My first attempt at anything remotely resembling stream of consciousness writing.
Despite this pall that hangs around my head,
I persevere, around the empty bed,
The mind, it burns – alone and disregarded,
Yet rhyme and reason seek,
To override emotion,
And create despite devotion.
For I’m no Plath! To gnash my teeth and wail,
And gas myself till mind and organs fail,
No skull to grasp, and muse on want to be,
I cling to live as it must cling to me.
I should have been a pair of covetous eyes,
Drifting bloodshot through the shrouded streets.
Though I have grinned and starved, wept and woke.
To desires hollow, stifled under skies,
My depth as shallow as an open vein,
The moment of my greatness is to wane.
Perhaps I ran out of time,
Or lust was a poor and zealous master,
I’ve left effigies of you in the depths of my person,
That frights the mind to flights,
And beckon to disaster.
I should have been a pair of grasping hands,
Laid silent in the depths of hallowed earth.
Have I the strength, when all is said and done,
To force the moment at the need of one?
Is it fair? Is it fair?
I am adrift, the soul of moral despair,
My mind the barrel of a smoking gun.
I have witnessed men clip back the wings of birds,
Whose only crime was song too soon to heed,
How long before my own wings are as shorn?
For thinkers are a rare, peculiar breed.
I should have been a soft and stifled mind,
Content until the moment of my death.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Friday, May 28, 2010
Goodbye, childhood.
In two hours time I will be an adult.
Hooooooly fuck.
This will be the last thing I write as a child. I want to be able to look back on this and go, huh. That's what was running through my head at that moment. I'm not sure why, but this whole 'coming of age' thing is really significant to me. I'm an adult. It's my turn to decide what that means. I'm terrified.
My last meal as a child was fish fingers with chips, in case I'm curious about that later.
Fittingly, I'm listening to a song, and the key vocal is 'Innocence will never be mine." I feel that way, looking back. I don't think I ever was an innocent. I want to talk about that. I want to acknowledge what I am and how I became that. The words are difficult to find, floating in my brain just out of reach - but I'll endeavour to say what I need to say, because I'll never be the same as I am now, and I want to capture it.
My life has been a series of warping moments - I don't believe that people grow, I believe they are twisted. What I am will be put through the wringer, and out of the other end will emerge a new me. Weaker or stronger, who's to say - but always changed.
My dad left when I was six. That was a moment, for sure. I grew cynical. I learned not to become attached. I learned to hide emotion and I learned that adults are not perfect. Now I'm going to become one. Interesting.
My mother married a man that beat me for years of my life. That was a moment - hundreds, thousands of agonising ones, of bloody warfare, struggle, tears, contempt and pure hatred - all overwhelming proof that there is nothing in the depths of an imagined hell that can rival what man can do with his own two hands. I knew what people were capable of when they truly hated - I learned what it was to hate. His sucide was a moment too - a triumph, the ultimate victory. I was finally free - my own person, who I wanted to be and who I felt I was. That person turned out to be a homosexual and I came out that week - another moment, liberation. I have never let anyone tell me how to live since, and I hold my head high as to what I am.
How to sum up a life in a few words!? It is impossible to say just what I mean! I have wept and prayed. I have been beaten. I have been bloodied. I have healed and I have loved. I have held and I have been held. I have had sex. I have eaten mangoes. I have hated and I have destroyed. How to sum up what I am, what I will become? IMPOSSIBLE. INFURIATING.
I am intelligent. There's no denying. I have a fiery intellect and a monumental ego. These are products of my childhood. Will they linger with me into adulthood? Will the years to come dull my mind and soften my arrogance? Who knows? I just want to remember - here and now, you are smart. You are bold, you are brave, you create, and you find yourself dead sexy. Whatever changes in your life, remember that. Here and now, at the cusp of adulthood, you love yourself.
I am a product of so many people, so many things. I still am. I am in love right now. He's straight. Will I look back on this and think I was foolish? Or will I look back on it and lament the wasted chances? I've had endless causes to lament my gender. Will that trend continue? Who knows?
I also hate right now. I hate with a passion. I loathe with every fibre of my being. I can FEEL it! It flows through me, the strength of my emotion! My blood boils! I hope that, at least, I retain. It is better to hate than to love.
I am spending this evening in solitude. Likely, I will spend tomorrow in solitude too. Most of my childhood has been spent alone. I have never connected well with others. I have met a few people in the world I could trust with my life and be comfortable around forever - but they are few and far between. I don't reach out to others and they don't reach out to me. I have always been this way. My life outside of school is a closed book to most, and I can't say that this worries me. I move through this world alone and unfettered, and I have a feeling that the trend of childhood is going to be forcibly changed soon.
I am running out of words, and yet I feel I must continue pushing them out. I feel that nothing IMPORTANT has been said, and yet the desire to say remains so strong! So many words and so little self in them. I am failing. I must attempt to paraphrase.
I am a complex individual whose life will never fully be revealed to anyone, not even myself. I am grateful to all the events that have transpired in my life to make me who I am, even the bad ones. I am thankful to all the people I have met that have shaped me into what I am, even the bad ones. I am proud of who I am, and I have faith that I will be a man who is worthy of my expectations of him. And at this moment in time I am strangely sad and I do not know why. It is cold. There is nobody here with me, and for the foreseeable future that will not change.
I will emerge from the debris of my childhood fully fledged and equipped with the tools to survive. That is all that this evening has shown me.
I will sit up late tonight and wait for midnight.
I know who I am.
Marvellous.
Hooooooly fuck.
This will be the last thing I write as a child. I want to be able to look back on this and go, huh. That's what was running through my head at that moment. I'm not sure why, but this whole 'coming of age' thing is really significant to me. I'm an adult. It's my turn to decide what that means. I'm terrified.
My last meal as a child was fish fingers with chips, in case I'm curious about that later.
Fittingly, I'm listening to a song, and the key vocal is 'Innocence will never be mine." I feel that way, looking back. I don't think I ever was an innocent. I want to talk about that. I want to acknowledge what I am and how I became that. The words are difficult to find, floating in my brain just out of reach - but I'll endeavour to say what I need to say, because I'll never be the same as I am now, and I want to capture it.
My life has been a series of warping moments - I don't believe that people grow, I believe they are twisted. What I am will be put through the wringer, and out of the other end will emerge a new me. Weaker or stronger, who's to say - but always changed.
My dad left when I was six. That was a moment, for sure. I grew cynical. I learned not to become attached. I learned to hide emotion and I learned that adults are not perfect. Now I'm going to become one. Interesting.
My mother married a man that beat me for years of my life. That was a moment - hundreds, thousands of agonising ones, of bloody warfare, struggle, tears, contempt and pure hatred - all overwhelming proof that there is nothing in the depths of an imagined hell that can rival what man can do with his own two hands. I knew what people were capable of when they truly hated - I learned what it was to hate. His sucide was a moment too - a triumph, the ultimate victory. I was finally free - my own person, who I wanted to be and who I felt I was. That person turned out to be a homosexual and I came out that week - another moment, liberation. I have never let anyone tell me how to live since, and I hold my head high as to what I am.
How to sum up a life in a few words!? It is impossible to say just what I mean! I have wept and prayed. I have been beaten. I have been bloodied. I have healed and I have loved. I have held and I have been held. I have had sex. I have eaten mangoes. I have hated and I have destroyed. How to sum up what I am, what I will become? IMPOSSIBLE. INFURIATING.
I am intelligent. There's no denying. I have a fiery intellect and a monumental ego. These are products of my childhood. Will they linger with me into adulthood? Will the years to come dull my mind and soften my arrogance? Who knows? I just want to remember - here and now, you are smart. You are bold, you are brave, you create, and you find yourself dead sexy. Whatever changes in your life, remember that. Here and now, at the cusp of adulthood, you love yourself.
I am a product of so many people, so many things. I still am. I am in love right now. He's straight. Will I look back on this and think I was foolish? Or will I look back on it and lament the wasted chances? I've had endless causes to lament my gender. Will that trend continue? Who knows?
I also hate right now. I hate with a passion. I loathe with every fibre of my being. I can FEEL it! It flows through me, the strength of my emotion! My blood boils! I hope that, at least, I retain. It is better to hate than to love.
I am spending this evening in solitude. Likely, I will spend tomorrow in solitude too. Most of my childhood has been spent alone. I have never connected well with others. I have met a few people in the world I could trust with my life and be comfortable around forever - but they are few and far between. I don't reach out to others and they don't reach out to me. I have always been this way. My life outside of school is a closed book to most, and I can't say that this worries me. I move through this world alone and unfettered, and I have a feeling that the trend of childhood is going to be forcibly changed soon.
I am running out of words, and yet I feel I must continue pushing them out. I feel that nothing IMPORTANT has been said, and yet the desire to say remains so strong! So many words and so little self in them. I am failing. I must attempt to paraphrase.
I am a complex individual whose life will never fully be revealed to anyone, not even myself. I am grateful to all the events that have transpired in my life to make me who I am, even the bad ones. I am thankful to all the people I have met that have shaped me into what I am, even the bad ones. I am proud of who I am, and I have faith that I will be a man who is worthy of my expectations of him. And at this moment in time I am strangely sad and I do not know why. It is cold. There is nobody here with me, and for the foreseeable future that will not change.
I will emerge from the debris of my childhood fully fledged and equipped with the tools to survive. That is all that this evening has shown me.
I will sit up late tonight and wait for midnight.
I know who I am.
Marvellous.
Saturday, May 8, 2010
Bourgeois Bohemians
I recently read a very interesting article about - well, I may as well just link it and copy and paste relevant bits, it's important for what I'm going to say here.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2000/may/28/focus.news1
"They are 'bourgeois bohemians' - or 'Bobos' - and they're the new 'enlightened élite' of the information age, their lucratively busy lives a seeming synthesis of comfort and conscience, corporate success and creative rebellion. Well-educated thirty-to-fortysomethings, they have forged a new social ethos from a logic-defying fusion of 1960s counter-culture and 1980s entrepreneurial materialism."
I read this article and I got to thinking about it, and I was struck by the amount of people I know who fit this kind of mold. How many people I know mediate, or do yoga, or smell incense or get in touch with their souls and God or talk about inner peace and enlightenment and saving the world and not eating meat and all those lovely and amazing hippy values - but still have phones, drive in cars, eat slave-trade foods and fail to churn through their recycling bins. One bit in particular struck me, it said something like:
"There is almost no difference in this day and age between the latte-sipping artist and the chai-sipping business executive."
What great hypocracy is this? What horrendous miscarriage of ideals! I thought even more about it, and I realised that this desire for spiritual meaning is all well and good, but the execution of it these days is just appauling. When you really get down to it, applying all these labels and values to yourself in search of spirituality is all fine and well, but the second you stop being blind to the hypocracy you are making, the comfortable illusions shatters. I relate quite well to those high-flying hippies - these 'Bobos', but now, unfortunately, I'm never going to be able to take them seriously again.
AND NOW TO SUGGEST MY REMEDY.
When a culture arises, there is always a counter-culture. I say to you, go forth and eat what you like. Waste and squander resources. Care not for the environment. Counter this growing farce with brutal honesty. I'm not saying don't be a giving person - but be honest with who you are and what you really believe and are capable of. For example:
"Yes, I think what they are doing to the rainforest is horrible, but I really love my coffee."
"No, I don't think I'm doing enough for recycling, but I can't be bothered going through my garbage for it."
"Those poor starving children in Africa are suffering so much, but I'm not really inclined to give up any of my money for them, that's too much effort."
"I like to think there's a God, but I'm not going to go hunting for him because I'm too practical."
You see? The only way to pierce this strange, comforting veneer that these Bobos have erected about themselves like armour is to wield honesty. Perhaps it will get them looking at what they aren't doing, and perhaps they will set aside this foolish notion that it is they who are going to save the world. This also has the added benefit of being very lazy and simplistic, rather than the intense, driven ideals of the Bobo.
I'd start living by it tomorrow, but I honestly can't be bothered. (See! It's working already!)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2000/may/28/focus.news1
"They are 'bourgeois bohemians' - or 'Bobos' - and they're the new 'enlightened élite' of the information age, their lucratively busy lives a seeming synthesis of comfort and conscience, corporate success and creative rebellion. Well-educated thirty-to-fortysomethings, they have forged a new social ethos from a logic-defying fusion of 1960s counter-culture and 1980s entrepreneurial materialism."
I read this article and I got to thinking about it, and I was struck by the amount of people I know who fit this kind of mold. How many people I know mediate, or do yoga, or smell incense or get in touch with their souls and God or talk about inner peace and enlightenment and saving the world and not eating meat and all those lovely and amazing hippy values - but still have phones, drive in cars, eat slave-trade foods and fail to churn through their recycling bins. One bit in particular struck me, it said something like:
"There is almost no difference in this day and age between the latte-sipping artist and the chai-sipping business executive."
What great hypocracy is this? What horrendous miscarriage of ideals! I thought even more about it, and I realised that this desire for spiritual meaning is all well and good, but the execution of it these days is just appauling. When you really get down to it, applying all these labels and values to yourself in search of spirituality is all fine and well, but the second you stop being blind to the hypocracy you are making, the comfortable illusions shatters. I relate quite well to those high-flying hippies - these 'Bobos', but now, unfortunately, I'm never going to be able to take them seriously again.
AND NOW TO SUGGEST MY REMEDY.
When a culture arises, there is always a counter-culture. I say to you, go forth and eat what you like. Waste and squander resources. Care not for the environment. Counter this growing farce with brutal honesty. I'm not saying don't be a giving person - but be honest with who you are and what you really believe and are capable of. For example:
"Yes, I think what they are doing to the rainforest is horrible, but I really love my coffee."
"No, I don't think I'm doing enough for recycling, but I can't be bothered going through my garbage for it."
"Those poor starving children in Africa are suffering so much, but I'm not really inclined to give up any of my money for them, that's too much effort."
"I like to think there's a God, but I'm not going to go hunting for him because I'm too practical."
You see? The only way to pierce this strange, comforting veneer that these Bobos have erected about themselves like armour is to wield honesty. Perhaps it will get them looking at what they aren't doing, and perhaps they will set aside this foolish notion that it is they who are going to save the world. This also has the added benefit of being very lazy and simplistic, rather than the intense, driven ideals of the Bobo.
I'd start living by it tomorrow, but I honestly can't be bothered. (See! It's working already!)
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