A NEW FLAVOR OF DEPRESSION DEATH ICE CREAM

Is it fiction? It feels pretty real to me.

Whatever genre is the hardest to get people to read, I write. I have a particle accelerator down below that I dump folders full of notes into, years later a poem happens.

Crazy guy walking around this town in summer heat. Dirty white tee shirt, Daniel Johnston gut. That’s me. I’m Archie Chamberlain 2.0 except I didn’t go to ‘Nam. I’m not even sure the first Archie did. He’s a schizophrenic distant relative. Everybody gets a story. It’s just horrible that mine arrived when it did.

I’m terrified to throw any piece of paper away in case the gov’t gods, that I pray to, need to see it. You see, somebody fixed up the ruined barns so they’re not ruins anymore. They only are to me.

I walk the family dog. The dog samples the petrichor from the landscaping gravel right outside the house.

I look into the animal’s eyes and see a condemnatory mirror that admits no reality testing, that allows zero ability to reality check. The dog-sitter’s suicidal ideation: a new flavor of depression death ice cream I haven’t tasted yet. I, a meaning-making insect stranded in the void, have always read my environment for clues to spiritual survival. I never made sense once in my life. And it’s too late to start now.

Since adolescence I have seen where allegories are more real than the world-gel they are suspended in. They give life structure, but you cross the bridge without really knowing everything it’s made of. The entrance to hell can be held open with one finger.

Tony Larry. Allegorical friend, shining like a newly opened embrasure that is soon closed again, a representative of heaven in hell: You give me eternal water.

Remember when the homeless guy on the street said I should take care of you, I should watch over you, Tony Larry? We were sitting outside having coffee and the sidewalks were full of shambling junkies and bag people as they often are in Oylesburg. A bright blue moving truck passed behind you in the sun and gave you an indelible halo. Funny that I was charged to take care of you when it’s more like you take care of me. I would be lost without our coffees, our lunches.

I have the notion that safe sex, protected, is not reality. It is an occlusion. Instead, a black hole opens at my urethra and lets nothing past. A cosmic vasectomy holds. “A time to refrain from embracing.” (Ecclesiastes) Futurity bleeds over into “now” through an array of delusional “what-if” channels. The objekt that is changed from day to day, that I’m searching for, on the lookout for sneaky changes being slipped in while I’m not noticing, is Mind. A genie rubbed from a lamp could easily grant the wish for the destruction of all mind states, all emotional contexts, even for relief, even for endless rest promised in the cemetery. The ninth or tenth sub-basement deep inside me where originates my death.

I am cited on the website of the 21st century decadent radio program L’étranger, saying of the show: “It also feels damned…so my soul responds…” I wrote that in a vulnerable moment. And I pray that the Holy Spirit understands how my heart moves, how my mind disobeys the words I engage with. I want to find backdoors and side passages to the Truth and swerve so that no man, no occultist, no priest, no agency knows where I’m coming from. Or has the Devil made me rationalize my own defeat? I try not to think so. It’s the Manichaean Kid’s scheme: secretly keep a strong inner defense as you go amongst the spiritual snares of the world. It impresses no one, though. Except maybe my imaginary liaison with the Holy Spirit: a meeting I fret over as if a nuclear summit where everything — nations, lands, sun, sky, hands, souls — hang in the balance.