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Your Glass Head Against the Brick Parade of Now Whats

by Sam Pink, Be Softly

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1.
The distance between how you see yourself and how others see you. The you that’s in focus of both. The distance between real emotions in yourself. The you that exists only in the distances. Wearing a mask that looks exactly like your face. Getting nowhere but trying harder and harder. Shivering at the bus stop. Wind going through your ripped jacket. Looking for openings to jump into, always. Always looking. Bullet holes in your coffin. So many bullet holes in your coffin. A legacy of nightmares for everyone you’ve known. Because you’re in pieces already so why not hand them out. Just give up. Pay what’s owed before it’ s due and take what you can before it’s gone. Finding a clearing or clearing everything along the way. A tour you guide for a self only seconds in the past moving forward with little understanding. No longer what went wrong but how anything went right. And more and more bricks from heaven. Bricks to kill the bricks that kill us. Thanking the person who’s hurt you most by head - butting off their horns and using them for your own. Which means haha motherfucker, look what you did. Glad for any decisions at all — not because they were right, but because whatever, fuck it. New problems. Sitting in the kitchen watching the freezing gray cover the skyline. Missing everything and everyone all the time and never quite prepared to admit it. The anxiety of living the things you don’ t want to admit. False-bottomed coffins to dig even deeper. Digging through your false-bottomed coffin to hide and catch whatever tries to dig you up. Pulling under whatever tries to dig you up. Pulling under whatever tries to dig you so you can spoon with it. New looks on the same dead you. The same dead you trying the same dumb shit. Thinking, ‘I look ugly’ whenever you see yourself in the mirror. A cast completely enclosing your head. A cast completely enclosing your head, on fire. Having to ask for mercy from the one who lit it. Having to know the right words. Or just kneeling down and letting your head burn. Hey man sometimes you just have to kneel down and let your head burn. Never in love. Two broken lawnmowers in the dumpster. A smashed dollhouse in the alley, surrounded by drug needles. ‘Christmas in July’ as slang for suicide. A way to return inward for peace no matter what, but always forgetting. Moments of remember ing you don’t hate yourself you hate how you choose to act based on having to choose because of everything else. And that’s shitty.
2.
Two types of eye contact: none and fuck you. Seeing a dead rat frozen in the alley and thinking, ‘missing youuuuuuu.’ Locking yourself in your head until you become a small weak thing that you let back out into the world to try and survive, and if it survives it’s better, and you lock it back up. Inhaling all the oxygen in the world and staring out blink-less as everything drops dead. Moving aimlessly in directions that if seen from above would spell out ‘don’t help me.’ Some of that ‘every day is one long moment of feeling like I’m tipping over backwards’ shit. Viewing most days as ‘light tours of death.’ The moment when you start to notice every thought you have is begun by one person and randomly ended by another and you don’t like either of them. And that neither of them want to know you. And that you just can never quite hit yourself hard enough. Living as three people: one inside your head saying hateful/depressed/hopeless shit, another as the one inside your head trying to deal with the first one, and the third one as visible to the outside world, trying to keep people from noticing any trace of the first two. That moment when you start to have a little feeling/emotion and you look back on having just acted out of not having any feelings/emotions. That weird moment. That moment when you don’t have any feelings/emotions and you look back on having just acted out of having feelings/emotions. That weird weird moment. When my bush smells like your bush, I own you and you own me and that’s the end of everything. Sleepover at your grave. Head-butting through your coffin just to spit on you. After-party for the firing squad. Losing your balance and falling over at the prospect of five more seconds. The opposite of marriage to everyone in all interactions, all the time. Breaking into a random house and making a lot of sandwiches and leaving them on a plate for whoever lives there to find. That deep down, ‘wish I was cut up in pieces in a dumpster’ type of doom. Depression like all there is inside your skull is melted plastic. Depression like, man, if only you had melted plastic in your skull then it’d be ok that that’s how you felt all the time because it’d be true. That feeling you already read/saw all the various endings in your own life and are now just going through it without any surprise of any kind because something about something something something. Feeling like you’re joking about everything you do but the fact that you keep doing it is very serious. Involuntarily clamping down your jaw all day and you’re not sure if it’s to keep your mouth shut, fight off tears, or eat your own head. Thanking the firing squad. The feeling of worrying about something coming to get you when you’re younger versus knowing nothing will come to get you when you’re older. Smiling/laughing more not out of joy but out of a feeling like, ‘Yeah, fuck this.’ The feeling that everything you do is doomed in a way that might not seem obvious at the moment but is always leading to one last moment of doom where you finally admit that there is nothing to be done and never was and you have been defeated and absolutely shitted on and the only thing you ever liked about yourself was that yeah you were stupid enough to think you were being brave in trying.
3.
Teaching someone the rules of their bullshit by doing it to them. The feeling that no matter where you are, someone is going to walk up and ask you to leave. The feeling you’d agree. Knowing you’d agree. The feeling that everything is obvious in a way that’s embarrassing. Making friends with the firing squad. But whatever. Guy on the subway half-asleep but trying to pull out his tooth, I believe in you. Guy on the subway falling asleep but jumping awake every so often and wildly stabbing your pocket knife around before going back to sleep, I understand. Lady who just got on the train and immediately yelled, ‘Does anyone want one of my hamburgers?’—yes, I do, I would like one of your hamburgers. Bogus magnets for a brain. Lungs full of glue. Heart held together with rubber bands. More and more knives in your heart but there’s nothing left anymore so whatever. Life like two broken hands trying to pick flowers for someone you really like. And half a burnt flag for a tongue. Crossed eyes from trying to figure yourself out. Remembering you have to relax your face to go to sleep. Relaxing your face then smiling then going back to tense and forgetting you have to relax your face to go to sleep. Remembering things that make you feel beautiful, right before falling asleep, and wanting to always remember them, then not, to let them go. Just go just go. Go on to new problems.
4.
Death like the slow addition of more and more tiny weak hands to your throat until it works. And it works. Man, I’m telling you, it works. Motivating yourself to leave your apartment by cupping hot water to your face and looking at yourself in the mirror and saying, ‘Don’t ever die.’ Broken glass lining the inside of your coffin for when you wake up and try to escape. A skull full of flies such that they split open your skull. Feeling like each moment doesn’t count once the next one happens. Adapting to the wait. A helium balloon with a dead bird taped to it. The same with my severed head. Forehead to forehead while fucking. And no idea how others see you. Your bones in a pile in the woods, like a deer but, you know, different. A fly eating a tiny bit of your bone and immediately growing to the size of an airplane. Reinstalling the tinfoil lining on your brain. The same with your heart. The law that you’ll hurt yourself the necessary and predestined amount if something else doesn’t. Because it’s already done. Worst when done through a painless and fake life. Thoughts descended from something else unfinished. Jumping off a building to kill someone below. My corpse, placed lovingly up underneath a highway overpass on a bed of fast-food wrappers. My severed head, punted high up into a tree. Everything that happens, happening without favorites. Given that I’m everyone’s favorite all the time. Given that you’re next in line but I don’t ever die. Beat to death with a gold brick. Revived with one kiss, blown from ten miles away. A pit that appears and disappears below each step you take. A million dead yous at the bottom of each pit. Immortal but living on the moon with one foot chained to the ground. No more acting. Brickmaker in heaven, please kill all the actors. Hopeful that, even after so much disappointment, one night your pillow will swallow your head. Suicide by head-butting through a windshield then pulling off your head. Considering yourself a guest no matter where you go. No matter what. The turning point when the love and excitement in you become a little painful and violent. The relief once it happens. A weird but refreshing new standard where a positive interaction with someone leaves you thinking, ‘You’re you and I’m me and that’s pretty much it and I won’t think about it anymore.’ Internal people-screening device that almost always reads, ‘not on my team.’ Where true love is being afraid of someone because you’re entirely sure you’d let them kill you if they wanted—you’d let them do whatever they want. Which is what you’ve always wanted. Where someone’s laughter is an accurate sign of who they are. Where someone’s eye contact signals how dead they are. Where you and I meet there is no you anymore just a pile of pretty-smelling dust for me to throw in the air. Living as an actor vaguely aware of a role in which you are comically dedicated to maintaining a version of yourself that is only an echo of what you think others think about you and even they are bullshit built of echoes. And it sucks. Man I’m telling you, it sucks.
5.
Talking to the lone lobster left in the tank at the supermarket to calm down and feel connected. Talking shit to the firing squad. Smiling wide as you allow your latest ghost to slowly come out of you in front of others, unseen. Smiling wide as you allow someone else’s latest ghost to go into you as if you earned it. And you have. You have you have you have! The feeling that if you head-butted a cannonball coming at you the cannonball would explode into dust and the dust would smell so pretty and it would shower you and you’d be smiling. The feeling of victory in having head-butted every skyscraper into the ground, like hammering nails. Standing there with your hands on your hips, every building buried and nothing left to do but enjoy your work. Goodbye to you all. Identifying yourself through anxieties outside of yourself that are too close to see and seem part of who you are. But that’s not who you are. Waking up as punishment. Waking up as a magic trick where everything you hate about yourself comes out of your face and creates the world. Waking up and praying, ‘Brickmaker in heaven, send down many bricks.’ Sex with bad breath. Trying to throw a paper airplane through a brick wall. Days the equivalent of coloring an entire coloring book one color. Where the sun is just a bomb too far away to do its job. Ouch ouch ouch. Looking down at someone you were, with total disapproval and denial, as a celebration. Celebrating the death of the last thing you tried to be. So many knives in your heart you can’t even tell what it is anymore. One more knife to push out an existing knife. Which means on to new doubts. Which means no one can teach you anything you don’t already or will never know. Like me right now. Which means have fun giving out trial versions of yourself and reserving the real you for a world you believe in but will never see. And have fun standing there while every world you believe in falls to the ground like a paper backdrop. Spitting at the firing squad. A firing squad of unloaded guns just clicking. Screaming back at the clicks.
6.
A way to win by refusing to acknowledge a winner. To lose by doing the same. Lives designed to happen so fast they don’t happen. But no complaints because it extends to the question of, ‘ok then what?’ And no one knows what. And you don’t know what because usually you’re just relieved to not be in control. And it’s always me against you. And when I take you in as mine, you love it. I take you in and give you back as someone you tried to abandon a long time ago but couldn’t, and never will. Never never never. But yeah, for you, anything. For you, a field of dandelions with diamond heads, sunlit and waving. For you, all the bricks from heaven such that their shadow freezes you long before you’re crushed. For you, less and less of me each time. A life of lessening. Life like dying batteries. Righting the debt right before the rewinding. A monster with a head made of a hundred toothless mouths. And no way to defeat it but jump in. A monster with a head full of knives that never dies, just stumbles around shrieking. And no way to help it but let it die. For you, I would hunt myself for years. For you, I’d die of any illness, or all in a row, with thousands of years of suffering. For you, that is the least payment. Wishing you and anyone else all the happiness you can handle, from the other side of this endless and impenetrable and imaginary glass divider, too cold myself to even register any steam. Like you’ve always known me and like I’ll always be. Already on to new problems.

credits

released November 10, 2017

Poetry and spoken word: Sam Pink
Music: Be Softly

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Be Softly is a creative collective & record label focused on creating collaboratively across various mediums.

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