respect

my mind draws a blank.

no need to judge. no need to rush thoughts. no need to force inspiration. still... there is the fear... the wish to impress. my spiritual colleagues. my brother. my friends. the fraternity inside my mind whose approval i seek.

in my mind is a posse of intellectual gangsters who watch from Foucaultian panopticons that are buried deep in bubbling, murky waters of my eternal subconscious. they discipline and punish me with royal pronouncements threatening Action, if i do not participate in self-imposed, self-flagellatory hazing rituals of ever-smart delivery...

who are these bullies? they are my internalised patriarch, voice of my 1st generation university educated father: hard-hearted, strict, punishing. they are my scientist-mother: exacting, skeptical. they are my university peers, the queers who battled politics while drunk on booze and skunk. they are the san francisco hipsters who always had more tattoos than me. they are the suburban white kids who blitz bmezine.com with a litany of lazy canadian cool... they are my older brother whose grades were always higher, more gifted, whose smarts set the benchmark for years of my own savvy teenage angst.

these are the bullies that elicit both my awe and my envy...
and in turn, i move beyond their panoptic gaze when i transmute this emotional fizz into respect. respect. respect.

to cultivate respect from awe
and respect from envy.
to rejoice in my own gifts
and not succumb to defeatedness... this is the goal of this erotic psychonaut. whose project is to see that my talent and my need for improvement are not two, not two. to see that these bullies and my own subjectivity are not two, not two.

that poetic transformation of raw drivel into Truth comes from the drive of this warrior, this witch, this wuss. these are not three, not three... they are but a few facets of me.

come in and see!