MERCURIAL...

Ever changing, fluid, mercurial…
Taking every form, every cast ,every mould put forth.
Ever changing, yet cast in bronze in judgmental eyes.
Ever fluid, yet frozen in stereotypical roles in rigid minds.
Ever mercurial, yet confirming to every single rule of this obtruse game.
Obediently rebellious, religiously liberal.
Has ever a fabrication of someone's imagination been so solid, so earthly, so there?
I believe I am everything… And yet nothing

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

I don’t know how exactly I lost it.
They divide life into compartments those fools.
Thinking they’d better utilize it.
Seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years…
Time is a meaningless measure of life.
And life is a meaningless span of time.
Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.
Dumb! Dumb! Dumb! Dumb!

I don’t know how exactly I lost it.
Violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red…
All merge into the same white light.
Happiness, doubts, joy, pain, peace, regrets…
All merge into the same empty void.
It’s so hard to differentiate.
When they are just the opposite sides of the same coin.
They try to separate one part of the spectrum from another, those fools.
It is the light which creates shadows.
Not the other way around.

I don’t know how exactly I lost it.
Conquer the world. Make your mark.
Justify your existence. Choose a path.
Run. Run. Run. Run.
There must be someplace to go.
And what if I make it?
And what if I don’t?
And what if I try?
And what if I won’t?
But what if it’s a circle stupid?

There was a tight cord once in my head.
And I could only take so much.
I don’t know how exactly I lost it.
I just heard a snap…
And then everything made sense.

INSIGHT

Imagine a wide, sleek, black window…
A window of the finest dark glass you’ve ever seen.
It’s placed in one of those scary, magnificent buildings.
Abode of the privileged.
Places where gifted minds live.
They live in a closed cubicle.
A high closed cubicle.
Height is always a vantage point for the gifted.
It gives them power, prestige and of course the view…
It widens their field of vision.
Enables them to inspect far and wide.
They see so much and yet nothing.
From up there everything appears so minute.
Little houses, little streets, little cars, little people… little inconsequential entities.
The lights appear so bright and many.
Patches of shadow in between can be easily ignored.
They imagine in their closed prisons, they know all.
And they are happy with their knowledge.
The ones outside imagine that they in fact do know all.
And they are happy with their knowledge.
I stand behind such a window right now.
I see a flourishing, bustling city beneath me.
Writhing and almost overflowing with life.
So what if I miss the diseased centers.
Unseen plagues spread far and wide.
So what if I miss the misery and the mirth.
The ecstasy and the exile…too bad.
To my right lies a cold crumbling graveyard.
I see it in the center of those blinking lights.
Death and life reconciled??
I am happy.
Yet there is something which disturbs me.
It’s right beneath my nose, an inch from my mind.
Yet I cannot grasp it.
It’s my silhouette in the glass.
And within it I can see the graveyard.
The real graveyard.
Cold and crumbling…

BLEEDING

Many decades have passed.
Long years stretching into nothingness.
Ancient, wearied, eroded.
Tired eyes keeping a silent vigil.
Seeing all and believing nothing.
Beautifully allusive cascading colors,
Darkness sullen, submerging, silent.
Angels bent on drawing blood.
Demons, damned, disgraced, delightful.
Affection, a hollow tag.
Hatred, simple, solid, surrounding.
Happiness, a fleeting diversion.
Pain, reckless, rampant, reliable.
Success, limited to one.
Failure, present, popular, patriotic.
Tired eyes keeping a silent vigil.
Seeing all and understanding nothing.
Ancient, wearied, eroded.
And yet my journey has just begun.
With a face young, smooth, pristine.
And a soul aged, scarred, bleeding.

LOST IN THE CHAOS

Voices are always distasteful.
Noise, the endless bludgeoning noise despicable.
Useless chatter irritates.
Like the meaningless clanking of empty pots and pans.
The commotion caused disturbs.
But more irking is the randomness.
The lack of order, meaning or purpose behind it.
A kind of madness is its cause.
A psychotic need to kill the silence, fill the emptiness.
Instead, it blurs the pattern so tediously detected.
Obscures the design which justifies all,
The pain, the frivolity, the suffering.
The ensuing discontent builds up.
Little by little, bit by bit.
Until an avalanche of incessant sounds overwhelms the mind.
The same loud, boisterous noise that signifies life,
Upsets the balance, blurs the truth and overshadows the self.
Only chaos survives then.
Eternally disturbing chaos.

A RESOUNDING LIE

The fiber of existence is wound around a lie.

The world that we built is a lie.
But then so is my peace with it.

The pretty things I own are a lie.
But then so is my compulsion for them.

The dreams that I lost were a lie.
But then so was my desire for them.

The affection I receive is a lie.
But then so is my joy in it.

The truths that you swear are a lie.
But then so are my confessions.

The tears that you cry are a lie.
But then so is the smile that I fake.

Your love for me is a lie.
But then so is my belief in it.

The life that I live is a lie.
But then again I do not really live, do I?

HAUNTED

They haunt me. The dead.
The first realization of betrayal.
Pained eyes. Harsh words.
The burden of relationships gone sour.
Gaping doubts. Unvoiced fears.
Hidden contours of familiar faces.
Deceiving masks. Appalling deceit.
Vague shadows of unknown places.
Crushing defeats. Shattered dreams.
A feeling of infinite loss.
Inexplicable pain. Lame excuses.
Darkness following darkness.
Shadows obscuring shadows.
Monsters gnawing in my mind.
Nagging reminders of doom.
I buried them in the past.
But I can still hear their resounding cry.
Strange ghosts determined to last.
They just refuse to die.
They haunt me. The dead.

THE THIN RED LINE

Re-examine your happiness.
Weave through your pain.
Explore the joy you say you feel.
Scrutinize the misery you say you suffer.
Savor your tears.
Swallow your laughter.
Encounter your most vicious fears.
Endure your most fancied wishes.
Face the stifling darkness.
Brave the blinding light.
Apprehend the turmoil of hope.
Appreciate the tranquility of gloom.
Feel the wrongness of the right.
Try the rightness of the wrong.
Reach the apex of an abyss.
Discover the chasm in the heights.
Witness life.
Live death.
Do you observe any distinct difference?
Do you belief in a firm divide?
Opposites merge into one another like so many colors.
Like dirt mixed with water.
Like black mixed with white.
From tears to laughter.
From joy to pain.
From ignorance to understanding.
From life to death.
You never know, you never realize.
When you transcend the boundaries.
And cross the thin red line.

TO BE OR NOT TO BE…

I am living a dream.
No, it is not a beautiful illusion.
Nor is it a horrific nightmare.
Nothing as unusual or as extreme.
It is just an unreal dream.
People are mere phantoms of their real selves.
Events are vague shadows in a remote part of my mind.
Circumstances do not seem aggravating anymore.
Results do not matter.
And when I cry, it’s like someone’s crying far away.
And when I laugh, the laughter’s hollow.
Emotions do not touch me anymore.
Happiness, grief, joy, pain all seem a mockery.
Everything filters through a haze.
The worlds but a confused maze.
Don’t know why comes distress or death.
I remain strangely detached.
I hear but I do not listen.
I look but I do not see.
It’s as if I am forever deciding.
To be or not to be.

USELESS

I have washed my hands off life.
Every cloud has a silver lining they say.
After every dark night there rises a day.
So I tried molding my life into an appropriate form.
To shape it into a commendable norm.
I twisted it and turned it and twined and bent.
I curved and bowed and warped and flexed.
I labored and toiled and drudged and sweat.
I huffed and puffed and cursed and regret.
But all that proved to be quite inept.
Because like an elastic band with a mean disposition.
My life always snapped right back to it’s useless condition.

THE COURAGE TO LIVE

Life is a drug. And he’s addicted.
In fact there is only one real difference between life and cocaine.
Instead of pure pleasure, it inflicts intense pain.
And he finally finds himself at a dead end.
Staring below at the violent sea’s strength.
Marveling at the dark foamy chaos.
He tried to make sense of life, tried to find a cause.
Finally, he took a deep breath closed his eyes prayed.
And then threw himself into an endless gray.
At first he swam with a frantic vigor trying to survive.
Thinking that he was in control of his life.
He considered himself the master of his own destiny.
A free man in a free territory.
But in truth he was bound by social, cultural and political ploys.
Tossed by the current like a toy.
Then too soon, he realized, there was no shore, it was all a lie.
He stood aside and watched his soul die.
And of course, as the story goes, by then it was too late.
The drug was wearing off, leaving him weak and desolate.
Death descended like a dark cover.
He gave in peacefully. Game over.
And so a living breathing man was reduced to a buried memory.
His name a recorded number in history.
Legend says he had a strange mind.
He wrote a will with just two lines.
Give my body to life as a gift.
And ask it whether it has the courage to live…

AN EMPTY VOID

Searching through:

Times immemorial.
Ages of ignorance.
Years of sorrow.
Moments of contentment.
Instants of disaster.
In the end, nothing.

Searching through:

Deep dense darkness.
White blinding light.
Scalding hot lava in the core of the earth.
Miles of empty space above the vast skies.
In the end, nothing.

Searching through:

Inhuman cries of defeat.
Joyful shouts of victory.
Decades of bloody revolutions.
Proud declarations of history.
In the end, nothing.

Searching through:

Powerful, primitive spells and chants.
Advancement of modern technology.
Mysteries, riddles, paradoxes and plans.
Piles of forgotten progeny.
In the end, nothing.

Searching through:

Millions of years of events all in a stride.
In the end, an empty void.
Every second bears unrest anew.
Don’t know what we are searching for.
But the search continues…

Toward a Topography of the Parallel Universe

People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well. I can't answer the real question. All I can tell them is, It's easy.

And it is easy to slip into a parallel universe. There are so many of them: worlds of the insane, the criminal, the crippled, the dying, perhaps of the dead as well. These worlds exist alongside this world and resemble it, but are not in it.

My roommate Georgina came in swiftly and totally, during her junior year at Vassar. She was in a theater watching a movie when a tidal wave of blackness broke over her head. The entire world was obliterated - for a few minutes. She knew she had gone crazy. She looked around the theater to see if it had happened to everyone, but all the other people were engrossed in the movie. She rushed out, because the darkness in the theater was too much when combined with the darkness in her head.

And after that? I asked her.

A lot of darkness, she said.

But most people pass over incrementally, making a series of perforations in the membrane between here and there until an opening exists. And who can resist an opening? In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended. What goes up does not necessarily come down. A body at rest does not tend to stay at rest, and not every action can be counted on to provoke an equal and opposite reaction. Time, too, is different. It may run in circles, flow backward, skip about from now to then. The very arrangement of molecules is fluid: Tables can be clocks; faces, flowers.

These are facts you find out later, though.

Another odd feature of the parallel universe is that although it is invisible from this side, once you are in it you can easily see the world you came from. Sometimes the world you came from looks huge and menacing, quivering like a vast pile of jelly; at other times it is miniaturized and alluring, aspin and shining in its orbit. Either way, it can't be discounted.

Every window on Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.

-Susanna Kaysen, Girl Interrupted.