loneliness

Streams of consciousness

/ andyveilleux / Leave a comment

One after the other

they flood through my mind

as water rushes over rocks to

create a waterfall

and never let you sleep.

 

The sound of the waters

slams against any

tranquillity

and maybe you were

beautiful and friendly enough to

help me sleep

but maybe you were

empty

just like me.

 

And talking about being

empty

does not make me deep

or profound

or philosophical,

it makes me honest,

and maybe not even that.

 

We run away from loneliness

and the sadness that pierces every

corner of our lives like the high afternoon sun

and we can’t run forever.

 

Numb it away with alcohol,

but the alcohol only pushes it further

like a hammer wedging splinters deeper

into your already bleeding heart,

and I hope you don’t

choke on the blood.

Anger and experience: Thoughts on love and loss

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Experience is the best teacher, and there's no debate about that. In love, one has to skulk through the gallows and be beheaded to understand loss, and how to be a proper lover. Some of us learn lessons quicker than others, and many people do not learn much. 

At 26, I've loved and lost many people in my life. I'm fortunate that way, because I've had the chance to be close to a lot of amazing people, and to learn a lot of harsh lessons. I've been cheated on, I've cheated, I've felt the desperation of another and I've been the desperate. I've spent nights holding someone I no longer loved while they cried in my arms, and I've been in their sad shoes too.

I've laughed and cried with lovers and ex-lovers, I've left people at the proverbial altar, and been left at the proverbial altar as well. I've been the one that couldn't let go, and let go of people too easily. Love and loss never get easier, if anything, they seem to be getting harder.

The loneliness grows, it does not rest. I could keep crawling in and out of beds like I used to, but that man is gone. That doesn't fill me up like it used, or like I thought it used to. Neil Gaiman is right about kisses and sex giving a piece of your heart to your partner, and one only has so much heart to give. For someone that loves intensely and with passion, this has always been a fact of warning for me.

At some point the jaded  feeling grows to dangerous levels, and loneliness is cancerous in your mind. What is the great seperator of lovers? How much did they all mean, and how do they compare? They do not compare, because every love is different. Some love dies early after the break-up – if these things can ever be said to die fully – and some smoulder in your heart for years – and maybe for life, although I'm far too young to say.

The pain lessens with time, but that is probably from one's pain tolerance growing as opposed to the pain itself lessening. Or maybe we do stop caring as much, but there is no way to gauge it. Either way the point remains the same: the pain lessens with time. Loneliness has a way of fanning the flames of past lovers in your sad heart, but that's the game of life. Humans are conflict-machines, and even our own heart tries to promote conflicts within us it seems.

The key is lessening conflict. Zen. Trying to live a more peaceful existence is not easy, nor always tolerable. Anger is a very righteous feeling, the primitive push for violence and war can be as strong as sexual desire. Anger does not solve problems. Anger eats love, and does nothing to combat loneliness, sadness or the pain of lovers lost. 

At the end of the day, you can be angry you lost someone, or that they don't appreciate you anymore, but that won't help you sleep away those lonely nights or get your mind right. If anything, anger will corrupt you, and make you toxic. Anger is a cycle that does not end, unless you force it to. The only thing anger understands is a violent, screeching halt, and that is exactly how it must be finished.

an unfamiliar absence

/ andyveilleux / 1 Comment

I reached my hand out,

an outline of flesh against off-white walls,

in a familar way in a familiar place.

 

An unfamiliar absence became,

and sat beside me,

strummed the chords of my

lonely, lonely

heart.

 

It wept for me,

as I could not weep for myself

in an empty place with ony my demons

for company.

 

It cried tears onto my shoulders

and I raised my head towards the ceiling,

an expression of understanding

and lament for all the lost days.

lonely hatred

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Hatred is a gun loaded

with loneliness

and sometimes ignorance.

 

Sometimes knowledge is

ammunition.

 

There's a fine line between letting

the 

good

times

roll

and the screeching halt of apathy and selfishness.

 

Actions are always stronger than

words spoken

and especially

ideas thought and intended.

hope past midnight (vulgarity between lines)

/ andyveilleux / 2 Comments

The worst part of loneliness

is hope.

 

Hope for somebody to cure it – 

some magic creature with a perfect mind, body

soul

but thats a fiction or

it is not

real

loneliness – or deep or true loneliness

as if it is so easily pinned by by signs.

 

And what signs shine through?

certainly none better than a tunnel

through the brain

or the light through a rope

but then why bother upsetting people?

 

Bukowski felt it,

he was a coward too – the kind he railed about

with his mouth full of vomit

cheap wine and

the vulgar

taste of a run-down old tramp's vagina.

alone with responsibility

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And who knows how to talk about it?

And who would bother?

 

On The Rock,

surrounded by ocean,

on a molten ball of dirt,

hurling through space and nothing.

 

This line won't matter.

 

There's a flow to life,

and anxiety scares you into

a lovely, hidden reality of near-death,

when you know you could jump into the breach,

turn your steering wheel in a complete one-eighty,

and embrace the anti-infinity by choice.

 

There are two choices in life you don't make:

Birth and Death,

you are responsible for every other mistake and success.

 

Of course,

you'll lie through your

gritted, stupid, little teeth,

about all the people who wronged you,

and why things didn't go as planned but,

nobody believes it,

they agree to be nice.

 

Your life is your own;

you fail alone,

succedd alone,

and die alone.

 

Life is a selfish act,

and our cages prevent connections.

 

 

I beg to keep or kill

/ andyveilleux / Leave a comment

A hand

in the distance

turn your head

you can see it

I know you can see it

you can see something

or is it just the reflection

in the mirror that binds you?

You can see me

or at least feel it,

somewhere in your bones

your heart skips three beats

light-headed now

but you can see me,

can't you?

Anxiety

can you see me?

I could have sworn you

winked

blinked

stopped

stared.

Can't you see me,

or feel,

well, anything

for me?

The deperation takes me by the throat,

raw, yellowed, finger nails shake into

dirty, exposed flesh

re-opening old wounds

or emptiness and bitterness,

directed at no on in particular.

I remember this,

I would beg you all over again

just for a taste of your conversation.

A fleeting surface talk,

of nothing important,

or to have you open me up – 

we could releases some demons together,

chooe which to keep

and which to kill,

maybe we could kill each other,

or learn how to hold

and keep

love.

Please,

open me up.

the value of a man with a gun

/ andyveilleux / 2 Comments

Thoughts beat as sledgehammers,

sieging my fragile, near-dawn mind,

The answer to the question is easy,

and therefore too hard to accept.

 

Wordsmiths are not what they were,

in the gun-slinging days,

when words oft failed.

 

No one values a man with a gun,

like they value one who can still

cheat

lie

beg

and generally be a scum-sucking

waste

of

flesh.

 

First-hand experience is trump,

and I can throw around bowers

with the kings of the underworld.

 

What happened to the sweet genius?

Where lay the inoocent, golden locks

of my youth?

 

When does a broken man,

oft mistaken for a saint,

and too hard on himself,

qualify for ascension?

 

The devil is in the details,

and she is dancing so lovely,

tonight.

 

The battle is between loneliness,

a long-neglected sense of destiny,

and the warm feeling of security;

nothing else matters.

 

Life doesn't go around handing out lemons,

it squirts them in your eye

while it kicks the piss out of

the useless, slowly-dying gas-bag

we all seem to refer to as the human body.

 

That's life,

and we deserve it.

representation of the Damned

/ andyveilleux / 2 Comments

Stability is a relative term,

when speaking of madness.

 

Those days left me long ago,

I remember it feeling like home,

and it's still such a tempting offer.

 

A history of my madness,

can be traced on onion-skin,

paper,

even by the poorest artists.

 

You'll find father figures,

lovers,

friends,

and those of greatness.

 

We all end up face down,

sucking on the dirt with our,

dead faces, flesh rots to bone,

we massage the dirt with cheek bones,

protruding from our skulls with their worn,

enamel.

 

There is no shell for the hearts,

and each abandonment kills a,

piece of heart,

that will never return,

but will never leave either;

a representation of the Damned.

 

Be certain,

we are all the Damned.

Good conversations and the eternal sadness of being human

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I've been having a lot of conversations lately, with a bunch of people with differing opinions. I've talked about purpose in life, Hemingway, Jung, Bukowski, the ADHD generation I am coming up in, intellectual boredom and stagnation, the difference between academic and public writing, and most important, the overall sadness that invades daily life.

There's a certain sadness to the daily events of life. Not specifically, because it's nothing you can put you finger on, but generally. It's not an overwhelming sadness.

It doesn't team up with the other negative emotions to push you down. It waits in the background most of the time. Occasionally, you can let it out of its cage, and play with it until you're both satisfied. It then will return to its cage and wait your next moment of weakness. In this way, it is like that ex-girlfriend, or friend-you-slept-with-and-sort-of-regretted-who-won't-go-away.

A lot of conversation has centred around what causes this sadness, and whether it will ever go away. I don't think it ever really goes away. The dull pain is probably always going to be there behind my ears. Maybe that's what got to Hemingway and Hunter S. Thomson.

Maybe it comes down to knowing that eventually we're all going to die. Our bodies can only continue for so long, and then the show's over. Good-bye Andy consciousness, you'll be gone for good one day. Hell, the whole species is doomed for that matter.

That's the eternal sadness of being human. It may be the only part of us that survives.

There is an emotion that teams up with that overall sadness well; loneliness. The feeling, or even thought, of being alone. To quote Bukowski, "there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock." The clocks have gone digital, the loneliness has to.

Now we sit around on MSN, Facebook, Twitter, just waiting for that message to lead us to salvation, away from loneliness. Sometimes it comes, sometimes it doesn't; but it never lasts. 

It's quicker than ever to get in touch with someone, but it's harder than ever to hold their attention and time. How much spectacle is acceptable in one's life to keep on entertaining, without becoming the jester?

Some nights are harder than others.