Feeling without

Standing in the center of a room. Any old room. It doesn’t matter and this indifference isn’t just out there in the world but has infiltrated the pores and become a part of me. As the days go by, the significance of Roquentin’s tree is more familiar. I can stand in this room and I can close my eyes and I can feel it revolving around me – like I am the peg in the center of a record player. The LP is winding round and round and suddenly the pitch is disturbed because this record has been warped over the years and the revolutions are high at some points and dip well below levels at others.

Circulations and imagery continue to meld and I am stuck in a tall, slender glass of water — a string attached to my head. Someone is absent-mindedly yanking on that string – perhaps in an attempt to keep time with the ebullient tune. Maybe they are listening intently to someone, or believe they are listening intently – but can’t seem to shake the rest of the world from their thalamus and thus are continuously distracted without being aware of any one particular instance of their failure. They are so caught up in acknowledging to themselves that they are listening that they have managed to slip into the conversation a glass wall. They are plunging me under the waterline over and over — and I am powerless to detach myself from that string. I am steeping.

I am standing in the room again. Or am I? I can’t make out the details. The colors blend and turn with the spinning – and I recognize them as the distortions of welled tears. A touch of yellow from a book’s spine becomes a shroud of van goghishness — swirling and swirling before me. The water is muddied — now brown, now blood red — colors atop each other in a fit of oil and water, wine and vinegar . It never slacks. The fits never slack. All is taut within, all unbound without.

It can begin slowly. It doesn’t always, but there are gathering moments. Flecks and pigments, steeping, seeping, swirling slowly. Milk and honey can alter the process, but the effects are only meted. In the end, the only end — everything in which I am steeped must once again be released.

Eventually, there will be the last release. The cleanest, fullest release of them all. For now, I am standing here in this room, or this glass, or wherever as an inefficient colander. For everything that moves out, something else moves in — and most of what I feel I am retaining is just weighing me down. The dregs. The dregs. The god damn dregs.

I used to wonder if this would be read. Now there is more worry than wonder.

Everything that seeps out of me pollutes this place a little more — and eventually I think someone is going to notice the dirt.

I’m putting some abandoned entries on autopilot for March 3rd. Beginning at 12 noon (EST). On the hour.