The dead, alive

Rapid-cycling through the day is a poor way to live while dead

What obtains from an image search for “Phoenix,” where the writer lives. The city gets 10 to 15 degree Fahrenheit hotter nighttime temperatures than the rural areas, & despite your best efforts, you cannot escape.

It once said in me, while observing my morning freedom to get high, “desperately the living must distinguish themselves from death. This distinguishment, drawn out, is in the end the same as life. When life no longer sustains its self-definitive act, it becomes clear it was always the same as death.”

I have known also a strange desire to shuffle off the scene, and I wonder now if I have ever lived at all, but if I always have been merely death pretending.

Photograph taken in between writing stanzas of the poem that follows. It is not definable but it is likely water that sustains the vaguely Martian-looking reeds in the foreground.

Now some original philosophy in the existentialist tradition.

(This was written at a café where it is impossible for the solitary to talk to strangers without risking an even further alienation from themselves. You bring your friends with you or you will have none.)

The subject position is precisely the terror.
The subject is, in fact, the abject suspect–

Abject suspectivity is the essential
self-accusation of one’s being

seen being a subjective object
being an unspeakable crime.

Thus one sees that continually
the former absorbs the form.

The spectacle of the translation,
former into form, form into thing,

is a defensive posture–it is our
human equivalent of cow herds,

eyelids low, jawboning the cud.

It is the displaced, new-seeming
glaaaazzzeee across God’s toast…

Our eyeballs must belong to others,
for the displacing and informing hand

of my gaze–It is enough
to destroy one of us for days.

Hello.