#marchjune2023

[bartonsmock]

the current record ( just ( pain

Pain notes March 2023 through beginning June 2023

 I love meaninglessness. I don't think I'll ever forgive this life for steering my writing away from emptiness.

 I didn't think my identity was so fragile. Three months of not being myself at home, at work, in self. I mean, moments, sure. And I've done the work of years that gives me an hour here and there, but jeesh. I would say humbling, but pain and dependence are unearned lessons. It's just, subtracting. From house to hotel to the day-by-day avoidance of no vacancy. So glad to have those around me who check-in like they own property

 Pain is exhausting. I can sense my sleep sleeping without me. It's an odd placement of spirit, for sure. And it feels deserved. Like, my body has agreed to something because it knows something I don't. About me.

 Pain replaces time. I travel only the world that an hour leaves unmapped. I count backward from a number I forget to choose. My body doesn't work. These are some fucked-up sheep.

 Pain as supply in a dollhouse too big. I have to settle for what my hand lands on and for what lands on my hand. Sleep is a hellscape. Comfort has no maker. I was yesterday an urgent child drawing a spacecraft and on the spacecraft I placed a machine that was meant to put blood in a mountain. I couldn’t make it work.      

 I've always had trouble sleeping, but damn...pain is a new kind of awake. It's like you're trying to sleep for two people who hate each other, but who've bonded on their dislike of you. I feel like the third wheel given to a god trying to reinvent the first.

 Hell not existing is an especially cold fact when pain puts you in it. Ah, well. Touch is touch recording what it hears.Sleep can wait. But not like a mirror waits.

 One day you don't have any forever thing wrong with your body, and the next, you do.Nnot true of course. The soul and the ghost can only distract each other for so long before they threeway your non-existence. But I used to look at photos as if they could look back. Maybe we can't sleep because sleep covers for death. I don't need an alibi. I need to know who I was with.

 Late pain makes one childlike. You feel you've done something, in a place you didn't belong. And now belonging has come for its name. And you utter what you know, and are shown the nothing you thought was more deeply buried. And you start your own belief, right at the moment you tire from trying to make others believe. There are no before-and-after photos of god.