from me, remembering
is it isn't it?
isn't it?
things are not things
love is not love
knowledge is not knowledge
But you and I are here, you walk away and then return again,
wonderful and terrifying and sometimes, sometimes almost enough
?enough?
*
Is it mind?
Mind or reality?
Here in the garden of my nonsense,
I am not and not
But Tatyana baffles him, delights him, takes him apart into fifty
fragments and assembles him back into one
It isn't exactly as he expected, but the texture of her skin is quite
astounding
And the way she looks at him, directly, as if she sees straight into his
soul, which does not exist.
Soulflowers blooming, howling madness, howling gladness for a
change, and illuminated moments of wild.
So much there is to understand, to feel, to move in
, in, in, in, in,
*
let's get funky,
she said,
forget about whatever it is
you're thinking,
turn that brain off,
let's get DOWN
i'm here, i'm ready,
she said
lifting her skirt up
You could sprinkle your short hairs with stars,
I quoted
And what? she asked
She walked closer toward me,
I could smell three distinct odors,
all of them delicious
Let's get funky baby
yeaaaaaahhhhhhh
*
dress falling down in reflected
sunlight, shoes kicked off
to the corner of the room, bra
snapped off and breasts set free
to hang and smile, odd, nipples
stiffening, underwear being
pulled down and kicked off onto
the bed, my pants unsnapped,
fly unzipped, feet struggling out, my
shirt pulled over my head, watch
removed, you pressed to me
pressed to me, pressed to me
pressed to me, skin
on skin on skin
In and out of you
moving
moving
Outside
the wind blows
Yeah
you sleep, mouth open
slightly, legs spread
slightly, one arm out
to the side, the other
on your belly, your breasts
sagged over by your arms
your breathing
slow and loud
*
Papaya Girl wasn't all that attractive to me, on purely physical
grounds. She never awed me with aesthetics like Tatyana never
matched my ideal of the ultimate woman, causing that frightening
wonderful resonance of the inner and the other, the dreamlike
image and the reality. But somehow she was amazingly sexy. Her
whole personality breathed Fuck me, Fuck me, Fuck me, FUCK ME
BABY yeah yeah yeah. And the ironic thing is, she never wanted me
to have this great erotic love for her, this boiling, gyrating physical
passion. Which is not to say that she didn't get off on it -- she did. I
could see it in the way her muscles relaxed when I walked into the
room she was in -- as if her body was preparing to give itself over,
anticipating already that illusory moment when the onrush of
pleasure overcame her passivity, transforming her into an insatiable
dragon of fire-breathing cunt, cunt and cunt.
What she wanted, or so she thought and said, was for me to respect
her mind, to value her opinions. And I did love her mind, in its
wonderful chaos, its bounty of colors and contrasts and forms. Her
mind was one huge unfinished theorem, continually moving in all
directions, pushing this here and pushing that there in bedazzling
patterns, but never quite getting to the point. She had such a talent
for manipulating shapes, in that non-dimensional world of hers. But
her mind was never autonomous; without a physical vehicle, it was
confused and adrift. Only in her body did her mind find completion.
For all her talent in art, mathematics, poetry, whatever, she could
never build a real inner universe. She was always fiddling with her
body -- trying a new, bizarre diet, or a new method of breathing, or
an impossible stretching routine. Every morning she rubbed her
olive colored skin down with scented oils or cocoa butter. She was
fixated on the flesh. I didn't respect her mind the way she wanted.
How the fuck could I? Her mind was a morass of sexy, delirious
confusion, pushing in every which way, controlled by the demands
of the body and the illusions or truths of spiritual insight, with logic
and consistency compressed almost to vanishing not out of inability
to understand them but out of lack of interest.
My ornate inner universe fascinated her, from a distance, with its
perfect mathematical structures, its endlessly inventive chaos,
always performing alchemical syntheses out of the most wildly
incongruous forms. But she never got lost in it, and never studied it
too closely, because to her it was of peripheral value only -- her mind
was not her center. My intellectual gymnastics amused her for a
short while but didn't grip her soul. She entered into my universe
and yanked me out of it, pulled me back to the world of salt and skin
and fluids and movements and laughs and tears. She tormented me
incredibly, doing battle with me in her domain, perhaps dimly aware
that to me, pain in the realm of the body and emotions was never
more than a seed about which new structures would crystallize in
the endless expanse of my mind. Any pleasure that was given her,
she returned twofold, and then divided by seventeen, observing
with confusion and awe the forms into which my brain twisted her
joy.
We were a chaotic psychotic dynamical system, moving in imaginary
frenetic orbits, passing through each other and transforming each
other, yet always coming out the same. She re-molded my flesh in
her own image; I re-molded her mind in mine; yet no matter how
many times we proved 2+2=4 in our own personal logics, it always
came out to equal 3 or 5 collectively, or occasionally 6.27 or even
3.1415926535
. In the end it was nothing but love, as five billion
people have experienced, read about, written about. It was purely
biological: my lust for her body, her differently angled lust for mine,
our thrill in each others' pleasure, our endless conversations, fights,
seductions, passions, deliriums. We moved along like biological
robots, heeding the calls of hormones, enzymes, neurons,
pheromones, ribosomes. But of course, the mind finds a vehicle in
the body. Something different, contained in the zero of the circle of
her mouth, as she leans her head back rapt in ecstasy, divided by the
zero of my absence, when she feels half-asleep because I am not
there. A zero divided by zero, an indeterminate form, a random
element beyond all words, even these ones, and yet crying out with
insatiable lust to be described, described, described....
And then, Tatyana, on the other hand. Sweet dreams, the
motherfucking madness of women! Tatyana, Tatyana, Tatyana. An
infinite divisor, constantly dividing itself by itself and by zero in
bizarre conflagrations. She was so perfect, like an idol, a pagan love-
goddess a demigoddess at least. I could have spent eternity bent
over at her feet, sucking the lint from between her toes, thanking
the heavens for her immense and eternal beauty. What she uniquely
evoked was not a warm family kind of love nor a purely sexual
obsession but a kind of aesthetic fervor. Unexceptional as others
may have considered her. She was the elementary particle of which
my universe was composed. She hypnotized me. Around Papaya I
was crazy, around Tatyana I was rational, supreme, nervous but
elevated to outer space wonder. It wasn't just the beauty of her
form, it was the gorgeous nine-dimensional symmetry of her mind
and personality, divided by the square root of her body, that made
her so incredible. Papaya made me crazy, Tatyana made me saner,
forced me to be saner, didn't tolerate my sappy side. Her perfection
demanded that I strive to be more perfect myself, so as to match
and deserve her better. What was in the circle of her mouth as she
leaned her head back in orgasm? The perfect demented symmetry
of a Picasso woman? Or the texture of the ocean?
Less baffled by my ornate inner universe, because she understood it
better she, like me, had a powerful rational component she was
able to enter into my trains of thought, though she frequently got
thrown off the tracks. She could look at me in a way that made me
forget everything, that made everything else in the universe seem
meaningless and irrelevant, like scenery in a video game. Papaya
could never do that. Papaya had to take off her clothes and sit on
my lap to really distract me from my internal galaxy. Tatyana could
do it with a glance.
On the other hand, Tatyana wasn't much of a puzzle. Not that I saw
right through her she had her subtleties, sophistications and mazes
-- but the basic logic of her existence was reasonably sane to me.
Not like Papaya, whose soul was utter blackness. Not black as in evil
but black as in opaque, with occasional glimmers of visibility,
warmth or hatred bubbling out, and occasional transformations into
comprehensible forms such as the shape of a bunny or a woman's
face or a nicely curved ass begging for kisses, kisses verging up to
the back then down to the perineum and around to the widely
bulging hips, and darting into the crack now and then daringly,
provoking squirms and squeals of embarrassed pleasure.
Hypnotized in multiple directions, can I even say that I exist? I
stagger, dazed by diverse beauties of women, internal and external,
grabbing and ignoring me, igniting me with incorporeal flames, and
singing my name in strange languages. I howl, howl and howl and
they don't even care, they say, shut your mouth fool and give me
something, give me love or money or wonder or intelligent words or
give me children or a four bedroom house with a half an acre property or
a night at the movies or on the town or eat dinner with
me and hold my hand and gaze at me hypnotically but not too
bizarrely please, don't give me these strange feelings, give me real
meaningful love, give me something I can understand, something I
can grasp onto, don't give me the outpourings of your antediluvian
soul because no one can really see into another's mind, no matter
how hard you try you stupid fool you can never really get it all out.
*
How Eugene and Tatyana part after a wonderful night of love and
lust. How Eugene goes back to Papaya Girl, realizing that Tatyana is
closer to his ideal dream girl, but he has a real relationship with
Papaya Girl, he trusts her and loves her deeply in the real world; and
he's devoted to their building a real relationship together.
Tatyana of course recovers quickly, robust and vivid soul that she is
she always has a soft spot in her soul for Eugene, but she knows
there are always other men, other minds, other loves and
dimensions.
Or: How Eugene breaks the news to Papaya Girl. He has to tell her
that, although he and she have something powerful, he has found
something stronger at last. The nonsense garden of his soul has
always been shut off to her, for whatever reason. Due to their
intrinsic differences, due to her lack of that spark and glow that is
entirely in Eugene's mind and that was projected from Tatyana the
first moment he saw her. At any rate, he's moving out, and he's in
love with Tatyana now, totally enamored, and she's in love with him
as well.
The Garden of Forking Paths. And so on and so forth. Does it really
matter which happens? All the universes exist at once. We just hop
from moment to moment to moment in the transdimensional
discontinuum don't you remember? I told you before!! It's all a
tangled up equational vine of loves and knots. The garden's
overgrowing.
What do you think? Should he follow compassion, stay with the
woman who needs him, Papaya girl, his sweet little love? Or should
he follow his delirious dream, the femme fatale who either wants
him or not depending on the state of her soul or maybe not:
perhaps she's truly experienced a phase transition and realized the
truth of their soul-level matching. It's very hard to tell, indeed.
Indeed, indeed, indeed. Which is the greater love, the greater
compassion? What's the metric of comparison? How can we know
the unknown? And if we can't know the unknown,
godfuckingdamnit, then what's the damn point of knowing
anything? And what's the point of throwing out all these words,
squeezing love through the tiny little portal of language, indicating
meanings hither and thither when we never know what the fuck
we're talking of. Indeed, indeed, indeed.
*
To seek unity,
harmony,
beauty,
perfection --
so brief the description,
so proud the oration
-- So terribly painful
the implementation
It's a puzzle and Also
a miniscule piece
of the puzzle the universe Is,
that we face
In the eye of pain, joy
At the core of joy, torture
As I'm sitting here, typing
these phrases in order
Eugene and Tatyana, small parts of my soul
Unfold on the screen,
they somehOw become whole
and they have a perfEction that isn't quite right
And I love them,
and love is the answer
Good night!
*
Good dawn
And on
And on
And on
Morning sunrise on my eyelids
wetness in the air
Mosquitoes on my forehead
In what damp jungle have I awakened?
In what primordial valley?
I open my eyes and find myself lying
Beneath a carpet of trees
The monkey sits beside me, speaks:
"The dharma of the dharma is that there is no dharma,"
The truth of the truth is that there is no truth
"But if the dharma of the dharma is that there is no dharma,
Then the dharma of this non-dharma dharma
cannot be the dharma
so the dharma has no dharma
and so there is not any dharma at all"
That's what he says
No truth, no core, no center to being
No meaning in pretentious Sanskrit words:
or meandering English ones
or even monkey shrieks
I awaken to see the truth
that there is no truth at all
and my eyes pop out from their sockets
wondering what it is they're looking at
how this nonexistent world
shines out in such brilliant hues of pink, green, red
blue, yellow, black, white, purple
and so many wonderful shapes
and frightening ones
cognitions of mind and sensations
of flesh
"What of that, monkey?"
I request angrily
"The fuck with dharmas, the fuck with dharmas,
what about realities, externalities, what about seeing feeling
hearing eating fucking drinking running walking working typing
fighting playing phoning faxing driving flying and on and on
and on, somehow on, nohow on, the actual presence of the
universe as manifested in every existing moment of my
motherfucking life!"
The monkey climbed up into a tree,
taking with it my breakfast
"Bring back my banana, you little furry asshole,"
I scream at him uselessly
"You stole that from my backpack!"
I watch him sit there on the
tree branch
Eating it happily
And I am enlightened
(Not)
*
Somehow on.
Baby, baby.
Nohow on.
Proceeding forwards, backwards, sideways,
through imaginary dimensions,
nine-dimensional stairways,
transcendent jungles of truth,
sweetly invisible whys whys whys
The thing that always sticks within me is her silhouette
When she leaves the room, it hangs there for a moment,
retaining her shape
and an element of her energy,
a pure electrical field of woman-ness
It asks me this question:
I open my mouth to give it an answer, and then it disappears
I reach out to touch it, overwhelmed by desire, but where is it
anyway?
She comes back in again,
all solid and substantial,
warm breathing face, fleshy breasts,
walking thighs, stomach eminently caressable
and engaged in digestion,
brain propagating electric charge internally
leading her to illusions and songs
and where did the silhouette go?
*
Can we end it here, with a bunch of stupid shit?
Well, what began with
But seriously.
Arbitrariness is half the equation.
And my mind, turning somersaults through its own passionate
Mobius strips, could continue forever. Or not. But there are other
nuts to crack, other Famous Amos Chocolate Chip Cookies with
Pecans to crumble. Work awaits me, documents I'd promised to
write, endless employees to evaluate. I don't enjoy evaluating them
at all: they're all doing their best given their inner and outer
conditions. Why should I make them feel like shit by pointing out
the limitations to the universe. I'm in the middle of mixing down a
pretty cool song. I need to go out into the cold yard and build a
plastic slide slash playhouse for my kids. It's Christmas day. I bought
it for them. It was moderately expensive. Why the fuck not. My
song is kind of weird, probably no one will like it but me. But that
doesn't matter. It pleases me. It captures some tiny beautiful part
of the strange twisting of my soul. And so with these words I've so
hastily typed out here. Perhaps their crystalline significance will
reflect some light into caverns of your mind, places no one has ever
been before, places I surely will never venture. Perhaps they'll bring
laughter, bafflement, spite. It really doesn't matter, does it? Far
worse crimes have been committed than saving a bunch of text to a
computer file, than printing out a few dozen pages of nonsense on
chemically treated, pressed fragments of murdered trees. We're all
murderers anyway. We kill the universe every moment. Every
definite thing is a sin, insofar as sin exists. This thing I have created
is no better or worse than others. I keep on cultivating my garden
of nonsense, and baby, why the fuck not? I keep on questing
impossible unity, in the form of woman, art, or thought. And why
the fuck not, baby? Eh?
I crave a beauty strange
This fact I cannot change
A twisted kind of brain
Joy all mixed up with pain
A lust mixed up with love
Sometimes I rise above
Sometimes I sink below
(A few things that I know)
Alive, delirious, moving, wonderful, brutish flesh. Friction of mind,
friction of bodies. A few things perfect, flawed, divine. Look at me
as if you were a stranger. Look at me as if you knew my mind. Read
my words as if you wrote them in a very strange mood. Read my
words as if they'd reached you in a space capsule sent from an alien
civilization. Read them as if your lover had vanished inexplicably,
and their diary, these words, were your only memento. Read, think,
don't think. Read with your hand in your pants, stroking vigorously.
Rub your juices on the page till the ink blurs. Mingle sex juice with
tears. Understand nothing. Reach out to grasp everything. Reach
out to taste everything and fail, fail, fail.
*
You came, a traveler from another land
And now, returning there, you leave
Headlong wind carries my thoughts away,
filling trees with their fragments, I'm
uneasy. There's no saying how this feels
or if we'll ever meet again. I lust for
you without understanding
what it is you are
I look far, farther, without seeing
you, my eyes grow tired
and spill their music
I see foggy peaks
The wind is clear and cool
Moon is bright
After this night, will we ever see
or even think of each other again?
It's not possible to feel this particular
moment, or ever to have it twice
*
Strange beauty of love
Strange beauty of tears
Strange beauty of madness
Strange beauty of perfect lunar madness
soaring high as a sigh
above the radiant nipple sun
Howl all you want, but no one listens, at most they only hear the
howling, the fine gradations of love and feeling, pain and
conclusions, nonsense, wonder, inside each note of the polyphonic
howl are eternally lost, lost, lost
Instantaneous beauty strikes with abandon, it had nothing to
abandon, it wanders through negro streets at dawn and, love, it
understands nothing, love
Vexation of love
Vexation of soul
Vexation of mind and eye
Strange beautiful vines and flowers grow tall in my garden, in the
garden of my nonsense, where I stand always totally alone
I wait for you to come and offer me another flower a different
color, a new shape, something that isn't the same as my nonsense
your own nonsense, darling
Is it delirium that my nonsense and yours
together could form
some kind of transcendent sense?
So far it hasn't occurred,
through 33 years in the teeth of death
I sit, alone,
in my garden of nonsense,
Lusting for women's bodies
I sit, alone,
in my garden of nonsense,
Dreaming strange kinky dreams
I sit, alone
in my garden of nonsense,
Wondering why I'm wondering, wondering
I sit, alone,
in my garden of nonsense
envisioning scenes of cryptopornographic madness,
what if I had sex with you
while your body was turned inside out
and your innards were dripping on my yuk!
I sit alone,
in my garden of nonsense,
thinking of you sitting by the window,
looking out for something
wonderfully unspecified,
looking out for something what
I sit alone,
in my garden of nonsense,
breeding transnihilistic orchids,
waiting for you to offer me love
I sit alone,
in my garden of nonsense
formulating equations for the logic of mind,
which are predominantly correct
of which I'm very proud
I sit alone,
in my garden of nonsense
reading books and extracting meanings
interpolating wildly
creating what I don't understand
I sit alone,
in my garden of nonsense
Eugene sits alone,
in his garden of nonsense
Tatyana sits alone,
in her garden of nonsense
Papaya Girl, alone, in her garden of nonsense,
Oiling her skin
Breathing the atmosphere
Celebrating her lungs
You, dear, reader,
alone in your garden of nonsense
Squeezing ideas and dreams
from these words
So alive in my mind,
so inert on the computer screen or the paper --
If I walk long enough through my garden
Will I reach somebody else's
Yours, perhaps, dear reader?
The best I can do is to send you dried flowers,
pale imitations of the blossoms of my garden,
And you can try to revive them
adding magical water
but you'll inevitably fail, fail, fail
With luck you'll take the dead dried husks
as inspiration
and use them to guide your own flower breeding,
your garden may imitate some of the best features
of mine, hopefully avoiding
the worst
But is that all that's possible?
Can't it occur, through a close enough communion,
that two gardens fuse into one?
The flowers of my inner cosmos
to wrap their stems around yours
as our bodies enwrap each other
in love and lust
isn't it possible?
Or no?
Flowers crossfertilize, breed
new ones, new
species of being and becoming,
crystallized around the germ of dangerous
whimsical imaginative
love?
That's really my question
Can the universe move backwards
toward its primary state
in which there was only one garden?
The Bible has it wrong, as we've seen
The Garden of Eden wasn't destroyed,
It's still there inside everyone
The garden was sliced and diced!
The Garden as a whole was wild meaning incarnate,
The fragmentary gardens created by slicing it
have lost all their meaning,
they are gardens of nonsense,
howling and screaming,
understanding nothing,
weaving weird words of madness,
confusing love, infatuation, lust, equations, nakedness, perfection,
error, god, parents, teeth, sanity, madness, employment, passion,
everything, nothing, computers, words, why why why why and why
not?
And so, alone in my garden I sit,
Alone in my garden of nonsense,
Loudly awaiting your impossible love
Howling vexations of madness, sadness, gladness, clitoral explosions,
soul corrosions, deluded visions, cranial incisions, weird women in
my brain, strange beautiful big brained big pained beasts, on my
flesh they feast Howl! Howl! Howl! madness of love, Holy fucking
madness howl wonder howl holy fucking madness dreams, vexed
howl by love, howl holy fucking madness dreams
Strange beauty of characters invented
to dramatize internal delusions,
presenting everything simply and plainly,
when in reality it's far more tangled
than even ten billion words could depict
Strange beauty of time
that comes in fits, sparks and slices
There is no real continuum:
there only are moments,
each with its own flavor,
moving, twisting and jerking around
Strange beauty of my nonsense garden
some small portion of which
is killed on these pages
Strange beauty of your nonsense gardens
which I've never
had the pleasure to know
Transcendent beauty of the imaginary moment
when our nonsense gardens come together
and new species of love flowers are formed
Strange beauty of approximate transcendence
which is perfect in the moment it's formed
I sit alone in my nonsense garden,
but you're here,
if only I imagine I see you
If only I imagine
with sufficient virility
I can see you sitting there
Yes, right there
Smiling next to me,
In your Calvin Klein figleaf
You're the most beautiful thing
I've ever seen
I can't understand
why I didn't fabricate you before?
I'll call you "Tatyana."
No, "Gwen."
"Melissa"?
"Papaya"?
I'll call you the teeth of the nothing.
Come on, nibble my skin.
I don't mind if it hurts a little.
Come on, nibble my skin.
I sit, alone,
in my garden of nonsense,
Lusting for women's bodies
I sit, alone,
in my garden of nonsense,
imagining love and love
Love is real, and I have it
I have people who love me
and I love them
Things that I love to do
Filled up with love, love, love
I'm much better off than Eugene,
my imaginary creation,
I'm not quite such a damn fool
Strange beauty of approximate transcendence
which is perfect in the moment it's formed
But still, there's something missing, ever missing, and for this in my
garden I wait.
I've felt the moments of true transmission, living flowers cast from
one world to another, preserving their wonder and life.
But my soul is a high-maintenance transcendental organism -- I need
a thousand times more --
I, the author of this ridiculous work, find that my most deep and
true moments have come from my children my three beautiful
children who come to me with such innocence and grace even in
their obnoxiousness and silliness, obsession with Pokemon cards,
video games, fussing and whining, crying, neurosis over food, desire
to play with me when I'm working and then ignore me when I come
to play, squabbling and babbling, human prosaic realities, endless
dishwashing and laundry, at the core of it all there's a beauty, an
immediate connection that penetrates beneath all the filth, all the
chaos and randomness, an essence that's determined to pound on
through, that brooks no doubt at all, a purity of love and
connection: they speak to me and I'm there, we're there, we're in
the same moment, we're in the same reality, we're in the same
nonsense garden. It doesn't matter who else or where else or what
or why.
I wait for you to come to me and, like my children, offer me another
flower an orchard of flowers alive in different colors and shapes,
Your own diversity of nonsense,
your own small universe of wild proto-sense?
Is it delirium that my nonsense and yours together
could form some kind of transcendent sense?
Perhaps this happens in your mind as you read these words I've
tapped out here
Who am I to say which flowers are dry and which are living? It's
really up to the flowers.
I, the author of this ridiculous work, have a beautiful wife who tastes
like papayas, but with whom, unlike Eugene and his Papaya Girl, I did
not couple out of pity or desperation, but out of mad dubious love.
We've gotten together terribly, and wonderfully. I've acted badly;
she's acted worse (of course, she might dispute this; in fact, she
definitely would dispute this). I love her very much. We've nearly
gotten divorced twice. If we'll still be together when (if ever) these
words are published, I really don't know. We're getting on fine right
now. We've been together for 15 years. I attribute our longevity in
spite of how badly we get along to our pretty damn good sex life.
It's amazing how far that will carry you. I'm only partly kidding. We
can talk about anything with each other, although it often leads to
arguments. Sometimes it doesn't, too. There are moments sitting
with her talking, or lying there in bed holding her as she goes to
sleep or wakes, up, when everything is perfect, golden and glowing,
when there's just one garden in which speech is superfluous, and
everything is contained in a touch or a glance. It's not sexual, it's not
personality, it's not really anything, it's just a genuine connection
that pops up when you're not expecting it, that binds you together
into a single experiencer, into one collective moment, and then goes
away without ever vanishing or knowing that it existed. It doesn't
happen with her nearly as often as it does with the kids, but it
happens and when it does there's an extra electricity which comes
from the fact that she's more different from me, she's not a part of
me spun off, she's my opposite pole, magnetically clung to me for
an instant and then other forces yank her away, usually other forces
in her forebrain, but occasionally her medulla oblongata (or the
pixies in the Van Allen belt). I need this electricity. I need more of
it, more, more, more. Can I get more of it from her? I don't think
it's impossible. But I don't think anything is impossible. Some people
call me an optimist; my wife sometimes calls me a pessimist. Do I
really need more, or more? At this point, I, the author of this
ridiculous work, don't call myself, not very much anyway.
Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
These words they are holy, your eyes they are holy, my garden of
nonsense is holy, everything is holy, holy. Every woman I've ever
lusted for, real and imaginary, is holy, holy, holy, holy! Everyone
I've ever spoken to is holy! Every molecule of air I've ever breathed,
or breathed. Every idea that's every lived inside me, crawled out and
sought another life. There's nothing that isn't holy, and being
unholy is holy. Howl, O vexation of love; howl, O vexation of love;
howl, O vexation of love, of love!
I, the author of this ridiculous work,
sit here holy in my nonsense garden
Appreciating the glory of your presence
Occasionally wondering if it's illusory
But then it doesn't matter
Sometimes it's such a glorious dream
And writing these words,
it's a strange kind of perfection
And designing software or writing equations embodying
the inventions of my mind,
it's a strange kind of perfection
And creating music, chords, scales and melodies, that veer close
to the soundscapes of my subliminal waking dreams,
it's a strange kind of perfection
It's a kind of communion with the real,
not a fusion of two individual nonsense gardens,
but an opening up of my nonsense garden to the world as a whole,
allowing it to spurt gases up into the atmosphere
and suck back gases in return,
become part of the ecosystem,
the nine-dimensional Gaia of universal cognition,
The world is the dreamer whom I dream dreams my dreams
Holy! Holy! Holy!
Vexation of the imperfection of existence
Vexation of perfect satisfaction that gives way
to frustration and need
Vexation of you who tempt me with secret promises
of what no one can give
Vexation of love
Vexation of beauty strange
and loving mind
I, the author of this ridiculous work,
sit here in my nonsense garden,
wondering why I type these words,
wondering if I'm really waiting for you to come
and bring me impossible love
or if I'm waiting for my mind to finally realize
that impossible love is here
I, the author of this ridiculous work,
sit here in my nonsense garden,
alone or not alone,
depending on interpretation
I, the author of this ridiculous work,
sit here in my nonsense garden,
being and being and being
goes on, on and on
and on
I, the author of this ridiculous work,
sit here in my nonsense garden,
not knowing how to end
because beginnings and middles and endings are illusory
and then amazed I see
Ben Goertzel
December 3, 1999 January 9, 2000
Randolph, New Jersey