(Please read this in front of a mirror, it's necessary.
If you're not near a mirror, it's cooo, you'll be at one eventually 🍎🐍)

.:.

Pardon me,
I see your troubles and elations hold you busy, but I have a gift for thee.

A hint?
It's something you'd think many people assume they have or don't need,
a gift many vulnerabilities try to deny,

The word "disabuse" is tricky to use.
It's easy to get confused on the violence of "abuse",

But,
you'll soon see,
words can disabuse you
from error,
misconception,
or fallacy…

🛑
PAUSE FROM READING

Find your face in a mirror
🛑

[Relax]

Patiently experience your face
Your lips
Your Cupid's bow below your nose
Your chin
Your cheekbones
Your skin

Tell the you you see:
"I love you {your name}"
If you were near you would hear, for me this would be, "I love you Erik"

Now, reflect on all those farr off things, ideas, and people you've said "I love you _ " to,
have you ever said these loving words to you?
When have you said these words unto thee?

When you do, the strange feelings you might findingly feel is a liberation spell that no one can take away from you.
no gun to your head,
no knife in your bed,
no threat you'll soon be dead can stop you from speaking these words…

if even only
in
your
head.

Ahh, but you see: the trick is not that you say "I love you" to your name,
it's that, saying "Erik" after "you" points my mind’s love,
  at me.

If you followed these instructions
despite objections from vulnerability,
maybe you,
if you're like me,
now see that just like
the incorrectly perceived
violence
within the word
"disabuse",
which is a transverse verb
that frees the listener from misconception,
much like when you declare
  you love you
  you disabuse yourself
(and your self)
from abuse.

Declaring "I love me"
are magic words
that
set
you
free.

"I love you Erik”
02:12 Oct 8, 2023
Tuolomne, Ca.

“Never try to put a leash on a fish, especially when a Pisces hands it to you”
E.Sv. 04:02 Nov 20, 2023

Erik Svarr
Sunday, January 24
03:00
2021

[Feelings and thoughts are similar,
except thoughts have words attached to them
and feelings do not.
Attaching words to feelings
makes intuitions, sensations, and unspoken understandings
accessible, but at lower resolution.]

[first bump]

  it's like a stamp,
That forgotten thought you wear on your knuckle
That ugly ******* ring!
You're here dulling your struggles.
Stop trying so hard!

If you'd relax & feel,
pick your scabs,
& just keep goring,
7-day Saturdays might somehow add up to this one numb Sunday morning.

Stop trying to carve steel with steel.

Where is that feeling?
There's dead **** in here,
you can't smell it cuz you're not here right now,

nor am I!

Look at me:
- talking to my phone.
- speaking punctuations,
- internally telling my brain to instruct my mouth to tell my phone to construct a world where words will still feel ******* important!

******* ******* *******, **** them, time is dangerous now,
Only fools mourn the sun.

Erik,
it's not her fault
she was the door
  you chose
to slam
your
H'art
in…
[2nd Bump - starting to cross over]

I exist?

The proof is at the outermost edge of my skin.

Hiding in a place
where
a film of oily dust meets
the part where
the littlest piece of me ends
at the edge where
my last molecule stops,
  air soothes,
and everything else begins.

I might exist!

Please Ignore me,
Thinking that feeling only scares it...

If it came in the night, it would have the wings of a lionfish.

If it came tomorrow in the daytime, it would never be on time.

You would hate how every ******* bit of it feels because it has my fingernails under its skin
and nothing you can do will ever wash my smell off its memory.

But, I can do something:
I can just STOP.

Stop Pretending
I can change anything
by telling myself:
  if change is constant
  it's not change.
…
[COMING LIVE FROM THE K-HOLE]


Ignore all of this

Broken parts fall off when you kick the ******* lid off it's top.
That **** wasn't useful anyway.
It’s that, a necessary part of the lid is too high because there’s too much paint in the bucket.


Nothing of value ever stays stored nicely.

Time ushers all things to irrelevance,
so where is that feeling?

It only waddles in in the morning
when you're trying to smile
and you're trying to tell your friend a joke about some stupid **** you did
but you can't
because you're concerned they'll spill wine on their white clothes and the photoshoot they're going to tomorrow isn't going to work out because even though we're in the middle of an existential crisis,
life happens
and we can't ******* stop it.

Erik Svarr
03:00 January 24, 2021
Sutter & Larkin
San Francisco, Ca.

Venus Flytraps grow in nitrogen deficient soil.
They coat their pallets in sweet syrup, attracting nitrogenous flies to their famine.

Flies,

such disgusting creatures.
Born into rotting flesh,
living on a diet of carcass and feces,
carrying disease and filth on their hairy, sickly bodies.

Being hatched into dead flesh and spending their adult lives feeding on animal **** must make dying in a Venus Flytrap's sweet syrup the gods' reprisal; a needed respite from sledgie meals of drippy dog dung and gobs of mangled possum flesh freshly flung up under a car's tire and bounced around its wheel-well and undercarriage before slopping & sopping in rain & road-grime and sweltering in the sun for 3 days before becoming a feast for rotten creatures such as flies.

But you're not a fly.

You're a Venus Flytrap.

You live where your needs aren't met.
Your body cannot create what's needed on its own.
It's evolved to take what it needs from the filthiest creatures on the planet.
The sweetest part of you is purposed with attracting a repulsive insect,
an adult maggot,
the adult version of nature's most gag-inducing infant.
Some marvel at your novelty and uniqueness,
but the truth is,
your roots bathe in rotting fly death-goo because
you cannot elegantly satisfy your needs.
Bees buzz busily between lavender lanes.
Flowers ferment sweet syrups to share
with their featherless flying friends.    

Their work breeds life within pretty purple parts and harmonious honey hives.
They trade nourishing nectar for fertilized seeds.

Lovely lavender droplets deposit dainty dew drops on fuzzy bee coats.
Pollen pours from pretty yellow pockets.

Stolen honey swirls & settles around the undrinkable bottom of my cloudy absinthe glass
and,
like Roman Numerals,
I = 1


Erik Svarr
Unknown date
Circa 2017
Smoking Patio
North Beach
San Francisco, Ca.

A homeless man
holding a sign
smiled at a crying woman
sitting in her Mercedes
in the rain.

She continued
to cry.

The sun
didn't need
to shine
at that moment.

Erik Svarr
16:44 April 1, 2023
Market & Van Ness
San Francisco, Ca.

Empty cough drop wrappers cover the passenger floor mat
as I veer into the other lane, nearly causing an accident.

I deserved that *******.

Cough drops are romantic lies,
apologies to unretractable insults,
Promises to change the direction of gravity.

Malaria carrying mosquitos
  dying in shallow spider pits,
Arachnophobia carrying spiders
  dying in shallow human fits.

There's often beauty in nasty things:

in,
the tingle of concussion's metallic taste,
or of licked ****** electricity,
  or of sweet antifreeze flicking off a poor
  cats unknowingly poisoned
  curious-tongue,

in happiness somehow felt
  in life's loneliest hours.

in the fond & fleeing feel of freedom in weightlessness,
  the sedation of time,
  the **** of sensations,
  the last painless moment felt as your car
  tumbles down hill,
  out of control before wrapping around an
  adolescent redwood.

In life's darkest moments,
happiness
and peace
and serenity,
  can thrive.
Yet, within serenity also thrives disassociation:

… the tickling silence of tide pullback, exposing rock & reef, before Poseidon's tsunami blooms in.

… the isolated ear-ringing of an angry mob's buzzing cacophony as pathological panic seeps in, following the first & only restful moment between fighting for life,
and giving up.

…the happiness hidden in frostbite's burning warmth and the euphoria of stabbing the ******* clown she used as a grinding post to destroy a decade of hard work before reality sets-in and actions birth consequences‽

**** me in the back of your car,
untinted windows,
let anyone see.

Screaming streams of headlights shine stars in my welling eyes and I can't believe you don't want me any more.

Erik Svarr
21:54 Mar 15, 2015
Highway 880 Frontage Road
Oakland, Ca.

When he came back from the bar


and saw her and me talking

I saw his heart break.



I grew distant from her

knowing his feeling.



Both he and I

loathed

whoever played

such a happy song

on the jukebox

for a dollar.



Erik Svarr
00:42 July 20, 2016
Merchant’s Saloon
Oakland, Ca.

Perhaps Claudia has stopped growing. Growth plateaus if people don't change how and what they learn. Maybe you get nothing from her because she has nothing to give.
                                        
I'm no longer Claudia. I've destroyed my life.
I've cleaned my plateau of demolished materials.
Now I'm building my high plain into a mountain once again.
                                        
I often feel very feminine.
I feel womanly,
That I am capable of creating life.
That I will degrade my body to birth something that may not want me around once it matures.
That I will have to watch from an imposed distance,
yearning to be close to whom once squirmed wormingly in my arms,
wiggling helplessly,
utterly unable to survive without my constant care,
but squirming nonetheless,
to be strong enough
to get out of my arms and into the world,
and see if they are strong enough,
womanly enough,
to create something or someone
able to survive longer than both of us,
to create someone who will carry our light once we can no longer seek;
To save us from the collapsing reality where we will one day no longer exist.
To placate the fear that our funeral will be the last time anyone speaks about us
for an extended period of time.
To create someone who will keep our life alive after we are gone.
This is an impossible task.
                                        
Our life is an airplane,
out of gas,
gliding as far as it can,
the pilot seeks up-drafts and trade winds
to keep it in the air
until they can find a nice place land                                
and have a drink on a poolside patio with the plane's black box in hand,
Desperately
seeking someone to study our flight's journey
and pass its wisdom on to someone who will create life with it.
                                        
But no one cares
and Claudia’s better as a stranger.



Erik Svarr
15:42 May 1, 2015
Somewhere in California,
living in my car
after intentionally destroying
my life in academic neuroscience