This is the way things went. But not according to God.

            Their mercy had just run out and soon they were stomping the breath out of their own shadows.  The shadows of their parents and their children and their homes where once their plumbing was not rusted and clean water poured from their faucets.  With every blow to their shadows, several days were erased from a bothersome recording.

            “STOP FOLLOWING ME, YOU FUCKER.”

            They consider themselves defined by their pulse, their ancestor’s echo that is constantly fading, constantly retreating into the Big Nothing. To sustain it, they all act as giant vocal chords for the universe, turning the Big Something’s chaotic molecules into concrete, physical vibrations that make sounds and declarations and wars and love.  Long, sticky, fleshy pink columns of Human, infesting the planet, lost and wandering, settled and stabilized, like phlegm in the lungs of a coughing giant.

            “What I do is me. For that I came!”

            They possess only rust and know not when this possession began. Sometime before yesterday.

            “Something becomes nothing when you consider everything else.”

            There is a girl sitting on a bench in the park.  She is staring at a tree.  She realizes the vast number of branches on the tree.  It confounds her.  The branches seem infinitely intricate and complex.  A system, an arrangement that her brain can never comprehend.  Their coordinates written in a strange language forged in eons of prehistory.  Each branch giving birth to a smaller branch; the girl imagines that this creation of branches cannot end with just the branches that the eye can see, and that we are all being suffocated by tiny, invisible branches, that creep into our orifices.  These wooden fractals explore our inner vastness, learning, knowing us better than anything else.  The girls sits there breathing in the tree, letting it enter her, letting it know her, even though she still cannot comprehend it and it’s branches. She desperately wants to understand it, believing it to hold something that may complete her.  Just when she is about to surrender her efforts, a single bird lands on one of the branches and suddenly the meaning of that branch becomes apparent and true.  Every detail of that branch has meaning and reason and justification because of this bird.  The girl realizes that if this can be true of one branch, then it can be true of all of them.

            I don’t want the night to endand

            something inside is the sky

            and everything

                                         and nothing

            and togetherwe

                                         make it real.

the cigarette is all burned up

it's come to an end

i know if there were more

i'd get sick

but i'm still sad that it's over.

more Miller

setting: the narrator and his friend have picked up a hooker for fifteen francs and she asks for a piece of bread...

"How the hell can you get up any passion when you've got a starving cunt on your hands?"

Precisely! We haven't any passion either of us. And as for her, one might as well expect her to produce a diamond necklace as to show a spark of passion. But there's the fifteen francs and something has to be done about it. It's like a state of war: the moment the condition is precipitated nobody thinks about anything but peace, about getting it over with. And yet nobody has the courage to lay down his arms, to say, "I'm fed up with it... I'm through." No, there's fifteen francs somewhere, which nobody gives a damn about any more and which nobody is going to get in the end anyhow, but the fifteen francs is like the primal cause of things and rather than listen to one's own voice, rather than walk out on the primal cause, one surrenders to the situation, one goes on butchering and butchering and the more cowardly one feels the more heroically does he behave, until a day when the bottom drops out and suddenly all the guns are silenced and the stretcher-bearers pick up the maimed and bleeding heroes and pin medals on their chest. Then one has the rest of his life to think about the fifteen francs. One hasn't any eyes or arms or legs, but he has the consolation of dreaming for the rest of his days about the fifteen francs everybody has forgotten.

...There are some of us who don't live in the moment, who live a little ahead, or a little behind. My mind is on the peace treaty all the time. I can't forget that it was the fifteen francs which started all the trouble. Fifteen francs! What does fifteen francs mean to me, particularly since it's not my fifteen francs?

...A man can get to love shit if his livelihood depends on it, if his happiness is involved."

our culture has decided that if you are having your picture taken

then you are someone

hence, all of these websites filled with

hipsters and scenesters and clubbers taking pictures of each other.

blatant vanity.

self-worship and preservation.

you can't embrace yourself until you embrace your inner no-one.

embrace your inner no-one.

be something for yourself.

The Wasteland

eliot's poem-masterpiece

it's said that The Wasteland is the poem that changed the way people saw poetry.

people began to see poetry as difficult.

and yeah, it's a fucking difficult poem.

it started this bullshit way of looking at poetry as an academic endeavour.

you have to study shakespeare, greek literature, the bible, Dante, Aquinas... blahdy blah etc

just to be able to understand what eliot is getting at.

but poetry is for the people, right? it comes from somewhere pure and simple

distilled life

little crystals of meaning and "truth" and beauty and ugliness and pain

no ACADEMIA

so fuck eliot right?

no, fuck YOU

i hate that argument.

why shouldn't eliot be able to do this?

it's just as valid as any other poem.

sure, overall it might've had a negative effect on the way people look at poetry.

eliot didn't set out to make poetry some elitist, academic bullshit.

all eliot was doing was sitting down to write a fucking good poem.

and he did.

how he did so and who is able to understand it and what it did is secondary

to his inspiration and desire to just write a poem.

can we really hold people responsible for the effects their accomplishments have on the world when the world is so fucked up and unable to handle things?

we must never fear putting things out into the world, no matter how ruined they will eventually become.

because that disaster, that evolution of meaning and perspective becomes a part of the poem itself.

nothing is ever done.

casualties

the cigarette in my hand

the whiskey in my other

and the black widow on 

the bottom of my shoe

and the girl with

dangerous diamonds

in her smile

all gone.

the Dodos wrote a song and it was one of those strange moments of significance where you realize you're not alone. 

"Winter"

Don't know if I'll make it through this winter without you by my side
I waited for you so long while I traveled far and wide
Convinced myself there's no one better, so how can I deny
Your love, it's like a thorn into my side

My friends they understand me better but don't whisper goodnight
I want a lover and a sister, but we know that's not right
You used to listen to my music, I always wondered why
I wish I could pretend you make me try

I want the days to come, I want these sleepless nights to end
I lie here thinking how I lost you to all your stupid friends
You made me feel so foolish for the twenty-second time
Your love might be the last time that I try

Don't know if I'll make it through this winter without you on my own
I waited here for you forever, I can't believe you'd go
I may not have the answers, but I'd rather never know
Your love was such a heavy, heavy blow

Goodnight my love, you seemed so nice 'til I knew you better
Now I can tell you're always thinking twice about what might be better
On the outside, there's no conscience, you're a victim of your cautiousness
You don't try, you just lie there hoping that someone will come to make it right

i relate with exactly 100% of this video:

fuck yes.

"More than sixty years ago, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac sat down in New York City to write a novel about the summer of 1944, when one of their friends killed another in a moment of brutal and tragic bloodshed. The two authors were then at the dawn of their careers, having yet to write anything of note. Alternating chapters and narrators, Burroughs and Kerouac pieced together a hard-boiled tale of bohemian New York during World War II, full of drugs and obsession, art and violence. The manuscript, called And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks after a line from a news story about a fire at a circus, was submitted to publishers but rejected and confined to a filing cabinet for decades. This legendary collaboration between two of the twentieth centuries most influential writers is set to be published for the first time in the fall of 2008. A remarkable, fascinating piece of American literary history, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks is also an engrossing, atmospheric novel that brings to life a shocking murder at the dawn of the Beat Generation."

national - forever after days

on my feet i stand tonight, stand and step up to the line
an extraordinary man unbroken in a breaking life

forever after days, stand and make myself a crown
to the table i step alone, hold my own above the ground
take my shot under the light, heroes come the common way
pull myself into the sky, wrap me in the banner i made

on my feet i stand tonight, stand alone inside the air
an extraordinary man, everything stops and holds me there

forever after days, stand and make myself a crown
to the table i step alone, hold my own above the ground
take my shot under the light, heroes come the common way
pull myself into the sky, wrap me in the banner i made

also, this is awesome:

he won't fuck us over.

NATIONAL INSIDE JOKES. NICE.

slowly inching my way towards being happy and normal. it has its ups and downs (lots and lots of downs) but i'm definitely better than i was.

the lamest part is feeling so alone. i haven't been alone for 2.5 years. so it's just a really lonely, crappy feeling. hopefully i can adjust. or maybe if i meet someone i won't have to. we'll see. i'm going in to see my psychologist. she can usually speed up the recovery process.

a positive is i've started exercising. three days strong. 1-2 miles on the treadmill, sit ups, weights. the works. it's nice. i feel more healthy and the guilt of not exercising no longer hangs over me. it's not that hard.

latin is lame, but i should make it.

i'm stinky and gross from the treadmill. time for a shower.

let's start off here where we left off there.

more Miller;please read

"The state of tension was so finely drawn now that the introduction of a single foreign particle, even a microscopic particle, as I say, would have shattered everything. For the fraction of a second, perhaps I experienced that utter clarity which the epileptic, it is said, is given to know. In that moment I lost completely the illusion of time and space: the world unfurled it's drama simultaneously along a meridian which had no axis. In this sort of hair-trigger eternity I felt that everything was justified, supremely justified; I felt the wars inside me that had left behind this pulp and wrack; I felt the crimes that were seething here to emerge tomorrow in blatant screamers; I felt the misery that was grinding itself out with pestle and mortar, the long dull misery that dribbles away in dirty handkerchiefs. On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama...

... the monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured- disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui- in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable."

new journal

hey guys. it's jake. got a new journal up here on blogger. xanga doesn't allow italics. fuck that noise.