I watched Girl Interrupted
and felt slightly better about myself

but wondered when I would end up in hospital.
Everything looks perfect in the half-light

if you've got perfect eyesight.
I have such chronopathy

for these moments
that tear at me.

Heaven is dark,
and the dark is warm.

Much that once was still is
for one has lived to remember it.

"Those who are not angry
at the things they should be
are thought to be fools";

Yet anger impairs cognition
and blinds us to its exact source.
Is righteous anger always so coarse?

We are blinded by these flashbulb memories
born among a storm of cortisol
and adrenaline.

Those chemicals course through us
as a part of belief
in an effort to elicit change.

Yet
"...the good-tempered [hu]man
is not revengeful, but rather

Walking home late
from a festive dinner,
I caught a glance inside
some living room window
and saw two women innocently shifting

I've been running the shadows. Seattle. Berlin. Hong Kong.
I learned the hermetic arts, got chromed up, and lost my crew
after a corp caught our industrial espionage. The astral planes
are fraught with activity from a new plague. Best to hide out
in the matrix 'til things calm down. I'll write about past exploits
and can continue my ventures in psychonautics. Last night
I tasted a couple milligrams of alpha-Pyrrolidinohexiophenone
and stayed up until 5am watching Euphoria and writing.

I get the sense of some venture,
And want to push for experience;
The pursuit of excellence, what else?
Is there anything other?
The pursuit of Otherness, perhaps.
What of mediocrity,
And of what we say merits?
Does intention have merit unto itself?
Is our pursuit of the good life so premised on virtue,
And the Other as premised on whatever's vice?

I reclaim my cravings, and return
to attend to some wayward notions
in the darkness of my dear hometown.
Laudatio Ejus Manet In Secula Seculorum.
Who let the living out?

The past on repeat, calm me.
Either "my head is a jungle" or my life's a maze.

Told myself I should get to America by 27.
I hear some euphoric vocal.

Earlier I took naproxen, esomeprazole, paracetamol
to alleviate the strain caused by excessive screen-time.
I'm such an addict. Was it a lie, that I managed to forget?
Me, a dopamine ******.

I sat in The Square, surrounded
by throngs of skaters, sesh-heads
and other humans out on the town
for Skate Culture night.
It may be
the last dry day of Autumn
in G-town.

You chat with familiar characters
or familiarize yourself, you hear them
trying to sort, mulling over their situation,
Lamenting their day-jobs while trying to avoid
the reek of mass public intoxication. Every weekend
thousands of pandemic drinkers congregated here
and summer's not quite over

so long as it's dry outside.
I watch people skate, I wonder
what's this feeling mean?
This brief, fleeting recognition
as I scan the crowds, pick out faces
from the inhabitants of
my home city.

It is not sonder,
They are not random passersby,
Their lives' complexities are known to me
having grown up around them. To know a town,
To be able to look around on a night out
and recognize so many faces;
Some insatiable nostalgia

even though I am at home

I hear the echoes of a lone house party
spill its tunes upon this cool summer night's aer.

I listen to the soft breeze carry sweet music
drifting across our kenopsic city.

Lounging from my bedroom windowsill,
I imagine what potential
our lives have

and wish for strength to make it real.

Went to bed feeling down.
Had a dream
they scanned my brain, doc says
I'm depressed.

I ask,
"Is it that obvious?"
Woke up blue, wondering
when I'll be able to feel love again.

For weeks I've been stuck in this mood,
Wandering with aimless hope
for an uncertain future, longing
to escape the country, listening to

some indie reverbstorm tunes, dreaming
strange nostalgia in my alienated hometown.

To think of our modern communications,
Those strings of code, packets of data
travel across the globe. So many
transmissions, matters so complex
achieved with such ease, and words
exchanged without a thought for eaves'.

Some messages wander odd paths,
Signed communiques, cyphers
and other cryptic methods
to verify information
and keep secrecy intact.
Lucid whispers
in the static

Once again, consider taking leave of the earth
albeit with no true intention of going anywhere,
Not a notion aside from wishful hopes, aspiration
for a life
where I can consume drugs, date whomever I want
and deal with falling apart

Friends go trippin' through the night
on all sorts: acid, 4-AcO, Mescaline.
We smoke cannabis blended with
oregano, and we freebase DPT.
I wake up on indigo Sunday
and sit across from them
before walking home.

I feel so lost
in my empty city
on a Monday night
as cool summer airs touch my brow, anxious habit
leaves my skin, and though I am not whole
I have found it again. I pass through
my old university campus
into millennium park, I listen
to Lake Control and feel this city
run though me, tethered memories
and fragments of my being, scattered
across a world I live in, and these words
I've given are all that remain of my moments,
Time spent about this town, which I share now.
I wanted nothing more
than to escape
into this

I felt loneliness, the likes of which
can only be known
as one contemplates their own body.
I recall where I was last week, a psi-trance gig.
I remember that evening's events:

There were many out, some
were from teenage years past.
We all ended up at squat party.
I felt belonging, but also brief sadness
as we raved in this abandonment:
Cold candlelight and phonescreens,
Cheap ***** and speed-amphetamine;
A portable speaker playing dark minimal.
Once upon a time, when we were true fiends,
I could hear it
calling to me.
Now I'm as lost, but no longer hear a calling.

When I got home my mind wandered until
it found the mirror, and I let quieted thought
wash through me, recalling, times, and friends.

How long can I stay before I'll never leave.
Graveyard of ambition, town of the lotus eaters,
City of the tribes. A tattoo of its name on my left rib
to the side of my heart. I was alive, once.
Now I'm a human In A Lonely Place,
New Order sharp, old chaos faint.

What does it mean to wander one's city,
Following paths that appears rewarding?
Where appearance is the very fabric
of our own reward pathways.
With no destiny
what determines aimless wandering?
What does my inclination collapse into the world,
What is it that our will envelopes? Our many drives
are bundled into what appears; we are carried
along a path, arbitrary or otherwise,
Only for one drive's will to be usurped
by the sweet vista, or strange nostalgia
which spoke to the whims of another.
Is there a collective unconscious, are there connections
which whisper unto our subordinates?
Something as simple as intuition or god;
Gut feeling, divine touch. Either being immanent enough
to qualify one's environment by.

In the company tower
overlooking my hometown
and its surroundings, I stood fast,

Contemplating my journey and station.
I stood near the apex of this corporate garrison
looming over my city of birth, observing

from walls of large, glass-paneled windows, at heights
I never imagined. Once I had roamed this city
as a free-spirit, floating between tribes.

It was something of a bitter-strange vista.
I had left my home, and on my return
found myself raised unwittingly
above it, something I never
wanted nor dreamed.

Still I am struck by memories

of Love Here, in the town, by the square,
through the park, amid university and the years
spent with friends there; the village I came from
and the house I grew-up in; these times
I never asked to be nostalgic for:

Lazy summers and cool nights
spent wandering over the land
of my hometown

thru ethereal, star-spotted forests
and tranquil, unperturbed canals
which once shivered

with empyreal mind.