By Adam Hutchinson
Beautiful night to go swimming. Plenty of chances to do it long before. Not enough gall. Take a last look at the milky dark English sky above, then. A butcher’s knife couldn’t pierce it. Cosmic vacuum. In the mood for an elegy? Should have written a note most likely. Some form of goodbye. No matter. Wonder what would happen if I wandered into town before. Could have a vodka. Ramble a cautionary tale to nobody. Late evening already: bad idea. Might change your mind. The ceaseless illusion of shade, my red eyes and black bliss. Our behaviour. Origin of habitual tendency in which astral potentials inevitably close. My morphogenetic development. Archway. Undulating anxiety of sentient beings, in varying proximity since the origin of beginningless time. Some say we yearn for the pathway back to ourselves, to retract our terrestrial luminescence. Questions that have long resisted explanation. We walk away without proceeding into. Egress: reality called to apologise. Someone passing. Who he was. That man with the face and the hands and the ego. I had taken all knowledge to be my province. Aeons of unacknowledged gyalpo spirits. Perched as an epiphenomenon on the branch of my own yew. Miming a thoughtless valediction with no sadness, no hint of resilience in my weak eremitical existence. Over soon. An eternal lack of breakfast, dinner, lunch. Farewell to Babylon.
Of course, we have plenty of good reasons to do it. A refresher, now: who was the first person who adopted the “I” pronoun? This inquiry of mine. A pertinent guide. To understand my previous colloquies held with pre-denominated sacred oxygen. Continuous psychache of the enskulled translator of the internal schizophrenic. Echoes of yesterday, transported and resounded by nefarious nobody. Eyes empty of stars. You will be forgotten very much. Bit greedy, but at least you left a visual and auditory impression of importance to a few human bodies. The socialisation of reconstructed consistency. Maybe even a few folks will remember images of you with fond dopamine releases. Not many. You’re in charge of your own happiness, they said. All my life I failed to master those gelastic reflexes. Doctrines of reconstructed affections, internalised. Missed eventualities. Sigillative smiles. A search, I believe in the end. Old roads crossed once, vanished twice, reappearing by way of tarnished memory. Visions of the oneiric matrix of X and Y and Z. Recalled synonyms for abhorrence. Symptom.
Few revellers out. Concealed souls of spilt streetlamp light imprisoned by immanence, glittering lustily over a lost resourceful nous with much-wasted and little-vaunted ideological potential. The anticipated red flush of a saunter up the street by rosy, tulip, lilac gardens. Beautiful demons about, aren’t there in this sapphire darkness? At least in the head. And the stars, shedding gentle, euphonious coruscations. Gilded, passionfruit black: could almost take a bite. Nubiological astrology of a cast town variety, hemmed in as we are by the tumultuary ardency of the clock of the sun. Jupiter is flying about somewhere up there, although I can't see it. Celestial rivers, galaxies lined with no boundaries, entwined by mute seraphic dusk, apathetic stars. Return to the firmament anon, and regretfully. The onslaught of everything. Encounter yourself here by being yourself. Unassisted by priests or psychiatrists. Pins of my bedevilled eyes. Swamp of this tacit epistemological morass. Variously called propositional statements that blow around my skull like dust bunnies. Yellow words and numbers embodied, codified deletions for universal procedures, all talking in me, by me. Voices of bread, voices of heartbeat, voices of gardeners, voices of night. Is this an illusion? Ignored by provenance, recalled by desire. Encircled by numerological institution. Pashupati seal. Unforgiven valediction. Tulpa of false concern. Darling cultures of locality and animal rights vultures. Ayam Atma Brahma. Assisted by a nefarious nebula of deceitful phone numbers. Customs. And, only here to return to fresh bodies.
How are you going to? I had a few ideas, have a few pretensions. Building up the courage will be a challenge. With the deafening traffic, into the soft alpenglow of sunbeams. A cloak of bloodied future left lounging on the river, pathless. Yet no. Patent overgrowth of mathematical magnitude, number or
ordertype of all matter surrounding our hyle. Spinozan. Transitional dynamic, reincorporated bullies, cuffed by the secretary stasis, snapped into grubby fingers that once beheld pan-European laconism with false reverence. God of delusion eluding our hylomorphism. Complicity. Some beguiling repackaging of living, a friend who’d mastered life, if only I could converse with him. The last regrets, innerness and soon outerness of the past. How to make any sense of the claim? Al fresco doldrums of reinvented tendencies. Defibrillator of unknown integrity. Protological and soon to be demoted reality. Connoted by the bitter tamarind moon. Ecocide and egocide. I cannot do it until I get there. Demeanour of calm but in essence all-overish. Amorphous harangues. Introspective self-imposed narrative. Shuffled perspectives of my vintage sociome. Incorporated and then overthrown away. Erstwhile veranda of ode and homage. I’m at my wit’s start here. Watch out for that labrador’s paws. Floriferous park. Under damp oaks, past crowing passerines. Fancy walking a dog out at this hour. Bloody. Crevice of peace. Mutt-pacer gave me an odd look. Woman in her fifties. Pashmina. Gargantuan eyes. Long nose. Scared of me, probably a kernel of misplaced consummation, as usual. Woe betide the shore of me! Soon to not be. Eschatology of considered orthography of kinesiology.
The ruby eyes and yellow foreheads of those thronging hucksters of my beloved neighbours. Friends, all of them? Their imagined eyes and horrid love still choke my abacinated and ultimately infertile self-concept. Abattoir of modernity: I have ventured among their demoralised ways and now the joyous note rings no longer in my anima. Acolyte of tomorrow, a visitor of false fortune. Aischrolatry, my intent and enuresis, my method. In terms of my tailless departure, there can be no perception that redeems it. Future of my presentless past and my endless hunger. Determined to collect our last impressions, I am. Eternalised visitor merely by arrival. Stop. There is something in my cornea.
Raise hand. Clear. Lower hand. Done. Now, to continue with self-pity.
What to think about in these late hours? Eastern. Wu wei. Tao. Karma. Miscellaneous heathen ways to diagnose the lack of tranquillity. And the opposite? Dysthymia. Melancholia. Depression. Or, the problem could be external? Age of hypermetropia, as some scholars might identify it. Archaeology of amor. What was the identifier? The word is known to all. Infantilised in this body. Honest to God, with no clue what he was talking about. Basement of forensics. Mind that sabbulonarium as well. Everybody’s trying to trip me up. Skyscrapers are so theurgical at this time of year. Emanates something ineffable. But there’s not as much light as I expected there to be. Delirium of an infinity of instants. Scopophilia of beauty. Hooded faces resting in tenebrous ovals. Like little flaming comets, our pupils cross. And, so, how many have you done in your span, eh? I did a lot of eye contact but not a long of ancestral contact. Do you think of all the days of all your life there was ever one who saw the true face? To ask me not to do that anymore. I’m the one: you’re a lot like me. Why the hell would I come and why the heaven would I leave? A grown man. Frosty airbrushes my white skin, shackles raised. What I don’t understand, I cannot connect. Shrivasta? Many interpretations are left yet.
The source of all my troubles? Really? Full of shit. 38-eight years young. Lives in delusion, seeks integrity, reads the Middle Testament. Fortune hindered me more than neglect and yet it all results from the same cosmic scene. The source. Correction, it all comes from there. Yet it’s not what you became but what you become. Life is a circle, they say. I would like to believe it. The curve of Dedekind that begins to incline back down again? It hinders. Public safety. Stop. I will cease when I want to, thank you very much. Zebra. Hey, I was just wondering, are you really going to go through with this? Lots of great stuff here. Serious. No, I’m intent. What I want to do know is why it is so easy to avoid a quietus? Well, to quodlibetificate with our surroundings reveals a knowledge of commodious supply. Like that bucket full of what, ten bricks? I can see it hanging from that rope, jostled by the wind. Nobody looking. Could easily tumble down. Break your skull. And the builders buzzing around with their churning cement mixers. They long for you to be happy. But I don’t. Bet they wish they could go home and sidle up next to the fire. Stop. Cruelest season. I’ve already decided to ignore you.