falling...finally

the tree stands too long...
longer than life should allow...
emptied and hollowed by the heartless elements...
battered and broken by the endless gusts of fate...
no memory of purpose...
no hope for healing...
a shameful spire of senescence...
a mocking monument to the irony of strength...
in desperate need of a merciful gale...
to end this futile stance...
finally...
its here

mea culpa

Im sorry for who I am

Im sorry for who I could have been

Im sorry for who I just wouldn’t be

Im sorry i didnt do more of what I should

Im sorry i didnt do less of what I did

Im sorry i laughed at the weeping

Im sorry i wept at the laughter
im sorry for my fear and doubt

Im sorry for my jealousy and envy

Im sorry for my foolishness and delusion

Im sorry for trusting and believing

Im sorry for wanting and feeling

im sorry

outrageous sobriety

Well…that was interesting…I spent this past weekend sitting in the lobby of the geneva state park lodge selling my pictures…this has been previously been referred to as “fruitstanding” [see the slings and arrows never felt better] and has never been attempted without that infinitely vast tool chest of marketing…alcohol…but, I made promises and trudged on without the usual drunken idiocy…those of you with whom i have interacted even slightly will not believe me, so feel free to skip the remainder of this and visit what is currently your favorite porn site…I have a rich history of getting drunk and obtuse whilst fruitstanding, so I was curious to see if I could weather this sudden gust of sobriety…it was odd at first…I found it very difficult not to make references to auto-erotic asphyxia or black tar heroin…fortunately I was enhanced in ways other than spirits… enough so, that the few times something did slip out it was mumbled incomprehensibly and met with confused grins of indifference…serendipity, I guess… I felt dull and inanimate…lobotomized by decorum…I worked around it…like a one hundred pound convict on his first trip to the shower, I accepted the reality of the way things were to be...i took the vanilla ice cream that I was handed and ate it…things began to get better…I found it easier and easier to play that person that the world wished I was…are you ready?……..just by keeping my mouth shut!!...ok…obviously, I didn’t stand there mute…not only would that have been far creepier than my usual showing…but, I believe that the possibility of my total silence would somehow violate the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in some way… all I did was omit from what I was actually saying, all the things that I actually wanted to say…seemed to work out pretty well…I sold quite a few pictures, made decent money [by my standards of course…some people sell one picture and buy a new car…im happy just to get back some of the money ive thrown down this endless rat hole so Im not making soup out of my belt this march], but most of all I met some really cool people…I could tell they were cool the minute they bought my pictures…seriously, the money really doesn’t mean as much to me as does the idea that one of my pictures will be hanging on someones wall…I have a vision of the not-so-distant future…a future devoid of my presence…but I will live on through my work…someone will point at one of my pictures on the south wall of the den in some palatial vacation home and ask “Who did that?”…in my vision, the proud response from the owner of the picture and caretaker of my memory is always the same…”some……..guy, I think”…and that’s reason enough to continue...

someone else's sunshine

Under an eternally dismal sky, I am pulled from my timeless purgatory of solitude by a crack in the opaque shield of endless grey clouds…

A speck of translucency quickly growing into a brilliant window of hope…

Could this finally be the sunshine for which I have waited so long?

My soul soars with future-tense visions of a happier me, blissfully embraced by the warm and beautiful rays of my sunshine…

As the blanket of gloom finally tears and the rays burst through, my heart takes a light speed plunge back to reality…

The sun is shining, but not on me…

My eyes follow the heavenly beams downward…

Away in the distance I see a well-dressed man glowing in the light of my sunshine…

I want to despise this man…

I want to believe that he is malicious and undeserving of this ethereal beauty that was meant for me…

But it is not the truth…

He is a better man than I…

I know that the sunshine will be more content illuminating his life…

I know that I cannot hate him for taking something from me that was never really mine…

I hope I can enjoy the foolish dreams of my bright future…

I hope he enjoys his sunshine.

who's there?

where have I gone?  where can I be?

When I look in the mirror it just isnt me

I hope I return before its too late

I just cannot live with someone I hate…

“fuck you!” he said to the man who says “fuck you!” to him every morning…

As has become the norm, he stares at him with disgust and a twisted sort of wonder…

he seems to do a great deal of wondering about this man…

why does he torment him so?

Why must he stand there behind the glass and scrutinize his every thought and action ad absurdum?
Why can he not allow him the somnambulistic bliss that others enjoy with such ease?

judge not lest ye be judged he said to him…

but did he truly understand by whom?

his egomaniacal addiction backfires and belches upon him the narcissistic flames of his own private hell…[as if there could be a public hell]…

The mutually hateful gaze continues as the battle of “who do you think you are?”/ “I know who you are!” escalates…

Gone are the days of the physical crescendo…

When the air would momentarily fill with a shower of broken glass, rusty razors and beautiful pastel dots that marked the end of his resistance to cosmetic psychopharmacology…

the war now languishes in a sorrowful stalemate of passive loathing…

which ultimately ends in a synchronized surrender…

and a return to the social distraction.

looking up looking down

Whether you know it or not, my family has a small breakfast restaurant…the menial labor which I perform there is how I maintain my paltry excuse for a life [it certainly isn’t photography at this juncture] …after the rush today, I was on my hands and knees just inside of our doorway scraping some egg that someone had dropped a few hours previous from the carpet…the restaurant was empty and as I set myself to this vile task I began to think about what I was doing…at first, my ego gnawed at me and I asked myself “what kind of man would do this for a living?”…well, I don’t do much living anyway, and I have always loved the way that seemingly thoughtless “grunt” work frees up my mind to think of other things…I began to think about the chemistry of the egg-carpet bond…good lord, its strong!...the proteins of the egg and the nylon of the carpet fiber are extremely similar in their chemical structure…perhaps that was why this mess was absorbing so much of my time… I considered the physics of the situation, how the energy associated with the lateral force of the scraper must exceed the energy of the chemical bonds between the polymeric structures of the protein and the carpet…the tourist-shaped shadows that flashed across the mess from the sidewalk just outside forced me to ponder the part that each photon of sunlight played in strengthening the egg-carpet bond...i began to think of the endless toil of sisyphus, and camus’ assertion that he was a happy man not in spite of his labor, but because of it…one of the shadows paused and lingered on the egg mess…I became aware of a very expensive pair of birkenstocks housing beautifully manicured male toenails giving me audience…the sandals were connected to something that, at first, appeared to be a man…he was wearing one of those expensive baseball caps with the miniature belt buckle in the back…on it was written the name of some obscure vacation paradise that only a select few could afford to experience…as the man looked down at me and offered a stodgy and condescending squint of pity, I could feel the single, lonely thought in his mind…it gave him the illusion of power and he felt himself a better man for it….from my lowly position my mind was still moving, thinking a multitude of ethereal and esoteric thoughts to  the single mundane decree of his mind…As i looked up at him, i looked back down at him with a different brand of pity…i think he felt it….he frowned at his now less-than-satisfying shoes, and walked along…