Caveat Lector

Like a bookmark between pages
He slides between my thighs
Picking up right where he left off

The next chapter
A new character
Words drip sweet and foreign onto my breasts
Acidic and penetrating, perforating, corrosive
the membrane between us wears thin

I shrink backwards for cover
Vulnerability caged only by ribs
I lie looking for a wool to pull over your eyes
Looking to escape your knowing
He begins to read aloud, confidently

Here lies inside-out girl
Heart exposed, flesh rent and mended

She learned from the bookbinder when he said
To strengthen the spine it is cut and glued and bound
Cut and glued and bound

The bookmark is shifted
In the middle now my spine cracks
Legs spread wide like book covers
He flips through my pages
Wildly devouring content
Pulling thoughts from binding
I lie loose leafed and scattered

I wanted him to weep at the beauty of my composition
I found instead he wrote a passage

Here lies inside-out girl
caveat lector

Untitled

in a world where nothing matters
I do.
post-modern destruction
meet a queen running
up mountains of her own design
Hey there, Camus
I am no slave.
My captor also serf, by your words
To its own creation
I am in love
With the two square feet I reside in and above
There is nothing you can do to stop a woman
Who has made up her mind
Like her bed sheets

Woman

I am not a woman because I bleed
I am not a woman because you will not be the first to lay seed,
in my belly
I am not a woman because I have hair in places mama told me not to talk about
No.
I am a woman because life has beaten me
held me down under the ocean and taught me to breathe
like a fish
dodging nets of
bad men and deadly opportunity
you see?
I am a woman because I can
hold my head high when I am told I am
less than, incapable of, too old, too young or spun
out
Burnt out, no clout, living in a world of doubt.
I am a woman because I can love unconditionally
rid myself of jealousy
and love
me
and the
the world, the relationship, the effect, and the cause
I am a woman because no longer am I governed
by the laws
of girl

My Zen is Frizzy

Intellect is not a substitute for empathy. I have a bit of the former, always want more of the latter, and often believe I can transmute one into the other through some rigorous mind-permutation of how an individual could be feeling at any one time. I am starting to think this isn’t true. I think the permutation machine might be throwing false positives of understanding and I am getting it just wrong enough to cause the worst kind of alienation imaginable. To believe you are empathizing, but in reality to just be thinking really hard at someone’s problem, and kind of leaving them adrift on your acknowledgement of something that must be truer, and more human, than what they are going through. This thinking that empathy resides in this “trueness” rather than in their independent experience of the whole situation is like evicting the person you’re caring for from their own being cared for, sterilizing local pain away into some greater truth that life is pain. Sure this is true, but “life is pain” and “I’m hurting” are very different experiences. One is nebulous, and all encompassing like a down blanket over the earth and all its war torn cities, and malnourished, and debt enslaved peoples. The other is acute. I’m bleeding, my mom died, I need addressing! In those moments, to assert “life is pain”, is like, the most assholian thing imaginable. You are so limited by this seemingly ultra-enlightened and exalted state of feeling like its all figured out and you are somehow at peace, or at at least in a puerile and frizzy zen state*. Yet, the person next to you is kind of just staring blankly like, you have been of absolutely no use to me and are potentially the worst shoulder to cry on ever.

I think we just want, and need, to marinate in sad together for a second.  It doesn’t need to mean anything. This is a culturally known thing, you’re not supposed to immediately try and start solving peoples problems when they come to you with them instead of listening, unsolicited advice is the worst kind, ect. I think instead of thrusting “world is tough, that’s a fact Jack” on someone, it might be more helpful to dip into that fact and feel the world being really tough in that moment with that person. That it is redemptive towards life to sit and to look at your friend intently and to study their words in the context of who they tell you they are, not who you assume they are. As, who I think you are has way more to do with me than you, and maybe cognizance of that fact is the first step. The first step towards truly holding hands in this valley of shadows.

 

*One is not in a state of Zen. Zen is a type of Buddhism. The state to which I am referring to is mushin no shin part of the practice of Zen Buddhism, but you catch my drift.

We Will Rebuild

Tabula rasa. A metamorphic term which I refer to often when contemplating my own metamorphosis.
     I believe it is either consciously or unconsciously understood that the crux of adulthood resides in finding an equilibrium between ones own neuroticism and that of the world. To completely resolve either is both Sysiphian and redolent of self-immolation, but I trust there lies a peacefulness in a meandering pursuit of order. Of this peace I have held fragments, and they have served me as rafts in a quiet ocean of sadness.
     When faced with a plethora of ways by which to approach equilibrium in my own life I have considered few alternatives outside of my occupation as an acolyte of academic and external quanta of approval. Quite painfully, as many before me, I have discovered this is not balanced. Even now, despite myself, I grasp for some profound insight to entice you the reader as if your satisfaction with my intelligence will be my panacea. For these reasons, I think it is high time I revisit my dusty slate scrawled upon with chalk, crayon, and Mr. Sketch marker to write a few of my own entries.

Stewardship of hope is critical to agency

     Be it a bad relationship, unfortunate household dynamic, or some other adverse circumstance we find ourselves in, to enact change we must believe in the possibility of something better. It is incredibly easy to become weary of belief in a better tomorrow when we are confronted with a long series of saturnine or harrowing todays. This is resignation. It is imperative, that we square eyes with our sensitized feelings of horror at ourselves and the world, then deliberately shift our gaze to what better could be and walk forward, as impossible as it may seem. This acute angle over many moments will be what separates us from the purgatory of hopelessness.
     Once practiced in the art of looking for alternative realities, we can begin to ponder which reality would suit us at all, ultimately moving to the stage of pondering which reality would suit us best. Then we must move, for we have developed the talent of vision and in seeing what could be, we become more uncomfortable with what is.

We have intrinsic value

     That is it. Life is predicated on the need to perpetuate itself. You are alive. You are here perpetuating. You have precipitated from the void and won the war against absence. That is enough. Now, continue and fall in love with the residue of your action.

We are both limited and liberated by the infinite

     We must make decisions, and function within a mesh of decisions which have been made for us. This knowledge is encapsulated brilliantly in the Serenity Prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr, however its wisdom should be extricated, as I believe of many but not all things, from an association with God.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.
Nestled in this quote is the belief that God harbors all wisdom, which I obviously cannot and will not argue, and that this wisdom is accessible to us.  Which I could argue at length, but will circumnavigate by establishing the axiom that my God resides in a power of observation of and empathy with the circumstances I have found myself in and privy to. Periodically, I am granted access to this insight. Make of that what you will.
     The crux of the matter is this, we must evaluate considering our limited will and influence what obstacles perceived through the lens of our value system seem worthwhile to attack, and attack them ferociously. I assert that the best place to start is with our own internal darkness and discomfort, as we have no greater dominion than in the realm of self. While limited in our recourse for action, we are virtually unlimited in our capacity for imagination, and we may begin here. Depression in my mind is simply, and cripplingly, a sensitization of an unfortunate subset of the spectrum of human emotion. It leaves no room for the other frequencies, which we must work to restore to their rightful abundance with our infinite capacity for imagination. Imagination is the sword we must use against our dragon and our escutcheon a hopeful aftermath.
     I’ve limited the scope of this article to the conversation with self, as I believe solace and understanding reverberates outward from this place. Our dialogue with ourself reflects in our dialogue with others, our dialogue with others influences our actions, and these actions transform our lives.

Something sententious this way comes

Neoplastic Pleonasm. Biological, vaguely self-deprecating and potentially fitting for what I am attempting in this inter-ether patch of whitespace. What the attempt is remains to be determined, and potentially never needs to be so long as we remain entertained. Right? I mean, that is the least I could do after you so graciously let me take up residence in your brain case. Knock, knock.

I am a biologist, sometimes I write code, I think about what makes brains wear out – or wear in I suppose – and I am very interested in how that training affects my little punctum of existence. Moreover, I am excited by how all our little puncta emit and excite one another, and the emergence of patterns from all of our interacting foci. I am here to amble around potential insight through things that interest me, and I hope you find the walk engaging enough to join me.