A Rocket Ship Life

Recently, a Master in Education told me, This work, it’s iterative. It iterates and of course reiterates and we might move improve but we always land, only a layer away.

And I was like Hmm, I should think of it that way, that’s a really good way to think of it.

So I’ve been thinking of it, and I’m not really sure that’s so good, for me, to think of it that way. I mean, it’s good because I can stop getting mad at myself for not living linearly—like, I can stop sitting on the toilet and being like, Here I am again, feeling these feelings…Wait, Here I really am again, I’m always here, when I’m Here, and flushing a hahahaaaaahhh-sigh/sad inside joke I have with myself down and around and around the toilet. Anyway, because, rawly, all I can think of are patterns, fractals, tree rings, mega-metacognition and then, broken PCs, my first year of teaching—thatthatcomesupinthisparticularstreamofconsciousnessjustpissesmeoff—October, daylight savings, and going back to what you thought was a really cool place in the past and finding out that it’s really lame, and others. Which, now that I’ve processed, they are strangely, mostly Sisyphean feats, like, even getting out of my bed, washing my face, brushing my teeth, mascara and underwear or not, etcetera. Just getting up. And I think it’s so funny—andbyfunnyIofcoursemeantotallyoverwhelmingunlessyousmileandshakeyourheadatit—that I have grouped these things together. That the little decisions that make up living make up your life.

I know, Duh. But that’s how absurd things have gotten.

So, the thing with landing only a layer away is it’s too thin and too close, to what was before, and so you know that you’re essentially the same, and you know that you’ll know the next time around the toilet. But its opacity is turned up just enough and it’s easy to let it get out-of-sight-out-of-mind, and soon you believe that you’ve somehow jumped ship, but you haven’t.

I actually like to think of it as jumping dimensions because I imagine that if you jump ship, you just see the wider path of a rotating earth hurling through space, and you see it from the ocean! The ocean! You’re overwhelmed by the water in you, on you, around you that you can’t see the end of, and even if you had the breath to waste on wishing to jump worlds you wouldn’t because it is your gut instinct that all the worlds are just rotating around something and hurling through space!

hahahaaaaahhh-sigh and there you’d be, again. ha ha like A Cosmic Toilet or something. I’m just playing now.

No but I want to jump dimensions. Just jump—into another reality, or another way of living that I can’t articulate as anything other than jumping dimensions. Because it’s another reality. And I can’t articulate what I can’t fathom. Although, I sense this like, vertical layer next to me—like the ones under my feet, really thin and like, sixty, seventy percent opacity—and muffled sounds, sounds as if their owners are living in a jello world, come from it and are conducted through my own dry, thick air I breathe that’s like the green foam stuff that you put fake plants into straight through my ear canal and into my subconscious so that I can just tell there’s another way to live on the other side of the up-and-down membrane. Yeah. So, I want to get out of this life. Not, as in, into not-life, but as into a life with like, another narrative pattern, more of a Germanic life and less of a Latin life? Like, a life with a point.

You know? I should probably start by rending my life from what seems like Iteration Itself, a.k.a. the school calendar. And I’m not so naïve to think—I’ve been around this block a time or two—ha ha sorry that was a low blow or like a cheap shot or just a not very clever thing I couldn’t resist—that I would never find myself where I’ve been before, that like, jumping from school to the world is equivalent to jumping dimensions, but it would maybe loosen the density of the repetition in my patterns.

 And so I’m going to say, I’d settle for a Rocket Ship life. Like, blast me into space, let me break gravity, and just let me orbit. Let me fly by the same points in space that I’ve been, only layers of atmosphere away, and just let me have a Rocket Ship Life.

I know my argument breaks down in that I’ll still be revolving around a thing that revolves around a thing that probably is revolving around a thing because why would the pattern break down at the sun? No, it’s an iterative universe, but I’m going to stubbornly ignore this maddening consistency and maintain my argument of inconsistency, that a Rocket Ship life is what would make me happy. Shoot for a point, revolve, shoot for another point, revolve. At least there would be the rush of the tangent and good view.

Patterns on Patterns

I lived
high above
all
oscillation,
fresh, free, feeling
for awhile
for the first time
in awhile,

but of course,

each day—
same sink,
each rope—
same slack , and each
and every time I bite—
same taste.

Soon, I’m resigned
to this rhythm, lulled
by the rock of  this familiar ride,
and now,
I’m asleep
to the same
rut of rhyme
and cheap cut  
in lines
of poems
that paper the walls of gutters.