Deliverance

Fuck it, I say, and start writing.

But—what of? what should I imagine now?

Hiding in the ocean of my head are uncountable legions of

eccentric starts, of twisted ideas,

of worlds and peoples and catastrophes and love triangles and deaths—

but I don’t feel like exploring it today: Setting myself to drift

upon the tides with moth-eaten sails,

the whim of this unrelentingly authoritarian brain which has

crafted and manipulated my world.

I am no Roland:

I know no Dark Tower to affix my soul.

I have no Suzanne;

I am yet unworthy to beg the melancholy deliverance of Hallelujah.

I bear no hand-stitched flag;

my dark materials lie nascent and dusty and rotting.

And yet always I return to them:

a thing creeping and uncertain,

fearing the slow conscription of the proud and the broken,

the never-ordained angels who chant hosannas—

those steadfast wanderers, the solemn hobbyists, the misguided

revolutionaries—reciting

in the kind of stubbornness reservéd of the hopeless damned,

their voices hoarse, their faces bedecked by the deep shadows and

eternal despair of Pandæmonium

as the fat, elected gods laugh and fuck

and wreak havoc on a thousand perverted Middle-Earths

from the hidden heavens above,

bellowing out saccharine and hypnotic music

to the fanatic captives of their created worlds.

To my dark arms I return:

a thing skulking and ponderous,

wondering if it is true that the faces of all the men an adventurer kills

are seen in

the flickering sneer of an old man’s fire—

for it is a haunting thought, that—

And still I return:

hopeful, desperate, and afraid of discovering either

greatness or barrenness.

These self-inflicted wounds are my path to redemption. Most lie invisible,

imagined, glorified, unwritten: as one sees a tattoo upon the skin

before its realisation. They chronicle pain and boundless insufficiency; and yet

I fumble in the grey light (dawn or dusk or

purgatory? I do sometimes wonder),

the stench of blood old and new choking my lungs

from the real and the anticipated: scabs upon scars upon lacerations deep and

with practice forgotten;

but in the end, weary and frustrated,

bent and incensed, find I

have only exacerbated what I set out to heal. A

silent and convoluted prophecy

honourably fulfilled; for

even the sharpest of steels can do naught but slice. I cut open to find

there is a taint within my soul

which subdues and burns,

and makes every victory a cunningly malignant one.

But I return of my own will, for they are my own scars;

for this is my gift: pyrrhic, poisoned and rapturous;

for this is my drug: my heroine and my medication;

for these whispered words are mine alone.

Still, I resent

being shackled in the mire and tickled by witchy swamp fire,

being manhandled by the tortuous undercurrents of my ocean;

I have been seduced before: have drowned in brackish tea and

wolfed ashes come all the way from China;

I am tired of watching my blind will shy and stumble upon

this forbidding Elysian;

I do not feel like being shackled, I say:

not today, not by the musings of my bored mind

or the brilliance of my grim and stolen images.

And yet I return.

The fear of unoriginality is the catalyst for creativity—and I can feel it now!

I recognize the creativity eating at me—my mind, my soul,

shrieking: Do it! Make something beautiful, you poor little animal,

grasp your tainted weapons and stagger into the darkness,

ignore the mumbling angels, dismiss the pompous gods,

struggle till your bonds

make you scream with piteous ecstasy and

forge something people will enjoy!

That’s what you’re here for,

isn’t it?

Entertain the masses with your wit, boy, myderangedself commands,

give them your very being: your loves, regrets, fears, addictions;

your hopes, dreams, loyalties, nightmares;

your pain and your self-loathing:

let it trickle from your heart, this water of life, till a river surges

fit to overrun and overwhelm:

give nurture to this ravenous and saturated land of plenty.

Allow your essence—you’re you—to flourish:

in a twisted, distorted view, seen from some other asshole’s beaten and honestly-wretched carcass—

but know you cannot give all freely. Open yourself and let it drain to leave

room for much and more.

Oh, the creativity!—it consumes me, eating, eating, eating at me—driving me crazy

as it laughs with the insanity of genius.

It laughs at me with a hollow soul:

    Fill me! it screeches, Use me Fill me

before I smite you dumb!—and abandon you to the mob.

Give unconditionally or be broken.

Replenish yourself by freeing from your heart all

that you hold dear—for it’s all that tethers you teetering on the brink

of lunacy—let your emotions

flow into the realms of brainless entertainment,

to dance like a monkey on display for the bored and hungry crowd as they waver on the point of

practiced desertion, unabashedly

smiling at your efforts, applauding your aplomb!

I want to be free, I tell me, free from all this—free from you—

Feed me and you will be, is the reply, give me passage:

allow me to devour you slowly, thoroughly, bit by bit,

story by story by story,

till all of you is strung out to dry in a million different strips of paper,

torn asunder, stitched together and on display in a hundred foreign countries to gather

dust and disinterest;

plunge into the abyss maimed and

terrified, resentful and lost and scared shitless;

free yourself to me, to the world, and I—

I shall make you live.

Disperse yourself! let the heroes march into the open,

the tricksters slink by, the fiery women and unsmiling men stride forth,

the curious children climb under and valiant swashbucklers leap up and over:

in a guise let them dance a battle in a fantasy:

straddle strange beasts, explore exotic lands, sail waters blue and black and green,

free them from their crushing claustrophobia

to realize and celebrate their potentials,

to find their own place in the many worlds of this Earth.

Go and play god

with a thousand faceless men women children kings and monsters,

all your fated undying

(who remain chained at the back of the brain evermore, as if in some basement torture chamber,

available to spring forth into suffering at one’s simple whim;

reader, pity these conceptual vampires, for at least the fated dead are granted their own liberty in the unknown).

Carve each degenerate wonderfully, cleverly;

disfigure them to hide the purity of

and the truth of what they are; let your fancy little words wrap themselves contentedly

about your contemptible, mundane thoughts,

to give them wings and dreams and

happily-ever-afters.

Throw yourself, fragment by pitiful fragment, to the four winds,

my friend, and I shall find

all the pieces and

make from them something beautiful and painfully heartfelt and then,

then you shall have your deliverance.

Then you shall taste the oranges.

So? (the question)

So:

  I say:

      Fuck it

and start writing: