skonen_blades

They say to always trust your gut

I picture that hideous being
Slithering like a boneless crow
Mucusing eel-moist
Through its office in my stomach
This itching, infected, raw, cyborg beast
Fed by a periscope
Of a media flood it doesn’t understand
Broken radar firing like a machine gun
Having the nerve to call itself intuition
Eyes lighthouse owling,
Swiveling and greedy for any scrap of input
To gulp into its hindbrain-mind
Like a jerking, slobbering calf at an udder
Shaking the clumped, wet locks of its judge’s wig
Muttering of threats and ego
A litany of gibbering brought on by isolation
Speaking in suspicion and side-eye
Wringing its cold, damp hands and cackling
A bloated spider in a cavern
A selfish, fearful, ignorant, repulsive idiot
Continually drunk on worry and high on tension
Slapping the panic button like a bongo drum
Wary of all who it sees as different
Which is almost everyone
Omniphobic and baselessly prejudiced
This Neolithic, squirrel-brained, anxiety-drenched tumour
Capable of generating the worst conclusions possible
And sending them all stamped URGENT
To my center of operations

Why did biology give this subhuman beast a loudspeaker?
A bullhorn with access to my mind?

I’m supposed to obey it when it tells me to flee a perfectly fine party?
To suspect a random new friend I just met?
My gut takes two plus two and comes up with
“Fear. Flee. Leave. Get out. Hate.”
“Protect yourself before it’s too late.”
Or whatever other wildly off-base equivalents
It can shovel into the engine

Worst of all, it spends half of its time
Hurling abuse at a mirror
That I foolishly lent it decades ago

I don’t trust my gut

Every now and then I give it a bone
And a pat on the head
And say “That’s nice.”

I’m jealous of other people’s guts
Those unerring, precise, hyper-intelligent clairvoyant psychics
That I hear about
Masters of deduction
That have never disappointed their owners

If you can always trust your gut,
You have my envy and admiration

(But my gut says not to trust you)






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I
In meditation, it’s prudent to be a passive listener to not only the outside world around you
But your inner monologue as well
Not to interact with it
But to just observe it
As you would observe passing traffic
Untethering it from your concern
Watching it happen over there
Or up there as if it were the sky
Sitting under it
Looking up at it
No engagement
No weighing
Just observing the clouds

II
It’s harder the second time
The first time there’s a lead up
The first time there’s a preparation
The first time there’s an “Okay let’s DO this”
The second time is expected to be easy
The second time so smoothly slips into being run of the mill
The second time disguises itself as routine
But it isn’t
It’s as hard as the first time but harder now because you thought it would be easy
You can know that
You don’t need to walk into every time with defenses at the ready
Just know that it’s never that steep of a drop off for anything you’re learning
And don’t let the surprise defeat you

III
It’s strange to take me out of me
To feel me be out of me
Not a division of me into two mes
Not an outer body experience
But a removal of me from me

IV
The world empties into us all
Coming in through all our senses
We are the drains it swirls into
But where does it go
Memories, yes
But also our bodies
It’s held there
We are reality's translators
We are its filters
And sometimes its sewers

V
Feeling it is freeing it.

VI
I’m dedicated to my armor
It’s very hard to remove
I’m good at pretending I’ve taken it off
Sometimes I even fool myself
But occasionally it’s revealed to me that I have a tremendous way to go
Before metaphorical nudity.




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I'm a house of cards that can walk
I'm a centaur dressed for polo
I’m a clone playing patty cake with my real self
I’m a color-blind Green Lantern
I’m a season of Stranger Things set in the future
I’m a night-vision microscope
I’m a clowder of successfully-herded cats
I’m a scuba-diving comedian trying out new material on coral
I’m a statue of a painting of a self-portrait
I’m Texas on the inside, Spuzzum on the outside
I’m a halo with a twist, making the sign for infinity and a glowing pair of handcuffs
I’m an ‘oops’ in the Enterprise engine room
I’m a phantom-limb tap dancer
I’m a circus-of-one ringmaster
I’m a lonely dog biscuit
I’m Westworld set in Groundhog Day
I’m a fluorescent brown light saber
I’m a cellophane flag
I’m Chihuahua nipples that excrete espresso
I’m a gladiator that wins by boredom
I’m a basement party

And I’m here for you


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Webster’s dictionary defines Webster’s dictionary as:

1. A current living snapshot of a tree with a spidering of moving branches and calcified roots that go back in time to the fadeout onset of recorded mouth sounds.
2. A tree that is not evergreen, coniferous or deciduous but rather temperaneous, pruned regularly during more forgetful times, growing new arms as culture swells.
3. A window on a train through, exposing only the current frame of the journey’s landscape.
4. A core-sample cross-section of today’s expressions.
5. Only one book amongst thousands of languages and millions of dialects.
6. Pretty and limited.
7. Missing more than it holds.
8. A futile claim stake.

Webster’s dictionary defines you as:

1. A pink furry razor with a heart made of affectionate snakes and the soul of an octopus.
2. A concept used as an excuse too often for violence
3. DNA ropes of television static and failures glued together like the studio of a messy artist.
4. Simultaneously the fork of lightning, the branching of blood vessel, the ivy of cracks forming in stressed earth, and the evolution of the path of least resistance.
5. Survival of the strangest.

Webster’s dictionary defines me as:

1. A concept refrigerator.
2. An illusion wearing a suit of decomposing clothes.
3. A gust of life encased permanently in meat.
4. A delusional trick of data processing that, through reflection, accidentally becomes a self.
5. A beautiful aberration capable of both ugliness and the perception of ugliness.
6. A present for death, gathering layers of experience like layers of a gobstopper.
7. Caught memories that time throws.

Webster’s dictionary defines we as:

1. The haunting, uniting knowledge that we are not our memories.
2. Defined by “What are we?”
3. Broken cameras with nowhere to download the recorded input except into each other
4. A consensual mass hallucination (see also: economics)
5. A tidal wave

Webster’s dictionary defines:

1. Salt as dessert.
2. Hope as a cat.
3. All motion as circles.
4. Every horse as a universe.
5. Sasparilla as sorcery.
6. Tautology as Webster’s definition of tautology.

Webster’s dictionary defines defining as:

1. A defiling by filing.
2. A grasp for power, an attempt at dominion, a naming resulting in perceived partial or total ownership.
3. Something that bounces off.
4. A tacit acknowledgement that if the name of thing disappears, the thing still exists.

I still exist.
You still exist.
We still exist.
Regardless of definition.


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So you get it twisted. You think that the people that refuse you know something that you don't. You think that the people that say yes to you are blind to the truth. You start to think that the ones who turn you down are smart and the ones who want you are stupid. It sets up an awful echo chamber in your mind. A hall of second-guessing mirrors with no right answer and a deep, dark spiral into self-hatred disguised as fact.



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If you look for evidence that you are a loser, you will find it. If you look for evidence that you are a winner, you will find it.

This is why some people go insane.

Because all theories are supported. The glory of a direction is faced with the responsibility of our perception. We are the fuel in our own engines. We can pull up or dive. I’m talking about self-determination in the grandest sense and the crisis of identity that comes about when one realizes that one is truly free to pick a path. When one realizes that the state of one’s life is truly no one’s fault and that it can be made better or worse immediately, a clash starts inside. A huddling, a cowering, a shiver of terror. A refusal to rise and be better than you are. Or conversely, a refusal to go to darker places.

The exploration of the self leads to one inescapable conclusion. We are much too complex and fluid to be defined. This is why the search is the definition.

Love is hard to put into words because all of our hearts are ESL.

The language of love is as plain as a sunrise. It burns up entire rooms during civilized tea parties. It takes banal sentences and makes balloon animals out of them. Love is a creature wired directly into our minds and bodies. It bypasses all attempts at codification. It is merely obvious.

I feel that as one gets older, one climbs up, out of the experience of life and into an overview. I feel that this is the beginnings of wisdom. I feel that some milestone birthdays are prisms for this. Nets, filters, sifters. 30 is like that. I imagine 50 will be as well.

So when I turn thirty and I try to define love for myself and the direction I’m headed in, I am at a loss for words. I feel more like a garden than a man. My attempts become bullet holes in the roof of the church, letting in the rain.





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I’m no stranger to visits from my future selves.

The first time I showed up to myself, I was only nineteen. I was in the backyard, smoking a cigarette with my hand cupped so that my parents wouldn’t see. I found out later that I wasn’t fooling anyone but that they just didn’t figure it was worth the bother. Plus both of them smoked so they didn’t want to appear hypocritical. I blamed it on laziness after I got older.

But there I was in the back yard when an older version of me stepped out of the bushes. He was wearing a suit but it was dingy and the elbows were frayed. He had some stubble and a wet, red look to his eyes. I could smell whiskey and desperation.

He told me that he was a future version of myself. I had no trouble believing it. There was a kinship there that went beyond the features of his face or the fact that it felt like I was looking at a reflection of myself that wasn’t flipped around like in a mirror. There was almost a magical flow of energy between the two of us, atoms calling to atoms, a recognition of the same time-space footprint being near.

He told me who was going to win the football game tomorrow. He told me to write it down. I went inside and took out a notebook and did what he said.

I took it to heart and bet big on it. At that point in my life, it meant conning two friends into putting money on the game against me. They lost and I made two hundred dollars. Big money for me at the time.

Years later, I’ve had hundreds of visits. I have six large estates around the world and I am the seventeenth richest man in the world. I write every visit from a future self in the notebook with the exact time notated as well. This is the notebook, my future selves say, that will allow me to come back and create this present. When the secret of time travel is discovered, they say, I will use this notebook as a bible and influence myself to this rich state of affairs, thereby avoiding a paradox.

What didn’t make sense to me, though, was that the versions of me that kept coming back to give me tips got progressively more well-dressed and wore more jewelry. I found that odd since I, myself, don’t really like wearing rings. Also, if my future selves were changing according to the riches that I was making, why was the first one to come back dressed so poorly?

I smelled something fishy. I was going to ask the next future self some pointed questions. The riches had made me bold. I was poised with the notebook, ready to get some answers.

The next time a future self showed up, however, it wasn’t me. It was a woman in a red dress and a scar down one cheek. She walked with purpose, the straight back of a dancer. She marched up to me and grabbed me by my expensive collar and kneed me in the balls.

While I was writhing in agony on the marble floor, she took the notebook out of my hands, the supposed bible and key to all of my success, and threw it into the fireplace.

There was a flash of blue light and she disappeared, having never uttered a word.

Nothing changed for me. I am still the seventeenth richest man in the world. My wealth is intact. My appearance hasn’t changed.

Her appearance happened just over four years ago. There hasn’t been a visit from the future, myself or otherwise, ever since that notebook was thrown into the fireplace.

I wonder who she was. I turn the puzzle pieces over in my mind and I can’t make sense of it. I feel left out and oddly alarmed most days, like this could all disappear in an instant.




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