I might have written my best poems with you,
You always believed in my poetry, if not me
Maybe.
Who knows,
I just know time goes
But we stay.
We stay.
I quote the things you used to say.
Sometimes it feels like every day.
The things you used to say.
Just wrote a poem and deleted it
Next song.
Okay, now I Breathe
And so….
But the song is sad.
Only I listen, because I am in love,
And so I breathe.
And next;
Yes. I breathe
Only, I wish life didnt trivialize and parody itself,
Because I need this:
Lily Allen, Something’s Not Right –
Pan 2015,
Now Odezsa, Kusanagi
–
Feels as rich as umami
–
pause.
It. has. been a. tough. week.
Smoke, and – pause. . .
My nightstand is mine,
Replete with blue bandana, overflowing with books
I’d brag –
But you wouldnt know them anyway:
My tastes in books as alienating as my tastes in persons,
Or so the bourgeous prole in me said
But now I must put him to bed
So the poet in me may sleep,
That the man again may have a life of peace
For there are beasts – wolves too,
To whom we are sheep,
But we may rest now
For the beasts too need sleep.
…
And a famous persons name may now be added here to lend credibility,
Oh, but I think you not the credulity –
To believe me of such insecurity,
As if my poem werent good enough for me
That I wouldnt publish it.
Were I undedicated, I wouldnt be so hated.
Chasing wildest dreams like he’s gonna make it
Heaven knows how long my talent felt wasted.
But I want to feel talent –
To have tasted it –
Written, rewritten, and written it again
Oh give me my sweet sin again,
That I wont waste it:
Deleting poems
Erasing omens and odes
Worse crimes fitting a criminal,
I say
Because today,
You wrote more than code
And that is of note.
If I had to choose between writing and sex, I’d choose pen over penis eight days a week. Why I’ve gone with such a seemingly daft metaphor, I know all too clearly; for my writing is growing into as compulsory an act as masturbating was for me at fifteen, only I’ve no Portnoy’s Complaint – quite the contrary in fact; if I don’t write, I’ll be riddled with guilt, which in many ways I am, owing to the fact that my fiction remains less than fiction: it’s fairy dust. And until I dedicate myself to the the four manuscripts living rent free in my head, that’s all it will ever be. I don’t have to search long and hard to discover there exists no more tragic fact about me.
I am, however, working to remedy this; only, I need be honest with myself: if I have one regret about my previous entry, it’s that I veiled my feelings in prose, which can be incredibly false. Not that I intended to do so, only I did nonetheless. And it was false because I wrote of courage and becoming oneself, and the undeniability of my identity as a writer – without talking about the pain.
The pain being almost the central fact of my existence; precisely what’s got me up in bed, writing this word by word at three thirty am. My how incredibly angst ridden I am.
At thirty one, I’ve managed to fortify myself with world class skills in a technical field I care naught for. I have actually failed in my field as a result of my lack of passion (That or fate).
Wanting – needing – to write desperately, I have two options: take a high paying job, or make a go at the one thing I have been successful with in a related field. Of course there is always a third option. I’ll get to that.
As passionless as I am about the business of moneymaking, which every adult knows is all consuming, it’s my passion as a writer that haunts me. Then there are the excuses: If I was single. If I had committed myself to writing fiction at a younger age. If I had financial independence.
Same shit countless frauds like me probably say to themselves. And I feel a fraud. Absofuckknglutely.
Three years ago I went through a terrible breakup and simultaneously nearly died of blood poisoning, which I had contracted on a business trip (Misery is strippers and steaks with insurance industry execs in Ohio). After that I smoked some DMT, took some LSD (God no not at the same time!), and awoke fully to myself being a writer. And I was in some ways for a time. I allowed myself the freedom to fall into dire financial straits, and I slept around like a nihilist pig; however, when I was sober I spent my time reading more novels than I had since I was fourteen (Having read non-fiction almost exclusively for years). I also amassed a personal library that can be said to belong only to a writer, owing both to its copious volume and eclectic contents (My tastes I will not comment on).
During this period of freedom and bacchanalia, I also began to spend much more time alone and in nature – more than I had since a child. I filled a few journals cover to cover, and I got to know myself in ways I never had. This blog also served me well – as a kind of cloud drive to upload all of the new software my consciousness was running on.
Of course, I wouldn’t be Lawrence Black if I didn’t find love again. Talk about a whirlwind [love]. It’s not unlike what I imagine heroin or some mind numbing opiate to be like: blindingly comforting and then you wake up months later wondering what the fuck happened, and suddenly you remember yourself and begin facing how much you lost touch with You in trying to please the muse. This I am most guilty of.
I want it all. Fuck me. Unfortunately there are only twenty four goddamn hours in a day, and I certainly do not possess the bandwidth to write code and push pixels all day long, in addition to writing. As Stephen King writes in On Writing: life is not a support system for art – it’s the other way around.
This I am figuring out how to arrange – no matter how much pluck and daring it requires. Lord knows – well, in this case, my girlfriend knows – that I am committed to my art above all. And by my art, I mean my inner peace. The shit that allows me to stay sane.
So, what will Lawrence do next?
I know this much: I will be honest. Not thinking about what some heartless or shallow ex who may reads this thinks of my life. I’m done with that ego mindfuck. If I am to be, I am to be honest about my life in my own writing.
In ten days I may be living in a cabin in the woods, or I may be crashing on a floor or a couch. Fuck if I care either way. All I know is that I must write. Because not writing fiction is killing me. And I can’t write any more fiction here.
– Oh yeah, that third option. Well, I may be doing menial technical work but I need my mental bandwidth for greater things, and I know a place with cheap cabins.
Have the courage to stop the world and start over at two am,
While the night is still and your days may yet be seized;
Have the courage to use your dreams as metaphors for the things you truly want:
Reimagining your life as one does who has become brave enough to see heroes as peers rather than role models
David Foster Wallace, (Whom, like Kerouac, I cannot really read for fear of going insane) said something to Rolling Stone’s David Lipsky about how of course in the end, we end up becoming ourselves. The statement was about growing up and the futility of our parent’s worries about who we will become in light of the inevitability of who we ultimately are.
I find it deeply calming to reflect on this – the idea that we end up becoming ourselves; it reminds me that I am becoming who I was meant to be – not just despite my mistakes, but because of them.
Without this, this idea that I am becoming myself, then it’s all a waste (Funny how I once thought I couldn’t fail at anything); however, I trust life: it has taken me this far, given me this clear a picture; and finally, at thirty one, I’m beginning to feel that there is a pattern to my life, one in which I am destined for certain things and bound to suffer in vain pursuit of others. And it has been in my failures, in vain pursuits, that I have discovered the futility of following roads not meant for me.
I suppose I feel there is simply no longer any escaping or denying who I am. Lord knows I tried. Heaven fuck I tried Bunny, Mousie.
Thankfully it is not dreams of soul and passion that have perished but merely the ideas my ego had concocted to give myself some false importance at not doing the thing I was born to do. If I am being obtuse it’s simply my way of not wanting to outline what it’s like to spend ten thousand hours on a diversion. Not that the time invested will go unused, just that it’s no more than financial potential. But the goal of my life was never about just money. And perhaps that’s where I betrayed myself…. Trails off
Life is a great, grand adventure – in which I am the hero. And true, I’m not a very likable one. But no plausible hero is – at least none capable of inspiring me. Commonplace is the contentment that fills the days of the bourgeois; however, there shall be no longer the air of quiet desperation in my hours; I banish despair from my bones. Simply in writing, simply in reflecting – in trusting life, and in being honest with myself. Simply in reimagining myself to be who I wish.
Because you can also fail at what you don’t want.
I lie so close to the one I love,
Ten million miles away
By rote I tell myself all will be well,
But these words invoke only a reminder of the hell
The loneliness,
The stone, cold to the bone, hurt loneliness
Where where dreams,
When we fall so sad
On one another in resignation
