The Sour Lining of Nirvana
Scorched goody goody flesh on a methane torch as the dark princess lights her farts. Anesthesia lifts and the opiate taste returns: it’s the sour lining of nirvana and it’s goody goody good – too good for me. When I come to the sour lining of nirvana after spiking my Red Bull, it’s hard to transcend to the enlightenment that’s so close I can smell it.
Upper, downer, allarounder. Woozy from zen stink, pubic hairs crisscross the bed and I retch again, sugar-loaded sperm-stained love-monkey safe in a Motel 6, feeling around for the dust in the corners, dust that must bring my saccharine trip back to grainy relatables, tables and constants, things I know what to do with. But I don’t know shit, except I feel sublimely sick and the maidwashed walls hide no dust at all. Let’s get some waffles.
What do you do with hyper inspiration / poetic perspiration in a crowded Kansas diner in the morning? Nine-to-fivers sizzle in the killer sun and I’m not used to having words at my disposal. I see no disposal anywhere, they must course most coarsely through my aching artist’s orifice, stretching my specs past their design as the lining constricts my mind. I play the squeezebox game for cryptic kinetics, movement number four, presto digitation, manual labour of love-dread.
I haven’t been a poet in months and my wrist is getting sore from writing this down. Forearm tendons throb the echoes of omnipresent koans at hand wringing ethereal clenches, choking the life out of life itself. Dao grates with a slick lubricant penetrating cheap bliss, breaking through to rich sleaze.
I’m afraid that at any moment MANIA will consume me. I’m far too sane, uncomfortable with madness. I’m too aware of awareness, revelation makes my shaky head explode, knocks the cardhouse flat. It’s all or nothing for me, and Mickey Mouse does not have the answer. Let’s go back to the room and hypothesize that if our supreme understanding was flowing out of the rocks and the trees and the TV screen, and the motel walls with their Mr. Clean sheen, everything would be set right. The Dao would prop up mania with rock solid foundation, Gaia’s synthetic verification, but so focused am I on the imperfection of imperfection, I fail to see that the truth of perfection is in what I’m writing RIGHT NOW!
I create my own sour lining, I ache because I’m alive. It’s folly to be fulfilled. I’ve lived a rich life as a pretty lazy petty paisley artist and the culmination of the subgenius is this laughing exegesis.
Politics await while I piss out the logos. Political animals are on the way, carnivores coming for me in my moment of calm, a urination moment where everything is everything. Time no longer ticks. It flows, like what the philosopher peasants called the Dao, the Dao, oh here we go, flow, with the grand old Dao, just like Lao. I’ll be sweet and wipe the seat after admiring the splatter-pattern.
I’ve missed the finger that points at the moon, I’ve actually been living. When I wake up I appreciate the dream. Sacred flakes off to real profanity and how does Lao-tse survive? Somehow history gowned him in the Emperor’s Garments but I see them draped across the ages.
Cup of life overflows for an epic slur and I’m still hung up on the coatrack of enlightenment, Mickey Mouse coding through my synapses, codeine flowing through the bad-boy’s bloodstream of bliss, might as well be heroin in synthetic life drama, chemical messages, electric signal, biological information… is this what consciousness is? I need to see deep to realize how shallow it all is. When I see life as a game, why do I feel so serious? I puke the Dao out of me, regurgitate ancient philosophy, Shiva in my pocket, ripping at the lining, alcohol gone, codeine leaving, lining tasting sweet at last in stark relief.
Political animals have taken over the zoo. We make shoddy myths when we watch CNN but one day they will become magic mantras and mythological manna. They will set armies marching, more of them, a link in a chain of genocide. George Bush, the cokehead christian president will resonate fractally in future events as a sociodynamic something or other, we can’t extrapolate from this crazy vantage, mired in bloody mercantile history, unable to agree on the sustainability of our SUVs, chasing the value of fluctuating currency, punchline spread through slices of time.
And I am on a poetic ego trip, felating my own enlightenment and cackling at its absurdity, dopamine to the last drop, drowned in divine mania. Words are madness, grotesque intoxicating madness, a deck of cards arranged like a house, a simulacrum of thought, a mockup of feeling, crumb of reeling rocking rolling rhyming ridiculosity. I will lose myself in words, the proper venue for mania, disappearing in the menu of blanket gravy. I’ll be sure to enunciate till every syllable sparkles in crisp, high-definition redundancy, polished pixels of syntactic intent, read to a roomful of perked-up poets who will appreciate – oh Ego, oh God, Oh Me!
I am on fucking fire, filling this notebook to the brim. Where do I credit this energy? Red Bull, Vodka, Sex, Self? There is no separation. And there is my partner in crime, sleeping through my mania. I feel so scarily loaded, I almost long for what I imagine is her placid mind mist. I wonder where the plumbers’ yearnings went. Woke up this morning after a Walmart cocktail and found the external brilliance of genetic imprint slapping me in the face, roping me into a sadomasochistic fuckfest, impaled on the maypole in a forty minute solo, wanking off with the world, giving Joyce a run for his literary lexicon.
Ring ring riff reverb burbs burbling along the deja-thread, you’ve heard this before. Isn’t this a cycle? There are finite possibilities but existence could be plural. Life is a loop but we can sever the string, shrug off the quest for the Dark Tower, chill a little longer in the Motel 6 after the notebook has been filled and find the interdimensional portal in the shower during the exploration of a new tantric sexual position: Oh Me! Oh You! Oh Doorway! Was this here the whole holy time? How’d we miss it? Wait! Is the phone ringing? Riffing? Reverberating? Better answer.
I guess I am maniacal but that is just a word. I’m addicted to writing. I assume I can put the pen down any time I want but will is an illusion. Still on the ego trip and feeling philanthropic. Everyone may bask in my ego, bathe in my light, there’s enough to go around. Good people, savor my good-hearted sarcasm, imbibe my sophisticated yin rapscality!
Do you mind if I open the windowshade or is it just a shade of hallucination? Is my actual circumstance wobbling on the street in front of a Denver comedy club loaded on tryptamines babbling incoherently to a smirking cameraman interviewing me for a David Cross DVD? Probably not but it’s fun to imagine such gateways through reality’s plurality. I’m going to milk the mania for all it’s worth, exploit the natural high which stems strangely from an artificial hangover low. Perhaps Red Bull really did give me wings and will ultimately drop me on the Manhattan streets when it’s exhausted its amusement at my arbitrary mania – and I will pick myself up off the ground looking for a crack dealer to keep me flying, higher than Christ in a Scorsese flick.
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