At the end of the day, I could play Doom and forget about it

Just convince yourself it's "interesting". I say. As I strain in pain. The pain isn't real. You're fooling yourself. Psychosomatic fool. Take the reins. Don't suffer the joke of purposeless alien pain regimes.

But there were good times. There are nostalgias. Yearns for fresh mind to replicate my childhood, genetically. Nothing so presumptuous as paternity. Not vanity. Some cock-eyed contemplation of vitality. A thread, a stitch of timelessness.

I wandered through the grass
wondering which fix was worse
locked in the dread of sickly maturity?
or locked in a room with three dozen sadistic delinquents
and having to justify my existence?
how could I rosy tint high school
and sell out my old defiant sneering self?

That excessively negative regime

was still aloft somehow
because at the end of the day, I could play Doom and forget about it.

Now, I can still play Doom
and try to forget the terrors of contemporaneous times

the feel of apocalypse, death, chronic crumpled corruption
but I just end up impaled on those subscript splinters.

There is the new
interface with the void, the alien, the disconcertingly familiar
what am I going to do with it?

Oh, it was real persecution
not like I was a jew in nazi germany
or a palestinian in jewistan
but I was a Weirdo in High School
I didn’t fit in.

“My people” – my people aren’t easily labeled
they come from a distant homeworld, extragalactic
orbiting a rogue star mega-parsecs away.

We aren’t geeks

but maybe freaks

but who isn’t?
isn’t it still cool to be weird?

No, that old delusion remains, if diluted
the one I raised to maturity
when I found my attraction to my aesthetic, my clashy alien color scheme
(and I don’t even like the clash, never was a punk, or so punk I didn’t know it)
the delusion that it was ever cool to be weird
too cool for school and its phlemy redbull aftermath
in the bars, the clubs, occasionally running into those old paradigm fools
now their fully grown mature selves, the ones who tower over me

some awesomely rotund, most successfully
projecting that they have it together, to be social, participate in a jolly fiction
maybe reality, I dunno, don’t ask me what reality is.

Or maybe I’m just pessimistic, neophobic, twice bitten, four times shy

oblivious to the possibilities, born yesterday, still quivering

in the glow of the rogue star in my head.

Once I could take comfort in the fact that Star Trek VIII was coming out in november
november would make everything alright if I could just make it to november
I could endure the parade of indignity that was my morning walk down the hall
to my locker to try and forget the new batch of designer insults the carnivores
had come up with, to impress each other with, to bring me down.

Actually I have to strain to remember the pain.
I didn’t want to dwell in a universe colored by that
so I made a new one for myself, colonized a homeworld in vast open psychedelic space, manifesting the mind with aplomb, it was an art I thought I could master, like my idols, new age guru types, Terence and RAW.

Ah, chaos, the final eternal frontier
making what I wanted to, harnessing the raw power of the quasar
people can be good, I’ll find my own people
I did find people, real people, a lovely girl, good friends.

But you can’t dwell in your reality
forever, you’ll run up against what those
stubborn other people call objectivity
what they save money for
what they crave money for
why they pay their dues
why they shake hands with record executives

while they eulogize Syd Barrett’s brain
while profiting from Crazy Diamond apparel that becomes cultural clothing
catch phrase trafficking, but hey, I’d take a Pink Floyd memorial on my tombstone.

But gravity isn’t always groovy, isn’t always gravy
and some good friends came to dead ends
and some rabbitholes were scary, I didn’t want to go down
bunnybloodslick tryptamine tunnels, why does meaning feel so slippery and sanguine
why is my blood an emetic, why can’t I drink my own lifeforce, why
can’t I look at my own mind, why does the mirror make me sick, what is this splinter
this toxin in my system, my spirit, my reality, why do I continue to use the word
“reality” in poetry even after I promised myself I’d stop, why is reality like my nicotine fix? Why were there acid freakouts and self-imposed limitations on consciousness
openness, openness opened up dark possibilities, nihilistic philosophies.

But time does heal some wounds, and some wounds healed up, I got out of the paranoid trip of needing to think everyone’s against me, gained massive freedom that way, luxuries there for the taking, accepting. Yes, some wounds healed up, but some new wounds opened up, wound me up in feedback loops, bleedblack bloops, trying to fix them, got on self-replicating patterns, repeating fractally, iterating at exponentially higher scales, a progression at 1.1, 1.2, 1.4, 1.8, 2.4, finally overloading, overclocking this information-taxed turing machine, sproinging loose springs, bolts flying, neurotransmitting fluid leaking, fractally mimicking society as a whole, an oil-addicted clusterfuck unable to diagnose itself, except by geniuses like me, haha, yeah right, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, I’ll attribute it all to the buddha, it would be blasphemous to say this silliness is my own.