In California, days in cars
bathed in orange, by the
kindness of strangers.
New York to Colorado,
along the Poudre Canyon
****** experiments along
rocks’ radiating warmth,
calling back to every girl
I ever cranked to, I’m not sorry.
My **** is perfect
in my fantasies.
In California, awake for
months.
Where roots burst
through wet soil, and
crisscross like the iridescent
patterns of rainbow
trout down the
walls of tributary framing
cliffs. It is the closest I ever
came to suicide.
Back to D.C. to atone for
my hubris, to quickly fall
in love with an acceptable
girl, to learn that above
all I love myself and that
I am very unlucky to
suffer so, though we do.
Suffer for warmth and
suffer for freedom, suffer
for not joining the game,
only basking yourself in
illusory silks akin to
deciduous shadows.
On a plane, the maddest
I’d ever been at my president,
my row mate casually ingesting
and offering tranquilizers,
and we’re in the
abyss between D.C. and
Sao Paulo, and it sure feels
like we’re nowhere. In and out
of alleys and fire escapes,
technicolor dirt bukes and mopeds
on tumescent cobblestones,
palm fronds baked yellow
against blood white
artifacts from Portugal.
Small kisses of blood
soaked in generations’
soil, bespectacled ogling
in throbbing storms.
Deeper then, more planes,
other cities, north, now
Brasilia now planes,
now Maraba, bus through
loaded land mines on
long stretches of highway
as spectator of many
barefooted football matches,
roadside chickes killed
and grilled at my behest,
were they at least impressed?
I had traveled so far to eat them,
afterall.
Bandits still living wild and
free in the brush, Redencao,
small town surrounded by big trees,
bullet scarred walls and charming
plazas full of colorful whims,
vagabond time keeping,
and ******
Here is where the smallest plane
of which I’m aware and it takes
you into a great big mouth
of endless glimmering hope.
Propellors spin and now
you’re giving your gadgets
to Indians and watching
the most beautiful dance
you’ve ever seen. And
you see that living off the land
is a kind of eternity.
hikes and hikes, endless ascents
and trees that choke the light
stretching past the capacity
of all legs, long walks down
functioning digestive systems.
In a canoe now, up the Xingu
deeper into the gaping maw
of unbeing, being less here
than whatever I was there,
knowing that Ihave been
less and have been more, and
now am all there ever was
on the precipice of the one
true choice, slow motion
blistering, unfathomable bugs,
the way the xingus mud cloacked
current felt more ominous
once you had to swim back.
It could be a hillside here that
I disappeared, finally, happy to feed
the pagan beasts and the insatiable
insects, the insatiable forest
strangling the life of anything
within reach. Then you are
expected to go back to things
as normal after all that, eat
from the same sad oven and
accpet things like tvs in showers.
Act like it’s not
all burning.
More plaes, Europe, fulfill the
cliché of your life wrapped
up in more self erosion and
quantifiable terrors originating
vectors. There’s the blue of
Nice that is all Yves Klein,
strong, forceful waves above
rusted calcified cliffs,
bellowing waves against
piers paved into the will
of rejecting God. Crashing
lighthouses, up and down
narrow alleys against
structure ugly with time,
nonstop ******* and Marseille
and Avingon and Paris and
who knows which memory is tether to which place,
or where you began making
things up because you
never thought anything you actually
did was worth a **** a time of
round brown ******* and cigarettes
burned down to the **** and having to tell people that the
moisture on their toilet
will destroy their *******
amsterdam, again, a train,
one chocolate, one cigarette,
one pull of water, windows
open with prologned creaks,
a thicket of tubes and gurgling
co-consprators. You prefer
that they not know that
you are American. But
in the end your’e always better.
Transcendence comes on the back of
uncomfortable hostel experiences
and prolonged stretches of
waitingwith nothing but wind
and space, nostalgia and melancholy
in the way you walk my bridges
and run your fingers along
my railings. Then so it had to
be Prague, more flights, more cars,
more horror and ways to die,
Krakow and Budapest, rivers,
hills, forests, death, years of finely
documented death, dalliances with
forbidden borders, easy prey
for the blissful hands of
pickpockets on old trains full
of cigarette smoke, and these
wonderful castles and impractical
cathedrals, I say, if you turn
rhe right corner at the right time
you begin to accept the humility
of compassion, how it makes two things
one, weightlessly ride on autumn waves
through several dreams.
A land of beautiful alcohol and
plentiful drugs, prostitutes,
aspiring pornographers in need of extras,
and cellar upon cellar upon cellar,
in which to lose sensory boundaries
and turn into the smoke,
the sweating and ******* through blood,
lies, lies, they are constant and in
Prague, too. Steep hills and
purring rivers lapping, left!
center! right! woo the taxi goes,
Marx & McDonalds finally
paying rent to the same landlord.
Planes and hotels and internet
cafes, job searches and cigarettes,
anything but having to admit that
it would just be easier to
go back to America,
the incense these street urchins
call hashish fills large spliffs
that ignite and engulf
your future, no money but always
coffee and cigarettes, and beautiful
alcohol,
more prostitutes than priests, but
then again that’s General Franco,
it all is, dog eared photos of
flea bitten relationships, creuelty and
violence, always ******* and always
dying, the self
persistent in deception, the compassion
receding in the hyper individualized,
Chartes cathedral? No, German
tourists ******* African prostitutes
in the sand under prickly brush,
how the former is identified versus
the latter says something and
the Mediterranean knows this song
and sings it unconcernedly.
Those red villages build of mud
and clay,
in the small spaces cut
into those carnivorous cliffs
where being frequented by
dream scenarios, white dress,
brown skin, red headband in
dark curls, the breeze as
monetary distraction to
observe the sand and
life wading through shallow
waters. Rental cars driven
into extinction, questionable
passes on hideously violent
roadways, but, they have
sacred mountains cut by human hands
with chartered buses available,
to scale dozens of noticeably
confrontational switchbacks,
flights to mallorca, to seville and
madrid, and the first time I was
truly catholic, and the dew soaked
cheese of Bilbao, flights cars cigarettes,
ashes and lonely headlights drowning
in the rear view, and finding time
throughout to fall out of love
quite convincingly, and maybe I
chose myself, a sin to be sure, but
I’m also autistic and I think God should
take some blame, too, but it only kept
going, there are other countries
and other rivers, corresponding
culture and consumption, so ultimately
words and architecture, museums and
hills, salty bays and wet grass that
emits powerful feeling of
mortality, and you can never
outrun all the countries and all the blood,
all the modes of transporation and the
death they ferry you to for a nominal fee,
the gorging self-destructive habits,
to be sure tiny flecks of me had
flaked off and I realized that I had
left small pieces of my self there
and had whittled into a more efficient
transmitter of the divine, and
I knew that I had neared perfection
with each loss bring me closer, and
I knew I would only reach Eden if
I continued losing.
Oct 29, 2025
Oct 29, 2025 at 10:26 PM UTC
The clock stutters like a drunk trying to remember the hour, hands slipping past their marks in quiet rebellion, as if even the machinery of time is aware that it too is being watched. And still, the sun pretends to rise, tilting through slats in a way that should feel familiar but instead fractures against the floor in shards of awkward light. No one is here to sweep up.
You lean against the frame of the day, letting it take the shape of your weight, though the frame itself seems to waver, unable to decide whether it is holding you or merely reflecting the idea of you. This is, of course, how it has always been, convincing you of your own coherence while their edges blur and buckle. The face looking back is half-yours, half-worn down by the eyes that refuse to rest, circling over the same hollow cheekbone like a vulture without an exit strategy.
Outside, the streets are unspooling quietly, laid bare like the backs of old photographs someone forgot to caption. The dog walkers, the paperboy, the woman in the red coat who insists she’s been here forever, all folding into the rhythm of a place that neither fully exists nor fully disappears. They step over the cracks like dancers rehearsing a fall, their shadows uncertain if they are cast by them or left behind.
And isn’t this the way it goes? The mind idling at the intersection of then and never quite, caught in the amber of an almost-sentence that rewrites itself the moment it is spoken. You meant to say something but the words, shy as moths near a flame, drifted apart before landing, scattering into the small corners where meaning waits but never fully emerges. The window remains open, a soft gesture of surrender, though to what exactly—wind, memory, or the faint hum of a distant train—no one can say. The hour thickens. And you, no more certain than the light slouching toward evening, continue watching the world tilt in on itself, folding at the seams like an envelope that might contain a letter or simply a space where one was meant to be.
Even the air hesitates, uncertain how much weight to give the silence that now occupies the room like a tenant between leases. You try to remember what it was that brought you here, what arrangement of small decisions lined the path to this particular corner of afternoon, but the answer drifts just beyond reach. Perhaps it was the shape of a conversation you didn’t finish, or the echo of a laugh that felt borrowed. The details blur, retreating like figures behind frosted glass.
The ceiling fan hums, circles, imitating the shape of thought without arriving. Its slow orbit marks time in fractions you can’t divide evenly. Beneath it, you consider the room not as it is but as it was the first time you entered, bright with the possibility of untold stories, before the furniture settled in like tired guests overstaying their welcome.
There is no conclusion, only the slow unwinding of hours, soft and pliable as dusk. The light spills forward as if forgetting to stop, pooling along the edges of the floor. Somewhere, someone lights a match, and the brief flicker suggests a kind of answer, though you know better than to ask the question aloud. The room closes gently around you, and the day slips quietly out the back, leaving nothing behind but the faint outline of its departure.
Jan 3, 2025
Jan 3, 2025 at 3:35 PM UTC
Drifting sand as appetizer, curling
wave as prolonged planing, proof
of concept in vellum paper, swirling
words etched into soft membrane, remembering
instances of lucid terrors, abrupt
in constant seizing of May, moribund
fantasies spilled in ink across the plane, burn
cattle lost to famine and cholera, aged
gently such as indigenous softwoods, pulsing
light from illiterate sources, wrecks
the blind insistence on burrowing angels, lifts
skyward the misspoken words, uncorrected
and festering while you fret of etiquette, burned
to nothing but fragrant ash in syllables, dreaming
of white nights outlined in nostalgia, bearing
the trauma of several odd fathers, forgotten.
Sep 1, 2023
Sep 1, 2023 at 2:46 PM UTC
The bird bellows low, thrusts its
chest, dander spitting through hot bark
it calls with innate confidence and questions,
fires rounds of distinct subterfuge at
facile hawks.
I have become the bird, afloat and
survicing on lost amplitude among
braying ***** mute incantations
for rising suns
how the dew coated meadow sparks
how my song splits the maw / exposing distance as illusion
how the pungent firs sigh and heave
how I am the light on their needles, disected and reformed in shadow
how the hawk is the songbird and I am the hawk and the songbird is I
how behind the mask we are all together faceless
Sep 1, 2023
Sep 1, 2023 at 2:43 PM UTC
Frozen ragweed slipped
into my dream, laid bare
the shadows between
what I say and how I act,
bemoaned my need for superfluous comfort,
though accepted it nodding
because it is and is less and because
long weekends through dark glasses
because as ragweed it has a
sliver of omnipresence because
by virtue of being frozen it has
retained its shape while changing its form
and because it is the ragweed of my
dream it is the ragweed of mid-Atlantic
pathways. because being defined by
its mid-Atlanticness it finds the
same home in my dream because
it lays in the meadow with its
brothers the humidity and insects,
because it is burrobrush because
ragweed invaded Europe from Mexico
because ragweed as reverse-colonialism
is important to any dream I have
because ragweed is ambrosia because
it renders my dreams immortal
because it erases any pretense
of context in favor of the
truths that exist beyond frozen ragweed.
Sep 1, 2023
Sep 1, 2023 at 2:38 PM UTC
The monkey strives for both abode
Japan devout the flame in road
Iran disburse a name it mutes
The donkey runs his mane computes
We fish and sleep believe a sheep
It's further than we see, the neap
Our mother calls the hen unknown
We sign and dream return to home
Sled fast conceive that in whiplash hues
Feel fat step back the stars confuse
Petite croissant exist embrace
Averse baguette awoke efface.
Sep 1, 2023
Sep 1, 2023 at 2:34 PM UTC
Upon and lake perchance to dream
It floats in fall convert to steam
Create the inward and twice ash
The ants devour the lonely lash
Fresh dances raze beneath obtain
Stuck double poet breath attain
We fly we love over the cloud
In creeks in dark macaw his shroud
Light frozen there bereft undress
Gone sigel leaps express duress
Deny denote the soft white waves
Inflict inform a child's last days
Broad field lacrosse ferment the oaks
Short hymns baroque taboo and spokes
Flee singing hymnal there withstand
The treated better half yourself demand
Sep 1, 2023
Sep 1, 2023 at 2:32 PM UTC
This world is dog ****
this world is dying,
these things are true,
these things are lying
Aug 21, 2023
Aug 21, 2023 at 7:24 PM UTC
Mornings are a time of brand
recognition, are the affirmations
of our silicone dreams, are the
insipid anchor of our biological
imperative, are an invention of
themselves.
Much like the poem writes
itself, the morning spreads
as part of its self-invention,
how particles of light are selffulfilling prophecies similar
to a spontaneous stream of words
filling a vessel in no particular
order.
The morning appears flat, but
at its edges it bends seamlessly,
is a disc of unfettered
centrifugal absolutions,
posits unanswerable
equations until night
overtakes it and makes it mine
again.
We keep morning hidden
under the sink like a
disinfectant, like spools
unwound and repurposed,
faded spectrums of
observable patterns, fixed
in the sense of observation
as industrial strength glue,
inviting God to see if It can
undo what consciousness has
borne.
May 5, 2023
May 5, 2023 at 6:03 PM UTC
Raining hell and fleeting
karma, again, in the fetid brush,
again in singing debris
afloat on leviathan,
again in a thicket
of notes, some
flat.
Again in generation-wide psychosis,
madly revolving across the
peninsula, their hair
ablaze, leasing groceries and
starving whole ecosystems
of luxury isolation.
always a nostril away
from being under the current,
always floating in the morass of
prejudicial survival skills,
always faintly more you than
me, always bygone echoes
of feeling, shadows of dust,
always favorable to disquiet,
alarmed at
how close the sun has gotten
over the years.
May 5, 2023
May 5, 2023 at 6:01 PM UTC