top down

Creative Forums Creative Writing
1

this either goes here or in rant. but i’m putting it here because I think if it will be appreciated at all, it will be appreciated here. first, i don’t mean to offend anyone. second, i mean to offend everyone. this is just my experience. but it is my experience.

I think,
my shadow is more me than me.
and I wonder,
does my outside reflect my inside?
no,
the one to conceal the other.
collateral damage.
the outside begins to infect the inside.
and we become what we spend so much time trying to appear and soon the two are inseparable.
realization comes too late.
and by the time you have any sense of all this you’ve wasted so much fucking time.
why do we aspire to be cardboard and paper dolls?
(youtube.com/watch?v=3phsIEmKWbw)
we are self-censoring, image projecting cover-ups.

money and all this shit we do for it.
it makes things so…unreal.
we have to pretend in order to live.
it’s so top down.
(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-down_a … ganization)
and yeah, I feel entitled to complain,
precisely because I do not feel it needs any special entitlement.
what if I don’t like “the way things work”?
I don’t want to go through some bullshit process of petitioning for change that’ll take years to actually happen
and many more months for some law to be effected - if at all.
my right to petition. great.

it’s a machine.
we feed it so that it can feed us.
and we’re all just feeding each other most of the time.
it’s mostly an act to get fed.
to get fucked.
to get satiated. to get satisfied.
it’s ugly.
(youtube.com/watch?v=CQntzqyde-w)
and I don’t want it. but i’m in it. up to my neck and can hardly breathe.

i’m trying to be real.
of course everything is “real.”
but that’s not what I mean.
i’m trying not to allow myself to be molded so completely by all these forces.
society is such a powerful force-
it’s a jet-stream that pulls you along
and before you realize it you are playing the game
and can no longer remember creativity…inspiration…wonder.

the game.
some people call it “growing up.”
false.
there is no reason growing up has to also suck the fucking life out of you.
maybe some people manage to retain themselves.
maybe this is what we’re alluding to when we talk about keeping one’s inner child,
i.e. remaining a child-at-heart.
as for me,
I’ve almost totally lost that part of me and I am - obviously - very bitter.
at who,
at what,
I don’t know.
but this feeling is the only real thing I have right now.

fuse

2

I think it can stay/belongs in Creative Writing Fuse…

Are you referring to the differing perspectives that comes with age…?

3

Sorry Magsj,

I should have gotten back to you awhile ago. Partly, this was me hating life for reasons that have nothing to do with what I wrote at all. Partly, this was me feeling limited by social mores and trends, which I don’t feel brave enough to break with. And partly, this was me mourning childhood and being angry about losing innocence so early. I am heavily nostalgic about a time when I wasn’t afraid to do what I would naturally have done because I wanted to and wasn’t yet chained to all the social consequences that might have motivated me against myself. Someone once told me: To ask permission is to seek denial. The struggle, as I now see it, is to do what I want to do (in general) with full knowledge and in the face of all the social consequences. In real life I’m highly self-conscious. This exacerbates the situation. If I were less self-conscious and anxious about all sorts of things, it would all probably be much less problematic and frustrating for me. Or perhaps I’ve got it wrong, I’m still not asking the right questions, and my problem is one of an entirely different nature.

To make my writing/poem/thing a little more understandable, I might mess around with certain parts- like so:

does my outside reflect my inside?
no,
the one prostituted, the other true.
but you can’t prostitute your outward self and not have it affect the inner self.
collateral damage.
the outside infects the inside, and pretty soon
we become what we spend so much time trying to appear
(what at first we were only trying to appear)
because the two are inseparable.
two lives conjoined,
like the two sides of a sheet of paper:
an impression on one side
appears inversely on the other
and vice-versa.
or something like that.

4

The repsonsibilities that come with age…? Hate it! [-(