All roads lead to Bedlam.

All roads eventually lead to Bedlam. Original artwork for Melancholic Georges by Faye West

Sometimes

The day approaches again

And views me slightly askance

Thoughtless thoughts maintain

The pointlessness of the dance

Cider seems like a balm

But one that wants to destroy

My sense of ‘reality calm’

And the wish of the hoi polloi

Too much enjoyment is banned

Hiding is a must, a necessary skill

No one will know you’re a man

Shhhh shhhhhhh mentally ill

Words don’t like the light

Slouching and folding in

Enduring the slow darkening night

Tragic draw of a violin

To be honest I can’t discern where

The future will spit me out

All I can do is gawp and stare

And quiver with fear and doubt

My Life Right Now (things I shouldn’t be saying).

This is the stuff that happens when you’re not looking.

Alone on a limb of the idiot tree trying to keep all the leaves facing the sunlight, while it’s blazing rays do nothing but antagonise my eyes, producing a tension headache and a will to drop off the tree into the ambiguity of the dark void below. 

I appear to have woken up into somebody else’s life, this is what happens: I leave the house, go to some predetermined destination, stand around a bit and on occasion take part in a trivial conversation, where I, rather than pierce it with a pointy finger popping it into a splay of exploding latex, stand there and nod and add a few uttered clichés to the ever flowing stream of hackneyed diatribe.   

I’m a bottle twisting and turning in the tumult of tepid waves of ego. I’ve somehow been given/given myself the task of keeping all those fragile plates of ‘self’ spinning, while I dash between them, sweating and drowning in disgust, becoming a seasoned entertainer, but an increasingly infuriated one.

Cumbersome and unwieldy metaphors aside, basically and clearly put this is what I’m trying to say: I’ve become innocuous, dull and dreary merely to maintain and reinforce those egos placed in my general vicinity; I find myself agreeing with all kinds of passionless mediocre collections of words dribbling out of lazy lips. Not because I actually agree, but just to keep everything in place and their dewy eyes from falling. I’ve become trapped between these words, censoring myself ‘just in case’ it upsets someone’s cart and their oranges spill out and roll around and about the place.

How did this happen?

Jeeeez I don’t know, but once you’re sat on your weeping stool and that little realisation comes down your face like the water from a burst pipe and you suddenly become aware of the rug you’re wrapped in, it’s hard not to look back on the last 6 months like the constant digging of the hole in which you’re about to be dumped.  Every spade-load of memories becomes evidence for how you became so splattered with mental lethargy and the heavy eye lids of a hooked-postured myrmidon.  

It’s like I’ve been slowly deafened by an ad nauseum hum, the sound of the machine drilling further inside – there is no will, no stepping into the unknown, I just feel the cold boot of the apathy pushing against my cheek. Melancholy is my master signifier, my ore to forge that ridiculous and wonderful creativity that spews from me; I was the weirdo, that person in between who could be simultaneously offensive and hilarious, but where is it now? Hidden, secreted out of sight with embarrassment, a cudgel to beat myself with rather than a sword sent from the gods with magical truth-telling powers.

Am I finally ‘normal’, suckered into that cul de sac of inspiration? Am I a participant in a slave morality, do I exist in bad conscience, and have I always?

I’m trying to upkeep this image of myself that has come to the fore in the last year of being someone ‘everyone likes and gets along with’. This is one of the downfalls of a sensitive person going out into the world and dealing with all the small others unaware of their fragile teetering and their participation in the game of egos, we empathise with them all, see value in them all; I’ve become so immersed in keeping up this transcendental image of me, the saviour, that I’ve become part of the game myself – locked-in syndrome. 

I’m looking in on myself as if on the cover of a gaudy magazine, looking so perfect. I’ trying to maintain this image, live up to the thing I think is me, misrecognising myself in this shiny paper mirror. I am a role, a facet of ‘The spectacle’ the Situationists talked about; it suddenly all makes sense again as it always did. I’m trying to construct myself into this prefect image at every second of the day, lying in bed my head whirrs with the way I should be lying, why I should be inspired and creative but I’m not, how I am a wily discerning sophisticated person as if trying to prove it to someone – that thing, the big Other, I’m at its feet whimpering with all the rest.

Caught in the clamour of egos, soothing their illusions, I have lost my own and flounder confused looking for one ill fated fantasy after another, not joyfully but apathetically, but none of them are mine, they are the detritus from all the personalities I have placated haunting me as I try to latch on to something, anything in the hullaballoo.

Now I sit abruptly aware of the rubble of my-self in my hands and I can immediately see the line, that slight border to be crossed; there are things you shouldn’t say and all that is wonderful and unknown is over that line, unpredictability is over that line, but I hold back, I can feel it even now; those thoughts of others that remain in flux, frowning and belittling, my imagination has been tainted by their imagination, a monstrous hybrid that leaves a weak inoffensive sallow face unmarked by tears. For now I am stuck in this lull waiting for the things I shouldn’t say to bubble to the surface.