hyenahell

yesterday morning i was up all night working in the print studio. i remember looking up and through the windows seeing this brilliant red-orange sky. there was a warm wind blowing a storm in over the city, and the sky was alive, swirling with pink, grey, purple, orange... i remember thinking that it must be the end of the world coming in with the clouds, because i'd never seen anything so beautiful and terrible all at once. i climbed up the stairwell to the fifth floor and up the maintainence shoot that leads up to the roof. by the time i got up there the sun was up and the blue-grey sky was sweeping over the campus, over uptown and towards the superdome and the CBD and on to the river, which was still shrouded in grey-orange darkness. everything was tinted red, windy but warm, and two crows flew over my head and circled with the wind, finally landing not five feet from where i sat on the rooftop. and i remember thinking that this must be a sign, i remember the clarity that only comes after hard nights with a hopeful dawn. and i felt like the only person left on earth, but not in a desperate or depressing way. i felt renewed, i felt alive, at last, as if somehow coming out of the darkness and into the light held more than some quasi-symbolic cliche...

i have risen and fallen so many times. you'd think i'd get used to it. you'd think i'd have something better to show for it by now. you'd think i'd learn a thing or two for all the humiliation and all the wonder, for all the ominous and hopeful dawns.

i've read all the writing on all the bathroom stalls in all the bars in this city. proverbs and parables, drunken proclamations and bits of wit and wisdom along with garbage and gossip, it seeps into your soul and starts to seem profound.

i've overheard the same three conversations from one side or another of a bar over and over again. and the simple misery of every story starts to play in your head as a melody.

i've been the fool and i've been the fly on the wall. i've been invisible and been able to see through skin, see flesh drip away and expose the rot and ruin of the soul of the world. i've covered more ground covered with vomit and bile, filth and broken dreams, coming from nowhere and moving toward nothing, i've been walking a terrible road.

and it's been a while but the ghosts are coming back. i guess they figure i'm desperate enough to hear them out again.

and i feel my core shifting, my voice cracking with sorrow or fear- i can't decide which- so i decide to just stay silent, stay still. i'll stay in bed for a week and when i finally emerge i'll crawl in and out of windoows to keep from being spotted. or rather just tell me what is expected of me, tell me the bare minimum and i'll surrender, i'll comply. i'll tow the line, i promise.

just give me back that brilliant sky, that shard of hope. keep it lodged in my eye so the pain never dulls, so i will not forget that there is something beautiful in every morning...

remind me why i do this to myself over and over again. why the same fucking things keep happening. give me a momento, a souvenier. so that i'll have something real to keep, to keep to myself if nothing else- let it be something real, though. not a whisper, a prayer, a promise or a dream- not any damned thing that fades. give me a stone, a button, a piece of glass, a chicken bone.

and i'll keep on, but barely, i'll limp forth and stumble. but i'll get by, i'll keep going... and i'll tell you, oh no, don't you worry none for me... but what that will really mean, what i really meant to say, what i really meant...

it was, "help".

but i won't say it, i won't ask. i'd rather let the pride in me be ground down day by day and bone by bone than lay it out for you to see, open up and just fucking give it away. it's part of my disease. and it's self-defeating; it's a negation of sorts... the phrase stuck in my head is "a process of diminishing return". and i'm not even sure where it comes from or what it means, but i get this vision of sand blowing away in the wind. and maybe it's because we're all trying to hard to hold on to the things in our lives that can't be kept. and maybe it's just that i'm lousy at holding on to anything. and maybe... maybe. maybe it just means that there's nothing to hold on to at all.

but that doesn't stop me from trying. no, no indeed...

and i'll tell you what i wrote on those dirty walls myself. i'll tell you just what i said, and it was this:

"you know what? it's all bullshit. all the same fucking bullshit. and when you wake up tomorrow, it will still be bullshit."

someone wrote an answer, and i'll tell you what it said:

"maybe 4 u dawg but not 4 me"

and that, i thought, the first time i saw it, that is the story of my life, brother.