'We float in language like icebergs - four-fifths under the surface and only one-fifth of us projecting into the open air.'

- Aldous Huxley

In between each word my thoughts wait in the shadows. This is the mystery of literature. It is the marriage of thought and writing; and in writing thought is half lost, and in thinking writing is half lost. I would like to stand on my head and let the thoughts drip from my mind, leaving my darkest confessions in a wet mess on the page. I should learn to admire the paper in all its cosmic blankness. Instead, my hands shake until it is covered in ink and I have devoured all. And still I hunger.

'Imagine the clouds dripping, dig a hole in your garden to put them in.'

- Yoko Ono

Why do I write feverishly when I'm far from home? I have been reading too, with a mad urgency, until my eyes turn red and bleed out the superfluous knowledge and fictional worlds that I've seen. I have been led to new dark continents, across a sea of words in which I'd calmly drown. Show me an ocean in this real world in which I can drown! I am bored of just getting my feet wet.

- Journal entry, Ham Wrong Mountain Vietnam

'Absorb me if you can'

- Andre Breton

Untie the braids in your hair, now run your fingers through
This is not me speaking this is you
Hold one hand over your heart, now sleep
This is your overnight religion
Wake, but not outside of yourself
Leave one eye open and shut the other
Know the light by knowing also the dark
Do not stand in your shadow and wonder why it's night
The moon will rise in the east and set in the west
When it is full you will hunger, let it feed on you this time
Learn to give yourself

'Beyond this world of wrong-doings and right-doings there is a field, and I will meet you there'

- Rumi

One day, communication will transcend language and instead of cheap talk the vines of the soul will be connected. It will look like tangled electricity and it will feel like making love. The universe will fall away and only invisible things will survive, like spirits and sound waves. Our new dimension will have no walls and we will vibrate on a higher frequency that is beyond good and evil. Amen

'Do not fear mystery'

- Jack Kerouac

The street singer writes his letters to a crowd defened by the machinery of night. Those who pass want to stop and sway but lack the courage to abandon their substance for the shadow. So they walk on, leaving washed up footprints on the sidewalk like waves trying to escape the sea. Does the city sing? and when they hear the music does it make the lines in their body curve. Yes? no. Have they mistaken the burning tip of my cigarette for the stars. How long has it been since they ran their fingers over wet paint, instead of watching it dry.

'We are human and our lot is to learn and to be hurled into inconceivable new worlds'

- Don Juan

I wonder if the cosmos would exist if the mind was not here to think it into being? Science and physiology really are two of the most poetic things mankind has ever mused over. The Greek translation for the word cosmos means both beauty and order, meaning that both are thought to exist within our universe. The lightning streaks that fan out from the pupils look like a miniature diagram of the big bang, perhaps the universe exploded into existence inside of the mind and left colorful scars in our eyes.

'To be happy in gazing, with benumbed will, without the grasping and greed of egotism - cold and ashen in body but with intoxicated moon-eyes!'

- Nietzsche

Modern Man,
Your hands are bound to concrete, now you want you jungle back
how will you make fire with no stones to crack?
The glass, half full, is drunk
And the barmaid has dropped her tips
to kneel at your hips -
While you thirst
to be reimbursed
For a mirror that favors substance over vanity
and an undebased humanity.

'My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them'

- Jack Kerouac

The inkless drawer has left patterns on your back in the shape of a map. The bandit lent you his gun and now you're on the run. The rules are broke but you'll play anyway. The leather on your skin is wearing thin. Another notch in the belt can be felt. The trigger pulls and shot blanks ring lust in your ear. The heat has left you red handed, and the skys blue it drips over you.

'Leave everything. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow. Leave your easy life, leave what you are given for the future. Set off on the roads.'

- Andre Breton

We are a pawn in the game, moving over the checks, working our way to the throne. Riches won't buy you freedom in a castle made of sticks. You strike the match at the wood end and never release the flame. Enlighten yourself, burning man, the fire is in your head. Do you know how to disappear completely? Have the ashes of your knowledge scattered to the wind and then laugh and then forget. When you reach the inferno, look back and wink, you have good reason to, in spite of it all.

'We are part of something vast, and we are part of something intimate'

- Leigh J McCloskey

You walk a tight line between clarity and insanity. The two parallels are bound, existing in matrimony while you stand suspended in between them like a spider caught in its own web. The air around you is thick and sensitive to the cut of your touch. You ripple through space and time. Imagine: each individual life like a stone falling into the ocean, causing ripples that swell out and connect to make spirographic patterns, all interwoven with the greater body of water. All one and of each other.

'Other echoes inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?'

- T. S. Eliot

If you want infinity just close your eyes. Release the hatch. You have two choices, love or fear. Will you climb back up the rabbit hole, back to your world of cozy symbols? If you feel resistance, if you feel the burn of curiosity etching its way onto the backs of your eyelids then do not retreat. That feeling in your side is intuition, it has always trusted you, now it is your turn. What have you to loose? Dignity. You abandoned your ideologies at the gate. There is nothing to prove in your naked existence.

'I ask for so little. Just fear me, love me, do exactly as I say, and I will be your slave.'

- David Bowie, The Labyrinth

Give bent to your fears, they too, fear you. Know pain, god forbid you feel nothing at all. There are many before you who have lived to die, the cemeteries of the world have no room for sleepwalkers. Be kind. Beware, this is not a dumb rock we live on. Sink your feet into the earth just to feel submerged. Don't make your bed, the creases in your sheets fit the mould of your loves. The song you hear has fallen upon deaf ears, now listen.

'Speak according to the madness that has seduced you.'

- Andre Breton

The words will come out right, don't think too much. Let them take the wheel, take you for a ride, rip the backspace off your keyboard and ride shotgun for a while. Words need to take a page out of music's book. The keyboards in the land of music preceded that of the computers version so maybe that's how we're supposed to use them. Type like you are composing a song, words should sing, they should cry out, they should echo and reverberate in the skull of another, you want to leave a door open at the back of their mind to that Other World. If they don't do all of that, there is no use for them.