Ponies That Can’t Stand Up

-Leviathan-

We are all poorly and accidentally designed desire-machines. Tiny bundles of emotions loosely wrapped in cognitive functions. That is a desire-machine. Over nursed and underdeveloped these tiny machines bounce around shitting here and shitting there. At least the desire-machine can shit. This tiny machine can eat too, though it never fully digests a meal. Something always remains. In this sense, a desire-machine is giving. Giving is a higher virtue than taking. Yet, desire-machines are being taught to take. They are being taught that taking is a far superior virtue than giving. A different much larger machine teaches these tiny machines to take. It teaches that not shitting is the holy of holies. This larger machine has many faces. Many endearing, loving, and tempting faces. Do not be fooled! Do not seek the treasure! That tempting treasure is but a farce.

Modernity is a machine that eats all people and digests them fully. This is no desire-machine for this machine has no excrement. This machine absorbs and insulates itself against destruction. It becomes larger, harder, and stronger; moving ever faster and consuming more people of all shapes and sizes. Do not shy away. Do not run to primitive forests to escape the machine. You will soon see that Modernity has already eaten those forests. Let modernity swallow you whole. To destroy this machine you must give it indigestion! You must force this machine to vomit! Modernity has no asshole. You must argue with its innards with you sour-tasting breath. You must bite and gnaw at its many intestinal cords and cables. Though if you are vomited out, be eaten again. And again you must make this machine sick! Over and over; again and again. If we are lucky the modernity may vomit all of its intestinal insulation and be too weak to eat again.

-Ponies That Can’t Stand Up-

I couldn’t stand the sound of the birds chorus, so I found my nearest pair of earplugs and shoved them in my ears. I probably damaged my ear drums in the process, but it was all for the better. I figured most sounds weren’t worth hearing, especially sounds which disrupted my own chain of thought. Each bird had its own tone, it’s own melody, it’s own set of expressions it used to gather the attention of some other bird similar to itself. I always figured a bird had it easy. Travel was simple for a bird. Travel was foolish for a human. For me. There were far too many germs lying about waiting to be intercepted onto my luggage. Onto my hands. In my mouth. I always worried about a bird shitting right into my mouth. That almost terrified me more than the DMV but that was a different story. Lines…Lines….Lines…I felt like the Grinch, but I know I wasn’t some caricature of a man. I was a real man. I knew I was real because I was an individual, unlike everyone else. Just like all those characters I had read about. I was that guy but better. School didn’t mean shit to me. My parents were morons. And so were those stupid birds. As long as they wouldn’t shit in my mouth. God, that would be terrible. I really had a serious fear about some bird shitting in my mouth. I bet no one else had a fear like that. That is what made me unique. My fears.

I remember my father liked beer. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. It made me bloated and I farted a lot. I didn’t always drink it. I was more of a clear liquor kind of guy. If I was sad. If I wasn’t worried about birds shitting in my mouth then I wouldn’t feel the need to drink, but if I was fearful…well, I either slept or drank, or both. Reading became boring after a few years. T.V. was also kinda of boring, but I found the flashing lights entertaining. All of those personalities reminded me of myself. Just as long as those stupid chorus’ of feathered shit mongers didn’t wake me up.

I saw a person who hated me yesterday. I told her how great it was to see her again. I don’t think she believed me. It didn’t matter. As long as I kept up the façade that I was interesting and liked interesting people I would be golden. Golden like King Midas would be the next reference I would use. I remembered it from a movie my babysitter use to play when she was bored of talking to me. Next time I encountered that person who hated me I would say they reminded me of King Midas, then they might find me interesting.

I saw that person again, but I forgot the reference I was going to make. Instead I looked at them for too long in the grocery line. I smiled and said it was amazing to see them again, but I probably overdid it. I was clearly overthinking the situation and decided that they were a piece of shit and that it didn’t matter if they thought I was interesting at all. I remember the word shit so vividly. I wonder if that was why I was so worried about some bird shitting in my mouth. There was also a score of pigeon that sat on the awning of the grocery store, glaring at me.

Everyday grew tiresome and lonesome, or so I assumed that what I was suppose to feel. The books I pretended to read and the media I watched told me that is how people felt, but I wasn’t exactly sure that is what I actually felt. I felt stupid and smart. I felt like the best. I felt like I was the only one who knew how stupid everything was. I was a regular Holden Caulfield or Stephen Hero, I couldn’t quite remember which book I connected with more. Or which book I pretended to connect with more. Sometimes I worried that people could smell me. Smell that I didn’t remember which book I liked more. Or that I pretended to read. It didn’t matter to the grapefruit I hated to eat. I didn’t put sugar on it because someone had called me a pussy once for doing that.

I saw that person who hated me again, but I nearly forgot the game I was playing with them. I faltered only for a moment and recovered my balance and recanted how much I too enjoyed that T.V. show we had been talking about for the past month. It was so much easier to think about myself and the things I liked rather than the things other people liked. I wonder if she liked grapefruit as well or if she just pretended to like it as I did. As least in that case we might have something in common. I would bring up grapefruit the next time we ran into one another.

My apartment was small. I never thought to get a house. I remember never having a house as a child, so why would I have one as an adult? I remember that houses were for families, and that was something that I never planned on having. A family seemed foolish. There were already too maybe people bumping into one another. It seemed silly to make more of them. Well, maybe I wanted to make more of them, but was well adjusted enough to know that no one in there right might would have one with me. Man or women. Adoption or pregnancy was out of the question. I was too well adjusted to make that mistake.

My place had an interesting smell. I’m pretty sure it was my upstairs neighbor. I thought he hated me, but I think we are fairly indifferent to one another. Sometimes it sounds like he has people over, but I think it is just his ex-wife coming over for alimony checks. Then again I don’t know shit about the guy. At least I thought it was a guy. I wasn’t into defining people’s genders or sexes or whatever was appropriate for the day. He could be what he wanted to be for all I cared. I wondered if people thought about me. I wondered if they thought about if I thought about ever wanting to be a women. I figure most people thought about it, so why wouldn’t they think about me thinking about it. I figured everyone did that at some point.

It was really hard to get on the plane when my mother died. I was assured we wouldn’t crash, but I wished I had just taken a cab. I didn’t have the money for that long of a cab ride though. The peanuts were stale. I was pretty sure they served muskrat for lunch. I was sure that the stewardess was into me. If the flight was going to go down, I was going to be the one to save her from her boring existence. The funeral was boring. I cried. I think it was because everyone else did, and the music was satisfying in that respect. There were bagpipes on a hill. I thought it was too fancy, but then again I’m pretty sure my mother’s side was Irish. I don’t know if that was significant. I was asked far too many questions and I think her relatives regretted my existence. Well, they were no better than that women I kept running into a home. Or was she a man. It was getting harder to tell. I really tended to concentrate on people’s mustaches. I began to realize that everyone had a mustache. They could be beautiful or poorly managed. I noticed my dead mother managed her final mustache well.

I saw that women again and told her she had an excellent mustache. She yelled; the manager of the grocery store told me that I should not shop there anymore. I dropped the grapefruit and left. The pigeons glared. There must be days where neither one of them were there. I sulked at home and ate pizza for a few days. Who needs to shop and nearly get shit on when a man will bring a pizza to you. Pizza is every food. Pizza is good.

-Leviathan 2-

Beware the solar anus for it may produce four distinct types of matter. Unfettered by shoots and branches the organelles dance atop twin peaks of mayhem. All the parts and processes, nodes of anti-production and forced desire-production, all coupling organisms and enemies of the body, the production machine, comes to a halt when the body without organs presents its smooth, slippery opaque, taut surface is full view for all to witness. There are only utterances, gasps, and subtly cries for what is there to do besides gaze upon this miserable miracle. A vast articulated block of sound washes over in a undifferentiated flow of amorphous fluid. Penetrating each body, shape and desiring machine. No working machines. A person’s own body is no more.

Mystical value is the investissement which thusly forces to the surface, as puss erupts from a pimple, the paranoiac machines. These are mere projections of a “person’s own body,” but projections are vile and malicious nonetheless. They damage and toss the yoke of oppression on your own mind. A repulsion machine. An attraction machine. These things have their place on the immanence plane. This is the teleological trick. Everything might seem as though its objectively produced as and by the quasi cause, but these are all just mystical beings. What truly constitutes the labor-process is encoded, recorded, inscribed on a kind of full body. These now paranoiac machines as tasteless projections of now non-desiring-organ-machines cling, not couple, to this slippy body without organs. Now everything is a matter of the vapid organless body as it records upon them the proper desires. No contradictions or dark humor here. This is safety production at surplus value. Be wary A-dam for this omnitudo realitatis will be inscribed across the noumenal stars of ambitious religions and capitalist specters, haunting each crevasse. Lying in wait to spit forth an enchanted tale of disjunctive syllogism as a priori. The God of Delirium creeps across the slippery surface establishing disjunction after disjunction. “It can’t be this so it must be that. It can’t be this so it much be that. I can’t be this so it must be that!”

-Please Put Your Skin in One Place-

People say the funniest things like, “I might have done that,” or “I  could have been the one to do that.” Well, its only strange if you don’t agree that we aren’t who we were before who we are now. I suppose you might be mad to think you are who you were but mere seconds ago, no less years or even decades. You might hold onto a name in a feeble attempt to bind some semblance of coherent consciousness over time, yet not everyone chooses this method. A name might help others recognize you, but it won’t stop your skin from falling off. We are disgusted at molted carapaces laying about, all the while we creep around shedding our skin everywhere we go. A least the crustacean or any arthropod has the decency to leave their skin in one place. It makes for an easier cleanup!

I had to start going to a different grocery store. This store was much larger. One where people didn’t leave their skin laying around. How am I suppose to pick out a grapefruit that won’t squirt me in the eye when I’m stepping on people’s skin, and nearly slipping and falling. There were different people here, though some of them were the same. I wasn’t entirely surprised by this feature, maybe people have duplicates. Even duplicates of duplicates. Some might even consider duplicates of duplicates of duplicates, yet I digress. Standing in line, each beep at the register indicated another duplicate was duplicated. I didn’t have anything, so the cashier let me leave. Everyone seemed upset, even though I was just following everyone else. I will try to pick the right grapefruit next time. I might have to try a third store, there was too much skin laying around at that last one. No stone left upturned as they say. I walked on. 

I liked the beach but hated the sand. The forest was excellent, unless it was wet, then you were wet. But I suppose being wet isn’t always a bad thing. Assuredly, there were people who wanted to and willing became wet and even sing about it. I saw this in movies often. You learn things from movies, but I had to unlearn most of it as soon as I had seen it. Look at the man smoke, but don’t smoke! Look at the people laugh and drink, but don’t drink! Look at the people fuck, but don’t fuck! Keep being told not to smoke, drink, and fuck places and sooner or later you figure out you aren’t suppose to smoke, drink, and fuck. There was sand bleeding into my shoes.

I left home when I was young, younger than today, trying to find places to smoke, drink, and fuck. I did, but it came at a cost. Here’s one misanthropic mustache and a double neurosis on the rocks please and thank you. I couldn’t keep track of whether I was anal retentive or anal expulsive because it was either always coming out or stuck way up in me. Do you expect me to keep a fecal journal? I had a hard enough time trying to find the right place to shit, before people told me not to. Telling me not to curse as well, but I manged to do that plenty in my youth as well. Every other word was a ‘fuck’ or a ‘shit’ or even a ‘cunt’ if they really had it coming. And by ‘they’ I don’t even mean another person, though sometimes it would be. Sometimes it was a trashcan that was too far out into the alley where I went lurking. Or an envelope that wouldn’t open properly. Especially a milk carton. I saw that all the time. I bet the man would whisper ‘cunt’ under his breath when the milk spilled all over him. It was people like him that deserved to have a bird shit in their mouth, but it was always me who got the shit in my mouth. Or maybe that hadn’t happened yet. It’s always back to the shitting and the pooping. “Christ on a cracker!” Or was it “Christ is a cracker?” I can’t remember any of those frivolous sayings anymore. My feet sank deeper.

I grew up looking at books, but never understanding them. I witnessed the pages move before my eyes, but I never fully took in the flavor of any particular narrative. That is to say, I mean, I understood the narrative, yet the meaning was lost on me. Each word would make sense, but the more that were strung together the less each compounded notion would make sense. Try and put two paragraphs together and I was nearly completely lost; however I always found more meaning when I would rearrange the paragraphs. That was until the librarian came in kicking and screaming and took my knife. I dumped in the wrong place again. I at least learned to mimic what I knew to be the right thing to say about the material in school. I learned how to say just enough so that they would stop bothering me. Behavioral problem this, learning disability that. I always wished they would just get it over with and just call me stupid, like everyone else did. I drew mostly stick-figures to pass the time. The black heads would fight the white heads. I noticed how that related to the puss emanating from my face, but the racial component was lost to me until a black guy punched me in the face one day. In was only in that moment, that I realized how easy I had it no matter how stupid everyone thought I was. Dumb people do dumb things. Smart people outsmart each other and then they go ahead and outsmart themselves. I’ve dealt with both dumb and smart people, but I think its hard to tell the difference between them. It was definitely time to leave this cursed place. Waves crashing were replaced by children wailing and the sun was giving me a headache. I was worried I might shoot someone. I would have to get a gun first.

I had a professor once who wrote books but kept them in his closet. He would make students cry over the introductory elements of Ethics. Suicide was a common thread of discussion. You might be surprised that a fool like me who ponders bird shit was able to attend such a prestigious class, well you should know that they let just about anyone with three-hundred dollars take an ethics course at community college. My friend might as well have been hanging right there in the class room, though, so maybe it wasn’t worth my money. I had to leave and get water. Maybe I was the only one who was crying. Maybe I couldn’t handle these difficult topics. I was ruined. I came to this class to show how morally superior I was to everyone else and now I’m hunted by ghosts swaying under florescent lights. I was suppose to go to college. There wasn’t two ways about it. I went and played and danced through the motions, but that swaying body continued haunting me. Was it my fault? I was stuck in the sky. I was told to never get stuck in the sky and that is exactly where I ended up. I read a bunch of dead losers and some live losers. I didn’t appreciate anything I had learned till much later, and by then it was useless anyway. Drugs made you smart and stupid just like the books you pretended to read. That women with her kid on the swing was doped up, I’m sure of it. These kids playing volleyball were probably on drugs too. 

I was all wrapped up in this miserable miracle they call adolescent. I think some people never leave this stage. Gently floating in a salty sea, these people rest and resist change. Living forever liminally as a lush featherbrained lunatic. I see these people in sandals and many colored shorts with large beaks and short guts. I might be one of these people. I spent most of my time walking or sitting alone now. Sitting various places and walking to other places to sit. This ever elusive grocery store continued to plague my mind, which raced with the question wracking my brain and making me physically ill. I knew people could see the anguish on my face. They must have thought my mother died. The amount of pain with which I writhed on a city bench. All the mistakes I had made in my life danced through my head, picking and prodding my fat fleshy brain. With cattle prods they tortured my weary soul, picking and prodding, picking and prodding. All of these moments culminated into this single unsolvable problem. Still, a thousand splendors stood before me, yet my feet felt dry and baked.

It’s hard to be told to, “move along” so many times in a single day. Constantly people must have found me so displeasurable they call someone else to tell me to leave the area. “Do you have a home,” they would ask? My ID was up to date. Each interaction made everyone feel silly and hurt my ego. “Why don’t you just go home and clean up?” What a preposterous thought! A country that touts freedom, yet you aren’t free to stink on a bench. I should be able to stink on a bench if I’d like to stink on a bench. To stink on a bench is to be free. They told me I could make a formal complaint at the station, but I knew that was a trick. I’d never see the light of day again if I went with any of them. Image the skin left in their cruiser, or worse the concrete slab they call a bed. They don’t clean that, and even if they did it would come crawling back. Skin on top of skin baking itself into ever nook and crevice available. I’d been there, and when I was there I wasn’t thinking about how much other skin was also there cluttering up the place. Now, the very thought of it ruined me. I would have to be more careful about where I sat in the future.

-Leviathan 3-

The tower of temptation welcomes the God of Delirium! The gibbering mouth machines cascade down the tower, recording here and recording there; mass producing productions to be consumed, which is a production in itself. Even now suffering is a form of self-enjoyment and eating is a past time activity. The growth of these grotesque genealogies grips tight the empire and the rebel both. The planes of immanence have now been flipped and dissected, mismatched and rebuilt. Are they still even immanent? A gibber would say no. HA! Then gaze into the abyss and grab the lyre of Orpheus, for how else can one witness these miraculating machines of all kinds? Conviviality is out of the question at this time. Critiquing caretakers and care-taking critics (both machines), will be exiled them from the kingdom. Cast them into a (his)tory of madness away from good and evil and tucked deep in the fetishisms of yesterday. The divided mind twists and buckles but nearly never breaks. Birth forth clinics of totalitarian fury; the tower howls atop of the unearthly hill.

The purest of states of energy reside in the zone of intensity. Trapped between the God of Delirium and all the machines, desiring, paranoiac, miraculating, celibate and gibbering this pure state is bound to be inscribed, yet as soon as it is it is gone. This necessary consummation/consumption is the motivating force behind repressed intensity and each neurosis. Life-defamation at its core, this is the burning, living center of what we think is matter. The subject passes through a series of states of being, thus there is no-self, but, if there is luck, a subject is spread about the circumference of the ego abandoned. The God of Delirium will have the subject thinking that they have pasted through history, as the gibber mouths macerate the subject’s faculties. This will look as if the subject has been adorned with triumphant necklaces and head coverings of gold, yet this is what the God wants. Now what is left is a veritable group fantasy born from the blood of The Other. A tower to be worshiped rests among a hill, orbited by specters and machines alike. The organless body emerges from the surrounding ocean. Gaze upon this feeble madness and rest assured you will be recorded and inscribed!

-Mirrors in the Open-

I prefer my fish as a paste but my steak as a slice. I wrote this on the survey postcard attached to the magazine I found on the coffee table outside of the bodega I frequented. They let me be near, which was kind. The survey smelled of perfume and I was intent on returning it to sender. My opinion was valid and they should know and take note. I wanted to be heard like so many others.

The Inhalation of myriad tiny machines that change your mind. The rapid content imprints itself as necessary in your own makeup. The More machines the more you desire them. The are constant and never ending. Each one is nearly 30 seconds in length and attempts to latch a hook and couple with your own desire machine. You might sway to and fro with many of these hooked machines clinging onto you. Some many get shaken asunder, yet many will cling for years to come, never to be completely discarded .

There was a man I knew who would laugh at his own jokes until you joined him. There were a few times where I didn’t join him and his laugh eventually dwindled or he would explain his joke further. This was worse. I still remember his sunken eyes and gaunt face. He was a gigantic man and his body had strange proportions. His mouth was full of large teeth that would stare right at you while he laughed and laughed until you joined.

I was starring at my monitor. A nice new monitor. And I couldn’t help be notice a small bubble starting to form on the screen. A small bubble that grew into a festering boil. I produced a knife with which I cut open the bubbling mass. The monitor was blemished, a scar lay on the bottom left corner of the screen. A childhood friend stood there and said as much that I had finally ruined it. Books fester in the corner, beverages bubbles near the bookshelf. Dust gathers in specific places. Have you ever noticed that? Dust is intentional. Draw pictures in the dust and watch they they took succumb to time.

I find mirrors in open rooms disturbing. A mirror is a reflection of reality and thus not reality itself, making whatever you are looking at in the mirror something other than you. Even though it looks like you and copies your movements it is not you. When I walk into a room I do not want to be confronted by such a ghastly experience of myself from another dimension. There are times when I know I must use a mirror, but these are times I can prepare for, not like being caught off guard to a gigantic mirror in some lobby. You put one of those things in there, what are you going to expect if you put a portal to an alternate dimension right there. I swear to you that other self that other me moved. He moved I tell you, so I had to break it. Wouldn’t you? But then I had to run. Couldn’t let them catch me, they kill a man for things like property damage these days.

I watched, in the mirror, the memories of an old man. His brain wasn’t what it use to be, but once we saw together what he was then we were again. To see before you the entirety of ones life broken into the most powerful memories feels you with dread. But not all dread is bad, dread just is. It is the saddest, most nostalgic experience. It crushes your soul with mortality, yet if you look closely if you look ever so closely you will see what is also there. That wonder and beauty of life reside in that dread, nestled together like pups seeking warmth.

Reaching into his pants I saw as he received a generous amount of sweat and stench from his own genitals and brought his fingers to his nose and smelled deeply. He enjoyed the smell of his own soured genitalia. It forced him to remember he was real. This brought on a terribleness of inexplicable doubt. A behavior formed upon in public should only be understood behind closed doors. If only everyone had doors to close.

It is a sinking feeling into a long ago comfort now lost. You can almost feel the warmth of the blanket, yet it is not there. It is almost there. You can nearly remember it. It’s so close. It’s less of a memory than it is a feeling triggered by lonely spaces, silence or melodies. A train rumbling past you invoked a profound sense of lost and longing for what you never had. You’ll experience time dilation through desiderium. To long for someone or something that is absent, and yet that object of desire may not even be known to you is to be….

I awoke in some garage, a tertiary piece and an unwanted son. A trench coat held my frame and kept me sane. A subtle snore and a delicate wind rolled through the porous structure. A blue boat that was actually a car rusted in the middle. I had taken hostage the corner. It wasn’t mind to occupy but I couldn’t remember why I came. Any common explanation for my placement was improbable. I had been one place and now I was in another. Wherever I had been it was not here, though I could not remember that place I had been specifically I could feel the memories of countless other experiences. A sushi restaurant with bright lights and sapwood booths along a long wall. A dimly lite oyster bar that served burgers with melted cheeses and caramelized onions. The smells and sensations were overwhelmingly real but they were only memories. I was in the garage.

I was an onion. In a bright white kitchen. The chef caressed a finely honed German blade around the entirety of my diameter, and then from that incision, peeled my skin away. He cast my husky exterior into a green bucket and proceeded to slice me directly in half. Each half was splayed across wooden surface as I was then cut horizontally three times and then across the top laterally into thin strips. The chef carefully sliced up to but not through my bulbous root. He then cut ever since close together perpendicularly to the horizontal cuts he had just made and I feel into thousands of tiny pieces scattered like leaves in winds from vast empty fields.

Happy holidays, I said, as I handed a large tip over to someone I swear I never had met but looked so oddly familiar. He had just finished packing my bags, or cleaning my dogs, or maybe my chimney. I had a fire the night before. I was alone and with my family. The house wasn’t smoky this time as we remember to open the flue. The Christmas tree was fake but the pine scented outlet was real. Presents progressed through rapid successions of various rapidly changing wrapping paper. I assumed the years were moving by, but the tree always stayed the same.

I was on a game show with flashing bright lights. A smiling man in a plaid suit beckoned me forward. Spell the right word and say what everyone else was thinking and I would win. A mini van was at stake. Top six answers and I couldn’t think of a single one; however I bogarted the entire introductory period with my flashy looks and style. Forget about answers the questions when you can look this good. The other team won the game but there were still snacks in the green room.