I want everyone who reads this to ask me 3 questions, no more no less. Ask me anything you want. Then I want you to go to your journal, copy and paste this allowing your friends (including myself) to ask you anything.

when the dust clears, will i see you at one end?
will i see you when the smoke is a curling silent scream in the sky?
will we fix breakfast of picked dandelions and robins’ eggs?
will we finally have the time and space to sit next to the ruins of this modern world and billow smoke signals of homemade paper cigarettes into the ultramarine sky?
when i can stop buying my time off, goddammit, organizing my life away
when you are not living on old time, worn memories …

the birds have come back to haunt me with their song … the daylight sneaks in before i realize and i am left opening eyes to sweet serenity … disillusionment a quiet shadow in the corner for now …

i have come to a few minor art conclusions in contrast to larger schemes, but it has given me peace for once:

art is this morning bird singing … it does not have an answer, it does not have a solution or point a single direction … it careens over the invisible space barriers, only appreciated when one slows down to listen, to experience the beauty potential in human perception … this should never be undermined or we are doomed to insecthood … collecting food for the masses to continue on their mechanic paths, slick, perfectly worn roads … everyone knows where they are going and every one knows where they will end …

alanis, you rock my shit

all i really want

do i stress you out

my sweater is on backwards and inside out

and you say how appropriate

i don’t want to dissect everything today

i don’t mean to pick you apart you see

but i can’t help it

there i go jumping before the gunshot has gone off

slap me with a splintered ruler

and it would knock me to the floor if i wasn’t there already

if only i could hunt the hunter

and all i really want is some patience

a way to calm the angry voice

and all i really want is deliverance

do i wear you out

you must wonder why i’m relentless and all strung out

i’m consumed by the chill of solitary

i’m like estella

i like to reel it in and then spit it out

i’m frustrated by your apathy

and i am frightened by the corrupted ways of this land

if only i could meet the maker

and i am fascianted by the spiritual man

i am humbled by his humble nature

what i wouldn’t give to find a soulmate

someone else eo catch this drift

and what i wouldn’t give to meet a kindred

enough about me, let’s talk about you for a minute

enough about you, let’s talk about life for awhile

the conflicts, the craziness and the sound of pretenses

falling all around … all around

why are you so petrified of silence

here can you handle this?

did you think about your bills, your ex, your deadlines

or when you think you’re gonna die

or did you long for the next distraction

and all i need now is intellectual intercourse

a soul to dig the hole the much deeper

and i have no concept of time other than it is flying

if only i could kill the killer

all i really want is some peace man

a place to find a common ground

and all i really want is a wavelength

all i really want is some comfort

a way to get my hands untied

and all i really want is some justice …

gasping for breath once again with hand to mouth and foresight to the wind … a little girl with the topless head and a tongue too fast for its own monstrous intent … i think all i do in this hush of lonely pretense is wish for selfless connection, selfless freedom, but it is a wish all the same and a dance that has been practiced for centuries, lethal in application for its own idealisms, like the sharpening dagger of every well-intentioned revolution … blood is everywhere, on my hands, in my clothes, trickles in my 70% water build-up, make-up body, its stench rips through the cloudy industrial skyscape … the horizon line is stained pink and blue with the spray … my genes they spread it so selfishly, my memes they speak it so righteously …

i still cannot help but think it is beautiful, this decay, this disease, it is so heart-wrenching beautiful, and i don’t know why … of all self-loathing reactions that only amount to denials, self-comforts (we’re all so mighty good at feigning by now), i think the one that causes the most mind hall mazes is my crying eyes at seeing beauty everywhere, at not being able to raise my hand to it, not so much that i cannot or will not, but that there is something that echoes through these inner canyons, these branching mansions that cry to me, “let it be.” and i cannot, will not look away. i want to see it all go down … destruction so close to creation, these manmade structures that replace trees, these concrete roads that spread like rivers … it is all imitation, amateur man, everything … nature will not be denied forever … this oxygen depletion, this host dying, cancer swelling, cutting away the epidermic layers, stick it up the hole in your trite society …

i still cannot deny the predator within … i cannot dissuade its necessity, i cannot swoon to its aggression, just as i cannot leave it to freewill to hunt whatever vulnerability it smells … bar the doors to the lions curling roars and ignore the strange temptation to let it roam free, even knowing the destruction it will bleed because it will find you, eventually … like running to thwart death, like running to thwart life, we are so full of bi-polarity … antipodes of the earth, when really as universal law will dictate, as inherent, impartial symmetry will deny, there is no right and left up or down, no minutes no hours no seconds, you created this godhead, this abstraction for order, you have to deal with it now … “god kills indiscrimately and so shall we …” and this mother earth we stick our cocks into? “the servant is only a master in disguise.”

this idealistic cloth piercing sunlight will warm my skin, i’m sure, but the cold creeps, the stains can only be bleached so many times before its threads begin to dismember … years of sewing skin has taught me everything, and i mean everything, can be mended with efficient and purposeful needlework and delicate fingers … when i create them with my gesticulating hands as i speak, as i work the clay, the steel, the textile, the stone, as i wave away a world that is so much a part of me to my own chagrine … irony drench my soul to dye me another color today, darling, darling, oh my darling danny boy … the bullhorn pipes, the war drums are calling … cliche my everything to make me tell you it means nothing and it is beautiful that way, it’s freedom in realization … it’s the only thing that matters to me in this whole conflicting world …

how does one insist on not talking about death at an international funeral?

whenever i talk to adam these days it always ends in “capitalism sucks” ranting, as if this is the ending variable to everything.
when this is said there is nothing left to say it seems.

but THERE IS SO MUCH left to say that trembles and withers in this mass presence of decay, and i see it like he does, even lightest emily agrees, in everything from my shoes to my sidewalk to my fingernail white spots (a sign of malnutrition)

that is why i fucking HATE it so much, because there is more to life than this “practical, business,” fucking people over, stab them in the face with your boot to get to the top >> which is NO WHERE >>

i think i know why it was so significant for john lennon to get assassinated, for robert mapplethorpe and andres serrano to get publicly crucified … why it is so important to give lots of publicity to conspiracy theories, so we can all second-guess each other until we’re blue in the face …

yet i am silent and half-amused, as if i had nothing more to say in the presence of such a stranger who continues to spit on me every time we cross paths … a daily occurence now

that is why i don’t believe in the social inactivity, the “liberal” idea of not impressing opinions on others, stop fucking spitting on me then and i’ll quit filling your streets with cries of disgust and tired manifestos bank-monumentous and just as abstractly worthless.

it occurs to me now how overly sensitive i am. i try not to be, causing of all confusing items of splurge: numbness

so lauren noticed my fiery eyes when i pick up a book, any book really, she said to me, “annika, i think you like books more than sculpture.” i squinted my eyes at her and stuck my nose back into the glossy pages of the manuscript containing all anyone would want to know about wood and carving … i am beginning to think how difficult it will be for people to know me again … i don’t know if i want them to, i am afraid what they will find, a breach beneath the surface i have sewn so delicately to hide, like pushing back cloth from bare skin, an ache as deep as adam’s hand uncurling at my navel and sliding down … so ambivalent, i back away but want it there all the same … know it is only a matter of time …

and still i try not to care so much, light myself afire and let it go like paper in the breathing wind, weight and lightness so interchangeable these days …

….

after my group read my essay on rodent evolution, some asshole in my biology class raised his hand to spout some useless words of messy intent: “did you wear out your thesaurus yet?”

ha, dickhead, no thesaurus used … people are so possessive of articulate knowledge … licking off your mental frosting whenever they get a whiff of something sweeter than their own …

when it has been years since you felt rain, not that you have gotten caught in the rain, running to the building to the meeting to the house to enclose this shelter of everything, enclose it like a blanket around your skin, so pink as it would have been if these elements caught that long-awaited kiss

just that you have not stood and felt it for awhile, for minutes that are no longer minutes, when those red slashed digital digits are not a mind’s eye away but centuries in seconds and time is time, waiting to be prolonged, not forgotten

i remember ….
i remember being descriptive, holding each moment like a loin cloth over my most private places, my deepest wonderments of life, moisten the edges with tongued fingertips, these words constructed like webs i used to stumble over in the forced forgotten lands of a diseased gandfather’s farm …

where hiding was a given and being inside was a right of passage for the old ones with all the facial composure (i know now this gestural emptiness)

when sensitivity and over-stimulation was cause for unfolding, not regressing, not a quiet awkwardness, where words fail and gestures are lost in ignorance to perception. when words were new not borrowed from used memories, over and over, an adage, a culture, a demogogue used over and through to a blank chalkboard black

lessons are always brightest in stark contrast

like how warhol was so overwhelmed with emptiness and repetition, how beautiful this thought void was, how like a child it must be, without prejudice because words and images no longer mean a thing here, in a saturated, beauty oblivion, how freely its associations could careen across moats and lavas of logic and reason to something deeper than thought or emotion could ever hope to caress

i feel sterilized, you know, ever since i (do you hear this me) left you … ever since i left you with my guilt at the swinging backdoor to my burned book childhood … it is funny how being with you felt so grown-up when i was there inside that child love haze … how much—when i look back across the fuzz of mental distance—how really childish it was … in the most endearing sense of course, memory made it ugly, not you …

how much i left with you i still will not allow the luxury of reminisce … how much i miss you, even as my conscious mind will tag its electric diodes on for added scare tactics, my own mind feeds me propoganda for comfort … when i feel this breeze, when i remember this rain, when i hear the haunting metallic ring of cheap guitar strings and hesitant beginners’ finger scraping, i remember you, brow furled, i remember us at lunch, yes so rebellious we would always sit outside and when it rained we ran to catch the sensation, cartwheeling in the graceless beauty of adolescence, when i watched you close your eyes and raise your head like the shining disavowed modern hero i thought such sentiments meant, let this torrent catch you shivering, face full, mouth open …

i wish i could keep you there before everything else … before flushed red hate and abandoned faith … before meaning and intention ran for cover down that defensive hole we stuck our pinky fingers in, you know, the ones we swore we’d lose if we ever broke a promise … how i see you and my old self in everything, only it is oblong and wavering now, like a great nightmare of a funhouse, every reflection is a distortion, and you run to the ones that show you the best illusion…

how i cringe, quite unnoticeably, when someone will respond to me, “you have pain in your life.” as if this is a special phrase for me, as if it should not apply but somehow hits the apple in two upon my head when i blink to smile, when i grimace to smile, when i look away from my own habits i promised you and myself i would never fall into …

i have fallen and stepped away from that train wreck … yet, for some reason i keep looking back, wondering at the potential of letting it hit me head-on … this self-destruction catching its own tale finally, falling into the mirror, the lake reflections i had lost so much to before, throwing myself into the sea, walking serenely head bowed under water to the river currents, letting myself feel the sensation of loss for once, for once

yet i walk away

under castle buildings and trip down fire escapes still … jumping in afterthought puddles because it should mean something … i just can no longer remember what …