(ipso x-acto)

hello cleveland 


My brain is a gold sound from an old phongraph rooted in the corner of a dying library where the ghosts of we scholars still sit and piss off the waxing poetics and scour of isms that first strangled our dreams of becoming the last great american anything.

A well timed scream...

Today i allowed a few minutes of mortality to creep its way through my briefly hungover and otherwise shimmering day of tacos and doughnuts and walking in the sun that shines a little brighter on the man who knows the value of an orgasmic start to the morning.

Not the rote woebegone existential dribble that's marked so many of my internal monologues: wondering when i'll find the book in print, when my pepper plant will become a tree or if a child really has anything to do with the legacy i leave this living plane. but a simple recognition of death.

I strolled under a scaffold. a rickety steel adhoc function of the new york city landscape whose beams i could see shaking with the weight of union men and concrete. it was about twenty feet. maybe thirty. long enough to ensure me a shitty fucking end to my questionable time once i was halfway in between either end (i'm not all that much of a runner. never really been an athlete. hell, whatever exercise i once promised myself is well curbed in favor of the tapping, the reading and some sleep [tv too. always with the fucking tv]).

I couldn't tell the value of the materials. couldn't determine how sturdy or wisely the lift had been raised.

And i didn't really care.

I was strangely unafraid.

Even though, in that moment, i realized that had anything above me gone amiss i would be destroyed (if not killed outright). my bones would break. my guts would ooze out onto the street beneath the weight. i wouldn't have a moment for redemption, regret. i would only have time to die.

And that felt fine. everything felt all right.

Not that i want to die. quite the opposite, really. i'd like to live a relatively long life (long enough, that is, to get the fuck away from the cave and see my face somewhere respectable if not committed to saving the world entirely). there's much more for me to do. to say. to experience before i kiss off this mortal coil.

I know now though, that if i didn't. if it all ended in some flash (or hulking mass as today might have provided) it would be okay. i'd have served my contract and i would have done it well.

Well enough at least, for me.