in multiple caves, browsing

layer down, as my father coughs to sleep. i am running out of tributaries. did the fountains at my disposal suddenly call me by gushing upwards of at least 20 feet?

i was here three years ago, maybe anxious to call an old man who once told me not to fiddle with all the photocopies he has made one afternoon. i wanted to apologize, but for what?

could every tweet i had seen some nights ago tell me that i have to know more people? has work made it harder for you—me—to meet interesting personalities? why am i even trying to dig deeper when i could easily say i'm in the wrong place the whole time?


look at me write incoherent stuff while looking at a profile! smoothly whisper to myself, "sanity is ironic." this undoing doesn't actually rely on negation. believe your friends. as parallel as you would like to think your timelines are, acknowledge your delusion. "sanity is ironic?"

i glance at the bloated books i never bothered to open if not for the flood last year.

maybe all i need from now is contextualization and forgiveness. and a more constant changelog, bordering on the performative (because "normal" people have a knack for misinterpreting my intentions!).

but you—i have overstayed. i should believe my friend when they implore me to be cynical of what i have seen in profiles in terms of its reliability to represent a person. for my own sake.

On Sympathy

I don't know if I just lost a friend. If I have, I don't know if I could express this need to go back to the point before I may have lost my friend without sounding too cliché. Not a need to defy death, just a need to rummage for the last normal I can remember.

Losing a friend is a purgatorial experience—from blinking cursors to downward shivers to losing a lot of blood to feeling like a hologram at some mall atrium anyone can pass through.

More variations

In a state of vagueness—or the immediate three meters in front of me, mostly other people, a signboard asking me if I should stop and breathe for a while, imagined smog, backstabbers—I manage to slice through everything, just to take one jeep.

I realign my allegiances with other things, particularly forcing myself to get rid of certain self-denials, such as the face I now go by, the joints that hurt from time to time due to various excesses, or my hesitance to show my love to my family more often.

How much time will the hiatus take? I no longer have the luxury of locking myself in a room, carefree, with regularly scheduled meals; I have to deal with bills and other things to fix just to keep my daily life running as efficient as possible.

One of the last pieces I read reminded me of one of Allan Popa's poems. This tidbit is a ticking time bomb considering how much context I have withheld regarding this hiatus. This is me signaling to anyone monitoring this with hands up, except my hands are rapidly moving from side to side as if doing some absurd CrossFit maneuver.

Impending revamp

To everything.

Mere outlooks in life, posture, dwelling units, choice of music, jumpshot for basketball, clothing, choice of camera, tweets, time spent on Facebook, nuances of people previously deemed incapable of anything but innocuous thought and activity to be valuable members of society trying to have a break from reality (which is a challenge and form of optimism), zine sizes, number of syllabic rhymes in a bar, people in contact with, bicycle brakes, food intake, love interest, hashtag character count, music player, VPN provider, internet service provider, podcasts, this lack of presence, forgoing a comma when sentences are short,

Dusted

When I got to the mausoleum, I barely cried.