You see it in the tattoos: arms and legs and necks inked with a chaotic array of snakes, crosses, dragons, roman numerals, hearts – the usual symbols screaming: “I am unique, dammit! And virile! Daring, sexy and intense!”  But, no. Not really.  You are, in fact, just one of billions looking for affirmation: “I have a reason for being here, for getting up in the morning and wending my path, for creating my lines and colors – on my canvas. Look at me!” 

(please God look at me . . . but nobody does, they stare at cold slabs of glass in their hands or look past me and each other; not looking at anything really, but especially not me; and yet I barely look at myself, avoiding eye contact in the mirror, like a racehorse with binders, not looking left or right, just straight ahead, running a solitary race.)

And so you broadcast your ‘channel’: ink your body, change your style, adopt a new persona, a different ‘sleeve’ (nod to ‘Altered Carbon’). You promote your brand to whomever will buy.  And wait, desperately, interminably, for other eyes to see, for recognition from another sentient, pliable, fleshy bright face; for acceptance and belonging. You wait.

(oh God, I am alone here, surrounded by so many, but alone, walking ghostlike through streets and buildings, an apparition, insubstantial, my signal hitting nothing, not connecting, not reverberating; and if you are not there God – and why would you be just for me? – then I am merely wandering, slowly dissolving into this yawning, impersonal earth).

Still utter silence, even amidst the ‘madding crowd’. Maybe the world has grown so much – explosions of heads and arms and legs, needs and desires, appetites and lusts – that the only untrammeled space must come, has to come, from inside, from our brain and spirit; from that concoction of consciousness that we brew every day.  But we don’t go inside.  For most of us, the brew stays on the back-burner, simmering, unsampled, almost cold.

(I want to feel something more, but only get irritated – “don’t bother me with ideas or emotions! I just want to scroll my mobile, plan and act, plan and act, debit another day.” And yet, driving down the coast at eventide, watching the sun drop between the palms; or catching moonlight on my bedroom window at midnight, I wonder: why am I doing what I’m doing; what loves have I given out, or allowed in? And then I understand: this feeling should get all my attention, because my life depends on it.)

– by MJB