Sharp-nosed and tight. I didn’t know I had a type. I might describe what I meant if I weren’t sober. I like angles. I resist arcs. This is almost a self-hatred thing. I hate myself, but not like that. My dreams are consumed with sex and death. And I prefer the former.
Hypnic
I’m still here.
There are no plans to be anywhere else.
Icon after icon falls.
Most to decay.
And one hates to blame the victim,
But they seem to me, at least,
To be complicit in the ravaging.
I have these dreams, then hypnic jerks,
then staccato screams of, “Heh.”
Afraid for a microsecond,
I have to talk myself into knowing.
It’s just a dream.
Broken
If you don’t understand, then you’ll never understand. Understanding feels good in fleeting moments. Understanding is a lie. Understanding is true only for a moment, then the balance returns to chaos. Scared, broken, and alone was familiar to him. Happiness and sugar and smiles were sinister in intent. Sweetness always had an agenda. He never trusted feeling well, he never liked it. Good, by definition, was precluded with, “But.”
Even before everything changed. Everything he did, he did silently. Without malice he acted dastardly. He was cunning. Always able to see the crevasses, he filled them with intent. And still he saw himself a victim. Of course, the universe was agnostic. It was an unending flow of water. Wishes mattered like sticks in a stream. Everything goes where the water goes. Choice is irrelevant. Fear and hope are the only things you have once the water comes. Fear usually wins. And he was afraid.
His fear was as nebulous as it was constant. It was provoked by the immediate and the eternal. He walked the world ready to pull away at a touch, but was simultaneously self-righteous.
Hard truths
And so reality had become motionless, inside a box of what he could think or feel. As his body melted, his mind froze. It is hard to describe what could never possibly happen. The worst part about any kind of incarceration, and he was almost perfectly incarcerated, wasn’t the lack of freedom. It was boredom. Freedom is mostly overrated, and almost always misidentified.
The hard truth that we don’t like to think about is that we’re all dying. Degeneration happens at different speeds, but it happens. He stopped the inevitable with a wish. And then he wished for an un-wish. Death has a reason. It may not be immediately clear. When you cannot die it becomes the everything. He wished he could die as strongly as he wished he might live. Lessons don’t come the way you want them. When they come.
Killing me softly
There are songs that kill him. Songs kill slowly. They don’t cause cardiac arrest, and at the same time break hearts. This song was playing when, that song then. He couldn’t listen to some because it brought back a flood that he couldn’t dam. And maybe he wouldn’t even if he could. He liked being neck-deep in the water. He liked the ghost of her. She was nicer as a memory. So was he.
Blink
I moved to Dallas from Venice Beach on this day 27 years ago. High on Adderall crushed into a Gatorade bottle, I drove alone with a U-Haul trailer hitched to my gold 1995 Saturn SL for 22 hours on Iʻs 10 and 20, with only a AAA map of the U.S. and a Thomas Guide for the Metroplex to guide me. There was no Google Maps. (I wouldn’t own my first cell phone for six months.) And just like many points in my life, I thought I knew much more than I actually did and was much more innocent than I felt myself to be. This was also the day I learned (the hard way) that I-35 splits and that I-35W goes through Fort Worth 25 miles before I-35E goes through Dallas, before reuniting north of both. Turning too early I spent the morning in Keller before a police officer pointed me toward the correct city. In hindsight, that drug-addled, blind, solo escape from Los Angeles is a perfect metaphor for my life at the time. And things were still to get much worse. Don’t get me wrong it was beautiful too. Beautiful and terrible and strange.
They tell you life goes by fast when you’re young and you don’t believe it until it actually happens. The blink of an eye. Twenty-seven years.
Wasatch
My reflections on Salt Lake City’s airport: Sitting in the belly of the beast. Well, the beast’s international airport, anyway. The mountains are snow-covered and beautiful. And, of course, the Department of Metaphors, located in my head, immediately sullies the beauty of the almost-winter, desert landscape with this thought: isn’t it appropriate that rising above the heart of one of the newest, strangest, whitest belief systems ever concocted by man, are the harsh conditions of the Wasatch mountains, also now covered in white, hiding the ground-level impurities and imperfections with a smooth blanket of pure, white snow.
Everything is in its place, buried under that which seems to fall from the heavens.
Lā Kūʻokoʻa
Today, November 28, is the day that the independence of the Hawaiian Kingdom is “celebrated.” I vacillate about how I feel about this. My natural tendency is to be skeptical about arbitrary (i.e., man-made) constructs of “nation,” or even “independence” as it is used in this context. Independent from exactly whom or what? The kānaka of ko pae ʻāina were here for millennia before the European and American colonial powers happened upon us. In 1843, their recognition that nā aupuni kahiko already existed, that a real Lāhui already was flourishing in a place that they “discovered” was an external recognition. We already knew who we were. Kauikeaouliʻs attempt to diplomatically protect Hawaiʻi from the onslaught of impending imperialism was not a declaration of independence. It was an identification to the world. And in the end, it only delayed the dam break of change brought on by disease, capitalist-driven greed, corruption, and the ideas of Euro-American (aka white) superiority.
The recognition of independence was militarily usurped by America when it became convenient and beneficial to do so, and summarily ignored by Europe. What is there to celebrate from this legacy?
Here is where I vacillate. Because I do celebrate Lā Kūʻokoʻa. I celebrate the intricate, aloha ʻāina-based society that was already independent. I celebrate a society that was able to support a population (comparable in size to what exists today) with innovative, sustainable methods of land, water, and resource management, food independence, and spirituality. Modern Hawaiʻi, with all of its modern technology, would starve in less than a month if the ships and planes stopped coming. I celebrate the Lāhui that has survived every effort, both natural and invasive, to eradicate it. I celebrate the resurgence of ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi to a degree that was unimaginable (with the exception of some very special kānaka mākua). I celebrate what I see happening on social media; Kānaka TikTok is a vibrant, living community. I celebrate the new ways of teaching at every level, from preschool to university. I celebrate that we now acknowledge the diaspora and are actively looking for ways to bring people home. (I was away for 25 years, and there were times I thought I would never come back.) I celebrate that I feel pilina to everything I am trying to describe.
Our kūʻokoʻa is not given to us by recognition from any “other.” Our kūʻokoʻa, our ea, exist in us. They exist in the Lāhui. They exist in the aupuni, in whatever form it has come to take in 2025. Kānaka maoli came very close to extinction. I celebrate that this did not happen. I celebrate the future, a future I did not even know was possible. That future is now.
Aloha Lā Kūʻokoʻa.
E kaumaha au
Do I miss the feeling? I suppose I do. It is too soft and comfortable in a blanket and a bed. I am not far removed from pulling my arms into my sweatshirt and feeling my hard clavicles tightening, and liking the fact that I was skinny enough to feel that hardness. Waking up to some asshole pulling my Walmart bag full of things soft enough to put my head on at a bus stop. Yelling when he pulled it out, and my head hit the concrete, “There is nothing in there you want.” Maybe there was. I stumbled across the street to the Waiʻanae police station, before I knew they did not have people in the building due to a labor shortage. A cop did drive up slowly, and when I slurred what happened, he said to move along.
I suppose that is a part of who I am now. Stronger. With my wits. Knowing something is wrong in this system. I needed help, and at that point, I could have been helped with the smallest bit of intervention. I can speak. I can write. I am lucky enough to have resources the oligarchy did not strip away. What do I do with this? It is easy to be angry, and I often am. How do we get change? You have to ask for it. You have to take it. Auē. My kūpuna. I was an impotent fighter on their behalf. Now I will fight as I breathe. You do not understand. My brain was colonized to the point that I have to push against my own thoughts. “Why speak?” “Why does it matter?” This is rhetorical. He Hawaiʻi au. A e like me Wilcox, e kaumaha au i nā mea aʻu e loaʻa ai i mea e ʻike ai ʻoe.
New originals
This is the new beginning. The new originals. The new today. This is the past countable. It is impossible to count. If the universe has a bookkeeper, then this is accounted for. But for all real purposes, there will be no count. It’s a thought exercise. Like wondering how many potentially fatal doses I’ve ingested, or how many times I’ve actually been close to death. No one is counting. But it is a set of integers greater than one and less than infinity.