experience walks up

experience walks up

(read bold italics

as under the breath monotone

quickly murmured)

Experience walks up,

stands next to me,

(it’s engine running).

Stands uncomfortably too close,

(breathing hard)

unavoidably close,

(waiting to catch my eye)

always annoyingly too close,

(as if I had no personal boundaries)

and asks me for some identification.

(blatantly so)

It's like invisibly stalking me,

I say to myself.

(constantly stalking me)

But I have no evidence.

No one has ever mentioned to me

about anything like this

happening to them.

Since it is all appears in my head

(at least I think it is all in my head)

Well, no, I don't have any proof

(and I haven't heard any from you either)

like for a court of law or for a psychiatrist

and yet I feel obliged.

Most of the time,

I am comfortably oblige.

I guess I didn't know

that I couldn't feel that way.

It really didn't occur to me,

(you should be somewhat embarrassed)

that I didn't have to,

that I did not have to,

you know,

be there for experience.

It was as simple as breathing,

but it just kept happening around me

no matter what.

I seemed to sign on without knowing.

(lookie here, listen up, feel this,

experience this)

Like my mind has a writing cramp

from doing this!

Look, my behavioral signature

is now something of a slur.

But really it is the same script

of familiar habits

that have always been habitually mine

but apparently, dumbly so.

I somehow believe

that this experience-stuff provides for me.

(don't no where that comes from)

It is something like

we’re spectating fans

with some sort of self-consciousness

as the bleacher seats.

And although I feel uncomfortable

with this kind of arrangement

like it's not really me,

(it is not really you)

almost always I feel uneasy.

And this uneasiness

is as a kind of constant

like a stream of consciousness

sort in the background,

(but not)

that puts me under a spot light.

(like a hot seat of sorts)

a kind of narrowed focus

with an overload

of attention and immediacy.

I feel hot and constrained

and very much on the surface.

(you’re on stage in a play, go)

Like I am an animated symbol,

(a talking billboard)

one of those pull-string toys

that says recorded voice remarks,

(yup, loaded with clichés

and logical remarks)

like anecdotes

and memory retention replies.

At times, I feel like we are all equipped

with these pull and say responses

disguised as our own voices

and our only real joy

is alternately pulling these strings

in some kind

of rhythmically tonal

conversational fashion

and the language coming out

is with these sayings,

and this voice that comes out,

for my part,

I constantly recognize as me!

(no one else is claiming it)

or I inadvertently identify with it,

(yea, a kind of familiarity by default)

because of the sound inside me I hear

or what I hear that it says.

That is so alluringly familiar,

at least in tone

(well, no one else is around)

that I have made up a version of me

based solely on what I say.

And when I check

what I have recently said

against what I have historically said,

it seems very plausible

that that was I, saying it.

(run that by me again?)

That something instantaneously

and interiorly happens,

that provokes these responses

and that all of this passes through me.

And seductively it preoccupies me

with the amount of time

that it is seemingly ongoing.

And it tags me

with some sort of accountability.

(yup, you're it)

And that tagging requires memory,

lots and lots of dedicated memory.

I do not know if this kind of thing

is happening to you,

(admit nothing)

but it seems amazing

that this is happening at all!

Most of the time,

I find myself in the clutter of it,

cluttered with these inputs.

It is as if these inputs had eyes,

staring at me.

The weight of many eyes, all at once,

(you know that feeling)

as a sign of urgency.

I have a quicken pulse.

I sense their weight on my being.

(obligation moves in)

I feel I am required and now inclined

towards doing as my response.

They seem to only care for doing.

(how about accountable actions?)

Everything is a doing in this method,

doing, doing, doing.

Its as if doing is

a form of personal politics

a kind of gestural rhetoric as response.

But doing rarely speaks!

(yea, what’s this? talk, talk, talk, talk)

Well, what I mean to say

is that doing rarely speaks for my being.

Doing may hardly function as my being!

It’s like a pretend of life to be doing.

(and your point is . . . ?)

Yet doing, for the most part,

is in a context of response

to this outside of beckoning.

It feels like I am

in this language of silence

and in the dialogue of coexisting

as being amongst beings,

yet there is this incessant barking.

(bow wow, wow, wow, wow, bow wow,

wow wow, wow)

This annoyance is of a context-dog.

(woof . . . woof . . . . woof,

bow wow, wow wow wow, wow,

woof . . .)

It is an insistence

to shift into a medium of the barking

and address what claims as itself

to be present

but is so distant and really disturbing.

(woof . . .)

And this dilemma is constantly ongoing.

And it feels very stale by repetition.

Also stale by a hollowness

of what it represents.

(feral dogs without owners ?)

Like this requires attention

but not substance,

as in no sincere feelings

really need to show,

yet I am stalled in my inward clarity.

I am stalled,

I am stalled where the dialogue

of inner silence

lives fully as a medium ship,

unapproached and unacknowledged,

unapproachable by this outsideness

as method

and yet, some bark is always at the door.

That frame-broken door opens

and then my life is filled

with a variety of these

coming-into-my-awareness rituals.

It’s all about the opening of this door

and low and behold . . .

As if there were, an outside!

( . . . woof . . .)