the green room across the way

working best within the nine-to-five parameter, altering it to form a junction, a departure, a force of reason. he arrives, by which i mean i arrive, faltering and full of self-fulfillment, looking at the light across the way.

it has been on for months.

i am worried. the room is large and green, a papery sort of chandelier, shortsighted and blurry photography propping up the walls. the curtains are half-drawn, but never closed and never open, there is no suspicion or innuendo present, the fabric frames nothing but stillness and a waste of electricity. the terraces die.

do futures future, do pasts past? is there an existence within this room beyond my singular vision, the towered viewpoint through the night and across the street? i am here and the light is on perpetually, always, in itself the negation of an infinite never. within its confines, anything may happen. its apparent sterility (the motion sensors seldom blink) shows it to simply be a symbol for possibility, one whose message carries into my own tiny, furnitureless room. my room that may be the subject of a thousand worried gazes. my room, the infinite never.

(the green room across the way deserves capitalization now. it is the green room across the way. it talks of nothing in the words of everything, a common problem: that old favorite, the desperate signifier.)

my feet cramp but a shift of position does not help, it confuses. the images remain as though the room is projecting onto the curve of my eye; i, passive screen, hold a captive audience. i stay here for a dream and an apology, a sign of my correction, a willing doubter.

the walls of my room are very bare, revealing the i myself as myself, but of course, symbols only exist for the weak. the strong shatter, displace and ignore. they draw the curtains and they certainly don’t paint their houses green and leave the light on all night.

they definitely don’t sit up watching.

the next-door-neighbor-woman is getting worried. she keeps looking up at me from the yard. i think she is afraid that i might fall from the window. if the world ended now, i would pretend to be asleep just so i could secretly watch what happened to the green room across the way. i’m not sure what would happen to the next-door-neighbor-woman.

i must try to remove obsessions. it is the most direct way to self-help. i think i’ll start by beginning a diary.

restrictions

there was a penguin, performing stand up in a faintly lit club. no one seemed to care that it was a talking penguin, maybe because its jokes were so amusing.

it told an ideal joke about an alcoholic octopus, to which the audience gave it’s gratitude. a lady in the back was rushed to hospital. diagnosed with fits of laughter.

after the gig, the penguin and i shared drinks then rushed back to my house to play video games. someone was on the front steps smelling of fags and potatoes.

she told the penguin it wasn’t allowed inside. “rules and that”, she mumbled.

we stood outside in the cold for a while, awkwardly rubbing our hands/fins together, the two of us like the fragments of a rocket that recently exploded.

the weekend that was

brittle, lazy, nasugbu.
fast asleep, as mankind
treads over your cracked lung paths.

spoilt, spoilt, taal.
in a coma since 1977,
below the rubble your feathered pillow remains.

breathless, breathless, los banos.
tar, vehicles and street-lights ablazed
hush you underground.

maps of you are now sold by machines,
you’ve relinquished your very own ground.

moon safari

i miss nights like this,
makes me want to hum air’s
“kelly watch the stars”.

water tower

i am driving when i see it
condom sheathed;
the unsightly thing jutting up
out of the earth; its yang of passion
revealed to all who pass.

spring; she brings out
the lothario in all of us
and we can only play a tiny
role in the grand cycle
that spins us along
infinite routes.

unemployed

i spent all night yesterday applying for jobs.

not because i want one, you understand, but because the envelopes coming through my mailbox make me feel wanted. they fill the day where the job should have been.

the unpoem (an experiment and a bit of wordplay)

listen, question; vision undone;
unction woken.
option given; beckon fortune,
certain heaven.
reason seven, sudden notion;
doctrine chosen.
thicken diction, straighten section;
version written.

written from negative

the end, the middle, the nothing.

to begin at the beginning makes no sense, not when you have the possibility of starting anywhere. to recount something from the beginning is flawed and fallible: a true beginning is a true forgetting, an instant without reference, the signification of the nonsense of attempting to define chronology’s antithesis with chronology. it is the moment (which is not a moment) in which a word forms and with the forming of that word, non-word ceases to exist, even as negative.

you began at the beginning.

the wiser man starts with the premise and shapes time around it; they do not stretch out the blueprint of events, with its skeletal rigidity, and then tighten the skin of argument around its frame.

but, you began at the beginning.

in telling a story, you undermined the argument, an argument that held firm despite my protestations. if you are to prove through memory and juncture then you must take time and recount every detail and tell every aspect, and this will then be all stories, but still the story will not be told.

there are still writers.

once you have spoken of every second and minute, you will then have to speak of every second and every minute for every second you, and third you, and forever you because in telling the story, you change the story and you change yourself invisibly, necessarily and irreversibly.

this must then happen for every person.

and so we receive a million stories laid upon a million stories and eventually you will be unable to see the stories for all the stories, or speak for all the spoken, so it is better to say what you wanted to say, and not lower us into the politics of tale. but you were unable to resist and you told the story, and in my head and your head the other stories flooded in upon themselves like echoes, slightly different but indistinguishable.

which is shame, because in the end you were probably right, you just lost me somewhere near the middle, and now at the beginning i make no sense.