Sleep deprivation is not the thrill a younger self once thought. Still, it is not without its uses. And neither piss nor vinegar are the endless trove of poetic resource once perceived, though still quite bountiful. Perhaps their impermanence proves their importance.

But being the right kinds of tired can ease the flow of words, if it doesn’t go so far to either which way. Mental rubbish can pour out on this stage just as easily as the fright can paralyze. But when the balance hits correct, something can often be got at.

So, try we might. We must- if we were me.

     The idea of the reduction of chaos has been fading from my living state. The cost to accomplish that is far more than I’m willing to spend, all while the end product would seem to me to be a design of dread. An existence I would not be convinced worthy of sentience, being only as far as inwardly self-perceiving.

     And it cannot quite be tamed, for then it would cease to be chaos at all. Just some neutered descendant, doomed to wither on the nearest or next vine available. Nor would I say I aim to contain it, at least not in some static way. It’s more a stalemate sort of reoccurring battle with neither side permanently retreating in enthusiasm. Each dawn and dusk, some renewed sense of endeavor sprawled out upon the circumstantial state of portrayal.

     The way I see, the chaos is always there, residing in wait until our subsequent confrontation, and so on. It is in all of us, at least at some point or another. We choose to face it or hide away. A game played in some shape or form until we each lose our physical metrics ourselves. And thus far, and as far foreseeable as I can manage, I choose the fight. I believe there is benevolence with the bouts we have with barbarity both inward and out. And each and every time, we get ourselves closer to the that truth we all seem to seek, without any real means of description or deduction.

     I don’t think it something hidden, on some prophesized or otherwise day to be revealed. And I cannot say whether it is something built up and molded, or rather just chipped away at until only enlightened essence remains. A bit of both, most likely. Ebbing and going as time arrives and flows.

     Among what was far too much time on application based interweb connection as of late, a moving image has managed to stick out in my mind with some potency. A time lapse camera set to the visible portion of our galaxy, Milky Way. That is assuming you are from this galaxy. The focus was on those clustered stars in the seemingly inconceivable distance to show how little they appear to move compared to the hurtling rock we think of the firmest and most substantial ground of home. Our geological spaceship, spinning about itself while simultaneously it shifts in a parabolic type path around our personal star. You can see the sped up human movements of the planet’s surface, like so many coked up ants with somewhere comically important to be.

     A bit of cosmic perspective- within all the shitposting, or worse, superficial political stances and debates and emotional oversharing.

     Saw a friend play some tunes a few nights ago, out and about some local town. A semi-social gathering. Though, I must confess I regularly long for days of witnessing such things in anonymity. Some aesthetically dim lit corner, with a bit of paper and pen and all the wonders or worries I might conjure up. Still, I managed to scrawl something out in a moment found.

     Something about living folks singing the songs of ghosts.

     That’s all I managed to scribble out, but I don’t think it deficient to work with.

     It helps when you dig the tune, the cover penned by now dead folks, that is. It helps even more when the song is sufficiently haunting in its composition and expression, when done originally by the now deceased. And this one received marks for both of those criteria.

     But there is something of an air of immortality to the idea, of words being echoed out after the crafter is gone, either long gone or more recent. And for your narrator here, there is no shortage of romantic ideology within never knowing yourself how long something might live on after you. The poetic conundrum of wondering whether anything we do will actually end up even echoing down the road, least of all how far into eternity.

     It also helps when the ghost’s words are regurgitated through a talented medium, musically correct when concerning this particular performer. A good friend, in this case.

     And I begin to think of the ghosts we hold of those still living. In some lives they call their own, that no longer have or never overlapped and passed with our own. Not so many thoughts of the latter, but certainly of the former. The souls forced or stolen or some other such otherwise acquisition of an existence that no longer exists in proximal physical existence to your own. It’s a habit that I aim to be better at managing, though I certainly used to be much worse.

     Funny thing is, I may be very well be such a living ghost to someone somewhere else. More than one even. The cursed existence of such a one-way outward expression such as this. Anyone could see these words, no matter how few actually do. And some of these may exist as a haunted echo of a person who used to be in the life of the aforementioned reader. Gone now, except for the digitized reverberation witnessed here. Regularly smothered algorithmically for something more volatile, but available all the same.

     If so, says this ghost, I do hope something can be gotten from all this yammering. Would be a wasting of temporary immortality if it was all for naught.