No Requirements Necessary.

The extensive requirements I seek in others that I can't seem to fathom on my own. Yet I place myself on these hierarchical schemes, as if I surpasses everyone's liberation but that of mine. But nothing's more frightful than detracting from reality because of what I think I know.

Selective Memory

I remember – we improvised a song about the flies that were eating us that early morning by the shore.
The egalitarian beach – as he would like to call it.
And how we held onto the pretense of a bright vacant mind.
Elation. Completely possessed.
We walked down that pier like soldiers – prepared to die with dignity. We jumped together; feet first, heart first, reasoning last.
One drunken afternoon, he bet that he could run across the ledge without falling in. He never made it one meter – in the ocean before I could relinquish my powerless wrath. Crowned head.
I was delusional.
And his impeccable charm.
I remember we had spoken to an older woman. A much older woman. ‘I like to drink tonic before I go to bed,’ she told us. Then she left.
We sang on the subway. The Turkish man applauded after every song and gave us his cigarettes.
These were very real.
Know that you are loved.
Be well.

I remember how he played. He played with such sorrow. Such hatred for himself but he would never let it show. The melodies were masochistic. Ceaselessly painful. We were intertwined. In reality, parasitic. And at the very end his face became meshed into many faces. I cannot remember his name. His occupation. His life. His departure from my life. His death. My memories of him were no longer of him, but of sorrow.

Waste.

He never felt such a heavier loss than wasted hours.
Wasted thoughts.
Wasted desires.
On something that could never feel loss to begin with.
He shames himself - shaming himself. And he will. And he does.
And he will caress his pity like the defect that it is.
They will elope. And contempt will be their child.

Laughing with God

"Do you think God is depressed?"

"... No, I think He finds it all very humorous..."

The Man-Moth.

The Man-Moth
By Elizabeth Bishop

Here, above,

cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight.

The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.

It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,

and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.

He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,

feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,

of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers.

But when the Man-Moth

pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,

the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges

from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks

and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings.

He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,

proving the sky quite useless for protection.

He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb.

Up the façades,

his shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him

he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage

to push his small head through that round clean opening

and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light.

(Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.)

But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although

he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt.

Then he returns

to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits,

he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains

fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly.

The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way

and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed,

without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort.

He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards.

Each night he must

be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams.

Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie

his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window,

for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison,

runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease

he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep

his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers.

If you catch him,

hold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil,

an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens

as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids

one tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting, slips.

Slyly he palms it, and if you’re not paying attention

he’ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he’ll hand it over,

cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.

Mock Her.

With the gradual actualization of an undesirable certainty, the mocker realizes that life has played a cruel and unimaginable joke on him. It is through this mentality that the mocker becomes a lie, a disfigured embodiment of all the lies he had been told. And so he lives a perpetually discouraged existence. He will attempt to demean the felicity of others, but with every incremental decibel of sound that bellows from within, he belittles himself, then condemns the belittling on those who pay no attention to his judgements. His own belittling becomes an inversion. Yet he continues to pridefully hold on to the idea that he is merely a byproduct of failed realities. What he does not realize is that reality has not failed him. He has failed reality by the self-regurgitation of mutilated feelings. He makes a mockery of all associations of peace, love, and empathy - paradoxically becoming a mockery himself by ridiculing the exact things that would provide him with joy. In his conceit, he believes he has lost nothing, and he is correct in this belief. He has gained only himself. A mockery.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

Fake it til you make it.

지금, 마음이 편하다... 
솔잇 인 솔이투드