No Satisfaction

As he speaks, I can see some glimmer of intelligence, but he is a slave to his facade.  There are at least 12-15 instances of self defence, of egoist fueled, angry rebuttals disguised as self deprecations- one unloading after the next, mediocrity swirling around the room, while the world surrounds, encircling this little enclave.  One engorged with banality, by its own serious choice.  

What am I doing here? My blood is boiling, my hands are hot and want to touch something, someone, feel anything.  The out of body is after me all the while.  He knows it's time to go.  My skin is hot still, all around, and I can't feel my feet or turn my head from my well made, ineffectual meal back around to these words about something -- works of no art to me, words of no meaning or time.  Humility backs its frail little spine into mine, into the room, and whispers to me to leave them be - they are happy here, after all.  Me - I tell humility that he has his worth, but not here and now.  This is the aftermath of a battlefield without honor, with no grit, no guts and no mettle.  These are mettleless people who, as this world ransacks its seething teeth into their backsides, leave the wolves at the door, and carry on - sleeping during mild fucks under dark blankets, orchestrating every meaningless detail of all the seconds in their wretched little forced lives that they think they can control, and me - I'm not different.  I just see.  I just see that they sleep, but I don't want to sleep.  I want to be alive, awake, under the sweetest lights, fully come to for the sweetest fuck; torrents of lifelines, family trees and internal battles between all our heavens and hells beneath and within holding my hand, all the while.  

I need to get out of here.  The air is stale, and I look around and can read the abstract horror which only lets itself out of their insides in short, disturbing bursts of mild expression across their faces....even the ones who normally laugh and are jolly are serious, and I can see the fear in their eyes--- the fear of not having this job.  How strange the whole thing is - the recirculation of fear based love spreading like a plague across the place, table to table, buttering your bread with dull knives driven sheepishly out of dull hearts.  Do you not know that the minutes are ticking by?  Look up, for god's sake, you people, why am I the one to tell you this? You can see plain as day most of you, and but a handful of you are in the right place. And you, displaced King, I will myself not to turn around this pale, sunken room, because I do not want to see you sitting here, with them.  I prefer to think of you as invisible.

Maybe it's me.  Maybe I just don't belong here and they all do.  I hold no fear across my face.  They know this.  They don't speak to me with trust.  They see in the way I walk and the leaves of secret scrolls I unravel from myself daily that I am not one of them.  They know there is to be no microchip implanted beneath my hairline.  My hair, beneath the darkest and longest wave, holds in its stead a small, well constructed door.....not for them, though I feel them stumbling around it sometimes, trying to figure out the mainstay of it, the why, the places it goes. I don't think so, my sad and sorrowful dinner guests.  You can smell the wine in my airs, but not my church and steeple.  I see you.  I see all of you and want to tell you to run.  I don't like what your daily verbal errands bring me, or how I reflect back to you, if at all.  Outside, of the talking, the defense mechanisms, the jokes, the fear clutching at you, I'm.......in my own shoes.  My feet touch the ground, and I am in the place in which I move through, past, from.  There is no time, only your fear makes it so.  One meal to the next, one weekend never long enough, one same old same old.  Same old same old is a combined stench now, rising of people without dreams, or dreams that mattered so little to them that they volunteered to have themselves locked up in this prison.  And don't fool yourselves with your gold watches, your health care, your paid vacations and easy going dress code.  This is a prison.  

Meanwhile, my thighs are screaming, they are trying to get up and walk out...looking up here and there, to see some semblance of sky, to taste the rain that hasn't even thought about falling yet, to see the place up through the glass where one of you finally had enough and lept down, smashing his brains and organs onto your rooftops....yet you never heard a sound.  Do you hear it coming? Because I do.  I do, ever so much, hear the ants in cavalcade in the grasses from far away, past your suburbs, past your vacation homes and golf courses, the grasses which grow too wild for you to consume the way you are used to.  I hear the marching bands playing at your funerals, and each baby born just a little bit dumber, a little bit weaker, a little bit less alive because of your lack of the same force.  This force shoots straight up from my head into the branches of every courageous act I am set to follow, but tends towards the moment I can set my lips around some air again.  Not in here - in here, quite plainly, amidst the burning of Rome, I see each and every one of you and every tool and thing on fire and no one knows it...  

Dinner's over and your chattering has ceased.  I look around at strangers who I have spent more of the hours of my life with than any man I every loved, family I ever had or friend I ever cherished.  Please, one of you, cast the first stone.  I am committing a grave sin by sitting here in silence, the rage and lust and fanaticism pouring out of my glands - from my fingertips I shoot you all down day in and day out, but like fuzzy TV you all still remain, in your natural state of half life.  Must be wonderful to be buried to your waist, some of you nearly to your eyes, underground, resting already and yet stealing air and light from the rest of us.  I want to take this steak knife and stab one of them.  Fuck another, or fuck with some others to be sure.  I don't know what I want, but I need the presence of you -legion- not one but many dead zombie souls, but not even with the hankering for human flesh that would make you more interesting to me.  Your collective gumption is without presence, but I need you, legion, to be gone from me.  Or me from you.  

I want to stop declaring myself and let actions speak louder than words.  Read my eyes like braille- you, the afflicted.  These words, this table, these glass windows onto the meaningless world ignites me, and I don't want any of you following me out of here.  Back to your tight lipped families, back to your pension plans and awkward souls.  I want to vomit out all but the air inside my system and shoot like a rocket ship into the stars, the ones shining just beyond the chemical dirt and pale yellow of the daylight city skies - the stars which exist to love each and every one of you, like I should, but are the stars which you can't see, because fear stands guard at your shadow boxes.  

After it was all over, I was still there, in the world with them, physically speaking.  I wanted to pass out, and felt the immense desire to dream, because it felt more real to me.  At least I got a free meal.

M. Lucia