The setting of traps
has always seemed
like a tacit endorsement
of the mice.

Acknowledgement.
Validation.
Admission of failings as a homeowner –
(cracked baseboards or an unsealed gap in the door.)

We are usually responsible
for our own infestations, after all.

The relationship with the mice is codified
“you are vermin,
I am not.
I will ****.
You will die.”

Thus the mice are transfigured,
Christ-like.
Frozen in fear,
frozen in time,
laid bare
on a sticky, chemical
altar of sacrifice.

Saviors
giving their lives
so that we may preserve
those unwanted crumbs
in the vacant space
between the couch and loveseat
where the vacuum won’t reach.

We rise
not like smoke from the flame
to demonstrate
the Law of Conservation of Energy
-matter shifting forms-
Violent change followed by
heavenward ascension.

We rise
not like the phoenix from the ashes.
No glorious re-emergence from
the ruined form
of what came before.
No rebirth as
the middle stage
of an endless cycle.

Instead
we rise
like an orchid, blooming,
up from the shitheap.
We reach for the sun
even while
our roots sink deep into the filth.

This chain was my home.
This chain is my home.
This chain
will not
always be my home.

I’ve seen a hundred things stranger than
a ship that steers itself.

Not all slaves
have a master
after all.

We can grind our teeth
down to weathered tombstones

together.


Bound by love and sadness,
here we are
the rearguard of the desperate and the anxious -
holding hands
before an ocean
made of all the brakelights in the world.

There's no one I'd rather ignore warnings with
than you.

Bitter imagination
I know the wheels on Mendicino avenue
The saint of the rose
Where she goes alone
Only hours behind where the sun goes to set
Grown so tired
And each irrelevant question
Interminable problem
Becomes a fear hard-cast in stone
And even the weightless
Is too heavy to bear
Life is a battle
The world spins rounds of ammunition
The man pains to bring peace
To that city far west of the place I stand

There are no flowers in the desert
Only fruitless land
Barren, dry
And beautiful

Pleiades,
hot blue and extremely luminous.
From across the blackest ocean
seven sisters call, but
just three are putting out and
only one loves me.
That's okay...
She's been my favorite
since she said,
"It takes a mighty rocket
to pierce the night sky and
****** into space."
******* right.
I write my atheist gospels
using only the letters of her name.
I collect the relics
of long dead nova clusters
to construct The Grand Heart Emoji.
And if I never make it back to space
maybe one day
we can hold hands
in San Diego.