One day you are born. You don't know anything. You adapt and adjust to the world and learn more and more. Your parents are, more likely than not, ******. They don't exactly know why they gave birth to you, but they know they're supposed to love you now. Your childhood years are formidable and promising. You show talent in sports, music, and mathematics. You go to junior high and get pimples and a ****** drive. You kiss a girl at a Violent Femmes concert at the Del Mar race track when you're thirteen. She's kinda fat and slutty, but oh well. You try really hard to not be included in anything at your high school. You do a lot of drugs. Anything will do, xanax, *******, ****, ******, ecstasy, morphine, ******, beer, it's all the same to you. You get arrested for some dumb ****, your parents help you. You stop doing drugs. You get really into music again. You start a band. You start writing a lot. Your writing is cliche and dry at first. This discourages you. You can't stop for some reason though. After writing hundreds of pages of *******, you write a line that is utterly magnificent. You go to work at a job that barely pays you, you come home. You dream. The money goes round. Your aspirations swivel about in a drunken stupor behind your frontal lobe. You dream. You wake. You eat, ****, and sleep. The money goes round. You eat, you wish you had someone to ****, then you sleep again. You keep writing and playing music though. You get really, really good. But the lash goes on.

"Were it not for imagination, Sir, a man would be as happy in the arms of a Chambermaid as of a Duchess." -- Dr. Johnson*

And what of angels, that dream?
The young face reflected on the stream,
More reflection than its living flesh?
From what field does inwadness thresh
Acceptance and vision enough
To know the desolateness of love?

The summer is static. Over
A drying lawn the slur
Of heat descends. Quiet
The garden flowers. This mind's diet?
Shaded hills and solitude.
Slow recession of the crude
Tracings of my origins,
The silhouettes of sins
And murmurs, blurs into
The sophomoric hue
Of my brain. Can I
Extricate myself? This lie,
Though it elude my thought
Into what action I know not,
Seems to legitimate my being
And foretell the fate of my self-fleeing.

It's raining outside.
Buses grind the streets.
Troubling to decide
If a product meets
My needs, because Keats

Is singing again
In my head, singing.
I know where I've been
And what I'm bringing,
But what's the meaning

If no poem comes
Of it? And what use
Is the sound of drums
Without words? Abuse?
I'm offered no clues.

I need these products,
But isn't life worse
If wanting conducts
No cash from my purse?
Keats' song is no curse!

for Robert-François Damiens the Regicide*

1.
"I" once ate pizza. It tasted of smudged sarcasm. "I" scarred my innards with its blazing oils. Now "I" remember it every time "I" nibble a tasty morsel, the pangs of a deadened sacrosanctity robbing my heart of its pulse.

2.
Pepperoni is vital for the one greased with illusion.
Cheese is necessary for the one who knows the word "soul" to be viable.
Tomato sauce is warrant for ritualistic exaltation.
Unleavened bread is the commandant of the fed world.

for Kenneth LaRosh*

"All are clear, I alone am clouded." -- Lao Tzu

Those definite days, when I still fooled
Myself into unnatural mind-states,
When I knew myself, but tricked
Others obliviously--
Those days be ******.
Now, my thoughts racked
With an equivocal polarity,
My heart uncertain to its very core,
I walk,
Reborn in ignorance,
Clouded, yet not unclear.

It was all tufts,
He said, like dandelion heads,
And spread likewise—
Ruderals scattered
Over barren tracts.