Category Archives: lit

Obfuscation and Authenticity: Some Notes

We always find ourselves in between. Physically, we are commuting, on a drive, going for a walk. Even standing still, our bodies have the ability to cover great bounds held taut within. Mentally too, we are always on our way somewhere else, on our way to becoming something else. In the past few years, I have come to feel this liminality of the self more and more acutely. I am always both at rest and moving towards something. Ideas of authenticity have come to haunt my passage through this strange land that we continue to call the everyday. Everyday I am bombarded with messages that tell me to experience the real this, the real that. The world preaches a solid truth, an authentic something at the heart of it all that we can grasp onto with our own two hands, but how am I to grab at some solid thing, when my conceptions of I constantly waver? How should I fit myself into a point, when the I (the I that I am constantly becoming and then immediately discarding) exists more as an amorphous cloud suddenly shifting this way and that? The idea of the authentic self becomes some implanted dream that we dance circles around, stick-figure skeletons shaking further and further from the neon flames.

but you can be the fire burning,
seeing the lights glinting off the landscape,
while you wisp around,
circling, the fire in those very same lights.

Ghosts of old words still shine through.

They are the garbled messages of the past made physical.

A Pair of Poems by Leonard Cohen

Travel

Loving you, flesh to flesh, I often thought
Of traveling penniless to some mud throne
Where a master might instruct me to plot
My life away from pain, to love alone
In the bruiseless embrace of stone and lake.

Lost in the fields of your hair I was never lost
Enough to lose a way I had to take;
Breathless beside your body I could not exhaust
The will that forbid me contract, vow,
Or promise, and often while you slept
I looked in awe beyond your beauty.

Now I know why many men have stopped and wept
Half-way between the loves they leave and seek,
And wondered if travel leads them anywhere –
Horizons keep the soft line of your cheek,
The windy sky’s a locket for your hair.

Kanye West is Not Picasso

Kanye West is not Picasso
I am Picasso
Kanye West is not Edison
I am Edison
I am Tesla
Jay-Z is not the Dylan of Anything
I am the Dylan of anything
I am the Kanye West of Kanye West
The Kanye West Of the great bogus shift of bullshit culture
From one boutique to another
I am Tesla
I am his coil
The coil that made electricity soft as a bed
I am the Kanye West Kanye West thinks he is
When he shoves your ass off the stage
I am the real Kanye West
I don’t get around much anymore
I never have
I only come alive after a war
And we have not had it yet