In a war-torn country, there is a bakeshop in which everyday,
new batches of dough are kneaded
and shaped and baked and every day,
fresh bread is put out;

And everyday, in the midst of impossibility and chaos and death and discord
every day on these shelves, people create normalcy,
safety, routine, freshness,
life --

As feeble as it may be, as significantly as possible.

 Today in the eyes of a crowd
The front gates remain closed, and in its wrought-iron
Obstinacy, holes and gaps form. Aggression lies in the space between the bars.
There is much opportunity to throw tomatoes here,
And some insults, a death threat, maybe a corpse.

On one side of the gate is a fear masked by so much
Power that it looks like confidence, from a certain angle –
Maybe that of a cannonball’s or a trebuchet – and it may be housed
In an elaborate palace, and there might be battlements, ditches, with
Spears glinting silently off to the side: but the fact remains that it
Hides entirely too many secrets in order to be truly safe.
Nothing that hides that much can escape notice, and therefore,
Escape the target of enemies. In the distance beyond this monolithic
Structure of defensiveness, there might be hills, a forest, the open sky –
Something incorruptible, something of nature – but it is too far away
To make out properly, too far away to matter.

Directly on the other side of the barricade is a seething, heaving mass
Of judgment. This is the square, and this is the public –
Nothing escapes its notice, nothing escapes retribution.
They are ready with their headlines, with their scandals, with their accusations;
They have made swords out of their hearts, and shields with their anger
There is nothing you can do to convince them that you are, in fact,
Blameless. There is only an invasive, seeking eye, spread shrewdly
Among the slime of people. They are ready to watch you, and judge you,
And once they get their hands on you, they will be most ready
To tear you apart.

There is a momentary stillness – the crowd awash with too much tension to resolve
Itself into a single line of attack – the palace enshrined in the shadow
Of a passing nimbus, immovable in its gray-ness – and the gate their
Stands shivering, in the middle, at once each side’s armor,
At once each side’s enemy.

There is a battle about to begin.

 What can I do as I sit here in a situation I have crafted to cater to my every demand for comfort and agreeability? If I want to listen to a sound, to a particular song, I can click and download it off the Internet. If I want to find something out, I can just Google it. If I want to eat something, I have cake, cheeses, and cereals in the refrigerator or the pantry. If I want to go to the bathroom, a clean and private one is not ten feet away from me. If I want a glass of water, I can pour myself a glass of water. If I want to look at something different every minute, I can surf the Internet. If I want to feel cool, I have a fan overhead, the air-conditioning upstairs. I can get ice and a glass of milk, multivitamins and fruit. If I want coffee, I can make some for myself. If I want to procrastinate, all I have to do is type this. I can sleep on my bed if I so wish, and arrange my pillows even the way I want them to feel like. If I get sick, all I have to do is complain to someone, and they’ll take me to the doctor.
And I don’t know how to do what I am really meant to do, because I am not sure what I am meant to do, and how to do it. I don’t know how to live.

This is almost laughably pathetic, no?

So many people out there as so deprived of choice, so impoverished to the point of death – the concept of choosing between low-fat and full cream milk, between Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, between alkaline or mineral water will be ridiculous, unavailable, impossible to them. Me, I think it’s an important choice to make. Most of us do, those of us who can pass enough to doubt and agonize over nothing, who have the luxury to contemplate and put contemplation down in writing.

At the same time, I think – maybe it’s just hormones.

Sometimes I’m scared of my endless capacity for caprice, for greed – I want to look at this, listen to this, feel this, taste this, say this, I want this this I want want I I—

I don’t know how someone can choke on their own preferences.
Why is the id, or a muted, less-obvious version of it – all these demands and all these stipulations for comfort – why do I care about them so much? Why is the world such an accommodating place to nourish our pettiness? Sometimes, when people don’t want to even live, they choose to die, to kill themselves. Young people. Rich people. People full of potential. They don’t know what they have because they have everything, and maybe when you have everything, or something very close to it, you surprise yourself by asking, but is there more, something else, something beyond this? So they kill themselves, because it doesn’t make sense to live when you have everything and yet you still have to ask. Maybe? Maybe. I don’t know. I think that those people who kill themselves might not be too sure, either.

Who made us so in control? What made us think that the world is here to do exactly what we want it to?

Just us, us us, us us and our tendency to be finite forever and operate within the confines of our mortality for each fleeting moment of transcendence, for happiness, meaning, whatever that is we have a nagging suspicion is eluding us –

I don’t know if we actually are missing anything, some great secret for happiness, the whole point. I think we just tend to mistake happiness for contentment, and we mistake ourselves for God.

Small words, huge meanings.

I think we don’t know how to stop asking, is our problem.

And I think that, this, these – is what misery feels like.

hello space and silence
if you do not mind I would like to talk to you
and in so doing kill you
no one mourns because we are too busy
crossing the t's and dotting the i's
and making sentences whole
if nothing, your death will be rejoiced but
your resurrection feared forever

The thing with not being yourself
is that everything feels too stretched but at the same time
too spacious. It feels like there's too much skin
and not enough breath. It feels like an off-ness about things
a vagueness in the outlines of objects;
where you are only looking at the world only out of the corner of your eyes,
and there's always the nagging feeling that you are missing something
and from the right angle, the view could have been stellar.
Whatever this makes you feel,
in the secret, quiet moments of the night --
whatever else it feels like, whatever else accompanies it,
there's always that dim sense of loneliness. Like you could be doing something
more. That you could be doing something else. That there's a part of
you that is, quite nonsensically, missing. And you grasp at the hints of it,
not even sure of what it is you're looking for. Is it greatness? Is it
recognition? Is it validation, the ability to punctuate your thoughts and your days,
is it mornings of the well-rested and the self-assured, the sleep of the hard-working and
the inspired? Is it passion, is it affirmation? Is it the silence in your head
when finally, you are sure, beyond any doubt, that you are doing what
you were meant to do?

There are people who are doing what they were meant to be doing,
even if its all in their heads. There's no sign-ups at the time of birth
or conception where our lives go to different booths and designate
something ridiculous, like destiny, no roster for finding the great practitioners
of a craft, no draft to find ourselves on this side of life's battlefield.
Nothing is that simple and nothing is that certain.
And yet the potentialities make you wonder, sometimes,
and the questions hold new ways of being regretful.

I don't know what it is I am meant to be doing.
I don't know if I have skewered myself on lines of being and thinking and
saying that I have lost my claim on identity. I don't know where, when you raise
your hand to volunteer for an opportunity, the shadow of your hand falls, don't know
who is on the other side of the world to watch it and say, you, you may go.

Whatever the world looks like out of the corner or my eyes,
there is not enough color and not enough lines
but always, always the moving forms and an ambiguity that glares, obvious,
clearer than anything else. Whatever the world looks like
out of the corner of my eyes feels like a seeping secret thing
that can go under my skin and reside there,
set up camp in spaces and render the it uninhabitable.
You may live here, the world tells me, live in your skin, but you will have to
co-exist with confusion. This is the thing that can fill up the gaps within you,
you who have stretched yourself in specific places and sewn over in others.
Only confusion is kind enough to stay with you,
when you have exhausted all other options.

And the more confusion is kept under your skin, the more it becomes part
of you and the more entrancing it gets. All along the world
strips itself apart with line and color and meaning and
you, you who are too busy being confused,
fail to see it.

What seems to be the problem?
I ask myself, in the warmly lit corners of the
therapy room, in my mind.

I ask myself, and probe a bit more insistently,
because I am a clinician to the core and I do so
verily suck at self-preservation:
what seems to be the problem?

And it appears that everything can be a problem.
It is not that I don't know how to respond to
the question, or even that I don't have an
answer. I am aware of too many problems,
and therein lies the challenge.

Start from the beginning, why don't you.
(Do not reference an Ouroboros right now,
because we would be stuck here all morning.)

I feel like a failure on so many levels, and this
is a valid feeling because I have been failing with a
staggering amount of frequency all this week,
like wham-bam-blam and the pain makes me want
to cry and be a brat.

Will crying and being a brat achieve much in the way
of helping you deal with pain?

I don't expect it to, no. But my other reactions
involve howling into pillows and writing
letters to cancer cells and being incoherent
with the rapidity of my heartbeat. I don't
want to have to go there.

That sounds like the inner chambers of
underwater caves sealed under shelves
of ice in unreachable poles of the earth. Or else, your
sympathetic nervous system extending its sympathies.

It is not altogether as insane as you make it sound.
For the most part it feels like the shrewdest,
most insidious tidal waves, and serotonin has always been
loyal to me.

I think it is downright attached to you.
And then what, going back to the feeling that makes you
want to cry and be a brat, now that we've established that
there are worse things in life to be --

They have these concepts of attribution, you know,
dealing with locus and stability and controllability,
and wouldn't you know, I have the configuration for the most
maladaptive application for it,
internal loci and stable factors which I can't control. Do you
want to know why?

Why?

Because there are things that creep up on you on your thought process
that you are a victim of your own intuition.
That, and the world outside is made up of streets and you need
street-smarts to make it good,
and unfortunately intuition is over-connectivity, the way I
experience it, and over-connectivity is when the ideas
take precedence over sense and logic, and
sense and logic are the components of a lot of things,
engineers and Microsoft and the lay-out of a good
English city, and street-smarts. And a lack of this
leaves you out on the streets of the world with
maybe five cents and no shoes and the city rats scurrying
steadfastly around you, and the buildings are looming and gray
over you and the sky and what is left clean of it is
far and away and the cobblestones crawl with bacteria.
And this is what the streets of the world look like
to those who do not have the smarts for it. Like me.

I think this is one of those hyperbole things. If
I throw you a potato, will you say it is potato bread?

Those are qualitatively different things. That means they
differ in essence. My failed philo orals taught me this.

I just don't know why you keep on failing.

I thought you were the therapist in this scene.
Therapists are supportive, you know.

Please try harder next time; you do not meet brick walls
with blow-torches.

Yes, you do; considerably better than brick walls and a head.
Except if you're the blow torch.

We're both the brick wall and the blow-torch, and in this
instance, they're not qualitatively different from each other.

I am suffering in so much negative effect, why are you still talking.

Well, it's like this. You fail. You make mistakes. You feel bad.
When it's not perfect, you feel bad. When it's incomplete, you feel bad.
When you fail a huge, magnanimous amount, you feel bad. And that makes sense.
What doesn't make sense is when you compound all these failures together,
the partial failures and the huge failures and the failures which aren't really failures,
merely below your standards -- you compound them together, and you internalize this
composite, self-eating thing, and you think of yourself as the failure.
Can you see the skips of sense in this? You fail, but everyone does.
It does not mean that you're a failure.

Can you imagine what would happen if I fell in love with someone and lost them,
or if one or all of my family died?

I would prefer not to imagine that, but since you are Christian and therefore
draw upon the infinite strength of someone who does not fail like you do,
then I can say that I see that turning out for the best. God is awesome
like that. Faith is awesome like that.

Yeah.

Yeah. And the fact that you can abstract these emotions and look at them from
a distance is not necessarily baggage, or a bad thing. The analysis and the meta
and the thought about the thoughts are not necessarily bad things. They may
be voluminous, and they might add clutter, but maybe with their expansion,
they can carry the emotions into buoyancy. Maybe it will stop things
from being too suffused with subjective meaning.

Maybe.

Yes. And laughing about these things -- yes, you react with overly-high
levels of emotional negative effect to things, but yes, also, that is
funny -- actually shows that you can deal with it. Good job. Everything
can be funny, or amusing, or enlightening, because it's all experience.

And experience can be a joke.

Can be.

In deer. In deed. Indeed.

I assume you find this mental syntax error amusing?

You are a shrink, you do not know what syntax errors are. Especially if you're me.

Yes, we tend to be one and the same.

Do I shut off the lights now?

Go ahead. This plant's been watered.

I've always wondered about that.

It's a staple to shrink rooms, don't you know.

I think orals rooms for philosophy mid-terms would benefit
from the oxygen that that provides.

We should write them a letter.

Yeah. And breathe more deeply next time.

And try harder.

And work faster.

...Yeah.

There's always tomorrow, after all.

Sometimes the eyes sting
slowly, like they do not want to get noticed
the world around you appears too bright and a bit blurred
and on the other side of the sensation, there is only a warmth
accumulating in your eyes. Then the warmth might intensify,
and then it stings, like the world and the discomfort around it,
so you feel distinctly surrounded by failure.

actually in every corner is a theater space
where things perform
and it is a vague plot and not much gets said
and for the most part only silence
is revealed and most of all, there
are no curtains

but every corner has three walls
and has all the axes of x-y-z you need to be
alive and validated and
if you sit there and squeeze
beliefs into that corner,
you can afterward stand back and watch
your beliefs spring out and spontaneously
birth new ones in a performance
of ideas.

they perform their ideas, all you have to do is
plot the initial subversive thought
and all else will go according
to the cues
and stage lights

center stage is the farthest point of the corner
the deepest space point in that isolation

and if you are not too afraid
if you are not too insane
and if you are not too public

you will picket your rebellion in that
little corner of a theater and watch it
explode over the invisible fourth wall
the invisible audience
who dared to look away

you are merely directing this -- the drama
of logic will follow the path of least resistance
which is always beyond, beyond, beyond

pack it in as far as it will go
as secretly as it can be
and let the walls of the corner nourish it
let it perform its own life

pack it in now
and thus cue the beginning

From one creature to another, I say

you are chaos before you it floats subversively
and caught up is every possibility, everything possible cannot
contain itself; all these abstract thoughts
wracking their hearts around spears and speeches
come flying past the will of every thought! It spins
maniacally along the axis of the totality of all things
and audiences hold their breaths, this is the mental rapture
come on, now, you cannot hold them in cages, nor cells
not that cell with its little nucleus, either, not a single unit,
not even the unit of life. These thoughts target
each other along their hearts as they bump and its
an entire atom where electrons do suicidal plane-crashes because
they can. such a thought, but what a thought that your thoughts
act like electrons and what chaos would look like
when viewed up close. Is there a little model of cognition
in every atom, but I thought you couldn't cage chaos
into units? I keep the little universes of chaos in the little
atoms that make up these compounds that make up my
cells that make up myself that make up this world and
make up this universe that make up chaos which makes up
everything else evantually

how do you stop recycling chaos? -- an anti-thesis to itself,
and how these words rebel --

and you have to wonder at which point the floating subversion
subverts itself, hammers itself into
lines and maybe rational thought?
Maybe never, maybe it is happening as we speak
(if chaos could think, what would it be thinking of?)

we would merely decompose the universe, in the end
and the order of disorder of things will be resolved and absolve itself
and in the absence of chaos
would be the sense of everything else

I am not just civil nor am I just polite
No
And I am not merely quirky and does it end there? No.
I have an endless resistance against this limitation on my body, which makes me
Careful, and fearful, and stops me from merging with the continuum of all possibilities.
I am resisting against my lungs and how they keep me from swallowing big gulps of air
I can never breathe enough with these lungs
And I hate how I need them, the air to survive because oh how I would love
To be breathless at the thought of you, to always be breathless and I am ready to
Love, I like to dream. If I can catch my breaths and stop them from escaping
I will never let them keep inside me, all this air, a secret: I will let it
Loose after keeping a reservoir of convictions about how I feel, I will let them explode
As I holler atop the mountain, “I am in love with you!”
Why do I feel like I have to make this declaration? Who says I do? I don’t, not really
All I have is faith, and this faith makes it a joy to shout, to sing.
I do not need to exclaim. But I will, because it is genuinely that wonderful,
Because I feel an illusory compulsion to find an audience (the world?), because I cannot help it
And still I manage to want to. Why is the idea of you so beautiful?
Is it even appropriate, is it valid, is it sensible, should I or should I not?
But to feel the wind and to let the atmosphere tighten around me like a cocoon
And to prop myself against a precipice, just a jump between me and oblivion,
To have to be a buffet for anything and everything that can destroy me, to be
So extremely vulnerable in my love for you, all the more do I want to raise my arms to the sun
And the cold and the warmth and the contrast, the constant tug-of-war between
What I should be and could be (secretive, private, exclamatory, unafraid, alive, dead,
In love, ignorant) and shout about, this is how I feel! Would anyone listen? Friends and family and
Various others we have entrapped ourselves in with pledges of loyalty, love and protectiveness,
All emotional entrapments preceding ours (but I am free within this bondage, free to exceed
Myself and to find you) would they listen? Would the world listen? Would the wind, the trees,
the ground, everything above and below and around me,
would they listen? Or at least, not stifle me with silence?

Would you listen? I hope you do. I have been shouting long enough, inside.

All this is a dream. I have just not found the appropriate mountain.

(When I stand atop mine and shout about my love for you,
I dream still of an answering call and another mountain across fields and fields of atmosphere
And the air burning around you with the songs, declarations, breaths you cannot help but let explode,
I love you, I love you too.)