Zombie

I’ve been very busy, which has caused me to miss posting these last couple weeks.  Two weeks ago I was just constantly busy with work; now I’m just as busy because I went to the AWP writer’s conference this past weekend.  Missing five days of work definitely puts me behind.

Even so, I’m pretty excited about this poem I just completed a draft for.  I’m sure it needs work, but as I go through it, I remain pretty happy about it.  I’m surprised I don’t end up changing a bunch of stuff.  Surely I will after workshop next week, but…for now, I feel like posting it.  It’s called ‘Zombie.’

Zombie

Dangle head-over-heels as skies await your soles
And echoing canyons flee your fingers.  Angel
Shale stripes Muav like ribbon, but melts to grayscale,
Faded chalk, as sunlight dribbles away.  Shamble
Back, park in seclusion, recline your bed.  Night comes
At ten.  Breathe pale heat, not flat air; x-ray the dead
Upholstered waste to an upside-down dark ceiling
Whose blank white specks quietly judge you.  Successful
Beams all-present as one bulb, blocked by felt padding.

Thudding on glass, fingertips catch under
Your air slit, snapping like peanut brittle.
They decay and drool while they tumble down
Your naked chest.  Gray rotted blueberries.
The window breaks devoid of echo, struck
Like by a fermented melon, catching
Shards in its flesh, and you topple away,
Writhing through the passenger door.  It snarls
Lazily at your tired bare foot, grabbing
You.  Only craving sleep.  Its hand slides off
Like wet cardboard pulled apart; you stumble,
Crawling, and quash it, popping black brain chunks
Out the car-door-compactor.  Wash yourself,
As the goo sloshed your ear, infecting you.

Corrupted before and will be again, squashed bile—
Caked and bursting these never-ending secretions—
Is too familiar.  The noxious bag haunting you
Oozes, anxious.  Clean it in the morning, not now;
Trickle hot liquid from the trunk and scrub the gook
Until you’re fresh.  Stretch long on the cool roof, gazing
At kaleidoscope clusters that swirl, hypnotize,
And hush you away.  Heat brushes your tiny fur;
Forget the monster who will taint your flesh again.

I Return

Before today, I’d never cooked a whole chicken. I’ve always purchased the breasts separately as some sort of obscure entity separate from the animal-chicken. I’ve bought them shrinkwrapped to those styrofoam trays in packs of two or four or five or whatever random number of breasts some factory-butcher decided to pack. They are slabs of meat: pink productblobs. Fairly recently I’ve also bought them as the whole full breast of one chicken, connected between the two breasts with its breastbone, which at least alludes to the chicken it was once connected to. I’d never experienced holding the cold, dead chicken before. Slipped from the bag, it has all the heft and fleshy meat of an animal. Other than the decapitated head and scooped innards, it resembles the living and potentially happy chicken it once was (probably not–as much as the bag tries to advertise the product as “all natural” and “without antibiotics,” it doesn’t mention anywhere that it’s free-range, so it probably isn’t.) or could have been. It was strange to hold the whole carcass. The animal gave everything it had to provide me with protein, vitamins, and general sustenance–that is: I indirectly took this everything away from the animal. I feel a little guilty, and while I’m not contemplating vegetarianism, there is an imbalance here. It’s true that those dollars I gave to the farm company went towards giving the chicken life, as certainly it wouldn’t have been bred if not for this end product of my purchase, but this itself seems problematic. Something is out of balance. This something is well beyond this small situation, though. The world in general is out of balance. My balancing act within it includes eating animals, but perhaps to steady myself, I should appreciate that a bit more. Dealing with the animal-resembling carcass is a start.

I didn’t realize I would deliberate chicken for so long, but it’s no surprise. Strengthening my depth of attention is important. Without that attention I feel like someone else I don’t like: a blob or brainless animal carrying out life minus purpose. All life has a tendency to grow, but without purpose, it either grows negative and destructive energy or bloats.

I’ve bloated for a long time. I’ve also swooned in destructive energy in spite of or perhaps exacerbated by attempts to quash it. I use the preposition ‘in’ here with ’swoon’ attempting to counteract its inherent passivity and turn the word into an active practice, which still fails to suggest an attentive dance with that negativity, but swoon may be the proper verb after all. By definition, one does not choose a swoon. The best definition I find is of its noun form: “a spontaneous loss of consciousness caused by insufficient blood to the brain” (Wordnet, http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/swoon). My brain has been sad. I’ve been sad. This is redundant because the brain and the self are not mutually exclusive, but I repeat as reminder of that. “Insufficient blood to the brain” means much more than what it says.

My decision to temporarily live with my family was one cause of this. While I appreciate them allowing me to live there, it filled me with negativity and bloating. This is something I need to come to terms with, because they’re my family and because I love and care about them. They’re part of me, and vice-versa. I never managed to balance this, though: not while I lived there and not now as I reflect on it. I have no idea how to fit coexisting with them in any capacity into my life, and that’s frightening and difficult. It’s something I need to work on. That aside, living there was negative. There was a lot of sadness in that home brought by strife marching hand-in-hand with negativity. Even now I can’t escape that sadness, but living there focused it central within my life. When negativity sleeps there in the breast, in the center of one’s home, it begins to take over.

Prior to moving back, living at my apartment in downtown Grand Rapids allowed me to thrive, and this pipeline of energy sputtered once I left that place. It and I had filled it and me with many energies, and I turned my back on that. I decided this abandonment was necessary, but it also, to no surprise, brought negativity beyond what that succeeding living space would cast.

Amidst those symbiotic events taking shape, I departed on summer travels. I left Grand Rapids to circle the country, and it was amazing. It posed many difficulties, but these challenged and taught me. I want to discuss the trip more now, but doing so would spin this essay out of its focus. I’ll say that it was excellent and move on.

I returned thrilled to be home. As excellent as the trip was, driving those 12,000 miles exhausted and consumed me. The general limits of the trip kept me from caring for myself, and I felt these effects. In this return, the definition of swoon adopted its medical aspects: blood was not flowing properly to my brain, thus limiting my consciousness. The brain needs exercise and nourishment and care to function well–just as I, generally as a whole person need these things to function well–and I hadn’t given myself this. Driving allows some limited quality of thought, but my had brain tired of this, possibly because of the low-quality energy flowing through it from the low-quality food I had been eating. I hadn’t kept up with reading, something that takes practice to do well, and this added to my atrophy. As much as I’d missed my family and friends in Grand Rapids prior to my return, I was coming back to a homelife that would set me out of balance, and I did nothing to correct this. I remembered that, prior to my trip, there had been no solution, so I bloated and waited. I sat and watched as it flowed over me. I watched everyone through that soggy lens: many of my friends came to Grand Rapids from their lives far away, and I was thrilled to see them, but my mind couldn’t keep up. I felt like I’d reverted to my self six years ago, when I was exceedingly quiet because of much younger brainpower. I hated creating such an impression with these friends I see so rarely, but that’s how it was, and I enjoyed their brief visit as much as I could.

While I discussed things revolving around this general lethargy prior to my travels, since then I haven’t said a word: just as I waited to move, I waited for this. I would’ve felt pathetic discussing this in its midst because of my atrophy: as if I were making promises to or poking at hope for myself. I feel that these kinds of promises about the future are worthless, as the only important thing is keeping them. Action is important, not the promise of it. Announcing both to the “world” and to myself through this blog that once I moved, things would improve, would’ve been nothing but complaining drivel. My last post shows that: as much as I tried to sound intelligent in my discussion of a fairly random feeling of loneliness, at its heart it was a complaint about my situation. This annoyed me so I shut the blog down.

Now I’m back. I mean this, obviously, to suggest that I’m back writing in this blog, which I’ll hopefully continue with throughout my surely work-intensive schoolwork, but I also mean that I’m back in more holistic terms. I’m back to the self I like. I am who I was when I lived in that peaceful one-bedroom place in Grand Rapids: someone who knows and works towards what he wants out of life, who can use his brain to be conscious of the world he lives in, who can write with the clarity of that thought, who can analyze texts and learn from them, who can work, and who can step back from all that and completely relax. I love being able to at least seek that peaceful relaxation. Without all that, I’m not me.

Making my new home in Carbondale is making this happen again. Living alone allows me to step back to my basic self and move into the world from there; I don’t work well when thrust into the world. I need to thrust myself into it. I’ve done so by making a life for myself here that allows that. Things here aren’t exactly as I’d like, but I have that base of complete control of myself and my consciousness, and that fills everything with potential.

I will use part of that potential for work on here. Just as I’ve missed having an energized brain to carry on cohesive thought, I’ve missed expressing that thought here. I began this with Jeff Jefferson’s joking attitude in mind, and while I appreciate that mockery, degradation, one-tracked American success-based sensibility, and, to some extent, the cockiness, I see this as a much more intellectual outlet. I’d like to work towards combining those attitudes, because there’s something interesting and real there; maybe something that disgusts me, which is something I’d love to challenge myself with.

I’m thrilled to be writing in this again.

Loneliness

“Only what you hide is profound, is true. Whence the power of base feelings” (30).

“Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone” (27).

-E. M. Cioran, from The Trouble with Being Born

I don’t know why Cioran sticks so well in my mind. His aphorisms and thought do, though; particularly this thought on our secrets. It encourages me.

Loneliness is an uncomfortable topic for me to discuss on here. I don’t particularly like broadcasting my weaknesses to anyone, so typically refrain from discussing these types of things. My merging with this thought of Cioran moves me towards the idea that I should continue with this discussion, though. As much as I enjoy, at times, indulging in my impulses, I also love pulling them in their opposite direction to feel that strain. I also think that stepping back from those base feelings of loneliness in order to examine them will help to quell them or let me discover strategies towards that end.

Loneliness actually manifests as a physical sinking feeling in my gut or maybe my throat: a downward tug from the base of my digestion, perhaps, that stretches everything else down with it. It’s not often that I feel this, but nor is it unfamiliar to me. It makes me feel as though I should do something with my digestion: eat something or not have eaten something in the past, or other things. None of those options help, though. Obviously I can’t go back in time and un-eat things. These feelings typically cause me to whittle away late night hours watching TV or searching the Internet in vain for something to diminish them and regain my typical self. Very unproductive and a little bit pathetic; maybe masochistic, too, as if I stepped away from those feelings and realized a way to diminish them, they would probably go away.

Now that I think about it, it seems that these feelings perpetuate themselves. I take myself into a spiral of self-pity that increases the loneliness. When I descend into this state, I seem to enjoy it. Yet realizing this right now only makes me laugh at it a bit. It’s so unnatural–not unnatural, but irrational. My brain is a somewhat irrational blob of pinkish goo, isn’t it? My existence, that is: I don’t think it’s just my brain that controls such things. It’s all connected. Perhaps if I would take care of myself like I used to, I wouldn’t feel these unpleasant things.

Regardless, taking care of myself isn’t an option until I restart life on my own in…11 days or so. I feel better from this, anyway. Realizing how irrational I was being makes me laugh at myself and move on; deep breaths help too. I’ll have to remember this the next time I have these feelings.

As an aside, obviously I’m back from my trip. I haven’t felt that needed its own post, so I haven’t posted since my return. I have no pictures yet: I sit on several rolls of undeveloped film because of laziness/advanced technology bringing me down. You see, most film “development” consists of scanning the film and printing that digital image. Thus, what is printed doesn’t look all that great: lots of graininess. It’s very difficult to do things against the grain of society, and sometimes it’s difficult to muster the effort to work that way. I’ve refrained from searching very hard for a photo center that caters to my wishes. So, I’ll do that tomorrow–or cave in. I’m quite proud of some of my photographs, though, so it will be disappointing if their final stage is shat out of some conveyor-belt printer.

Once I get my photos back I will discuss my trip more. All I’ll say now is that it was everything I could have possibly expected and more. I feel like it filled me out in some way: put some meat on my bones. I’ve lived in Grand Rapids for so long that stepping away from this–especially in the rough sort of way I did–gave me some new perspective. The way I viewed hardship and discomfort while living it was strikingly different from the way I view it from a distance. Even now, just a week or so after my return, I think about going a step further with my roughing-it and hitchhiking on cargo trains instead of taking a car. When I was exhausted and 2000 miles away from Grand Rapids, that was the last thing on my mind. Place and situation have a huge effect on perspective.

I could probably write all night about my trip, but I won’t. Instead, I will sleep. I need to soon, though, so I don’t forget that perspective I found. It was a great trip; as much as I enjoy the comforts of home, I miss much from it.