Prosaic Shades of Gray » Tangents

Visions of the Collective Breath

KZ — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 08:02:51 +0000

I lament the loss of diminishing vision, but what is it I’m supposed to be seeing? I glimpse those enticing sights feathering along the breeze, dancing at heights just beyond my reach. They brush the tips of my naked paws and taunt my rudimentary processes of thought before I can snatch them greedily within my weak and vestigial claws.

For all of my conceit, I’m just a humble beast — a breathing mass of bones and skin not much further removed from the simplicity of paramecium — those single-cell vessels of contained little equilibrium, formed to eat and reproduce by transferring weight and water and information, dancing in the perpetuation of that quivering, living mass, to undulate and collapse amid the rhythms of the collective breath. It’s all a sea, this arid heap of waste — and you can’t help but drown amid the indifferent waves.

Incomplete Thoughts

KZ — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 04:01:53 +0000

Free will is such a constricting thing. I have dreams of fatigue, of sleep within sleep, respite in the face of so much tiring certainty. The haste of living creates a hateful kind of glaze that coats the landscape beneath familiar layers of reimagined wrinkles. In this world, the living will forever be plagued by a maddening sense of need, but there will never be a hunger worthy enough to crave it.

I have faith in humanity, human discovery, the interaction of knowledge and necessity. If only there were enough time to witness those awakenings, the salutations to imagination, the gentle downpour of inevitable understanding. Who among us will remain standing when the time comes for us to awaken and dream, to reach for the newly tangible, those formerly unattainable things? Sometimes I wonder.

As time goes by, never forget the dreamers, the lovers who lack the understanding to endure the faithless rigors of lost certainty. Never forget our common capacity for triumph and songs, sorrows and sins, empathy and forgiveness. The commonality of human experience entwines us all into an uncertain, though inevitable outcome. Here’s to new beginnings and repeated mistakes, introductions observed over the course of countless firsts.

A Plea to Distant Memory

KZ — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 07:37:18 +0000

Remember me, friends, long after my final breath, and ages since the day when my dim light once faded. Remember me whenever you begin to believe that you are breathing in vain. Breathing is a matter of belief in things to come — a belief that the world will carry forward and remain a place where life is worth remaining. Breathing is an assumptive, hopeful action, involuntary and instinctively indistinct, yet often distressingly strained. This is the place where I remain, this life, this time, this tidy set of reasons and miniscule mistakes. Remember that my breaths once drew me forward by the momentum of inevitable tides — and I coasted along, willingly or not, towards the promise of some grand revelation.

Remember me, friends, long after my final breath. Remember that there once existed a man whose heart beat against the same rhythm as yours — that he once laughed as proudly, roared as mightily, and had his heart broken as readily as any one of you during the span of his modest and unremarkable moments. Listen to your most personal motivations, your silent and unshared intentions, and know that I once felt similar things, and understood those notions as privately and as earnestly as you do today. Remember me, friends, and never forget that the commonality of experience binds us by unspeakable means.

Across all measures of time, our hearts shall bleed among tides of unlikely unison, and we are left no choice but to believe that tomorrow is a day worth seeing, that there is a reason to keep the human spirit from receding. Remember me, friends, for I once lived, and loved, and dreamed as honestly and as imperfectly as I knew how to, and was moved to tears beneath the vastness of the same stretch of unrelenting sky to which you offer your prayers, your songs, your sobs, your errant gazes, your wild cries, recollections of stolen moments, and exhalations of private sighs.

Remember me, friends, long after my final breath, and ages since the days when I lived my life with the irrepressible desire to believe. Remember me, friends, for I was once a man who lived and breathed.

“For a Saint” – Part IV

KZ — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 03:06:44 +0000

Their machinery was too much for you, oh fallen saint
oh living Dream, oh healing life
a love denied through faceless, insidious plague
Yet in lack of limbs and human warmth
in lack of breath and mortal sense
though rooms may stand in lonesome depth
and though sin may stand to dwell again in absence of your healing hand
you will resume

A Practice, oh life, oh granting place
vital halls adorned in laughter’s wealth restoring
and in life you sought to remedy the cries
for better days
for children’s need
and still they will laugh
In the land of Free

Be still now sightless night
embrace the winds in luscious curls
lift each sodden brow and stay the chimes
for eyes of youth will grace the skies and view the world in loving hues
for in life you loved them well, oh resting saint
and draped in faith they will remain

So blurred eyes and life resuming,
gaze not on the past each day in mourning light
fear not release from suffering’s state
In the Land of Free this song we sing shall never wane in living strength:
to laugh in craze, to sob to sleep, to lilt and swing
to bleed in vein, to roar and praise, to exist — to be
To rest we lay a forgiven saint

Messages from the Dark

KZ — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 08:39:09 +0000

Inexplicably, I woke up this morning with a large scratch running lengthwise down my chest and stomach. It wasn’t there before I went to bed last night. My friends, if you didn’t believe me before about the authenticity of my previous ghost wound, then get a load of this.

Yeah, yeah, I know — I’m getting a little soft in the middle. But check out that gnarly scratch. It really stings. How the hell did it get there? The skin on my chest was smooth and unscathed the night before when I went to bed.

At first, I was inclined to place the blame on my cats, Momo, and Madam Beasley Meowington (Maddie for short). They’ve never really gotten along, and they do often chase each other around the apartment when Diana and I are trying to sleep at night.

It’s not hard to imagine those cats chasing each other around the bedroom during the dead of night. In the heat of the chase, perhaps Momo jumped up to the surface of the bed and decided to use my chest as a landing pad. That’s just what cats do. Yet as convenient as it might be to simply blame the cats, there are a couple problems with this explanation.

First, how in the world was I not woken up by an eleven-pound cat thrashing my flesh while he skidded to an inconsiderate claw-stop across my chest? Like I said, this wound really stings. Whatever it was that scratched me, it got me deep. Second, I sleep with my blankets tucked neatly underneath my chin, so I’m not sure how likely it is that a cat would be able to penetrate this protective layer above me. Third and finally, take a look at the t-shirt I was wearing on the night of the alleged cat attack.

There isn’t a single scratch to be found on that shirt. You’d figure the shirt would show at least some sign of wear after an incident like that. The physical evidence just doesn’t seem to support a cat attack.

So, what gives? Something clearly doesn’t add up around here. I’m not convinced that I should attribute this wound to my cats, and it’s not as if I sleep with knives in my bed. Perhaps there are some things in this world that simply defy rational explanation. Perhaps some of those pissed off ghosts whom I’ve been telling you about have decided to reach out to me this Halloween season in order to send me a message. The spooks are upon us, my friends. Beware of the gasping night, the cackles of specters, those diversions of fright. As we draw ever closer to All Hallows Eve, draw your loved ones closer, and remain ever vigilant of the talons that strike out at our feeble tendons and tissue under the cover of shadow.

Boo.

This Is the Way it Begins

KZ — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 11:20:14 +0000

Much of this life is tinged with misdirection, mistaken notions, unconscious resentment dressed in justified indignance, as if the validity of civil rage were any better than the ferocious roars of primal urge. We monsters of monstrous insignificance, blips of uncertain near-certainties, existing by the nature of collapsed intention, explosions and collisions of particles gathered in masses of matter, swaying in a coordination of unconscious dance. We sway like blades on the tips of grass, dipping and colliding atop every current of wind, bending in deference to the formation of each morning’s dew as if it were something wondrous, and somehow new.

Ah, to live among the dreams as intentions melt away, those gentle drifts of repeated steps — an elaborate dance with so many steps — it fools the dancers from perceiving each day’s events as anything other than novel and uniquely unseen. You seem to have mistaken the things we do as deliberate acts.

The thesis of existence unfolded many pages ago, so many words repeated either in ignorance or in spite of the cycles of times, and of writers, and of words. Of words do I sing, for without words we have no meaning, no commonality of wretched being. We’ve become so good at finding new and better ways to repeat the things we’ve always been meant to say — those words that are, and have always been, essentially the same.

The first page. This is the way it begins.

Someday Soon

KZ — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 05:49:13 +0000

I can’t wait. One day far or near into the future, my words will be re-spoken, awakening a memory of significance in motion, salvation through a Creator of my choice, and followers will find meaning through my ludicrous insistence, instances of miracles and revelations which awaken old passions and which dull the inner cries, independent thought simply set aside. All that I own shall one day own salvation — the best aphrodisiac being proximity, and the greatest friend to created faith is the proximity of time, distances greater than lifetimes of dreams, dull moments of mundane celebration, a dry hum filled with echoed chants, breathless incantations panted from heaving lungs, bound to the ground, all of those knees knelt in the face of dubious eternity, a reality I have only yet to devise. Fate casts an invitation to defy established lies with independent fiction.

I can’t wait for the days to be revered as a prophet, a shadow of a savior who led the way for the ones seeking refuge from the bleak, savoring the opportunity to exchange bewilderment for certainty, hardship for providence, protection from human nature, natural change, estrangement from rationality, a forfeiture to Fate. I can’t wait for those words of admiration. How loyally they’ll bend their brittle wills, formed from malleable shells of fervent understanding. Setting a revolution in motion from a distance, in the name of faceless Certainty, a deity of my design, who shall be praised loudly and with the softness of clasped and swollen hands, and the hardness of a saber.

Amen I say to you. I can’t wait.

I Am Not Him, But He Is Me

KZ — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 07:30:52 +0000

Some friendships are meant to be remembered, and some are easily forgotten. But then there are some friendships that have a way of inflicting themselves on you. They grasp you by your guilty obligations, your quiet frustrations. Private notions of loyalty and compassion degrade over time, varnished by a silenced eternity of stifled resentment. These are the kinds of friendships that plague you long after their logical conclusion. This is a form of friendship that I often wish I’d never known. For the rest of my life, I will be haunted by the ghost of a friend who refuses to die. He shot himself in the head like an asshole.

I never asked him to shoot himself in the head, and he never asked me if he could dump his collection of scribbles on me. He just woke up one morning and decided to do both of those things, and now I find myself inexorably linked to the most obnoxious corpse of a pest who ever wielded a pen. How’s that for a eulogy, Ben?

Until the day he died, I’ve endured Ben’s friendship for years. Now that he’s dead, it’s a little disconcerting to realize that not very much has changed. Ben is the one who shot himself, but here I remain, the walking dead, with a conspicuous bloody hole in my head. It offends the senses and dulls the sentiment. Just a bit. I am not him, but he is me.

Fear Into Pieces

KZ — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 12:30:20 +0000

A common age and a common name, how low we bow
to common pains, the like mistakes
dictated by complacency, familiar trembling aches
decaying the root of reason, the tides of time sweeping
swooning plops ashore in granite rhythm
sea of the wincing stewards of change

Past we roll, oblivious to the bloody sky
on common grounds, a constant state
Unsteady peace, fear into pieces
ambassadors of nuclear rage
particles bursting apart in frenzied glee
shrapnel, rusty screws, ball bearings
indignance and human decency
the cries of righteous suicide
as we rely on steady orders from unflinching leaders
ordained by rite
by authority of warring deities

Fear not, child
The ashes are bequeathed to the meek

-Kevin Zing

On Being Saved

KZ — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 10:07:00 +0000

Define salvation. The mind immediately grasps for explanations of the metaphysical, recollections of the mystical, wisps of stardust and Divine refuse, ethereal trails of holy time, thoughts, visions, majestic myths. The Divine. We all have some joker in the sky to blame for our joys and our woes, existence of flesh, the theoretical residence of ghostly apparitions of self, the infamous soul. We exist to toil and amuse, and if the holy men are right, the allotted ratios are something we all have to decide in life.

Salvation implies distress, strained existence, discomfort and insistence to persist without so much as an explanation as to what we need to accomplish in our mortal state. The coil, they call it. Coil and recoil, life and death, it’s all the same meager sentiment, this jumbled mess. The debts we retain in life extend further than a grave or the confines of generations or decades, the waves of fate ever failing to respond to our devastation, our indignant rage, the demands and indictments in favor of explanation, justification for indiscriminate destruction, incessant hate. Humanity has been set ablaze, and who in God’s name are we expecting to tend to the flames?

Salvation is change, a means of relief from intolerable heat, and moaning, indefinite need, greed for desire’s sake, the sake of revisions to escape the weight of lamentable lost purity. Salvation is the culmination of dreams, the subconscious growing with ever more contempt, yet each day we rely on those depths to keep us afloat, to live in the exclusion of savagery. Many fail. Yet those dreams drive us forward, mere vessels of tendons, bones, water, delicate flesh, and self-transcending selves in need of a destination worth attaining, a justification for this retched state in which we toil and grieve and exist on the insistence of fear. Such is life, and such is us. Salvation can’t seem to come soon enough.