A note to my yoga teachers

A note to my yoga teachers, know on the days you see me, more often than not I am present for basic survival reasons. I come to yoga because at least I know I can do this. I can go to a room with other human beings, hear a real human voice, be at least peripherally observed that I still am alive by human eyes and move my body to accomplish something small. At least today I can do this.

I can be in yoga near other human beings and not feel like I am violating other people’s space to succumb to either rejection or complete invisibility. I can smell the scent of visibility even if no one directly speaks to me in the entire before, during, or after process or I to them.

One of you, my teachers, may be the only human I speak with face to face all day, and cumulatively you may be the only group all week in whatever perfunctory politeness or genuine exchange occurs. You are the modern American therapy for the bargain price of less than a hundred dollars a month.

The radio reminds me physical isolation and lack of relationships is a greater risk to shorten my lifespan than lack of exercise or an unhealthy diet.

Robin's Eggs

The irony of emotional availability is that it smells like desperation to the other person’s instinct to hunt what does not wish to be hunted. The animal within senses both the lack of external labor as off-putting and the presence of internal self-reflection to be present intimidating. It is in this dichotomy we teach ourselves to wear masks and go through the world so largely unloved.

Blasphemous Questions

Somewhere in navigating the guts of the machine the labyrinth's darkness became its beauty. The realization the objective was not escape, but that we are the maze itself canoodling in crevices of mustard gas clouds and pear orchards. Bodies die without fanfare and live with contorted enthusiasm. Angelic eyelashes flutter in the fireworks. We sip joy our body feels not so missing in this turn left compared to our last attempt at a due north. The contraption flashes flimflam epileptic seizure screen cellphone gluttony. We stare down the glitter impossible to eradicate like herpes in our delusions. Odysseus munches lotuses. There is a constant hum in the background of everything. The murmur of Thanatos whispering, "Do it." 

The choice to eat fruit in the abyss of a Friday night or clack an animal survival instinct dancing to the Trinidadian drum beats. We paint ourselves in tribal consanguinity. I could remember that once, but now all I remember is the machine, the beautiful shadows of it, that I am the atomic shifts. I want most to have the illusion back. The colossus of boredom stares echoing the hum. I rub the backs of my upper ears with thumbs in tiny circles with my eyes closed pretending these are not my thumbs. In the darkness there is an openness, like an open field away from the machine's walls like somewhere my mother told me god lived. I do my best not to believe her as I savor the realness of a tactile moment.

I live with the a constant tightness below each set of ribs, pinching an anxious vice of "I do not want to be here." The notion repeats in annihilation piano keys. I missed my 401k payments the past two years. The accountant is negligent on the tax advantages of retirement planning. The thought of ending it sits like a constant bird inside the room. I rummage through the fecklessness of talking to other humans about the bird. I decline. There is little or any aid but to regain the illusion. Pluck into the change purse for the magic bean of sex or love or a suppository of human connection. Twist the wonder capsule up into the hole. Fill the void with high school intelligence and television sparkles. Weigh the first blasphemous question. Am I more frightened of dying or living?   

Depression is under each glitter fleck in a permanent readiness to return. Any flicker of hope is a dual hook sharpened in the pang. We know its potential yet hope anyway watching ourselves fall back into the pit, a new face to mourn in the rotating masks we call savior of the solar and lunar cycles. The heaviness in the lie that we say we know there is no savior. There is only the second blasphemous question, what makes me happy? An honest answer is the sphinx's requirement for exit.

I miss the sunlight. 20180626

I told my family I think about killing myself sometimes eight months ago. It is always in there like looking at my own nose. There was a perfunctory we would rather you not, but a summarily understood exhalation that there is little any of us can or will do. So it is, as before, and for these decades, I am on my own. Fart. To be or not to be. I think about work, unemployment, America, personal relationships, art…I figure write a few books and when the gas sputters out of the bank tank say goodbyes. I don't want to say goodbyes. I never have. 

I manufacture a story that the kid wants something to do with me, but that’s mostly bullshit. Occasionally I get to text. We have a call. Laugh. it's god damn beautiful, but compartmentalized. 

There is this radiant numb sort of perpetual weight. I cannot afford to get a diagnosis or drugs or a person to talk to about it because why bother. I tried the shrink. It didn’t shrink. The irony in America is if you seek professional help and get diagnosed the check boxes on forms change, employers or reports or people who want to extricate you from the subways or court proceedings get notified and the gyro of the world starts the pariah stigma of labeling the crazy one.

This is my fight with the voice that is gleeful that this could all end. In all the meditation and trying there is a voice in the subtext of everything that just says it is all illusion. None of this is real and every waking day requires theatrical performance to conjure the self-deceit about why anyone would want to be alive. I have my reasons. I choose to stay. 

I stare into the ledger of joy. I look out across the world. I feel the awfulness people do to each other. The ooze baby of our self-hatred elected to the throne in D.C. I taste the steel in my mouth of the dehumanized corporate mechanics. The lack of kindness feels lethal like a big fucking snuff film with an orgy scene before the grand finale for the march of the pigs.

I do not want to be here for this. Imagining faking it for another person feels Sisyphean. Then I think about the child in me, the one who cannot imagine anyone wanting to stay around. I confront the paradox doom loop of depression repellent, the contagion, the way the kid talked to me, the way her mother did, the way my family looked at me so bored when I told them I think about killing myself. Hard to convince me inside they do not feel the same. All faking it, struggling, stirring the roux that this world is worth staying in if we can just lie to each other well enough.

Maybe we each find different drugs. I wonder if I ever had the capability to love, like really be in love, if I could get there. I feel like my ankle is roped to a hole and it’s just a matter of time. So meeting new people or talking about it is just a disservice to others. Whatever illusion other people can muster, I hope other people can keep it, because the rawness of all of this is just too much. Then I think that's all bullshit of course I could, I just need the right season. 

I have not felt safe in years. I think about if there were suicide stores where we could just go get an injection or a breathe helium and off ourselves, millions would do it. It would be the only thing to get the Orange Slut off the news. All the world would need is a tipping point and the bodies would just be leaping into pits to end this farce. Fuck it humanity, if you don’t want to be here…if you are this cruel, I am exhausted and an asshole. I am no hero, no voice, a shitty writer whose best talent of saying no to his demons is quavering.

I miss the sunlight. But I know it exists. I stay for the sunlight behind the clouds, knowing as Eric Draven taught high school me, it can't rain all the time. 

We need a Disney Princess who has had an Abortion

Reality Show cartoon thoughts edition: I saw this stream of troll bait articles on conservative websites about Planned Parenthood tweeting, We need a Disney Princess who has had an abortion.

Disney princes…Hercules fights gods and uses weapons. Aladdin steals and uses a sword. Peter Pan has a knife and refuses to grow up. John Smith kidnaps and is a soldier. The Beast kidnaps and fights a guy who plummets to his death. Prince Eric, Charming...nondescript fill in pretty rich boys all seem to be highly correlated with kingdoms that would have armies doing some killing. These movies conveniently crescendo with betrothals which imply sex and happily ever after, well what if maybe we rushed into this, maybe Disney Princesses tend to rush into relationships with powerful enchanting violent men and Disney Princes tend to get immediately enamored for no logical reason with a certain ingénue.

What if, let’s just imagine, call me crazy I know, after the ever after those relationships aren’t working out or are not ready for progeny or father-in-king or mother-in-queen wants to keep you trapped in a tower or be somebody who isn’t quite you? What if you just want take off this bra and gown and put on some god damn yoga pants or your old fish tail? What if you might want to say this family and castle life is not for me? But you had sex and are debating should I stay in this castle or invoke volition to reverse this hastily conjoined arrangement full of my husband killing dragons, sea witches, dark queens, arrogant Gaston’s, Oriental Jaffar’s, my entire indigenous nation, or pirates after he clearly was fooling around with other mermaids?

Maybe that is the kind of man a Disney Princess might get all goo-goo eyed for and realize huh this guy has a dark side and after he got his dick in me he is not all Genie wishes and taking me dancing at balls anymore? Just making jokes about rubbing other balls. Maybe I was distracted because Disney decided to kill off or rip away my father or mother for some sadistic reason and I have daddy issues and take guidance from birds, mice, dwarfs, crustaceans, small dragons, or teapots. Maybe I didn’t see the dark side of my chosen suitor before like a reverse Stockholm syndrome Belle and the Beast moment. Now we’re pregnant.

The Disney Prince would surely want his heir who his princess would be dutifully taking care of while he is off crusading and warring for kingdom on his trusty talking horse or slave ship or magic carpet while Disney Princess is expected to sit in a fancy room being obedient. Maybe the abortion here for the cartoon is to say the Disney Princess life is unrealistic on more levels than just maestro sea orchestra conducting crabs, pixie dust, and sleep spells broken by a kiss. Maybe sheltering kids with horrific examples of adult relationships ignoring equitable emotional labor, relationship building, and self-actualization might lead to ta dah a Disney Princess choosing an abortion or egad the Prince agreeing because parenting just isn't meant to be.

Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are both based on women wanting to kill or curse little girls. Belle was kidnapped by a beast, Tangled princess was trapped in a tower by her mother. Cinderella was trapped in a tower by her stepmother. Ariel had her voice taken away by a fat-shamed sea witch in the cartoon version. She dies in the real version becoming sea foam. Maybe the real story is the misogyny of showing evil women and evil done to girls. Maybe an abortion is an artistic device to say women have a choice to say no. Maybe Ariel gets her god damn voice and fish vagina back.

ttp://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/03/27/backlash-after-planned-parenthood-branch-tweets-need-disney-princess-whos-had-abortion.html

Gifted

I watched this movie tonight… Some sentences in art resonate empathy in horrific ways, some scenes, you don’t want to be able to relate, fiction into non-fiction. You live underneath the limen where faith used to be. You hope spacetime’s passkey arrives in one coordinated moment in the future where the other sees you. No requirement to explain the why behind the path to now, the other just gets it. That recognition is like a forgiveness in a gust, filling you with validation of just how much you can love a person trying to do what is best for them never knowing if you were doing the right thing, but you buried into the deepest parts of you in moments that keep repeating to do the hardest thing you can imagine. Maybe that breaks you in a way you can’t explain to people. Few know where it comes from, but you do it, because it is not always about you. It’s not like a movie with clean lines and succinct felicity, you know you might not make it out of this alive or functional, but you did your best. You took the slap in the face. You were the bowing trunk staring up at that sun, bending in wind, meditating on what bounties the rain may one morn bring.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7CAjpdRaXU

An Image of the Male Body

The untouched male body

I live in

Walks into a dark house at eight p.m.

And talks to himself

With simulated sitcom conversations

Of how was and guess what

Dinner is always in the refrigerated plastic

Cooked ahead for the week

Consumed in totality by this stomach and these lips

Subsisting in a deficit of tactile contact

Recycled folly exercises honed in the realization of the way

A woman texts “I don’t feel romantic potential between us.”

The awful politeness of coded honesties

To be a man who was engrained so young to know

I am one of the ugly ones

I think women look at me the way I look at the ugly women

So it is one big animal pit of fleshed judgment

I am almost forty  

The sexlessness is the only Catholic thing left in me

I can no longer blame god for the celibacy

This is just dry runs bathed in PTSD and the mirror

The ghosted unreturned phone calls and the never given chances

This time I gave her a ride home mid-date

After she left to move lumber from incoming rainfall

My penis finds this humorous

The curtesy, the indifference

Never long enough to receive hatred or anger this decade

Just terminal expedient assessment of no thank you

A divorced man with an executive salary

A yoga body with muscled abdomen

A full head of hair

Re-transplanted top-dollar smile

And this face of lonely blue eyes 

Questioning his entire life how to talk to females

As anything other than friends

The sexlessness exudes my pores so much

I was once kicked out of an erotic writers group

By email because my demisexuality was not up to snuff

No retort just go, please stop, another no thank you for your service

We just do not see how you fit in here

I remember the week before my wife left

After ten years the last time we had sex

Was at her company Christmas Party

At a hotel on Bourbon Street

The image of her body on top of me rattles in my brain like rape

I remember how she insisted on the condom

I remember her anger at showing me in public

When we went downstairs for the dinner

I remember how clueless I was of what she was about to announce 
The unreadable beast was soon to devour me in courtrooms

I think of this decade since

This so long untouched skin

I want to feel safe

Like there ever was a place

Timid for coquetry in this Me-Too era

I want to play

Patience from the other seems so short

To get to know these cheeks

Like rusted bicycle spokes unridden left out in the rain

Sometimes I put my fingers to brushing up from the neck

Washing up to forehead, closing my eyes

Dreaming that this is not my limb

That the whole universe is one big thing

So it is like even in this dark house at eight p.m.

I am not alone.
Laughter percolates in a tussle of permanent loneliness

Naked honesty since thirteen that this predictable

Early death, unattended cremation outcome keeps materializing

The deadliness in sex, fear in touch

The consequential atrocities of an untouched human body