This one is for my fellow Essex writers

We came together a long time ago,
but I can still smell coffee in the air,
hear your chanting laugh,
feel your burning eyes looking a me.

We were there from the start but many joined us,
performing their poems,
sunset behind their back,
standing in the middle of a stairway.

We wrote those words,
in the intimacy of our bedrooms,
at the mercy of the wind in parks,
by the sea hypnotized by rolling waves.

We gave ourselves to the words,
asking nothing in return,
but one perfect transcending verse,
that would change everything.

We devoted our nights to our muses,
our pencils loving them,
bringing them to life,
or burying them alive.

We fought our darkest demons,
danced with the devil,
but always went to bed alone,
writing not to get lost.

We walked side by side,
not necessarily knowing each other,
but bound by the unspoken promesse,
never to judge or reject.

We butchered poetry more than once,
tried too hard or too little,
so sure about who we were,
so desperate to be someone.

We grew older and life pulled us apart,
but we are the Essex writers circle,
and we have a book motherfuckers.
Thank you Ossídio Gaspar.

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Starry Night

1

This night is just a scenario painted in dark blue,

where my wishes are disposed in an arbitrary order

shaped by the impulse of my desire

of having on each star a reason for hope,

a motivation to avoid the absolute absence of longing.

2

Which plans rule the movement of the stars?

we receive only a miraculous testimony

of their past existence,

weakly understood by the astronomic wisdoms,

successfully backed up on the encrypted speckles

of the jaguar skin.

As I remain an illiterate about those secrets,

they are carefully entangled in the stellar map,

they are patiently ordered by the cosmic grammar

too far away to my little scope and my lack of sapience,

I just attempt to be aware of their subtle presence.

3

Which rules govern your glances?

I receive your light as a miraculous prophecy,

about our future existence,

I try in vain to decode the message of your smile

hardly hidden by your recurring disdain

once there is no night.

4

I get back to my own seclusion

enclosed into the religion

of useless algorithms and absurd equations.

The make-ing of feeling.

Feeling the assumpitive gift of my first pace, second accented, zoologies.

Clouded judgement when chimney sweeping might not be the appropriate metaphor for the possible clarification of the head.

Source mysteries.

I subscribe only to certain guilt complexes.

Recognition resources.

I am made to feel only after bedtime, post-rest analysis, when the silence of the body re-turns the pre-set frame-work of every-thing’s under the sur-face experience. Nothing unsettles the rhythm of silence like heart beats and lungs filling and emptying.

My goal in life is to build a language using solely post-phantastic metaphor.

The sur-prise-ing few. A new zoological narrative. To see the future in the dis-order, and not make of it a memory of a possible self-history.

The determined experience of life’s goal to goal, mouth-to-mouth, access of the gap. A hole in the floor is sealed with a map of the terrain. Unfortunately, the air is not speech-proof.

Everything about my day to day can be characterised as an attempt to relieve myself from every suspension of the relief happening as a result of every promise of relief. Pleasure, for me, would be, the shortest cut to self-addressing.

I am sexual irresponsibility to the instinct.

I can re-mind of everything there is not, in the presumption that disappears unharmed in the phenomenology of my trace.

Zoology: upon me is farmed a series of instincts.

Animal farming: imitative structure. But what is this distinguished willingness to avoid the imitation, and to insult even its possibility by calling it imitation?

The consciousness of my drive-ing is always already split; in two courses, to sex and not to sex. It should be said that my consciousness, as of the moment in which it has been given the time to give itself out, is already the manifest divorce of my entwinement with a precursory homology of the basics.

This text is the dead-end of a suspended relief; the impressionistic dis-course conformed to the suspension of certain beliefs.

Splintered sleep. Splintered resting. For which extreme of willing or resistance do I take this time to subdue the significance of? Against what basis of the basic or the non-basic does a fulfilment in me achieve its statehood? Questions that suddenly sound full of resistance, once again.

I have nothing behind me: everything that was there has now eroded in the circumstance of time-being. The structure of what was a time that had been time. The question that was there to answer the mediating re-courses of “what next?”

Expiry date for the structure: two years from the date of departing the source of its construction. Two years away from the source. Deep valuations only instruct so long after a last laying.

The basis for this constant self-replacement is post-structural. Now every arousal is a wall.

More of the same being more of that being never again.

I cannot get away from stupid truths.

My relation to my will is not a healthy one. My will’s relation to the world is not a healthy one.

Every treatment is its own treatise on human nature.

The objectivist ethics: of world poverty: cancels the validity of my struggle. The violence of lifelessness in life counteracts the life of my lifelessness. This is the impossible against which I cannot transcend, the demand that commands me to be unhappy with the weakness of my unhappiness. This source unwrites me.

My existence is a death to existing. I cannot ignore and accede, nor can I know and proceed.

What I really want is not really for me to say. As always, I have only ever heard myself speak, this voice in all its honesty has no final say in everything I have said finally.

I have the body of an animal; it is my sur-face.

And the face of an idiot; it is my reason.

The zoo of my mind is themed with a circuitry of resistances that in their most symptomatic configure the ideology of Self-hatred.

Self-ish-ness

I

No more in-sights. The project of the self is failing.
I was a face, on the surface of things, always, anyway.
The vision is dead. This death hath made it clearer.
Symptoms of a headache – now painfully understood.

II

For those heads looking over, creamy in the swell of desire
I stood in myself, seeking in me the merits for this attention
From a pause to another gaze, my question to their remark,
My labour studying itself for what it might portend for me
Which is for me the labour of myself, what I am looking for.

I would flatter myself thinking that someone would think of me
The same way in which I should think of my most flattered self
And I would be flattered and inspired and consoled in my labour
Thinking that the head of another would see this deep flattery
And be compelled by its depth and want it too as I have sought it.

But it seems there was in fact no drift, no deeper inflammation
Than the look I was stood in, given to nothing, not even to them
For this look I was then stood in I have not the face anymore
Nor the head looking over whilst I have kept the labour intact
Except for the surface damage that has devolved the self-flattery.

III

Against the formative belief in the honest question of my being:
The height of my presence was nothing but socialised indifference,
I was a part in the normative performance – nothing was subverted
It was hope that made it look otherwise, hope from its affirmation
Nothing but the summer appearance of my pretty boy face.

My head is now in autumn: back to working in the shade again
My body a broken tree, rooted to the space that once held it, too
I straighten my back, look about me, all is settled for the season
I must have missed a day or two – making use of the weak light
My point of view is the only one still searching the distance.

Against Survival (Kingdom I)

To build a pyramid, I lay my thoughts down in layers rising from best to worst. Every superior level sits on a slightly wider accumulation of better qualities. At the apex, no one would want to meet me. I rarely contact myself at such mystical heights.

A few years ago, I was accused of being a labyrinthine writer. Indeed, the signs I compose with may be amazing. But I cannot altogether be sure of the specific text where this entrance into the maze was actually begun and of the one within which the exit was so artificially undisclosed or omitted. If I am the author of mazes, then from what elaborate and intricate structures do my thoughts come?

Anti-civilising reconstructions of the disorder of appearances: this is something I would write, as I have, just now, about writing just now. The city is a formula, an incomplete vision of what it means to not be able to see fully. The State is a suggestion in the appearances about appearance itself.

A few years later, I would ask how many more of these appearances about appearance could there be? This is a possibility in our possible world of possibilities. I am not the sort of writer that one would seek to ask the political questions.

I was born into the luxury of thought. My head towers above starvation in ivory dreams and silver-plated platitudes. The action in the space of my questions is safely uneventful: I do not compromise the status of this providential inheritance.

I play with the idea of history, as I turn the idea of history into a play, playing for the history of an idea, and idealise the history of a play, instead.

I was not born to answer the question of premature death. My question is death itself – which is always already a question possible only from the mouth of a survivor. This body that carries me is coloured by uninterrupted satiation.

There is nothing in my survival to suggest that I have deserved to survive; it has also taught me nothing about what survival may be nor has it learned from itself the instruction for its technical transference to others who have not been afforded the same automatic means to this sort of existential peace.

In all honesty (honesty: an astral obligation), the only suffering I have ever had to endure is that of the headache: the occasional blockage to unlimited thinking. A luxurious pain, no doubt. A privation which is not really a privation at all, but always again the golden sign of a capacity to suffer so derivatively of the significance of pure suffering.

My life is pathetic: emotion upon emotion since there is no fight and I fight for no one. And, from time to time, to actually dramatize the monotony of this embedded tranquillity, I contemplate suicide. The theatre is perfect, because I have the intellectual accompaniment of thoughts pushing me to the edge.

But I always remain on the stage, subsequently performing the return from the “abyss” as much as I had narrated my non-movement up to it. The whole state of my mind is a spectacle. The political must wait for its turn to appear on this stage likewise: directed by the same meaningless interests of my thoughtful questions.

I keep the factory of control from regarding itself by voluntarily playing with the significance of such a thing. Or I keep the synthesis of control from over-playing the sign of the factory of significance. My thoughts are the dishonesty of survival.

Very little action associated with the head of the fully-formed pyramid. Still, all questions about not-being. A head-ache comprehends the full void of being able to think.

The whole headache

I accuse the voice in my head

Shadow narratives

The peripheral phenomena written on the outskirts of the main focus

The future of a lie

Articulation on secondary terms, third moments of a thoughtful synthesis

Left-over qualities of the coerced world of the becoming

Where you appear, as I learn to tell you accordingly

Made up of inattentions

And put together through the discreet functions of the knowledge phases.

 

Ask me to repeat the Intention and I swear it is not originally mine

In my first thoughts the belief is that this is just as much of you.

 

My inner story is mostly a distraction from the whole of what I do

Thus I fail to acknowledge the whole of my influence in what has been done

I am further than the truth of my primary interests

Thus I am also the lies in which they orbit –

And only in my failure may I acknowledge this

 

A barely audible translation improvises the immediate faces of the unanswered questions

Borrowed from the people who mask my surroundings

Where you have been discovered

Every time

Holding the edge of the inquiry against its own limit

Keeping it from being lost in the wilderness of unlimited difference

And beginning to love it

To care for it

To be there for it.

 

Shadow personalities being exchanged so purposefully

The external presence of the voice of the voice in my head

The necessary text is formulated in all the available silence

In the blank background of the fight of contradicting neutralities;

To understand that everything is in place I must not know any of it all that well

I must be played along the dead history of the projected priorities

And the historicising re-presentation of the limits of my beginning

Will sound like the perfect place for me to start again.

 

I accuse this voice for the way it breaks me from the signs of this world.

I accuse this voice for the phenomena it overtakes and overwrites.

I accuse this voice for believing in you.

Because I have now been accused of love

As well as writing.

 

Loss of Vision

I was going to stare at this page until my eyes bled.

And with a desperate impatience, I was about to stab my eyes to expedite that moment.

But I chose to do the disappointing thing, and write about not writing.

What is now even more insulting about this fiction: two fully functioning eyes behold my documented failure with uninhibited clarity.

I wish I still knew writing like I used to before I got this far. I possibly wrote myself up to this point.

There was an excitement about getting here. Because it was an excitement about getting far beyond here, at the same time.

This was supposed to be a moment on the way to being on the way to somewhere. I was not supposed to be interrupted by the end so prematurely.

Somewhere should not have been here. If it were here, I would never have bothered, or I would not have bothered with the excitement.

But to say something of the ontological problem of excitement: it is transitionally necessary. And transitional necessity is profound displacement: from which the limits of being end and begin again.

And my philosophy is weak and always disintegrating along the route to its conclusions. It transits from one premise to the next as short-sightedly as it describes the life it proclaims philosophically.

I cannot write the affirmative, because I do not believe in the affirmation of writing.

Writing reminds me too much of this struggle between me and anything else.

Writing is the cancelation of writing anything else.

I do not have to feel sorry for myself. I have unconsciously learnt to express self-pity through others whom I believe resemble my limits in their ways. Others who in suffering betray signs I can hijack. I do not affirm these poor souls; I approximate them beyond their imminence. I try to justify myself through them and in their thankful kindness they justify themselves through me.

I romanticise but I cannot make love. I idealise but I cannot make grand.

My aesthetics are prosthetics. Replacements for a consistent attribution of values. I adjectivise inconsequentially.

I actually hate myself because I cannot meet the person I would like to be. And still I have no idea who that excellent person is. And I hope he hates himself just as much.

I hope that what I fail to do fails itself in doing whatever next it might aim for through its more enlightened vision of being. I hope that the disappointment produced in me holds some synchronic resonance within all fields and all enlightenments. Even if such a thing lowers the position of the whole species.

I hope for this, so that I may feel well-accommodated exactly where this writing has ended. Where this bloodless, and therefore lifeless, page has happened.

Eyes or no eyes, my vision has decayed. My transition has turned into a loop. Perhaps I should have been more aware from the abundance of self-reference in my electric days: perhaps this fullness of me and writing so early on, so close together, was a detailed signal about the dead-end ahead.

This time, I got this far. This page will survive.

But whoever I was going to be – a fabrication consolidated in and out of all that poetic excitement – is dead. Eyes or no eyes, he will never be seen again.