click through to chapter two

I’m writing again, but this is not the place for it anymore.

~ Driz

happiness and mischief

I haven’t written in a while, but I have nothing of appropriate scope and scale to say.  I, instead, muse:

This world has within it pleasures so chocolate and sublime that simply taste of them brings wonder into one’s heart; we ask, ‘what scandal have we gotten away with to find such utter, undiluted glee amongst the folds, in the gentle pocket between every and the day?’

I am wealthy and unwilling to share my fortune; selfish and petulant you may label me thusly, and be completely right to brand me as such.  But there is only two reasons a child is ever quiet – he has innocently found happiness and contentment, and enjoys his enjoyment, or he is up to the very best kind of mischief.

For both above reasons has my voice found peace, and I suspect I shall need to be roughly unsettled to have much to speak about if I would have more to say anytime soon.

I don’t know whether I’ve moved up, or simply moved on, but I point anyone who comes across this body of work to the site archives on the right.  My best work is undeniably done when I’m miserable, so anything I’d have to write at this point and onward would most likely be catastrophically underwhelming.

So…  so long, but not necessarily goodbye.  I just pray I have little to write about for a long time to come, if quiet tastes this good to my tongue.

With the most reckless sort of love,

~ Driz

subtlety

Our experiences are always catalogued as story, tale, fable and song.  We are storytellers, before we’re anything else, before lovers and fathers and cellmates and heathens, we are storytellers first and foremost.

Our mind lags as it grapples with the ‘now’, it trails just barely behind the moment itself so that we are forever scratching the pens across the pages of our mind, lazily taking note of the history unfolding on a second by second basis.  We anticipate a future, but never a present oncoming.

Consider, as I type, I hear these words in my mind, and my fingers trail still, always behind, always the scribe and never the sculptor.  I take note of the songs in my mind and I lay this sheet music bare and before you here.  But the now, the present, the actual moments and notes in this song, those psychotic, clanging keys, banged out at random, impossible for me to apprehend and then overtake in process, impossible to predict and out-tactic, impossible to walk with and alongside, for it’s stroll is my fervor and race.

With all the struggle I can inflict upon such a chase, I can reach only that precious point behind our present, where the trails of it’s long hair just brush my cheek and the scent of today and what ‘is’, eludes me so gracefully and without exception.

Eluded without exception.  Hmmph.  Do I fail as a hunter, or do my moments fail as prey?

But then, that is my function, to record and recall, to emboss into memory what impressions I’ve been left with, to survey and pore over the marks left upon me after the fact(s).

I hold her in my arms and I forget that I’m there, so busy a bee I am, buzzing about and collecting into my honeycomb the very stuff of my dreams, stockpiling my senses in slavish anticipation of my wants and needs to come.

I’m alone tonight, but I’m never really alone.  So sweet does my story of her taste to my memory, the gentle calligraphic arcs of each of her subtle curves and subtle words and subtle nerves; her subtle verve and subtle… her.

I am the story of a writer who wrote of a story of a writer who wrote of a story of a writer who will never know what the present feels like: whether it would be liberating, like a car with no roads, unchaining and everchanging, or whether it would be a horror unlike anything else, a limbo and wry emptiness of soul, an unconnectedness of strained proportions, a vertigo into self…  and as I dream of it, fantasize what a moment would feel like, I’m again just the puppet and idle hands of a mind un-idle.  I am the story and the student to the author, a mind and soul that teaches and preaches and hopes, that perches just behind and above and recites to me my thoughts and loves… and with each clack of the key, I write of his wanderings through the mindscape.  I’m forever the middle-man, the go between, the hoarse, grimy voice of the cover band that, despite an inspired performance, ruins a great song with uninspiring skills.

I’m eyes that see and believe and warm winds that lift and soften and wax wings that just never get close enough to melt.

I’m the story of all, and all that I am isn’t close enough even to be touched by what I see, at least not yet.  I see it, but I can only give you my insular, impish perspective on the whole accord, my story of it, my characterization of it’s people and my dramas set in it’s settings, my fantasies of it’s laying of hands and touching me so that I might learn of it’s touch and collect it’s details for honest recall.

I’ve been told that I love this story, so I’ll keep up my read and recital; my gentle, forgiving trudge through the litter and opened boxes and packing peanuts and blister packs of ideas, my well chaptered and appointed books, bound with leather and pomp, set in such bookshelves of grandeur and importance.

But when I opened the drawer in the hotel, I found a bible there.  Not my petaled words and thorny grins, but something else, a story and book that can sit on any shelf, rest in any pocket, be read by any voice.  Unassuming, but assumed to be present. That’s a moment there, a real present and ‘now.’  That’s one of dozens I’ve seen, but I’ll never know their character well enough to write of them and add them to the story. I can only describe their appearance.

15. Enlightenment

The enlightened possess understanding

So profound they can not be understood.

Because they cannot be understood

I can only describe their appearance:

Cautious as one crossing thin ice,

Undecided as one surrounded by danger,

Modest as one who is a guest,

Unbounded as melting ice,

Genuine as unshaped wood,

Broad as a valley,

Seamless as muddy water.

Who stills the water that the mud may settle,

Who seeks to stop that he may travel on,

Who desires less than what may transpire,

Decays, but will not renew.

15. Enlightenment

The enlightened possess understanding

So profound they can not be understood.

Because they cannot be understood

I can only describe their appearance:

Cautious as one crossing thin ice,

Undecided as one surrounded by danger,

Modest as one who is a guest,

Unbounded as melting ice,

Genuine as unshaped wood,

Broad as a valley,

Seamless as muddy water.

Who stills the water that the mud may settle,

Who seeks to stop that he may travel on,

Who desires less than what may transpire,

Decays, but will not renew.

I love this story – our story, and all it’s subtle whispers into my ear and heart.  How nice to be a character of this world.  How nice to hear the narration.

~ Driz

speechless

the song ~/~ the echo

~ Driz and Veach

abstractions of image and form

Looking through, looking past and into, a sideways glance, a shard and piece of the whole, half of a reflection, a tenth of soul and yet all too much substance, oppressive in her presence and demanding of my lips.

I feel like everything she tells me is a secret she’s decided to share, words I’ve earned, softly spoken, directly to my heart.

Wild acceptance, unending patience, friendly smiles, happy glances and giggles, girlishness and pride in and of it, sensuality of curve and curvature of senses, wild arcs in impossible directions and sly slopes of female in all of her form.

I feel like everything she does she does with grace, moving slowly as the world rips by at fantastic speed, time itself bending to her beauty and being pushed aside to make room for her divine personage.

Generous glee and softhearted insistence, pushing and penitent in her desires and drive; hesitant and anxious, self-conscious and self-conquered; well traveled and static; bright, loving, noble eyes.

I feel like every day starts where our last day ends, and the sun rises and sets with every sweet breath she drinks in.

God help us all if this love ever dies; she’s made with her love this monster, a monk.

And not in final, but with finality, to look upon her is to desire the memory of her the instant you see her; the very second a gaze like mine come to touch on her skin, I should never want of anything else again but to find that soft topaz glow in the darkness behind my eyes… I should become a defender of memory, guarding these precious rocks and ore of the mind, these crystal memories of incalculable value, and whole other storehouses of past trinkets and the unprecious zirconia of other prior recall would be laid out with the trash to make good room and ample space for my new betters.

I am better for keeping my memories of her; all present(s) in her presence should be secondary to a burning and wild need to jealously remember them in the moments we’re apart.  Men like me should see her and live in such unbelief of our fortune in those moments – we should be human enough to fail in our understanding, and find ourselves scrambling about, collecting temporal scraps of proof should any doubt of her and our moments together ever enter our hearts.

But she demands that I feel like she belongs only to me.

I demand then of myself that I rise, and deserve.

So paint her then Veach, if I lend her like this, and my friend… do treat her with a new sort of care.

~ Driz

becoming christian, becoming me

Brush dipped into my deepest of sleeps, I can paint myself quite a dream when this artist finds his artistry.  Her favourite colour is green.  My favourite colour is her.  I’m throwing out my canvas in favour of drowning in paint.

I’m listening to her breath as she sleeps.  I can be hard, and hard of hearing, but I cannot mistake the peaceful winds that carry past those lips and grace my soul with their favour and flavour.  She paints across me in broad, playful strokes with every kind word, she dispels my magic and glamour with every laugh and smile.

She asked me if soulmates exist.  I learn of prayer only by praying to be hers.

I never expected to come through my ordeals unscathed.  I wonder if that’s the nature of war, how the true test of a soldier is knowing when and how to lay down his arms and unclench his fists.  She washes over me with every slumbered sigh, she paints me in emerald and cobalt and rain.  I’m eroded until I’m hers and nothing else.  I’m hers before I’m me, and I love, I swear it, I love who I’ve become.

And this illusion bends so freely, and this dream never creases no matter how I mistreat it in my mind.  This woman can’t seem to find in my hands and my eyes and my voice the same brute and broken soul that my years have seen stomp about dressed in coarse memory and philisophical torment.  Maybe he’s gone.  Maybe that’s why I feel so light and so enlightened.  If you grind a vase to dust, should memory allow, it will remain a vase.

I disperse as dust in her winds!  Sweep me up!

This dream won’t see me wake, because I’m no longer dreaming.  The winds of change escape from each of her satisfied sighs, and I drink them in greedily.

I am madly in love, and my heart cries it’s uncontrollable little heart out at seeing it’s very first realized dream.  I cannot stress the magnitude of my experience enough.  Of my infinite ideas, expressions, words, hopes, needs, loves, whims, screams, demands, pleasures, pains… I’ve finally actually fucking found one honest, pure form in this world, and my poor little heart is hysterical and livid at the very first glance: shocked and horrified at seeing it’s hard earned cynicism and jade trapping stripped away with the gentlest whisk of her fingers; vindicated and justified for seeing it’s unbroken, uncompromising faith culminate in the penitent service to an angel.

And how ironic.  The girl who loves green loves the most jaded man she’d ever find.

For a man who lives only in, only with, only for his dreams: I just cannot; will not describe her beauty.  I’m not up to it.  I can’t deal in figures when all I live for is form, even if I’d only ever seen it in dream.

But I’m awake.  And christ…  I see her now.  I see nothing else whatever.

Sweep me up!

~ Driz

obscenity

My life has been the poem I would have writ,

But I could not both live and utter it.

~ Henry David Thoreau

She told me that she loves me an obscene amount.  I’ve been thinking about this for days now, what that might even begin to mean, to be loved obscenely, what an obscene sort of love might be.

Something described as obscene is excessive to the point of offense to one’s tastes, it’s a little taboo, a little too much, a little too wanton and needing, more than required, more than deserved, but given and taken with abandon in case supply would ever run dry.  It’s a sort of dangerous attachment, a sort of begging trust, a leaning on one another to a too-scary point…  I get this image of two lovers with outstretched arms reaching over a chasm, looking to lock fingers, tipping over, reaching too far, falling…  catching each other, pressing against each other, bridging together, preventing each other’s fall…

And that’s the obscenity and absurdity of it, no?  They can’t let go, or they tumble into the chasm.  They can’t head back, because of the unforgiving pact they had to strike with balance.  It’s obscene in it’s very existance, this tableau, offensive because of it’s dichotomy: dire impracticality of position struck against the happy, satisfied smiles of lovers having finally found their other.

Who are we to smile when so precariously placed?

Who are you to suggest our feet should ever, EVER falter, that our fingers would ever let go?

She is more than I can ever deserve.

Maybe our love is obscene, and maybe it should be, maybe all love that’s real, and honest, needs to be a little obscene to break through the banality and let itself be heard and felt and be real.  I don’t think a lone person can judge the quality of, and label a thing ‘obscenity,’ I think there’s an element of socialization involved – if we are obscene, we are obscene to the world’s tastes.

And that’s a particular set of senses and sensibilities I’m all too happy to offend.

I joked to her that a love like ours gives love back to the gods, that all our happy, silly, impossible smiles and smiling possibilities does generate something, a tangible feeling, presence, aura that keeps us wrapped and enveloped, our message excitable and still undelivered…  and again, how obscene!  All these words, my push and pull and thrust and struggle to explain us, I feel her here beside me, around me…  and when the words bleed off the page, as my mind and eyes wander to her side and to feast on her sides, I want, and I want her obscenely, to peel at her layers and taste of her skin and keep her so offensively close and for so offensively long a time.

Watch me kiss her and see how she’ll shudder at my touch and gentle requests.

Using the male, being female, we enter the world and offend all, blasphemous even to the gods, as they behold a love that they too, lack.

So be offended, you lookers on and onlookers.  Be wildly offended at our love and our needs and our fulsome sensualities, and continue to be offended until you feel enough of a stirring to notice that parched taste in your mouth, that quiet and maddening thirst for an obsession you can rightfully and righteously live for.

Tell me again how obscene we are and will be, when you too find that hunger, when you hunger for another the way my soul screams for her hands and her mouth and her love.

Tell me with a smile how your woman tastes to you, or better, tell her instead, let her know just how you lust and linger over thoughts of her, watch her blush and then kiss the fire off her reddening cheeks.

Be human, be a man, love a woman, and love her obscenely.  Love each other as obscenely as you can.  I implore you, I promise it’s right.

She showed me it’s right.

~ Driz

a failed catharsis

I’ve been stretching farther and farther away from my self, I’m becoming antagonistic, reaching out too far, letting my disharmony ripple and shatter along through everyone and everything I touch.  I feel like what I should be doing is inviting in the quiet, sobering force of my better half, but all I want to do is drive the psychic fist into the psychic earth, and let the shockwave that ensues cackle along and crackle the earth.  I want to feel my toes dig into the dirt, I want to ground myself, and then I want to uproot a fucking mountain, I want to flex and scream into the sky, I want to sear this world with my name and my self and then sign it like a painting I’ve passed my hands over enough times that I can resign myself to it’s countenance.  I want to allow myself to want, to make noise, to ‘be’, and then, to be good enough.

Put better, put into someone else’s words, much better words… “The quest is to be liberated from the negative, which is really our own will to nothingness. And, once having said yes to the instant, the affirmation is contagious. It bursts into a chain of affirmations that knows no limit. To say yes to one instant, is to say yes to all of existence.”

I feel I’m being coerced into to saying ‘yes.’  I feel angry, and I feel stretched thin, and I feel yes, a little indignant, and yes, a little proud, and yes, a little too fucking human.

I’d say I’d rather not sink to that level, but while I’m rathering this or that, I’m drowning in what I’ve sunk to.

Reverting to bad habits when in a deteriorated state is the worst sort of vice.  But perhaps not, too.  Perhaps the gods do as I do, create for ourselves a sort of playground and otherworldly that they can trash and destroy when they too feel trashed and destroyed.  Perhaps the indentation and pressing, depressing idea of gloom and neglect is a sort of divine nudge to remember that whoever we’ve become, no matter how powerful or depraved, we can feel heartache all the same.  But then, maybe fuck that idea too.  I don’t know how to become any more humble, I already championed the cause of my own melancholy, stood up for another against me.  I can’t arrest, try, convinct myself, and *then* be asked to build my own prison too, christ.

Any more humble and I’d have to lie, and given a choice between hubris and dishonesty, well, I can’t choose the latter.

But it’s my honesty that keeps me continuing to drink in and drown out my sad world right now.  I’m too honest to look away from the image burned into my eyes, too honest to ignore or mishear the voice haunting my ears…  and my hands are soft only because I can feel your skin upon them.  My heart stays warm because I know you’re still beside it.

I can still feel you there.

Hope is the medicine that will cure me or kill me, but I’m wracked with fear.  I don’t think my heart is going to break over this one; I think it’s finally become ready to learn what love might actually cost.  I just didn’t realize that my heart’s decision to wait for her would see the demons come after my mind instead.

~ Driz

polo

Shuffling papers around on my desk, I found some chickenscratch I wrote one night:

Does the paper beg for the ink?  Our ears, beg for a music worth hearing?

We live to be impressed and impressed upon.

I wonder if it makes any sense.  Are we lovers, first and foremost?  Appreciators?  Evaluators?  I’d suggest we’re designers, but maybe that’s too proud, maybe I have to take another look at that.

Maybe the process of design is an unconscious one.  Perhaps, in our hearts, we have (unbeknownst)  drawn up and worked through, blueprinted and printed out, the square holes, as it were…  and we spend what little time we have in life chasing down the square pegs to fit them.

Perhaps we are not the artists, maybe we don’t have the pens.  Maybe we are the echoes, maybe we are the resonance and the audience of the world, and we are dull, unlit, un-cast..  because we are the un-ready for the play and fancy of life.

Maybe we are the actors, living in constant audition… and not the makers of the script.

And why not?  We spend an awful lot of time asking that age old question, Who am I?  Trying to find ourselves, discover ourselves.  Maybe this is just a prolonged, deranged game of marco polo, and we wander around, in and into darkness, looking for our place in the forest and our part to play?

It suits me fine to think of this, because it seems to be one of my thoughts.

And yet, with all the souls and hearts and minds of this world wandering about, the lonely crowd, faceless until painted upon…  I sit silent, I knelt, and I waited.

And without a word, or a call, or a wonder, or a while, when I opened my eyes, so did she.  And we are nose to nose, heartbeat to heartbeat, sitting in the rain… and I kiss the rainwater off her lips, as I intend to continue to do for as long as she’ll let me.

And now I know who I am, and who I intend to be.

Can we have an echo if we’ve never bothered to speak?

I think learning to share our silence is the true face of love.

~ Driz

somfort me

This entry is, and must be, about is how I felt this early afternoon, because today I had an experience that everyone would do well to suffer through at least once in their lives.

I had a secret, and it was a good one, one of those really good, juicy secrets that change everything once they get out.  And I’m a good keeper of secrets, I’m an amazing liar, a re-director, a mis-director.  I can hide your secrets where no one can find them, deep inside me, hidden even from myself, from my own memory of hearing them in the first place.

The best lies, the most perfect lies, are in themselves a form of truth, in that you must convince yourself you believe them before you ever begin to tell them.  If I want to lie to you about even the simplest thing, say perhaps I decide to lie to you about whether I bought a lottery ticket today, the process is enormous.

You must imagine the lottery itself, know the payout for the week.  You have to decide where you bought the ticket, and what you spent on it, and how many tickets you bought.  What was the weather like?  Were there other people in the store?  Perhaps a mom and her two kids, maybe a teenager listening to an ipod.  Maybe there was a lineup, maybe the cash register was down at the moment.  Maybe this, maybe that.  Maybe anything.  But you’ve got to choose, got to be fluid with it; every question needs an answer, every angle needs to be explored, dreamed up, and you’ve got to step into this world you design with ease and comfortability.

That way, if asked if you’ve bought a lottery ticket, you can answer, simply, ‘Yup, got one earlier,’ and that line, that lie, the misdirection and falsification, the story, the kid with the ipod, it’s all there, it happened…  you just told the truth, an indifferent truth, about an entirely fabricated scenario.  These are the best, most powerful lies.

What defense does your victim have against such deception?  So far removed from the fight would they be, they are engaged and beaten before they knew what had happened, and they would be worked, and compelled, into the reality set before them.

But, I wander.  My point.

I wrote once, somewhere in here, that I suspected myself of sabotage.  It’s not unheard of.  If I feel a thing, or think a thing, that on one level or another I disapprove of, I’ve developed a pestering reflex to simply bury it.  Put differently, I lie to myself about it’s existance, a graceful, flawless lie of omission, and a happy excuse switched into it’s place with the slightest of sleight of hand.

But today..  today I was ambushed.  Today, that secret that I thought I had so well hidden away and camouflaged, it stole away from my heart and ran free, ran well away from my chains I’d shackled it up in, and it chased her down… and told her all about it.

And I could do nothing but watch.  It was as if I’d practiced for a lifetime to walk proudly into battle with a thing, and upon rounding to corner to the arena, I just dropped the sword and shield and fell prone and cried.

I watched as the words bubbled up out of me, were stolen from my mouth.  Nietzsche tells us our conscience will kiss us as it bites; and my, what a kiss…  I was helpless, bound by my own good sense, and I said a thing that while I will tell you I never should have said…  if I had waited one fucking moment longer, the stress of it all would have killed me.

You think you can prepare yourself for a thing, understand it to be a test of endurance, a patience, a long haul…  and with a grim jaw and a steady hand you turn to face it.

But the really beautiful things in this world will take you straight to a knee, and bend you to their will, and you will learn that there are bigger things than our precious choices and decisions and wills and needs and wants, and these beautiful moments will have our way with us as they please.

And in the face of it all, I said:  “I love you.”

I will never take those words back, even if by some magic and phantom’s blessing, I were able to.  There was nothing more *right* to say at the time.

Everyone should be allowed their secrets; but some secrets are not ours to keep.

~ Driz