9:32 AM

IT WAS A GRAY-GREEN THURSDAY and I awoke to the sound of banging, like the crackle of a wrench on sewer pipe. Knowing every common sound of the house, from breaking glass and bottle cap pops to short-lived lovemaking and slamming doors, the incessant clanging was foreign.

Rolling a cigarette, I didn’t bother putting on pants and walked out to my back porch, where I spied over the fence beside, a man digging a pizza box-shaped hole. Sweating and obese, he slammed the shovel down again, while standing on the patio pavement next to the hole.

I lit my cigarette and gave in to temptation. “What are you digging?”

He turned and wiped a thick paw across his forehead and squinted up at me.

“A grave.”

“Why?”

“Because nothing dies when it should.”

He turned back to his task, a neighbor whose name I had never known, nor would, burying pieces of his past on a Thursday before noon, quietly resigned to his secrets.

I watched for a few more minutes, but eventually went back inside, orphaning my oversized cigarette in a graveyard, leaving my neighbor to his grim task.

The day lay naked and waiting, unmarred by even the slightest obligation – a rare white whale that had to be hunted – so I went to the kitchen.

Breakfast was essential, or so I’d heard, and it seemed like a good move given my newly formed plan for the day. The smashing of the shovel turned my stomach, but drugs on an empty stomach were never a wise choice.

Cold pizza and half a carton of orange juice later, I opened the freezer and plucked out the tiny ball of foil wedged carefully in the door beside an ice pack. Unwrapping the aluminum, I revealed the tiny green disc, darker in the middle – a summertime SweeTart.

Popping it under my tongue, I put on a pair of crumpled as-yet-unwashed pants and pack a bag of essentials – 4 pens, 2 books, 1 beer, 1 flask, 1 notebook, 3 lighters, a hoodie, a pack of cigarettes and a banana.

Twenty minutes later, the shoveling had stopped, but I knew it would start again soon, in reverse, and I didn’t want to be there to hear it.

Coming up on acid is weird enough without the echo of death in your ears. I looked at the clock as I closed the door – 10:42am.

11:15 am – Bike ride to the park

There were birds at the park, and while he couldn’t explain why, seeing birds always kept him calm, and fooled his brain into feeling like he was in the country, away from the choked-off buildings and alleys that had never seen sunlight.

It was as good a place as any to let the drugs take hold. As expected, the park was barren, except for a few quiet fishermen and a miserable-looking jogger whose wife was almost certainly making him doing it. The birds were there for support, singing in the high yellow breeze that sent shivers of blood through parts of his body he’d forgotten were there.

The rocks at the end of the jetty he’d strolled had begun to crawl, and the crevasses were swimming. He didn’t know where, but the pattering raindrops pushed him towards something new, the next chapter in the melting cosmos of the dusky afternoon.

12:55 pm – Bike ride home, music on the couch, Ghostpoet for days

Music on acid has the ability to ravish us, as much as any lover, drawing out own hands across our body in lustful desire, our head swimming in swallowing scrumptious waves. The notes swoop in and pluck us from below, filling our blood and bodies with fresh life and energy we once thought was gone, or abandoned in a fit of growing-up rage, but there it is, after all.

The old orgasm of mental liberation, tearing us from the cold, accepted reality to which we’ve become accustomed. Those beats though, cascading into our souls and brains in ecstatic release, never letting us go until the dams bulge and bust. Music is better than sex on acid, and if you disagree, then get a better acid guy.

1:44 pm – Cigarettes on the back porch, haunting oboe solos from over the alleys and far away.

We are not allowing ourselves to be packaged, shipped and sold without a fight, not when we can still see the old scars healing on our neighbor’s skin, nor the empty picture frames on their walls.

We’re interrupted from our regularly scheduled pleasure, once again, by the demanding devices we’ve raised to the level of gods, those unconscious slavers bearing no whips save those we give them with our time and eyes and devotion.

What more does an invading force need but blind devotion and the strong belief that the usurpers are necessary. 

2:13 – Walked down the block, four left turns, back home… not real world-ready 

Imagine putting a mirror of yourself in front of you and then trying to stare down an endless corridor of yourself, knowing every reason you’ll give and neuroses you have to explain your actions, not giving you anywhere to hide from the deepest down part of you that stays buried, except on days like today, when it gets to come out and breathe the fresh air of existence. The base desires of the flesh come out to play in privacy, in the quiet stillness between songs.

I have reached the end of my proverbial rope, which likely has a noose at the end, so chasing to the opposite extreme seems logical, right? You can’t hope to find solace in absolutes. There must be uncertainty and strangeness in our days and lives, not only with the patterns of our days, but in the way that we think about out world, and what we accept as a given, the things we so blindly swallow, when there are such greater and loftier dreams to which we should aspire. We are greater than the sum of our parts, and as the shadows dance madly around these words, even as I scribble them furiously, I feel more linked or properly connected to this creative heart than I have felt in many months. Fiercely unleashed, savage and hungry to tilt my vision further over the deep end. I had forgotten how good the view is…

2:29 – Under a blanket, freshly rained on, rolling joints to Wax Tailor

And here we are again, face to face with our deepest visceral part, the human side that we’ve always shied away from, slightly at least, because you could always hide behind books and the relative safety of the mind. As children, we have so little real control, and thus our imaginations are born, but as we age, our seeming control grows, and our ability to imagine fades, and is renamed idealism, teenage angst, or otherwise cubby-holed and prejudiced, because there wasn’t a name for the way we felt. And so, we shut out the purely physical desires, because they are associated with nonsense – kid stuff.

Scattered thoughts like pretension, we see again the clear tunnel towards relaxation, the foolish idea of documenting the heart of a purely individual revolution, to try and immortalize it or express it simultaneously, if there is a right and wrong, this must be the right side – surely, this.

Bliss of mind and body,

Connected and painless.

2:50 – Bathroom break, looked in the mirror… error

But then that spark of a goal…. Ideas come with their own orbits, occasionally slinging off path if they’re particularly powerful. Finding those ideas, or seeking out people who are similarly curious, will make for an interesting life. Time burbles like a mad brook in the midst of this moveable feast.

The shivering fingers of enlightenment moving up your spine and seduce, to pull a man into his death and desires.

3:14 – Circling the apartment, front door, back door, lost something, can’t find it

Even in these lowest moments, the most honest that a man can face, I struggle to separate the observer from the observed. Some words are only powerful on skin or gravestones.

Face to face with what I have buried so many times, so long ago, the fears of being untrue, of being a fraud, of never really knowing what I want, and jumping instead on the dreams of old heroes. They were enough – why would I need an identity, when theirs were always better than the one I would have made? 

3:32 – Solo dance party, energy burst, Bakermat in the speakers

When you go looking for inner demons,

don’t be afraid when you find them.

That’s when they need to be slain.

3:40 pm – Second journey into the world, two blocks square, chased home by clouds

Even this trip was motivated by something else, the need for words, but not what my real desires were telling me to do. Even to achieve this level of clarity, I had to justify it somehow in the outside world. That damn endless mirror of myself mocks me in moments like these.

3:56 pm – Rolling a spliff and pacing the patio, speaking to the sky

Not everything can be used for writing.

Everything can be used for writing.

4:13 pm 

4:22pm

11:48 pm

There is still something to digging deeper than most.

There is value in seeking beneath the soil.

****

Turn on and Tune in to more madness in SN6: MAYDAY – available on Amazon!

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