I do things I do not want to do. Tug at chains attached to vessels out of sight, preying behind peach fuzz fog. Cargos of delayed onset trauma, graffitied epithets in neon green tacked all up and down the corrugated faces. My arms are strong, I believe as I pull, sweat pleasantly seeping with the efforts, endorphins blooming up in the foam like overturned seaglass, transparent but softened. No symptoms for miles until mist splits at the fall of some atmospheric axe and I catch sight of the ghost ship leaking in.
I do things that feel like reward then feel like sneaking then feel like guilt. My sunken heels bruise the clay far beneath. To savour is to place a limitation on pleasure but I often scrap the bookends just to enjoy it all the more, as if time and consequence bend both at my intention to extend goodness just for myself, for no other purpose than to keep the dopamine slick as oil cast over water. Surface level hedonism in its most reductive form.
And for all the indulgence braided with self-scorn, I do wonder: can my tendencies get any more banal. Like the swilled tenderness of looking out over the ocean, like photographing a sunset on a fucking phone. Spit me out as the wine offered as blood and the bread as flesh and go find something of substance to consume below board. Treat whatever else as the spoil, the furtive escapist headrush taken in silence at the gate just outside the building. Nothing reliable for me to say as both the criminal and the punisher, one pocket filled with uppers and the other loaded with leaden repercussion. I am better off scattered to sand upon which the barges will inevitably run ground. Every day I wear my feet to bloodless sludge at the mortar of impulse. Happiness as single photons raining erratically through coastal grey. Seagulls hack endlessly overhead.
Two sea-sawing actions, the consequences of which I have been wracked for as long as I can remember: chasing the dragon of whatever small opportunistic pleasure is available to me, and regretting the consumption of it. Calories. Ethanol. Self-indulgent sorrow, and then daydreams. Someone tell me to get a better hobby. I keep going after these razor-edged ideals thinking they’ll provide some splendour and even when they do, what they offer each is never enough to satiate the longing that lingers/languishes in my brain. Neural tissue is difficult to appraise as part of one’s body – compared to muscle, which fatigues, or flesh, which scars – and I despise whatever electrical frizzling of my physiology makes me reach out for second helpings of no-good charge. I can’t control myself around certain whims. I do things that I regret for the sake of momentary movements on a needle measuring units I can’t read. I feel like I’ll never ghost into the body of the pure and demure person I want to be, for at every shoreline is the next best disaster on which I will always choose to imbibe.