about that place/state of being

There is a place.
a place we all may one day reach, where the hurt is so constant that you are inured, immune to the power of it. this place is a settling of the spirit I like to term"Meh."

Meh is not a place to be dignified with the term limbo. it is not some place of balance and expectation. it is a place of negligent torment and wasted feeling. it is...meh

it is a place to which we are consigned, but make no mistake - we are consigned to it by virtue of our choice. we choose to accept the treatment meted out to us that ensures our spot in Meh' purgatory.

why?
it is the easiest thing to abandon the world of Meh, to break free and banish the heart fractures of expectations and promises, to not live in the realm of hope in the face of sustained disappointment.

but we will not.

that one time out of a thousand is just behind the next meh episode. that one time that makes it worth it, that makes you for even a minute feel the warmth of affection and desire...

may your moment not be of steadily diminishing returns.

meanwhile, you have the meh for company.

Musings

Boris Vallejo's "Prometheus"

There is a titan who it was said, was eternally damned for his daring to bring fire to the world of man. He was berated and punished by his equals for giving the gift of progress,  of warmth, of LIGHT to a dark cold and forbidding world. While the mortals who before him knew only cold and darkness praised him, he hung physically on the altar of his peers disdain and alienation for his compassion. This tale takes shape every time we as a Caribbean people are gifted with a luminary who also has a soul.

You would think we would learn to love and share freely; that resentment and divisiveness serve no one; that the only prestige worth having is the peace of mind that acknowledging and loving your fellow man brings...but no.

We live, aggrandising our efforts, deigning to  consider the work of those less than our opinion of ourselves as worthwhile - worse yet on par in importance as ours. We create colonies of exclusion,  we seek out superiority.

We have put ego above community.

We have put self above family.

We have put pride before service

And, fools that we are, we believe that we all each are immune to these - even judging others for their levels of self indulgence.

Who have we become? Who have some of us always been?

What qualifies us to cast nets of negativity and dissent? From what pedestal of righteous indignation do we feel justified in causing division and discord? 

We live in an age where information and wisdom are mistaken for each other;  an age where same wisdom can no longer be counted in years lived,  and authority a construct to be questioned and daily revised under the scrutiny it has needed for evolution.  This is a glorious time to be alive, a fantastic time and opportunity to bridge the gap.

But we are not bridging the gap. We are creating walls of transparent titanium metres thick, and digging trenches of separation miles wide and deep.

And it is a problem that will destroy us.

The aging cling to the legacies and advancements of the present, happy to receive the work of the young, and jealously guarding their birthright in their unwillingness to risk irrelevance. 

The young, now no longer constrained to wait for this (in their mind) unnecessarily rigorous baton passing, have already lost mass interest in their heritage.

And why wouldn't they? So many other cultures are there for the choosing - and all readily available and packaged to look like everything they ever desired.

There is much to reckon for, and you on your various mounts Olympus are sadly first to blame.

There have been too few Prometheans and far too many incensed gods.

You cannot hold welcome and inclusion into community as tools for manipulation when to survive you need their presence and interest. You curse yourself to the bitterest of damnatio memoriae - and the world is poorer for it.

The young...oh that I could lay all the ills at the feet of those charged to tend us; to blame the society that failed to make us confident of her embrace. But I cannot. We have allowed the privilege of birth to become shadowed by the spirit of entitlement. We seek belonging through demands, ourselves needing to be handled carefully.

And so we create, not a subculture,  but remove ourselves from the well of inherited and inherent to sip from the meagre canteen of self. 

We have struck valiantly out on our own, to commit the sins errors and evils that generations before should have inoculated us against but were too busy carving themselves into the now, marginally concerned for the tomorrow that they know they will not be part of.

And it is STUPID.

And it hurts us

But you do not truly care

And to the few that do, they are shamed before they can turn the lens of your petty self absorption on you.

No one is free from Sin,  but the stones have been cast in blind fury so wide that the village is in ruins. And now, I finally see why hermits are content by their streams of solitude.

It is said God is dead, and that we killed him. Community's soul lies bleeding out,  and, but for the odd gasp and grimace fading out in the shamefully 'indignifiable' death to which we have consigned it.

And....I am tired

Tired of false "we," people containing themselves into an invisible multitude, invoking narcissism too great for one body.

Tired of empty empathy that fails to even be sympathy

Tired of underhanded schemes and barefaced manipulation when the honesty of admission of a sense of disconnect would solve the loneliness.

EGO,  that ruins the "we" only when it is given full autonomy over not only the self but the selves of others... an interpersonal colonisation of toxic result.

And we make it hard to love us

So very hard

And yet we demand it. That which we won't selflessly give for fear of being in a position of vulnerability. How foolish! 

Even this letter and it's hubris in supposing it will change anything hurts.

But it can't not exist. 

And I can't stop believing in a world where Prometheus is all of us, and so celebrated is the act of freely sharing and loving that it is impossible to consider the warmth as not eternal. Maybe I will awake to the reality that my hope is not a fantasy. 

Til then, the queue for a slab altar and the removal of regenerative livers is thinning...and not because love granted the foolish Pardon ego and selfishness demanded.

Sin Cera,

Carl Anthony Hines

cycle, circle, closed.

"You see dat ting you do? you gwine have to stop it and LISTEN TO YOUR HEAD ... from you little mi a tell you say people a people, and dem not always ready like you fi 'see full picture' - sometimes dem nuh even ready fi more dan one line at a time... and you always know when enuh, you always know when, but you just stubborn. anyway, as usual mi bet yuh tiyad now an' ready fi finally listen. clear out and go again. an' dis time, don't call me when is prayer time (the only woman I know who from 4 am to 7 is prayer time) to ask what you already know. mi love you. take care a yuhself, and God have it - even when yuh nuh feel it."

My Grandmother has a pertinent and present voice in my head, and almost none of our talks are new - for some reason I keep heading to the same spiral.

...maybe the book everyone claims to want to live by is secondary to the egos everyone wants to nurture and I'm behind on truly believing that. well, this rubber duck has left the gyre

Love yourself. Value yourself. Be good to and for yourself

Why do I keep Venting? On Self Worth

We are told everywhere we go, all we do "let no one dictate your worth." But do we truly know what that means?  And  can we ever escape it?
Self worth has always been a bit of a recurring theme for me. Those readers and friends (and here that may as well be a synonym) who follow this blog have seen me constantly navigating that minefield of identity,  worth and belief. sadly, I come away with the same conclusion most days: the unsettling realisation that all men dictate our worth. Men here may be misconstrued as the male of the species... I do not mean them (or rather us) specifically,  but mankind on a whole.
Now...when you think of yourself,  when you truly consider yourself, what do you picture? For many the mental mirror comes out and we appraise and present our physical self. Eyes that may or may not be aligned with our concept of beauty, a nose that may be too wide or narrow, ears to big/small/pixie like for our faces. We may think of our ill health, of lack of musculature,  of disease and dis - ease. Then slowly if at all we come round to the positives, and we begrudgingly admit our face isn't quite so wonky, our smile a likeable thing, our bodies graceful enough.

Why is it that many of us precede this list of the physical traits with the faulty aspects of our being? Why do we even think of the outside first?

Then there are those who go abstract in their search - abstract here not a term for offense but a lumping term for the intangible aspects of self, such as personality - coming up with traits that define them "I am reflective/peaceful/passionate."

And here we present them first as flaws and not as value free aspects of out makeup.

Everything, even the vocabulary we use to evaluate our worth were things observed and legitimised through collective experience. We define our worth and feelings and experiences on the index of human collective experience and expression.

And here's the thing: we don't get freed from it.

The true sociopaths among us navigate life free from it while manipulating others with the knowledge of it, yes but think of all you have lived as units across the index.

- a sticker for a well done school project
- positive words to a baby on an achieved milestone
- a cheer when an athlete performs spectacularly

Though only one of those instances directly affect fiscal value (itself a whole other system of self valuation and its own Pandora's box), all of them contribute to both our individual sense of worth and the collective appraisal of our worth.

So are we...free?

More time,

Carl.

What word of grace
in such a place
could save a brother's soul?
- O. Wilde,
Ballad of Reading Gaol

Poetry to make you go "hmmm"...

Little Beast

By Richard Siken

1


An all-night barbeque. A dance on the courthouse lawn.

The radio aches a little tune that tells the story of what the night

is thinking. It’s thinking of love.

It’s thinking of stabbing us to death

and leaving our bodies in a dumpster.

That’s a nice touch, stains in the night, whiskey and kisses for everyone.


Tonight, by the freeway, a man eating fruit pie with a buckknife

carves the likeness of his lover’s face into the motel wall. I like him

and I want to be like him, my hands no longer an afterthought.


2


Someone once told me that explaining is an admission of failure.

I’m sure you remember, I was on the phone with you, sweetheart.


3


History repeats itself. Somebody says this.

History throws its shadow over the beginning, over the desktop,

over the sock drawer with its socks, its hidden letters.

History is a little man in a brown suit

trying to define a room he is outside of.

I know history. There are many names in history

but none of them are ours.


4


He had green eyes,

so I wanted to sleep with him—

green eyes flecked with yellow, dried leaves on the surface of a pool-

You could drown in those eyes, I said.

The fact of his pulse,

the way he pulled his body in, out of shyness or shame or a desire

not to disturb the air around him.

Everyone could see the way his muscles worked,

the way we look like animals,

his skin barely keeping him inside.

I wanted to take him home

and rough him up and get my hands inside him, drive my body into his

like a crash test car.

I wanted to be wanted and he was

very beautiful, kissed with his eyes closed, and only felt good while moving.

You could drown in those eyes, I said,

so it’s summer, so it’s suicide,

so we’re helpless in sleep and struggling at the bottom of the pool.


5


It wasn’t until we were well past the middle of it

that we realized

the old dull pain, whose stitched wrists and clammy fingers,

far from being subverted,

had only slipped underneath us, freshly scrubbed.

Mirrors and shop windows returned our faces to us,

replete with the tight lips and the eyes that remained eyes

and not the doorways we had hoped for.

His wounds healed, the skin a bit thicker than before,

scars like train tracks on his arms and on his body underneath his shirt.


6


We still groped for each other on the backstairs or in parked cars

as the roads around us

grew glossy with ice and our breath softened the view through a glass

already laced with frost,

but more frequently I was finding myself sleepless, and he was running out

of lullabies.

But damn if there isn’t anything sexier

than a slender boy with a handgun,

a fast car, a bottle of pills.


7


What would you like? I’d like my money’s worth.

Try explaining a life bundled with episodes of this—

swallowing mud, swallowing glass, the smell of blood

on the first four knuckles.

We pull our boots on with both hands

but we can’t punch ourselves awake and all I can do

is stand on the curb and say Sorry

about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine.




I couldn’t get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time.