WHAM!

WHAM! is an iconic 80's band that produced music that epitomized 80's pop, including such popular tracks as "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go," "Club Tropicana," and "Everything She Wants." The music is derivative, cheap, peppy, pseudo-homosexual, and generally speaking some of the worst pop-garbage filth ever to heave its glistening bulk out of the stinking sewage drain of 80's music.

And I love it so much.

Please kill me.

We must try again

I must tell you!
Somehow I must say:
The way the days and nights linger.
The darkness outside and inside.
The shadows on my bedroom wall.
The blue light that stares me in the eye.
And how my feet carry me without my asking or thinking,
How the road races beneath me and my eye flies away,
How the silence is always waiting just outside,
And if the noises bother me, it weighs, but I can tell one Devil from another.

The world is not a place anymore.
It is a series of images cast on my eyes,
Sounds that assault the ears,
There is only me and where I go.
Wherever you go, there you are,
And here I am, everywhere I go.
To go where you are not,
You must be who you are not.
This I know how to do, and I seek it,
And the waiting weighs too.

I remember a time when the mists hid things,
When beyond every wall there stretched a cavernous expanse,
When the glass and steel cathedrals of my dreams hung majestically about me, just out of sight.
But now every wall is a wall,
And beyond the wall, nothing.
Philosophers ask: What is there at the edge of the world?
A sheet of drywall and two coats of eggshell.

And I remember the first wall, and the terror.
Atop a hill, with the air hot and dry, the trees dead, the branches bare,
I looked up.
No clouds, no sun, no birds, no roof.
No shelter.
Blue and blank.
I saw the wall and the nothing beyond.
My heart stopped,
My youth died.
For a while I held on.
I thought of the damp, dim places,
The mists, the vines, the echoing tunnel.
And on an overcast day I can still believe.
But a second day came, when the wall found me again.
This one is inside and outside and all around.
It is the wall that is not a wall.
It is everything.

Some live in a world made of persons,
And some in a world of places.
I live in a world made of walls,
The emptiness behind them,
And the emptiness between.

A paragraph that is trying very hard to be a poem

I remember how the words used to come.
Tight, sharp, with all the iambs in a row, and a rhyme on every line.
Now they meander. The semicolon abounds.
An overabundance of words fills in for the things I can't say or feel.
Rhyming seems so quaint now, so trite.
Rhythm, meter, anyone can do it. Why bother?
Children's songs is all they are.
Increasingly I suspect that the only valid form is the haiku.
Say what you mean, and leave it be.

Youth, bright, sharp, clean, straight.
Pain, fear, worry, withdrawal.
Dull, long, cheap, dry, dead.

Dead Week

Recently I was listening again to Dr. Feel Good. I heard the line "Got a cushy little job through the Mexican mob / Packaged as a candy cane." I realized that they mean he is posing as a candy-striper; a nursing intern, and that he is stealing drugs from the hospital to sell on the street. This is a small thing which nobody cares about. It was significant to me.

James has a habit of taking my ideas and running with them headlong, even the ones I was only contemplating. It is surreal and disorienting, particularly because of the amazing progress that he makes in so short a time. It seems as if I need only speak it and the next day it is before me. I don't quite understand why he does it. Maybe he genuinely likes my ideas. It's the only thing I can think of.

I made a leek and potato soup tonight for dinner. It took a long time because I had to chop everything by hand and I had no potato masher with which to mash the potatoes. Consequently, it came out chunky. Nonetheless it is nice. It is not cold but I am shivering. I am very lonely. I wonder if Marie is calling? I should check. She has not called.

I need to decide on an organization to join for the fall semester. A failure to have social interaction outside of work and weekends will have a poor effect on my mood. I understand this despite my general aversion to people, particularly those organized in groups. I may attend meeting of the campus Republicans and Democrats. It would be good to become more educated about the upcoming election and politics in general. I may begin attending meetings of the so-called Freethinkers again, despite their small-mindedness. I may attend some anti-Scientology protests. Have I mentioned that the Church of Scientology is the single thing that I hate the most? It is.

Where has all my wit gone? My hateful youth gave way to a smoldering bitterness in adolescence which seems to have since gone out entirely. Is there a bed of coals beneath these ashes, or am I as cold as I feel?

So much work is being undone right now. I am shaken.
It's no good at all.

On the way back in tonight I passed a couple. They were suspicious because of the lateness of the hour. There was a storm far off on the horizon, but the air was so hot and thick that I could feel the pines embrace me as I passed beneath them and smell their sweetness like a fog. The clouds were bright in the sky, lit from below by the city and above by the moon. The homing beacon was out; it was a night of many shadows.