I wake up. The bed is cold.
I am cold.
A gray day awaits.
I stare into the blank ceiling,
And feel an emptiness I cannot fill.
Not without her.
I stand up and shuffle across my shattered bedroom,
To the door.
The glint of the golden doorknob is the only color in this place.
I drink a tea. My mother is worried.
She's starting to notice I'm not eating at all.
Maybe...
It's time for a haircut.
A change...
From who I am. It'll do me good,
To be someone else, for a moment.
"I still love her" I think to myself, but it is silenced when I slice a hole into my head.
It is clean, a thin trail of blood which becomes a waterfall.
It streams down my face, and I keep cutting,
Blood and hair and tears falling as I stare into this broken mirror,
And the most horrible, hideous monster looks back at me.
I hate him so much, and I cut more in hopes that he will look away.
But he doesn't.
His frozen, desolate eyes stare deep into my soul,
Or rather his own,
The poor disgusting *******.
He has forgotten what it is to feel anything but pain,
And even that is escaping him.

I grip the barbed wire that I use a rein,
For this beast of a world that I cannot yet tame,
I grit my teeth and I hold my breath,
The name of my lover is death.
I kneel in the salt as I am abused,
With cables and whips, yet I am amused,
Blood hits the floor, and I smile at the stain,
The name of my lover is pain.
I spit out the words that I hear in my soul,
Reciting them from this internalized scroll,
I gather my demons and open the gate,
The name of my lover is hate.

Night falls upon the sleepless one,
who stares deep into the void.
He cannot yet be overrun,
He shall not be destroyed.
On the precipice of the blank,
He has lost all hope.
The riverside with either bank,
But while on land he cannot cope,
And so the water engulfs him,
He is drowned but still he breathes.
Light without him is now fading,
But within him it still seethes.
Destruction lies upon the sleepless mind,
Until it pounces on the light, resigned.

The flash flood of euphoria,
is swallowed by the thirsty ground,
eternally unquenched.
I will smile,
and fix my eyes on the desert sun.
I will grow roots and bloom,
an endogenous cactus,
while envious drifters lick the sand,
desperate for a drop of rain.

Obey the law, the law of man,
For it's all that makes us divine.
Obey the law, the law of God,
For it gives society spine.
Obey the laws you make yourself,
Or your soul will weigh thousands of tons.
Obey the law imposed on you,
Or be killed by your neighbors with guns.

1.5 grams of marijuana, 30 mL of cough syrup, half a bowl of cereal, and an iron supplement.
Then I throw up blood into a toilet, shave, and put on a pair of flip flops.
I don't bother changing pants, so I just grab a different shirt, throw on some deodorant, and smoke another joint.
I get in the car.
I take a deep, shaky breath.
And drive away.

The bible in my hand feels far too heavy.
I open to a random page, and realize that,
although it would make grandma happy,
I will never read it.
Still, when I sit down at the piano here,
I hear divinity in the music.
When I smoke **** on the hill outside,
and look up at the stars,
I feel the excitement, the awe, of being a tiny part of something
infinite.
So who is their God to disapprove?

Breath the air in zeroes and ones,
Gather your forces and gather your guns,
Feel electricity flowing through you,
Paint oozing red from pulsating blue.
A network of neurons fuels violent vigor,
Process their fear and pull on the trigger.

It won't stop bleeding,
This gaping red and black hole.
Useless bandages.

It's hard to live without *******,
Tied to powder by a chain.
"Help," I say, but no one knows:
I'm bleeding lifeblood from my nose.

It's hard to live without some *****,
Liqueur up and start to cruise.
"I want to die." I flip a penny,
Rev the car and hit one-twenty.

It's hard to live without some shrooms,
I liked my life as a cartoon.
"I'm broken inside," I tell my friends,
They laugh along, the world bends.

It's hard to live without some ****,
It helps to balance out the speed,
"I'm in danger," no one cares,
Buried under thoughts and prayers.

It's hard to live with conscious mind,
I need poison, make me blind.
Roll me, smoke me, snort me up,
Pipe, spoon, ****, or cup.

The game stops being fun,
When you spend a night full-throttle,
And can't remember if your headache's,
from a needle or a bottle.
The game stops being cool,
When you throw up in your yard,
When you look inside your mirror,
And behind your eye's you're scarred.
The game stops being fine,
When you start to fear a hug,
Because you almost check their pockets,
For some money, for some drugs.
The game comes to an end,
When you realize what you are,
When you give in to your urges,
And you OD in your car.

To the lover of my youth,
and the yellow in my tooth.
To the flower's greatest prize,
and the red behind my eyes.
God knows I love you, you're green but true blue,
oh Mary Jane, my girl, this one's for you.

"If I held myself to my resolutions, I would be twice ahead of the pack. Yet I find myself, perhaps unsurprisingly, bending the rules."
and now I think to myself that I too am in the same predicament.
and so I say, "What lofty goals of this world or the next do you aspire to? Those we share, we can accomplish together." And in the spoken language of prophets you replied: "let the shepherds of goodness upon the earth guide the hand of the ignoble, so that, in their ignorance, they may be of service to the light." But I hesitated; there was the smell of money on his breath... "Why not share our light across the channel we hold now to all brothers and sisters in need of light to shine from their eyes?"

So you think there are monsters that wander at night?
Witches and demons behind every blight?
Laughing hysterically, evil incarnate,
Sowing your fields with their parasites?

So you think there are devils that live in your ear,
Right next to the angel that you never hear?
Examine them closely, and I think you'll find,
None of your actions are from puppeteers.

So you think there are angels that watch over you,
Because they've got nothing that's better to do?
Letting you suffer, sometimes for fun,
Maybe that's why angels go to hell too.

So you think the demons and angels are fighting,
Scratching and clawing and screaming and biting?
Come now, you know it, that if that were true,
Don't you think clouds would be way more exciting?

No, I think you know there's no God in the sky,
No Satan below who can be your bad guy,
No good, no evil, no nothing at all,
We invented them back when our stories got dry.

Scapegoats live down below politics,
Blame is our addiction, and we need our fix,
But there isn't an evil that was ever real,
Because sin didn’t die on a crucifix.

Wrists made out of pencils,
A will made out of steel.
Blood and teeth amongst the tiles,
Was he ever even real?
Resisting cruel hands,
Left his words where they are.
He jumped out of the window,
Rather than stay and spar.
He could've stayed among the flesh,
But his bones snapped on stone.
Did he really choose to die?
Did he jump or was he thrown?

For better for worse,
But rarely in rage,
Or when hidden in sheets,
With someone half their age.
For richer or poor,
But not when they're old,
Sensual attractions,
turn into mold.
In sickness and health,
But not when in pain,
When the plague is hiding,
in the bachelor brain.
Till death do them part,
We all wish them well.
Their misery promised,
By the iron church bell.

"I don't even feel the caffeine anymore,"
said Claudio, a cigarette hanging loosely from his mouth.
"Maybe you should take a break. Then, after the break, you'll feel the rush."
He took a long, slow drag.
"No point. I've felt it already."

In a world of my own construction,
reality bends to my will.
Ancient secrets of ancestral blood
transmute to its inheritor.
The voice of eternity whispers my name,
carried on winds of rolling laughter
to my ear, waiting.
Naive enchantment behind child eyes
is transformed into something magic,
but real; second sight becomes
second nature.
Soon, the joy behind my eyes will return,
forged in inner fire and whetted with love.

I'm a foreigner,
In the land I was born to...
So this is real pain.

If you don't know how to punch,
or how to have a good time,
If you can't make a decision,
you should know to flip a dime.
Cover me in tattoos,
Piercings galore,
confidence is ****,
without it you're a bore.

There lived a man,
with wife and child,
Who toiled the hours away.
He was never home,
So his son was wild,
And the man's hairs turned to gray.
The man, he prayed,
for something new,
To break his boring days.
The next day, on the shore,
On the edge of a cliff,
Was a girl with her hair ablaze.
The lady turned with a shake of her hips,
And the man did cry of lust.
For he knew that his wife,
His black haired jewel,
had half the face and half the bust.
But the ******* the shore,
With the bleeding hair,
had a trick for the man she'd ensnared.
She told the man her dastardly plan,
For she knew she could never be shared.
The man went home, and he ******* his bride,
Went away to find his blade.
Her hair of black did turn to white,
for she had never been so afraid.
When the man returned,
He cut her throat and she fell down from the bed.
Her blood did pool around her,
Till her hair was dripping red.
So the man returned to his mistress,
Who was waiting beneath the palm tree,
His mistress wore his spouse's face,
She killed him and ran into the sea.

If I could, learn to do,
How to do things right by you,
I would do about anything.
I might even learn how to love.
If I could, begin to be,
A fraction of the bad you see,
I might do about anything,
But never learn how to love.
If I could, turn and say,
Something that'd make us okay,
I would say about anything,
But first of all I'd say that I love,
You.

My compass is broken,
It’s needle is aimless.
Where there should be directions,
Lurk the evil and nameless.
When I wish to go north,
It takes me to hell,
I once wanted a heaven,
But that man is a shell.
When I need to go west,
It takes me to void,
Where my feelings are deadened,
My soul is destroyed.
When I wish to go east,
Yet know that I can’t,
It takes me to nature,
And I am an ant.
When I must go south,
Or suffer pains,
It takes me to myself,
Where it rains and rains.

The keys of the piano slipped and fell,
tumbling into oblivion.
The taste of horse tranquilizers,
the slow drip of distortion...
it twisted reality apart, and into something new.
I breathe, and the world changes shape,
As the music soars across the church.
Another line ties my blood to my mind,
and I begin to speak in riddles;
Altogether unbound by all the things I am.

I am the sun.
I am atom against atom,
In open warfare
Thousands of miles away.
I am the moon,
I walk in the night
Among the dark ones
The creatures you want to forget.
I am the sun,
I am light and life and good weather.
No cloud to obliterate,
No ocean to extinguish.
I am the moon,
I am master of the ebb and flow,
I am water,
Deep and dark and hidden below the raging waves.
I am black light,
Fiery water,
Living death,
and Master of None.
And yet...
I am only me.

Planted in the mind,
Growing stronger by each day.
God, I need an axe.

How much time did I spend?
Sitting on the bed. Throwing darts. Reading books.
or rather, how much time did I waste?
And more importantly, how much do I have left?

If I had power and wasn't made of flesh,
My blood would flow like rivers through the sands.
No one would live from France to Bangladesh,
I'd be an angel formed with blackened hands.
My godliness would end the lives of those,
Who dare to take a life that isn't theirs.
The fathers and their children come to blows,
The young would eat the old to be their heirs.
Men would neither run nor try to hide,
They'd know that I have come and I am fate.
A thousand men chose loving as their guide,
But billions fell pray to wretched hate.
I'd slay until there's nothing to be slain,
Until there's nothing left to bring me pain.

Oh brother, loved brother
Bless my arm and bless my blade,
For the sinners of our world must be baptized in blood and fear.
Sweet brother, kind brother
Bring my soul into your shade,
For tonight I cut apart the ones who killed our mother dear.
Vengeful brother, destructive brother
All I’ve seen and all I’ve done,
God won’t forgive me when I make this tainted oath to thee.
Dark brother, dead brother
You can't even hear me can you?
Yet a man who has lost everything can take no further fee.
Poor brother, scarred brother
You didn’t deserve to suffer death,
And so tonight I will avenge you with your spirit at my back.
Good brother, just brother
With every meaningless breath,
I will plunge myself in sin until my soul has turned black.
My brother, absent brother,
Things just always seem the same,
Though I give away my time my effort; sweat, blood and bone.
Pure brother, holy brother,
I will **** in your name
Because it’s easier than accepting the darkness that’s my own.

Tick tock, rise and shine, shake the whiskey from your eyes.
Close your mind and count to five, scream yoursELF A LULLABY.

We tell everyone lies they want to hear,
Translucent guns are waved from face to face.
We say “It’s nice to meet you” out of fear,
of being ****** and marked to be erased.
The sociable are  given gifts of gold,
While loners rot in cages made of words.
All your expressions need to be controlled,
If your wish is to live among the birds.
We strive to be the people that we hate,
Jealousy turns our heart into a stone.
We claw with nails and teeth on iron gates,
we built ourselves and choose to leave alone.
Emotions build behind a mask of clay,
and masks explode on those whom we betray.

We're just 1 mole of inches away,
Just 9,501,262,626,262,624,256 miles away.

Red, orange, yellow, white,
Green and blue and purple too,
A thousand supernova hues.
Flames will light, born from the pyre,
Or perhaps from the meeting of flint and stone.
One small spark becomes wildfire.
Destroying homes.
Charring bones.
Fire needs fuel to stay alive,
And when it’s gone,
You can't revive,
That unique orange, every glorious dawn.
Warm as a mother, deadly as a viper
A fire burns inside the hearth.
In the distance, a lonely ******,
Will extinguish you, and ignite the dark.

I almost forgot what it felt like.
You see, I avoid coming home as much as I can,
but there's always the blue moon. There's nowhere else to go sometimes.
And this time it happened.
The conversation about how my day was, boring details and all.
And the sounds of crickets, gently chirping in the woods.
The warm light of the chandelier.
A word flits across the dinner table and into the air, and there is sudden silence.
Everyone knows it was a mistake, innocent.
But  I sit at the dinner table and say nothing,
One part glad that it isn't me and one part guilty for the other.
I pretend I can't hear screaming.
I pretend that there isn't this feeling,
I had almost forgotten,
Squatting on the mashed potatoes.
It stares me in the face and whispers through the crackling in the air.
It speaks louder as my little sister says,
"Pass the salt."
It laughs at the irony,
and the illusion of safety sits,
split cleanly in half on the floor,
while the dog, oblivious, licks up the scraps.

Alone in a crowd,
A drop in a cloud.
Trapped in my own mind.
I smile and laugh,
Give my autograph,
But the lights are making me blind.
Alone and surrounded,
Happiness unfounded,
But I just put up a grin.
My mask is imploding,
From people's corroding,
So I will reveal what's within.

Run, hide, scream, despair,
Upon us comes an old nightmare.
Terror, weakness, gasp for air,
It's psychological warfare.
In the windows, yellow eyes,
Primal demons from the skies,
Parts of you that you despise,
Blotting out the red sunrise.
Snakes and spiders do kung-fu,
Boiling water raining too.
It's a dream, you're breaking through,
But the things you saw wake up with you.

The clock ticks slowly towards doomsday.
I am in a desert, the sun pounding down onto my back,
Telling me:
"You are worthless."
It is right of course, but it doesn't make it hurt less.

I want only to look up from the sand,
And to see your smile.
I want to hold you, to kiss you, and to look up,
And to see the gentle moon once more.

Our breath is that of Earth,
the forests
mighty lungs.
Our blood is that of gasoline,
of dead ancestors,
and open ocean.
My soul is that of life,
the quintessential
beauty in everything.

Have you ever heard of article three?
It sets apart the dos and don'ts of law.
It gives power to hear the people's plea,
And to ignore it, shred it with a claw.
The Constitution speaks for people's rights,
Of justice set for humans far and wide.
It is confused by those who're born in light,
and think it equal to live to misguide.
The mighty masters set apart our race,
And put their own ten steps above the rest.
The others ran so fast from their first base,
When slavers got to start by being blessed.
Justice will never live for those died,
So long as we seek justice for our pride.

Molotovs explode, windows shatter
But to them, it doesn’t matter.
Their sheltered lives are bliss, while little children die,
They sit in their bubble baths and let out a sigh.
They burn their coal to heat their homes,
While warplanes fly from aerodromes.
They clink their flimsy wine-filled glasses,
While the earth rots in a shell of gases.
They talk of truth, peace and love,
While praying to the skies above.
They ask for good things, for themselves.
While kids, teenagers, join cartels.
They “Save The Seals”, but they are blind,
The thing that needs saving is mankind.
A thousand cry out, but they claim to be powerless.
How would they feel if they were towerless?

Does He care if I eat pork?
How about when I ****?
Well what if I only do it for the thrill?
What about meat and cheese?
Does He care about that?
Does he care about knives I put in alley cats?
Does He know all the things that I hide under cloaks?
Can he see through all my ****** red mist?
Did He make me a broken, angry angel...
Does he even exist?

The nuclear winter fell on this place,
This broken desert glen,
And whale bones serve as carcass homes
For the very last of men.
Oil runs like blood,
Across the broken, lifeless dune.
They siphon it from ancient cars,
And howl at the moon.
Corpses rot abandoned,
With an X upon their palm,
Irradiated from the night,
They call the Night of Bombs.
One man who lives forgotten,
On the taste of human skin,
The man exists in all of them,
The evil deep within.

There is nothing worse,
Than waking up from a dream,
To see that she's gone.

I am the last of a dying breed,
The shrinking group of people who can say,
They know me.
Not my name,
Nor my stories.
Hell, half of them are lies.
I am alone with my thoughts, and actions, and mind,
And I can tell you for sure,
That we are all alone, together.
We are not how we're seen, or how we see ourselves;
I am every ****** thing I have ever done,
And if somebody knew,
They would weep for the part of me that still gives a ****.
Thankfully, I know what they do not.
That this part of me does not exist.

No words can express,
The love I feel for the world
I was born into.

A lonely spider,
No bigger than a tack.
He has built his home,
A sturdy web between two great wooden pillars,
Overlooking the lake.
His silk is strong as steel.
His web is a silent monument to his will.

Love is, fools may say,
As a warm, softened kitten,
Mewing pitifully.
Gods-men may say it is the snake,
Poised venomously in the tree of knowledge,
Tempting gleefully into sin.
Some say it is a peacock,
Strutting high upon its perch,
But running away at the drop of a pin.
I say it is the owl,
Flying above on wings of terror,
And its glowing eyes turn to the grass,
To swoop down and
devour
that
***.

We all have happy places,
Where evil never rears it’s ugly head.
A garden of eden,
Or perhaps a summer camp in the Berkshires.
Or maybe it’s an island with sunsets made of gold,
Or a market with food that tastes like friends, like laughter.
Maybe it is the place you call home,
Or maybe it’s the fear you call death.
We all live life for now.
We laugh, we cry and then we die,
Those we’ve left behind clinging to our pale corpses.
Or maybe they’re clinging to their own memories of us,
The things that they won’t forget until they join us in the void.
Life ends, and then our loved ones end, and so do our happy places.
That summer camp you love?
It’s a filthy landfill.
Your sweet island?
It’s been buried in the waters of former ice caps.
The market that was your refuge?
It’s been nuked, just like New York, Moscow, Paris.
All things end.
All things end.

"Meow," said the deaf cat.
The two humans in the room,
Blink thrice, and agree.

An old man walks the earth,
he fears nothing but terrible God.
His cane is beaten, his eyes are blind,
He is nothing but broken and flawed.
His knees are weak and wobbly,
His face was carved with pain.
He comes to a fork in the road,
Beneath the pouring rain.
Each path is equally pleasant,
To eyes and ears alike.
He hears the bustling tavern,
He hears the lightning strike.
His feet are tired of walking,
He knows he won't have long.
He sits down at the fork,
He sees his endless wrongs.
He takes no further paths,
He starts to see the light,
His son takes up his cane and pack,
And steps into the night.