Parasitic Vocation

Someone once told me that education is like a "bricklayer's job." I think it's more like a sewage reclamation job.

I'm getting more and more fed-up with my current vocation. Never in my life have I ever imagined teaching and being a teacher to be this dissatisfying. Here are the overall complains: last minute exegesis of tasks, incompetent structuring and organisation of tasks, all accountability and no autonomy.

Maybe I have been too pampered in the universities, but working in pre-university contexts have opened my eyes to the level of bureaucracy that stifles and suffocates an academic. Marshall McLuhan was right. We're that machinic extension; that insufferable organ that finds itself unable to detach even though it wishes death. A cowardly parasite. That's what I have become. A pedagogical parasite - feeding dangerously from its expressive host.

We are that extension of this beast called the Institution. We become the false proprietors of action for what you do is always asked to be done. We become the discontent of Prometheus, wishing fervently to defy - to spit and vociferate - against the pantheon of power. To steal, as it were, that flame which inspires creation, movement, sustenance, that would burn that insufefrable Law and facetious mask of beureaucratic righteousness. But silly me. What dreams a parasite makes. I'm just another scab, like many other scabs, on a woundless wound.

I wait... like a silvery lichen hidden under the foliage of magnificent fools. I have no patience to consume this system of un-rhizomatic organs. I will float against the wind - one day. One day I will find myself master of my kingdom - alone, unperturbed, undenied. I will raise my body of malcontent and leave this organisation of dull deeds.

For Oscar

There are moments in life when the safe assumptions of logic and reason fall prey to the phantasmatic and colourful illusions of ardour. Like shattered glasses on painted walls, each refraction becomes an infraction of the senses. Bows and splinters of rainbow meld and sew into each other; soft maroon and saffron gold coalesces like ambushed lovers with effulgent emeralds and turquoise shards of light.

The walls that were once grey - crumbling plaster that one knew so well, lived with so well - had begun to dance in incandescent fire. Aurora ignited on a simple plane of existence, adulterating simplicity and ennui with an entropic force of life. Here is where the safe assumptions of reason and logic fail. The senses reel in confusion; the body weakens and paralyses with the onslaught of incomprehensible beauty and incommensurable emotions.

What was once decay and dilapidation, now sparks and illuminates with a blinding luster of tones and hues. Rotting crevices are now stained with iridescent colours that waxes over the dreary dullness of grey. This is magic that strip depressions and restores amorous ecstasy. This is the force of creation that exponentially quantifies the value of life.

This passionate display is a mimetic tinct of what some might call Love.

Believe me when I tell you I am a fuck wit. I ruin the very thing that I desire.

I am a pragmatist. I have conjured my own demise and thus I will eat the briers that weed my life. My own selfishness has caused the pain that I must now endure. The pain for another... by another... by my own. What have I done? I cannot say but know that I cannot be trusted.

Why the fuck did I say what I said? It was true though... what I felt, at least in part, from fear and self-possessed narcissism. Don't trust me... I'm a fucking fool. What's worst... I lie so fluently, like oil sliding on ice, it makes me sick. There is no forgiveness. How to I mend a broken heart? I can't. Not even Jesus can mend broken hearts.

I have no self-control. I am ruled by a solipsistic carelessness that not even the deranged would attempt. I am more than deranged. I am hopeless. Why can't I see it coming? Oh, it was coming all right... it was coming to bite my ass when I least expected. I deserve it. I deserve his hate and his condemnation. Good. Suffer his contempt. Suffer all that he may lambaste upon you.

I've said it so many times... it's making me sick, but I know not the love that you speak. What the fuck is it?! Love a person unconditionally? I've never heard of such a ridiculous proposition. Love is exceptionally conditional, especially when it is defined beside monogamy. Love another as there are no others comparable? What that is I do not know. Do you feel the hearts of all those around you? Those beating rhythms are matched to your own; those thumps are desperate to synchronise with your own; those plentiful others are gyrating to false satiation. Yet you choose only one? One and forever? Liar. Liars! I will not live with such idiotic pretense.

I will not give unless it is given. But my needs are so varied... who may possibly satiate all? Make a decision now. If one is a parasite, then be that parasite. Show the monstrosity that one is endowed with. Show no false pretenses. Show nothing that is otherwise oneself. Show the eidolon whom I mask as an angel.


I am never alone. I fear loneliness. I fear rejection. Thus I am first to consume... I am first to regurgitate... I am first to fuck... I am first to leave. For no one has made me stay, for no one can make me cherish loneliness. For loneliness needs a cherished heart.

A Revealing

Baby, baby, baby... Here's Nostradamus - the man whom you asked about but did not know. Here's his vision of our future together wrought from the boughs of limpid branches overhanging a dusty copper bowl of fluid.

The crystalline water shimmers and reveals an ocean; a vast, incomprehensible expanse of blue nothingness dotted with floating diamonds. And as eagle eyes follow south, a boat about the size of one's fingernail bobs nonchalantly. No sails are raised or winds to call... only a lonely serpent lies curled in a corner of newly coated planks.

Then the vision plummets into a whirlpool of swirling colours. See that there baby? What's that? A spider on its web. But it looks peculiar. Something is not right about it. The water brings us closer to that thing. The spider looks too large, or perhaps the web is too small. Either way, it is queer.

The spider releases its hold and drops into a coated bowl of caramel. It moves against the thickness of the soup. Unfortunately every move drags it further and further into death. As every leg is consumed within the sticky starch, the body is entrapped ever lower until its mandibles grapple desperately for a last hope of life. A spoon then enters the caramel muck, picks up the gooey matter and places it within its mouth.

A final swirl of the fluid and it settles on your angelic face. So naive... so beautiful. Why am I seeing you in shadows? Why do I hear you speak but your mouth says nothing? You smile ever so sincerely, but I see the leer behind the tightness of your lips. Your image falters and jumps. I see you simultaneously cry and laugh and sneer and moan. All your emotions filtering through the static within the water. And then nothing. Just nothing. All black like the ebony souls of Tartarus.

And so Nostradamus nods his goodbye and walks away. You and I must now ponder and deliberate. So much is said but nothing to stake the heart.

Irrational Fear

Something courses within my spirit; Fear burrows so deep and clandestine it shadows from perception. Its companion is Irrationality. These few days has eaten me alive. But it's always like that - the fear of poison, that thing that consumes your vitality, day by day, minute by minute, of every waking moment you know there is no cure, no hope, no nothing. Fear saturates every fiber of the self; every shiver from deep within, invisible perspirations line the neck.

Irrationality courses with Fear, each hand-in-hand, crafting illusions of death and depression. Irrationality damns reason and alternates reality. It seeps within the crevices of consciousness, always whispering hollow damnation; always lining a sliver of hope with blood.

When both conjoin their lust for madness, it fuels an irrevocable paranoia. What if? What if? Could it? Would it? Irrational longings for death; fear of life. It's so simple. Just that invisible demon coursing through your veins. It's so small. Just that one fiend to ruin all.

I pray. I pray for wellness. I pray for warmth. I pray for a negation.

Hearts pass in tranquil space
unadulterated by emotions;
by the soft flutter of beats
that resonate from the skin;
by the excrement of the body
marring our complexion;
by the words that waft
into cold and deafened ears.

Fingers tap like click beetles in heat
moving in paranoia from screen to screen;
consuming voluptuousness,
consuming desire,
consuming simulacra,
consuming empty affectivities.

Ghosts in shells initiate discourse
to shells without ghosts;
to find the hyper-extension of the self
amid the clutter of wires and spaceless space;
to find solace in (un)reprimandle vices
amid the cacophony of voices;
to find the Other
of our Platonic half.

Ephemeral Ecstasy

In the night, when your loins burn a fiery passion, it sears every fibre of your self; within it courses through the veins and arteries like a demon seeking satiation from without. I am consumed by this eidolon; every waking moment of my life I am consumed by ephemeral ecstasy.

I touch my self and run my hands ever lower, ever deeper into that volatile state of combustion. Just one more voice... one more mouth... one more hand. One more... always just that... another Other igniting a furnace of their own to warm my face.

I hate it. I detest myself. I am everything that I loathe. Yet... yet it's the same. Every night my body haunts me; taunts me with lascivious yearnings that whisper promises of fulfillment. Promises that waft in the air like old, aristocratic perfume, rich with the scent of flowers and spices.

Come thither... the boys hear me; the men leer at me; the old envy me; the weak possess me. Come thither again... the boys desire always; the men thrash my body; the old salivate and pay; the weak become strong.

A moan... moaning... and the clock chimes within. The spell is broken. All that was is lost. Take your mouth from me! Your nauseating perfume is poisonous to breathe. Who are you? Why are you here? He heaves like a beast and wraps his sticky arms around you. The hair on his chest, no longer tickling, scratches like briers against chaffed skin. I unwrap myself from the stench of his desperate release - from my own desperate release.

I turn my head with my back against his silhouette. I offer a brief, heartless smile and said, "thanks". I run to the bathroom and scour my body in hot water. I scrub every inch, afraid of being contaminated. Where's the disinfectant? Never mind. You dirty little bitch. Water caresses my face like acid rain. It feels good. I'm being cleansed by fire.

I sleep. I wake.. I dream... and darkness comes again.

In the night, when your loins burn a fiery passion, it sears every fibre of your self; within it courses through the veins and arteries like a demon seeking satiation from without. I am consumed by this eidolon; every waking moment of my life I am consumed by ephemeral ecstasy.