Observations From Underneath the Multitudes

One of my sketches, 2006

IF...

I fold up my inability into a circle, my knees will touch my forehead; my toes will curl under; my eyes will close and I will be numb from the inside out. The world is an egg and I struggle inside it. Sometimes I feel like a stowaway on a sinking ship, hoping for the languid bottom to finally cork my lungs, swell my belly, and hide me forever. In a sea of people, I swim toward the whirlpool of Nobody, eddying down until I am dissolved.  People are like horses to me; they thunder over my quiet voice and my lowered eyes.  I am trampled at the start of everyday with these ignoble masses bearing down on me.  What they don’t know is they feed me secrets here at the bottom. The rubbish in the center of their hearts is pushed and repressed to my eye level, where I can see plainly the stones they hide from their glass houses.  The floor of their mental trash bins is slick with refuse and my feet gingerly step like amphibians in the cool of their doubts and questions.  It’s like drool from the seat of the soul.  I waiver in my obstinacy to join these swirling herds, packs, gaggles, murders, and groups of the lifeless.  I’m tired of noses turned down at me, as though my fingers form their sanitation crews, as though the muck in their emotional crypts were mine to bury.  Somehow they believe I’ll cover their ruinous cycles with my very body – as though my existence were mourning veil for the results of a failed polygraph, or the desire for the explicit embarrassments too soon revealed.  I want to enter into the universe, cracking my embryo of stagnation that smoothes over the rough and tumble of others’ imaginations.  I am – so far – putrid within the rotting nucleus of doldrums and decadence.  I live among the cigarette butts of the rich, the stupid, the fake, and the cruel.  Inwardly I would burn up in the regress of human history, and languish like a pulsar that quietly thumps a reminder of impermanence.