For four decades now I have been alive
and my existence has taken so many forms…
myself
my Self
me
a tiny shiny pure being who looked --- rapt --- at a ladybug on a tall plant;
who, decades later, stared stoned at a small green bug and made up a poem about it;
who
got all of the childhood diseases early on (“Let’s get it over with, all or
nothing, I either die right now or be healthy from now on”) but in so doing he
even got one which usually targets the elderly, and it almost made him
blind, and left him scarred;
who was wide-eyed at the screaming crazy angry harpy pointing and spouting insults at him and his family;
who was scared shitless as he was entering the domain of that haunted house he would inhabit for the next 21 years;
whose entire day-to-day life, as a child, was contained within a single square mile of small-town simplicity;
who had a cat-food meal with a wary feline, trying to tame him, one of countless silent communions with others of that species;
who was friendly to canines but chased by them over and over, friends taking the brunt of their cruel bites for him;
whose existence became plagued by vampires, and who had the idea that a book of forgotten lore might help him;
who went through numberless role-takings with friends, innumerable stories, battles, rescues, deaths, feats of heroism and villainy, scattered all over the universes of the mental space, but all in a pocket-sized piece of physical land;
who would fall in love, over and over…
first with an arrogant blond because everyone admired her and she was flashy and outgoing; then (my tastes evolving into a more personal thing) with a tall, thin, shy, long black-haired doe of a girl; then I made myself love a likeable but bland waif, who I was told to like because it would complete some kind of social circle; then with a mischievous, mature little devil, who dragged me under the blankets to kiss me (oh! the braces on her teeth!) and who was unzipping my pants when my mother barged in on us; then (O, momentous day) with my sweet Lioness, willful and wholesome, troubled by some sordid patriarchal issues, who I would try (over and over) to get close to, until that one day, our one day together in this Life, a few hours together in a Museum, laughing and feeling good, so much so that I ignored my body and was left with shame at the end of the day, but still I loved her, grew to understand what love and desire were through her, and she was The One for years without even knowing it; then, briefly, like a flash-fire, there was that red-headed sports-loving girl, whose energy and imagination drew the dark brooding person I was becoming, and with her I dared to tell her how I felt but she told me she had a boyfriend and that was that; then, somewhat, coldly and distantly, I was drawn to a rebellious, giggling, sensual, slow-going girl, but she wasn't attracted to me I guess and we drifted; and then for a while, although fiercely drawn to a variety of female human beings, I felt no love... until I got overseas, and fell for a strong young woman, she smiled and gave me compliments and offered niceties but I wasn't part of her world; and then I came back and, working away from home for the summer, I fell for two other girls, one who didn't know I existed and one (too young) whose direct advances I had to ignore; then, for a while, nothing again but a faraway longing for pretty, gentle-looking girls, of hot lust for a sexy but mean-looking neighbor; and then, fateful day, I met the one who was to become my wife, and she was struck with me, and without knowing or really wanting to I wooed her and she kissed me and we coupled, and gradually I grew to feel grateful for her love and the caring I felt for her turned to love, for what she offered to me and what was possible with her, and with her I broadened my life-experiences, we had children and we shared time, but guilty of passivity I gave without taking and we grew used to that unhealthy cycle which was nevertheless sustained by love, until she just couldn't live with the status quo anymore, and she put an end to us; and then, lastly, my heart finally mended, I went out of my way and found my next Love, who amazingly with her quirky artistic mind found something in me, and we celebrated each other...
whose doorway to his own seductive multiverse took the form of Stories, mostly written or drawn, but also filmed;
who found ways out of everything that plagued him, from anger to sadness to anxiety to family to day-to-day or spiritual greasy obscenities;
who
had his first white hairs around the time that he became an official adult, and
he just saw it as another manifestation of his innate strangeness;
who drifted from friend to friend, grateful to be accepted and to have someone to share some interests, some laughter;
who grew cynical and despondent in the face of universal expectations and the mechanical sorting out of individuals towards their inevitable professional future;
who ran hard in the opposite direction, fleeing, fleeing everything, to any kind of world (fantastical or sinister or hopeless or romantic or gleeful or cruel or beautiful) as long as it wasn't this one;
who started rebelling against authority by simply ignoring it and withdrawing within himself (the greatest "fuck you" he could think of);
who found a doorway to some fabled land of friendship and decadent wonder, and there he learned and shared and laughed and played and talked and listened and heard and created and destroyed and drank and smoked and dreamed and saw and saw and Saw and SAW;
who stayed with an escape plan that was officially sanctioned by the All-Powerful patri-matri-Figure, for as long as he could until (his mouth full of money and disgust and anger and despair) he threw it all up and used that moment to leave and travel a bit;
who wrote and wrote and wrote, ceaselessly, for no reason at all, just to get some things out of his head in the form of stories;
who was infatuated with the simple(minded) idea of taking that overwhelming rush of passionate outpour, and committing his Life to it;
who then was made to understand how unfeasible that was, how foolish and irresponsible and immature and useless and counter-productive and silly and harebrained... at least for a clumsy bland amateur like myself;
who reached for unattainable friendships with far-away figures of idealized companionship and creative magick;
who drank and stoned himself, alone, to plunge into the rapid moving flow or to open the levee and let the flow in;
whose abstract visions of obsequious despair and hopeless eternity drove him to catatonic melancholia, seeing the rain drops rolling on a car window and realizing that's all there is, all the rest is a fog-headed dream;
who went through phases of extreme creative coherence which resulted in tangible proof of his dreams and his ability to manifest them (even if only in some warped, senseless exercise in self-absorption);
who wrote down ideas in little notebooks, enough for a lifetime of nonstop writing and dreaming;
who dreamed up intricately connected stories, a magickal and significant life's work (if only he had that life);
who dispersed the little stories he was so proud of, across digital realms and geographical landmarks, like so many bottles throw in an uncaring, unending ocean;
who lost himself, increasingly so, in daydreams and nightdreams and sexdreams and lovedreams and traveldreams and visiondreams and dreamdreams;
who learned, through it all, about anything and everything, and improved his craft at the same rate that he was losing his heart;
who grew to love and interiorize those primal Archetypes: the River, the Mountain, the Town, the City, Rain, Snow, Blood, Death;
who got close to his River and there found in a stone a shark-tooth and was thus granted a Vision of the Limitless Seas that used to cover everything he knew;
who saw his parents split up, and then became his young sister's secondary caregiver and... brother;
who knew the mother-imposed stigma of poverty, standing in line (the only young person) for a box of food items with a bunch of beat and merry characters;
who sweated and burned his skin gathering berries with similarly broken people, all for what amounted to little more than pocket money;
who peeled potatoes in the odorous Fall, and filled up some fridges with bottles, and put up some shelf-structures in a warehouse and sold bird-houses and (for one wrong evening) tried to scare young kids for a Halloween kick, only succeeding in striking one in the face by accident;
who walked alone, late at night, seeing no one, thinking, thinking, thinking as a disease to be assaulted with whatever is at hand;
who was repulsed by fuel-propelled machines, choosing to walk or to cycle or to bus his way to everything;
who chose to spend on books and games rather than food or clothes, skipping meals to justify purchase;
who became a docile and discrete guest whenever he would be invited to someone's house;
who suffered a great Fall one day, which changed his "fragile egg-shelled mind" forever;
who, sneaking a nocturnal visit to his Mountain, saw a Great Shark swimming through the trees, overlooking a sinister canyon where shambling skeletons were waiting for him and his friend to stumble down to them;
who drunkenly explorer a cemetery with his acrobatic friend, watched him climb on top of a crypt and hid in an open grave with him;
who went on with that friend to many out of the way, forsaken places... a corn field, some snowy caves, a railway bridge, a frozen river;
who was drawn by light-posts, like a moth, frozen to the spot as if time had stopped, naked, the crickets droning their life away;
who, lying in bed, felt weird phenomena happening inside him... a claw pressing behind his eye... eyes closed, feeling like he was sinking inside himself, shrinking inside a massive body... seeing a small house on the screen of his closed eyelids, the roof removed, with tiny medieval peasants going about their business, of their own accord, without his will being involved... feeling like he was growing, growing, stretching the limits of his body's capacity to hold him;
who ran desperately through an empty field, knowing he would have to go back but just wanting to run and run anyway;
who tried to will two haunted houses into existence, one which ended up destroyed (but transported inside one of his Stories), and the other which turned out to be a ramshackle storage shed, guarded by a common and base smalltown grouch;
who raked leaves and washed windows and picked some weeds and mowed the lawn, stuck inside one neverending moment of gray heartbreaking afternoon;
who foolishly poisoned his mind with an unknown narcotic for the official reason of "having fun", secretly wanting -- even at that young age -- some kind of vision;
who cried over the deaths of so many cat companions, torn from this world by despicable machines or merciless old age or drowned in a pool of ice-cold water;
who whiled away many an evening just writing in a notebook, his mind fooling him into thinking that his excitement meant something else than an illusion created by his organism to entertain and soothe his troubled and vulnerable mind;
who looked at his River with drunken, suicidal eyes, and was filled with joy at the thought of jumping in and swimming with the current all the way to his friend's house;
who found solace inside a minuscule little forested area, generally unfrequented, where he left some messages from another dimension (his brain);
who found himself, every so often, dreading the return home, wondering why put ourselves through this;
who grew to hate his parents, his country and its Institutions, his world, his time, while still possessor of a mine-full of golden Love;
who got slapped, kicked across the room, and had his book ripped from his hands, once each, but it was enough for him to learn what violence is;
who was faithful and loyal and self-abnegating and enduring, and then was betrayed and rejected, which eventually resulted in a rebirth of sorts;
for whom his only asset was his mind, even though others insisted he was also handsome, gentle, courageous, generous, passionate, caring;
who saw the Void behind everything from a very young age, and was contaminated by this knowledge, and who forever struggled to lead some kind of life, notwithstanding;
who gave up on worldly ambitions, then on artistic ambitions, and then on everything, before coming back to a kind of artistic dedication with no hope for anything besides the short-lived but liberating exaltation of Creation;
who managed to break several laws while never getting noticed by the authorities;
who, from young adulthood on, felt the pull of compassion and tried to always treat others like he would like to be treated;
who was compelled to write about the same events, over and over, as if there was always some new perspective to be gained;
who never could see the standalone value of money, or the underlying problem behind indolence;
who lusted for so many female humans, making up poetic names for those he would see regularly, while in fact having physical relations with only two;
who ate little, but longed for even less, wishing for the possibility to abstain completely;
who could be passionate about a great number of things, both popular and scholarly, serious or playful, geeky or artistic, vulgar and heavy or refined and sorrowful;
who in the eternal joyful intensity of his ecstatic soul, once jumped on a bed, in front of a fan, during a thunderstorm, with some friends;
who tried playing the harpsichord with his friend, but just couldn’t do it;
who, wearing a fool’s jangling cap, hurt his ankle while jumping down from a trampoline;
who shot an arrow in the thick wooded area of a hillside;
who, exploring an abandoned sandpit in the winter, thought shots were being fired at him and his friend, and panicked;
who didn’t know how and when to end this poem;
who still thinks, with pain and shame, of those thoughtless or cruel acts he committed, decades ago;
who had a “childhood dream” implanted into his head, and when his progenitors put themselves into debt to make it come true, he was expected to be grateful forevermore;
who felt sick and had to slump down while visiting the place where humans leave Earth for outer space;
who saw a plane crash during some aerial events which were supposed to impress him;
who, without wanting to seemed always to attract those for whom he was someone to be protected, taken care of, controlled, as if they felt that he was somehow broken, sickly or incomplete;
who always wanted, in one way or another, consciously or not, to subtract himself from the world, to escape into some hidden half-world in which he could live out his chosen life, free from rules, laws, judgement, obligations, stupidity, vulgarity, gross ignorance, anger, resentment, the tyranny of tradition and the dictatorship of family;
who would always strive for respect, civility, politeness, trust and honesty, while shying away from competition, worldly ambition, conquest, control, power;
who knew there would never be enough time to read all the books, see all the films, see all the paintings, hear all the music, travel to all the places;
who would go without sleep, food, drink, if he could;
who always tried to try, even when he knew there was no way to achieve his goal;
who, between luminous chiming swings, took his destiny in his own hands by cupping his Love’s face and daring a sweet gentle kiss;
who, presented with the possibility of having his children taken away from him, reacted with a detached attempt at lucidity, trying to see the greater good and not just his own point of view;
all of that, and more, I carry these things with me, and they are part of my tears and my songs and my love and my laughter and my pain and my writing. I am what I am because of them, and I will not renounce them. I will try to celebrate them, and myself, in everything that I do.
(August 23rd -- Sept. 18th)
