I once wrote these lyrics in my hardcore days: “These metaphors, don’t tell me who I am. They classify me in a box and feed me to death. Now I am dying here, in your euphoria. Your soft coercion, I name chains. I don’t need your new age doctrine, I don’t need to shake your hands. I don’t need your pretty pictures, I don’t need your promised land. You spread your lies, like rain across the land. They live your lies, savages… “ and so on.

The song was called ‘Box’ and the thought of it kept me awake last night. Or maybe it was just something to do while I was awake anyway. Serves me right for listening to this 108 compilation (which you all should get if you want to know shit about shit) over and over again in my car, to and from work. I got up to piss and while I strolled into the bathroom, I saw the light of the washing machine which sprung the voice of my girlfriend saying: “I’m gonna put in this laundry, but – shit – it’s gonna suffocate if I leave it ‘til the morning. Ah fuck it” (what a marvellous woman), while pressing ‘go’ on the display. So after doing my urinating business and washing my hands (really, soap, towel, the works), I took the laundry basket, popped the hatch and started pulling the damp stuff from the cylinder. I walked over to the little white wash rack (all bent and banged up from falling over) and hung the shirts and shorts and socks (most of it my stuff) over the wires. It felt gratifying. I almost felt like I should have been awarded a prize or something for doing this. What a great new man I was for a moment. Look at me, standing here in my ‘greige’ undies. Feeling all empathic and understanding, knowing I’m not. Then the song leaped back in my face. I have enjoyed that box metaphor over and over again. I’m in a box. With arms and legs, and a face. And cardboard walls of character and thick layers of bubble wrap ego. The things that we call immaterial are nonetheless manifestations and folds of a box that contains our really damp stuff. Filled to the brim with a mindless magic that would scare the hell out of us if we knew where it leads. This infinity. But still, smothered. On my way out, I kicked the basket to the side and stepped over a fat black cat, stretched over the floor like he too, owned it.

When I stepped back into bed, she asked me where I’d been off too. I decided not to joke about masturbation but told her honestly I hung up the laundry, cause I remembered her saying something about it. I got my appraisal. I felt truly dumb and male for having chased it.

It can be a day, warm like the inert surface of a vibrant lake or the loose skin of a silver serpent. Slithering through our shadows. Something hoary and ancient. But still seething and bursting with your most venomous and murderous fires. Warm days can feel truly cold and dead. Whereas frozen, damp and dim places can be the most heartwarming of them all. They seem to be. My warmest moments never had anything to do with the weather or the outdoors, even the outside world was far from there.

Our skins did burst with rapture, making real nasty gushers of melancholy and promise but also of unanticipated pleasures. Puncturing our unripe senses and unleashing something of a god on our souls. I felt it. Haven’t you? I’m floating and bobbing languidly on layers of thick sentimental drivel. My pathetic goo of discontent and a thick sense of abandonment. A sorry excuse for empathy, which I seem to lack completely. And, let’s be honest, somewhat of an extravagance. Lavishly and shamelessly self-prescribed to soothe my whimpering. Trying to take the edge off.

As if I needed to be consoled. As if there is ever any point. The heart heals easily once you can admit the obvious. It’s just a big grey mass we all float in. The committed blacks and unwavering whites of our early life mix themselves up until it all dissolves into the converted silver skin of that venerable basilisk. The chemicals that perform and pretend to be the moral substances in our minds, run fresh out and leave only an astonishing flatness and the ominous majesty of death. The one, valid acknowledgement we all rush toward. It is much more than we deserve.

Beyond this breathing crust, the gray viper keeps on snapping at the soul, since the heart was left behind in the former round. Bereft from all senses and enriched with the clear view of the beyond, the wounds in our spirits can never fade or repair or even soften. At this point, the slayer is hailed with the warmest of welcomes. Before more of this gets imposed. Bring on the winter with its icy, short days.

Uh, it wants me. Wheezing in my neck, dripping and slurping at my lobes, soaking my shoulders in its viscous mouth water, glaring at my stale carcass, grabbing at my feelings, all horny for my breath, ruining my wanton virtue. A many legged undead something that outstretches over the skies, flaking and propelling its warty scales into my forcibly unlocked, broken jaws. Discharging its reeking sick from gaping and spluttering orifices for it to come down on me in foul, oily rains. What a sight for knifed eyes. It stands and spans over all, for all the world to see its bitterness. Clasping its claws into volcanoes and crevasses, holding on for dear life, to immortalize the second in an era. Behind its murky mantle the atmosphere is ablaze, heaving intense vapors of amethysts and emeralds like a downpour over its horned and spoiled back. Dripping and spitting from its loins into our open wounds. Blended with the sour sting of its festering boils. It is wrapped around the globe for all to endure a more solemn wrath.
…

There is a time when I feel this realm will cover the skies forever, pushing the sunlight out. Knowing the sun is my sole reason to live at times. A wicked panic leaps in my chest, ripping at the soft tissue and the brittle bones. Tearing and slashing its way to my weakness. My innards howl with despair. The desolate cloth drapes itself around my heart to smother my existence. But then it trickles and drizzles down until an infernal fog melts over everyone and everything. Impregnating all the pores of the earth with morbid dew. Clogging up all possibility of inspiration with every single stroke. It relieves the skies of its manifest demise but burns ever more invigorated with the new fuel of anguish. The helplessness of the spirit of man, who finds himself detained by a failure to seize the grandeur of essence. The everlasting space that lives between our mind and skin and all around and inside us, leaves no room for interpretation by a futile set of senses. It feels as if I’m trying to lift galaxies with a supple reed. A disproportionate attempt that somehow appears out of nothing as a remarkable and suddenly feasible prospect. The trick is to find the other angle. The one that bursts open every construction of dimension to explode in rapture. But more importantly, the willful abstraction to do so. Such is the bed of wonder. That is the awakening of the outer empire in which all importance loses its implications and big white, fist-like waves of undiluted harmony hammer down the walls of reluctance. Feeding a voracious, insatiable desire to see my doubts battered. A death of the narrow life by drowning my warring suspicions in the concept of ‘letting go’. It is all so far beyond us.

One can manoeuvre around one’s own self half the time and just be plain oblivious the other half but still find yet another ‘extra’ half or whole to be thoroughly miserable. What does that tell us about ourselves? What does that really tell us, except for the fact that we have too much time on our hands. Idle time for the psyche to construe more layers than we can deal with, up to the point where we split in half or in thirds or more. The trick is to keep busy and not to find or give yourself the time of considering the gist of things. The thick of it.

Every thought endures a process that siphons you straight to the same end. An enchanted figment where the rainbows touch the ground right where you stand, leaving you ankle deep in tears of joy. Engulfed by the warmth of bitter love and protruding harmonies as to wring the very nature from your bodily vessel. The evaporation of the last drop of effervescence in your words, since words are useless there, and the decimation of the myriad wonders of the arousing commotion in your dances, for pose is made absolutely redundant by that new ruling environment.

We are not hollow to begin with but filled with exploding aspirations of splendid moments. There are stretch marks all over our minds, infinite assemblies of fears and crusts of talented adaptation, caked on top of each other. A tarnished coat for each pitfall we leaped and barely evaded. And hence we find ourselves on the brink of crossing over, covered in horrendous, wormy and uneven scars. Monstrous in our every way. Sobbing, heaving and oozing, while we so desperately want to consider ourselves refined, elusive and delicate. The acted-out fragility of genuine artists with none of the actual shards. There is just no trace of a shadow of wreckage to support the evidence of those anxious feelings. You’re a fraudulent interpretation of yourself. And that mirror is growing thicker and more impenetrable with every true feeling you deny yourself. With every lost day you spend in your office cubicle. Totally disconnected from the scratching, confined creature that you hold captive by your own willingness.

Arise for the last time and overstretch those matured scars to meekly look yourself in the eyes, as the reaper reaps.

What a day. Such a wonderful collection of dear moments. Every next one more magical and compelling than the last. The sumptuous meadow I’m lying in. The embracing wire fences. The stumbling calves and the smiling herd. The hillside I’m repeatedly, vigorously, compulsively rolling down. The mitigating warmth that tickles me. The flow of scents that pulls back on my fleeing through the wild. The willows that reach down to sweep their plush branches against my head. The crunching echoes of the old tree trunks releasing their outer bark. The staggering sounds that whisper and kiss my battered drums. The length of time that opens up in front of me. The absolute simplicity of every former step. The gentlest of hands to loosely clasp my dried out knuckles. The earnest thoughts of leaving everything for only this faintest of possibilities. Pushing out the realities that stab their mortal judgment and oppression into my softened gut. Banning the bitter sting of the grime that pushes in, to overcast the splendour of our undying flicker of all. Edging past the rank, bug infested swamp of expectations and convictions, that freely creep through the skin and sink well in the flesh, conning even the most resilient spirits into compliance. Overwhelmed and tamed by astounding disillusion and disappointment, of seeing perfect moments expire. Rock bottom. The impartiality of highs and lows.

Most of the time I try not to feel entitled to anything at all. But occasionally, when I do slip, I profoundly feel I have the right to be annoyed by the evolved state of things that used to matter to me, and which I have failed to consider for a while. And before I regain my desperate posture, a vast amount of disgruntled thoughts, has already made it to my disfigured mind.

Many of the influences and input and noise that we get bombarded with, is teeming and bursting with plots and vicious schemes. I don’t know about you, but it makes me feel totally disconnected to myself. The deepest of feelings are ‘construed’ and ‘displayed’ and ‘facilitated’. It’s like soul is being marketed, easily achieved. I hate that. Really! It goes for anything nowadays. People think they are buying slices of downright purity while they are really spooning filthy shit into their open and vulnerable hearts. All unsuspecting and innocent.

Concept used to be the direct consequence of context. It needed validation by its context and real proof of life. A long, long time ago. We all got so infuriated when the marketeers started shoving ever more brutal baselines down our throat. How we roared and shrieked in premature victory when the interwebz gave us the ‘power back’. A mighty user generated and thus equal weapon against those ravenous mammoth foes. Turns out that thanks to the new and highly volatile nature of content, due to the ridiculous superfluity of the offer, concept became a stand alone product. The mere memory of something called context, now seems enough to validate and justify its presence.

Still people keep calling me to order on my pessimism. Claiming it is inappropriate, misguided even. Trying to point out that there still are silver linings and rays of wonderful sunshine on cloudless days. As if that compensates for all the heaps of putrid stench, that are building up beyond eyeshot. It may be so that there is a more relative state to life. But I don’t want to go there. I want verification.