Giving Up

Sometimes I don't mind getting sick because in my soul of souls I feel like I feel like I ought to feel because, goddamnit, I'm sick sick sick sick in my soul and not in the quiet way that lies abed and not in the gentle and graceful way that people die on those rare occasions in the movies when they die gracefully and fall gravely into their graves. My sickness has mucous and snot and it hacks and throbs in a filmy phlegmy way without drama. And it's deep deep deep deep and the fourth is always unintuitive; it's off-balance and contrived, but who the fuck are you to tell me what's contrived and what isn't? Where's the superiority of the natural and what’s wrong with my cement trees and concrete mountains, my pools of motor oil and my semen-streaked stars? Where does it say that I can't build a scabby sand castle of my own to lie in and hack up ectoplasm?— the thick scum that people are born from and borne through, the first viscous shit that we crawled out of in the long ago times before my grandparents were small, smaller than they are now, even? Where the fuck does it say I can’t sleep in this filth?

I can’t sleep in this filth.

And where does it say I can't be a fascist? And where does it say people should have free speech? And who the fuck says I have get married and who are you to tell me that Alexander Calder is an artist? Damn art and expression and all the futile screaming into the wind, all that Sisyphean empty torment. And, dear friend, who needs a parenthetical when you can run a sentence dead over the horizon, sweating and foamy and heaving into the fucking dirt? Not the point.

Because sometimes I don't mind getting sick when it's so clear that everyone around me is sicker and getting sicker, drowning in dread every gray-black morning and puking ashes into the filthy sink and stumbling through sandpaper days that tear at them and shred the soft skin of their cheeks and throats and breasts and leave them raw and streaked, with flesh—real flesh—peeking though the skin and weeping sacred red?

And who can stop? Who can stop when there’s so much forward momentum and creation itself is pushing you forward, urging you on toward the flat horizon and its attainable goals, tiny worthless mile markers that will show you how far you’ve come, but never how far you still have to go? I can’t stop the unending and I'll never fill the empty. The filthy will stay filthy and the wells will overrun and even if I stop crying there will be enough to drown the soggy earth and the parched people on it. And even if the words don’t make sense and they taste like sawdust in my mouth, will I keep tearing my voice with them?

I will keep tearing my voice with them.

Probably and probably not. Yes and no. Because they’ll keep flooding out, leaking out, or they’ll form sticky endless gallons inside me.

You can’t fill the empty and you can’t empty the full.

And when you’re 20 or thirty or 40 or more, and you’re standing naked and you see the leanness, the hungry something still eating you inside or outside and sucking on your essence like a Jolly Rancher. . .

The empty won’t ever fill and the full could never go empty and nothing will ever be even and it can’t ever be quite fair.

And when you’re standing without pants in the morning chill, with your socks and shoes and coat and hat strewn upon the asphalt around you, you won’t understand any more than you do fully dressed and in chains in the cage of the car.

And when you’re sick the way I’m sick, you’ll know when it’s time to give up and that giving up means going on because only the proud and the strong—and there are none left—would try to stay.

Let's go.