I sit here in a room where the names of death march across my walls, issue from a hundred lips, lodge in my heart. Connections form and break. A tearful man sends his pain out to be absorbed by the sponge of my brain matter. I soak up some of the blood, some of the smell, some of the fire, and they go away thinking that they have connected with me in some sense of humanness.

But, in the truth lies anguish, for I merely absorb; cat litter on the ground of human suffering. There is no real dialog.  Presence exists for me in the space I stare out of, the hole I have made in the world. I am backed into this crevice of civilization, where I can suck in the pain and drain it into the soil. It doesn’t drain. Where are my human connections? Where do I distribute smells and screams? I scatter them through the distant parts of my brain, the desert places that I infrequently visit and yet, I visit them often. I turn a corner of thought and a film begins. Short clip of sudden death, a man blown from the hatch of a tank returns down in blackened detail. Flesh sheds from his shoulders as a friend desperately attempts to extract him from his pain. Before long, he extracts himself and his pain passes to those still alive. He’s always there around the corner of neural matter, stuffed back into the far reaches, so that my surprise at seeing him again is only less frequent.

I go away from my head-space, reaching out to contact. My eyes show people places they never want to know, so they look away. Every time someone looks away there are reflections returned from the back of my cornea, reflections of desert places. The pounding reflections bounce back and forth until issuing from my eyes they pierce the soul across from me. Dialog. Stamp the visuals down. Break the old celluloid images until only the sprocket holes remain. Open my ears. Listen, listen, LISTEN! I’m so tired of listening. My giving consists of absorption.

I want the purely physical. I want to cry down into a trance and feel the stroke of soft fingers that take me only to my skin, never to thoughts again. I want to give up. I want to give up all control. Take the viewfinder from the back of my brain. Rejoin the me-watching, me-listening, to the one me-being. I want to be engulfed in my body-physical. I once though that I existed in passion. What a fool I was! I thought passion and now know that to think is to deny passion. I, who thought I existed in a world of doing have been electric shocked into the real me of abstraction. I walk through my brain as others walk through their gardens, but I never smell flowers in my head, I smell jellied flesh and diesel fuel. No one can save me. No one can know. No one seems to care to know. Yet, in the final act I know it is me that must find a true connection somewhere.