Rhythm, Rhyme, and Reason

The night filled the moment as I pondered when and how was I going to sleep.

The way they moved inside me, penetrating the intestines of my discontent, breached the wall that I myself had built. I am no one, this is no one, and, by the time this is finished, none of you will be there anymore. Just me and this.

To think, to wonder, thing of ponder. Words used for melodramatic obsolete purposes. I can't remember a time when doing this brought pleasure. And I can't remember why I even began to do this. Exercise maybe. To show off possibly. Or maybe just to confirm that I can still do it. Unorganized, thoughtless, without technique... like always.

This writing, like my life, was supposed to be a poem, but it grew into prose. And I miss it so; the connection between rhythm, rhyme, and reason. A true challenge, even more so for the fact that it shouldn't feel like one. If so, the lines suffer from unwarranted tension; although, sometimes they feed from it. Of the ones I've pulled off, some certainly did, but I didn't begrudge. They were my children: one of the few things in my past life that were truly genuine. Honesty swept from my fingers, while I struggled to not think, to not feel, to just write. Like now.

I've tried to revive it, but it is of no use. Poetry in verse is a melancholic blind spot, easily drawn into a corny soap opera, in which mediocrity oozes, sucking the life out of the paper. It ends up lacking character, a definition... it ends up lacking balls:

Dirty sweat and muscles tightening.
I tear the skin off her.
The meat, the sour, the scream,
all steer my strength to sunder.

But it's useless, as those four lines equate a lifetime of exasperation with my own self. Those lines were tiresome, heartening, and just plain vicious, in both message and technique. They do no favor in disguising the writer's inner struggle between wanting to be a good poet and wanting to be an honest writer. It may have balls, but the sweetness underneath was kept aside, forced into submission, all for the sake of saving an ego-driven face:

The weak pull from you,
steal your tears,
but you keep on,
drowning in your own sweat.
Blast through the traps with no fear,
Just don't forget,
those lines hooked and set
were pulled by your own self, dear.
But, no worries, no shroud.
Step in, forget the cloud.
Quivering in expectation,
I await your blunder.
A slip, a fall, a stumbler.
The oh sweet sound
of another one tripping in.
Go on, another round,
why maybe, who knows?
Lucky you might go again.

It's near, but not for long, like it's saying goodbye, but I don't want to wave back. It can hold so much meaning, the simplicity in its own can be enough to explain whole essays, yet I've never learned how to grasp it adequately. Like a magic sword with no owner, a threefold stool that doesn't seem to hold any weight, or a symbol that only God understands: it's powerful but untamable. Character, beauty, and meaning; rhythm, rhyme, and reason...

My fingertips are growing numb
as the sentiment of a known past is yonder.
Canned in the outer wrapping
it peels off, steadily,
to a brisk powder.
I wait, hastily, asleep
in a dream that seems no different in splendor.
Stopped, I awake absent of it,
but feeling just the same.
It has flown away from me,
as if it were never mine.
My fingertips feel warm,
they dance now to a different time.
Different style,
but same thoughts,
same grunts.
It slips, "let go."
Today's different,
"I'm through.
You don't need me anymore,
you haven't since long ago."

A memory of solitude, of warmth in time of cold, teachings of how to hold on while letting go. Irony, it seems, it's immune to style, and letting go seems as appropriate as ever. The cloud is still there, and, even though I'm left with only one tool to walk through it, it is the one I forged. With it, I'll ride through the myst that is called life, and breath it through the new lungs I've been using all along.

Verse, I hardly knew ye, and I hardly think that will be a problem.

Pr0n

I've recently written an article about Steve Jobs' position on pornography in the iPhone (to summarize: He doesn't like it). And while writing it, I've come to realize the suicide subject which is pornography, wielding its powers of dividingness.

If you talk bad about it, you get people like me championing it as a celebration of freedom of speech, with billboards filled with timetables showing how it has helped legitimize today's current technology.

If you talk good about it, you get extreme conservatists and fundamentalist telling us how it's immoral, detrimental to society's backbone, and can even cause earthquakes.

Of the handful of readers of this blog, I'm sure that by now you know I like to comprehend the many sides of an argument, but in this regard I can't help see the conservative side with a hint of condescension. Really? People fucking is wrong? How is it that practicing my voyeuristic side by seeing a video of a consenting couple doing it is immoral? In what page of the Moral Guidelines Book does it say that I'm hurting somebody (even myself) by doing so?

One famous argument is that "it degrades women". To that I say: it depends on what type of porn your watching (pause for laughter). Seriously, though, nowadays the Pornographic Industry (that's right, it's an industry) is one of the few economic sectors in which the woman can be expected to be paid more than the man (like I said, depends on the type of pr0n); even 100% more.

Another bogus argument is that of "pornography induces perversion"; it doesn't, it really really doesn't. However, that misconception is very dangerous, prone to heritage through the ages, fostering stigmas against any type of sexuality (even the "normal" one), and making youths either believe it's wrong to have a boner or experiment outside of a safe environment.

When I preach to myself about this, I always hear my other voices answer back "but what about the children?" You mean, the thousands of kids that see on National Geographic or the Discovery Channel two chimps doing the nasty and finding out the hard way where the little bugger actually came from? Easy: you say to the wide-eyed mucus factory, "that's pornography, some people like to see it because it causes them pleasure, but to some it's distasteful, so don't be showing it to everybody". This was exactly what my dad told me when I was five, a person that to this day doesn't like pornography, but has never ordered me to stop seeing it.

To put it another way: don't bullshit your kids, porn is everywhere and they will eventually find out about it. I find it cruel that some people try to deny children the freedom of finding out for themselves if they like it or not. Like horror films or chick flicks: some like it, some don't, based purely on taste, not perversion.

And this is the most horrifying stature of this whole ordeal: pornography's reputation as a "sin" or "immoral" can be directly traced to how fundamentalistic-conservative persons believe that the pure act of sex is derived from evil. That act that not only grants us the ability of procreation, but the way we can manifest our love for one another, providing a step closer to God in every shared orgasm, is defined as "bad" for an unknown stupid reason. And everything related to it (like pornography) is likewise wrong.

If only people would realize that rain isn't God's tears, but is God cumming over all of us (pause for gasps). Thunder is his orgasmic grunt, while he watches millions upon millions of us (animals, plants, you name it) doing every type of weird shit he has grant us the imagination to do. Yes, you're reading right: God likes pornography. We are his pornography. Smile for the camera!

And of all the type of pornography he gets to watch, I think he likes the one about us, mankind, the best. Why do you think we are the only ones to wear clothes in this planet? He likes to watch us strip before we get down and dirty.

(Untitled)

The rage in pudding, the guacamole of sorrow, and the solidarity in masturbation. I grew up with these afflictions and virtues, and I feel their disconnection. A disconnection I've long forgotten.

It's been a while, and, such a short time has passed, I don't feel the change anymore. I could say that the change has been the only constant, and, thus, I've grown accustomed to it such that I don't feel it anymore. Like a burning sun after the fifth hour: the burn is there, but somehow it isn't anymore, as the skin absorbs it, and you become the burn.

Or I could say that there isn't a change, and that I've peaked to whatever being my sub-conscious has decided to flourish into. This alternative appears as the most satisfying, but you and I know this isn't the case. I've seen myself after all these years, and I know the incessant change has only altered the way I look at the world, but not who I am, indicating that the change hasn't even begun. This may seem as a paradox, as I still don't know who I am, but, alas, I feel the same. If symbolic logic has taught me anything, is that you don't need to know the value of something to know that it hasn't changed, just the differential from one point to another.

This year, the differential seems null. The same pudding, the same guacamole, the same solidarity. And I ache for some change, some improvement, some sort of evidence that here lies a less egotistic being that acts more upon his written words. The struggle has been evident, however, and the fire and the sun and the moon have witnessed it. Have they? Darn, I'm not sure. Cold blood serving beside a table of witchcraft still lingers; the scratches still appear, and the weary stillness of my stare towards the sky still account for it. That's my struggle, and it's still there... is it?

Maybe I've been looking at this all wrong. Maybe the wall that I'm pushing has been altering itself. Maybe that's the change that's been happening: I'm the same, but the struggle is different, and my old tactics aren't working against this new enemy. New bullets need to be fired towards new targets. New abilities need to be learned. New ways of changing, new alternations for a new oblivion.

... Thus, I need to reboot. I need to start over. Clean slate, empty mind, a bowl and nothing more. And then, reabsorb, refill, look at things anew, and re-comprehend their meaning.

I'm too full, too big, too fat with self-contradicting truths: I need to find myself amidst these weeds of ego-filling pseudo-knowledge. Throw myself from a hill, let myself loose pieces of myself and look at me downstream. Symbolic logic has done all it can, now its time to open up the variable and find out what's in there. The fact of the matter is I've been teasing myself of what lies inside, trying to remember from pieces of memory of what's locked in there. In reality I honestly can't remember what I've been repressing all these years, only the legend-like remembrance of it being "bad".

All this bullshit that I've grown fat from has served as the wall of a prison of myself... My God, that's the same wall I've been fighting! The outer has turned inner, and I've been too scared to look at the other side of the wall. The change has occurred, but in a part I haven't been looking at. Yes, I've been definitely looking at this all wrong.

It's time then... the pudding, the guacamole, and the solidarity are going to see themselves in the mirror. Strangely, a feeling of familiarity is present, as if I've done this before. Yet, as whenever uncertainty points to a misty road ahead, I can't help feel frightened of where I'll end up, of what lies buried beneath my fattening presumptuousness and delusions of grandeur.

Logic implies that I should be frightened of finding a deep sense of evil, but such definition actually calms me. "Evil" is misunderstood, and by comprehending it, it can be salvaged. Another possibility is that "ego" winds up being my fuel, but that just would mean that the locked up enemy was the one that I've been battling all along: the misty road would end up where I am right now. No, what I'm frightened of the most is that I find nothing there: I don't know what to do with that. What would that mean? How would I go about after that?

...

I'm grinning right now, because I realized that I've been so foolish. Of course I know what to do with that: fill it up, exactly as I was preparing to do a couple of paragraphs ago. The mean becomes the end. By preparing to tear down the wall, I would be tearing down the wall. I get it now.

While staring at the keyboard, I can't feel anything, and for the first time I'm actually content with that. That's why my sub-conscious chose "Nihil" as the title for my blog and my electronic children. It was right there all along. I am nothing, and I haven't done anything about it since ever. But, should I? There's a part of me that wants to enjoy this as it is, and another that wants to begin filling it up... I'm grinning again:

Fuck it: I'll do both. It's a misty road after all, I haven't travelled it yet, why not embrace its uncertainty? Why define what can and can't be done so early?

It's time to look at things with wonder again, to relearn things I supposedly know, to fuck up where I've fucked up before, and to let myself enjoy it this time around.

I am nothing and nothing am I
~><~