My fingertips sweep across these subtle indentations
Tracing her serial number
A traumatic and numbing truth
copy written and branded on a tiny scar
just below her microscopic transistor
voice box
The shallow intake of oxygen into
recycled plastic lungs recycling air
either for realism or function
felt just as alluring
when they whispered into my ear
Her hardwired ducts always produced
tears that hurt just as much
even if it was programmable and on command
Losing the warm caress of her polymer skin
was just as painful
even though underneath was only cellular service
and not cellular growth
I swore to my friends that she wasn't like
any other I've ever loved
but as I push the lifeless shell of this
all too perfect woman into the muck caked
dumpster
I think to myself
Maybe I would have had better luck with
a name brand

The rain has gentle hands that
smother out my claim to flame
as I stand with a soggy borrowed cigarette
in one hand
and one of those expensive uptown
coffee shop drinks in the other,
their daily grind keeping me awake
but ultimately coffee rings
hollow, insufficient in fulfilling
my constant half-empty outlook.
I'm resigned to bracing myself on a street corner
watching traffic lights
flash and cars streak by obscenely,
wishing I could get by on good looks
from everyone moving past me
but I know it's all just an allusion.
Always alone in the big
city but she changes that,
she's sensual but odd
like the smooth shielding
over the wings of a beetle
if you can stand holding one
long enough to touch them.
I raise my face to the sky
and she washes away my
hazy carbon monoxide exhaustion daydreams,
letting them bleed into corroded rain gutters
All those curve bald face lies and avoidance tactics
dilute by her storm fronts until they mean nothing.
You and I?
Well I can't figure out if our daisy chaingun
romance will ever
be more than hollow points fired
across each others brow,
but I know no matter how hard
she pelts me in torrential downpours,
the rain always answers.

It's not that I don't appreciate
the glorious struggle of this life.
But when I'm crowbar hopping until I can hardly stand up
guilty of smashed in windows and foggy afterglow afterthought
I can't help but wonder
how I can be anything but off the wagon
when they've been circled to fend me off?
They want their stereotypes?
Fine.
I'll be the station wagon burner of their suburbs
but even if they're entertained I don't want their thanks.
I reserve my thanks for being alive
for being allowed to rise each day
even if my thanks are abstract marks lining
my arms.
Sorry if this is disjointed.
I'm writing from the heart
but shooting from the hip
with those familiar revolving killers
slung low on fun belts with
the chambers of my heart spun
until I'm dizzy.
I've always been an avid subscriber to chaos
but I can't deal with this disorder any longer.
I know that each and every one of you
are precious and dear to me
but I can't break away from the oubliette of
my dreary words.
They're like my alchemical dependency
burning dread into gold.
I give thanks to know you
even if showing it is difficult.
I'm a barren mined strip.
Now I'm discharging thought heavy metals into your
water supply and I can't help but think I'm
poisoning everyone.
I've been a misanthropologist all my life
discovering what makes us so awful at times.
Now I just
want to be a sincere apologist.
I need you more than you need me
and I love you.

Darling?
Don't read into it
too much

When I put out my stale headache cigarettes
in your ashtray
and I put out in that
tainted-with-cheap-*****-cracked-lip-kisses
way that I do so well

Then lay my head down
next to you
on your
worn-out-*****-box-spring-no-covers-only-refuge
and you feel secure
like everything lasts forever

Keep in mind
that old adage
that's as tired as I am
about keeping friends close
and enemies closer

And hey
Darling?

This ain't going to end
with one of those awful deus ex machina
dream wake ups

This isn't the dream we're living
so let's make the best of this disposable outcome
get some sleep
and do it all over again tomorrow
in that
over-indulged-but-still
unhappy-first-world-prison-paradise
kinda of way that we do so well

-From discarded poetry found in the trashcan
of Fiona Eris Strand

In the half-life half-death
of cold capsule prison cells
The shaken but unstirred synapses
of my sedated frantic grey matter
are left cruelly seduced into dreamstate contemplation
Forced induction into comatose hypersleep
all systems shocked and slowed
Reduced to internal monologue
debating tranquility and frustration
captured amidst nurturing seas and predator skies
Life support machinations online
so that I must deal with life offline
My interlude thoughts in full control
as they run amok
through the living dead dreams
forever frozen and framed
in iced over glass
floating through the black nothing
of all encompassing space
alone

This is the kind of poem I wish I had
an old rusty typewriter for
so each disgusted clack crack and punch
hit like your shatter jaw swings
But this will have to suffice
and
yeah
okay
fine
It makes you feel better
to put things
in such a stark black and white
that ugly gaudy stale whole-half-truth you
claim to love
then
yeah
okay
fine
All the ill forgotten pill hurts were all my fault
and we can pretend all the long scarlet letter
scratches you carved on my back were
from someone else
So burn my name to the ground
and put your cigarettes out on
my pictures
and all it will amount to
is your last denial
of all I had to give

You know
I was thinking how much
I'd like to just leave it all behind
and let loose like a mad
rebel with plenty of caws
flitting through sunlight that creeps
through the trees
because anymore
I can't get behind another day of
constantly dragging on more
supposed last toxin riddles
while your hands become these frail metastatic
cooling tower fingers
I can already see them already shaking off
clinched jaw fuel droplets
onto cancerous rancid mass graves
and I don't want to imagine what's beyond that
Besides
lately I've been preoccupied
with the feel of timeworn ciphers etched
in my charcoal wings as I
descend on power lines joining
scorched throat jesters cackling murderously
at this scorched earth
See I want to get away from our plutonic friends
all they want is to binge on residual radiation
raising their safety glasses to their excesses
knowing their acceptable risk deformities await
with contaminated breath
Sure we've got a reputation of being devious
but I'd rather proudly flaunt tattered onyx feathers
than sit around with
decaying radioactive half lives surrounding
inactive decaying half lives abounding
We crows scavenge our meals indiscriminately
but we don't dare eat our young as you do