I tried to write a poem
But it was rambling and pointless
And now I find myself

Rambling

Pointlessly

About a poem that doesn’t exist

At what point does tragedy become regular, mundane irony?

Like, why do artists always die in obscurity
When everyone else just dies?

I am slowly fading, contemplating integrating with the sun. Don’t be afraid; I will come back for everyone. In quiet times. In silent minds. Backwoods Massachusetts nights. When snow falls, deafening the light. When snow falls.

Ikke hvit
Men
Den følelsen
Bare etter det

I tried to tell you just how dark it was inside
But all the lights were on that time
You said I sounded crazy

I tried to teach you just how dark it is inside
You said, "You don't know what you're saying, no, you don't know what you're saying!"

You were right

Ikke svart
Men
Den fargen
Bare før det

Jesus didn't love you like I loved you

Jesus didn't show you what I showed you

Jesus didn't care for you --

In fact, he died

Lucy left her bracelet on my dresser

Came up to me asking for a picture

We spent the night together

Then I spent the day alone

With all my questions

Ah,

I see you
The way you spiral
Enmeshed through empty space
A dance not seen or observed in a usual sense
Developed —
Exposed —
Built up into an overpowering neon scene I can not look upon, nor would I wish to look away from.

Oh,

I hear you
Chattering cicada rhythms
Pulsing— pulsing—
Wild, rhythmic chattering
tk tk tk tk tk
A low hum, a machine?
The sound of my blood
Coursing past my eardrums— a machine?
Wild, pulsing — pulsing, chattering machine hum
Tk tk tk

Mh,

I feel you
Or I feel something
Well, maybe not something
But certainly a lack of nothing
Alack, not nothing
Or it would be easier to call it something
But i can not call it something
For fear I may be placing too much faith in it

It shoots up my spine
In to the center of my skull
Explodes
I feel the shock in my core
I gasp
I am awake
I am alive
I am
Aren’t I?

Loved the way dope moved
Stretched it for his cousin who
Rode bikes out in Lynn for a living

He one two stepped
A couple bundles from a stick
Caught his first finger
Flipped it cuffed a brick

Some boys caught wind
Bucked him right upside the neck
Now his cousin’s in some debt
And he can’t be found

I am an ocean of single use plastic. A birds nest of cigarette filters. A sky of fuel emissions. I am the cell phone always by my side. A bell attached to my hospital bed. I know someone is always a button away. The foundation of my house a blemish on the earth. Clogged concrete pore poured so I may exist, proliferating infection. The soles of my shoes are rubber armor. Spare me from feeling anything that might be real. I am ****, I am ****, *****, dead skin cells, blood poured out in a bathroom sink. I am a messy bed, ***** clothes I am the never ending cycle of clean dishes. I am consumer. All I touch I need more of. All I touch I corrupt and make commodity of, make for market. I am an empire. I am imperialist for I saw and said nothing. As the planet was *****, humanity stripped of humanity. As people who looked like me and thought like me dictated the course of lives of those who did not. Therefore I am dictator.

I saw you trance dance in the moonlight

I was too ****** up to speak

The way the fire light - it danced with you

Made shadows of your seams

If I could go back to that place

I’d tell you all the things I’ve seen

We could dance until the sun belied

The words we can not speak

We could trance dance in the moonlight

Get too ****** up to speak

Stand beside the fire;

Make shadows of our seams

The longest winter I have ever known
You left me chewing stones
To try and find something that’s meaningful
Inside of them

The shortest story I have ever told
Once left me breaking bones
To try and make something that’s meaningful
In spite of them

And as my fingers worked these grains of sand
Into the cloudy sky
I saw a picture that was meaningful
And lied to them

Im the type of ******* that robs his parents front of everybody

Just to cop a couple things, kick some stones and throw a solo party

Most solid dude I ever met just ****** overdosed

**** the doctors think they learn from takin notes up in an overcoat

Walk with me

Through the alleys down the ave where people give all that they have just to stare into an empty sky

Walk with me

Through the shadows in the valley where the gods dont keep their children from the evil that is bounding

Where the holy rod of righteousness was stolen, sold for powder

Where the people lose their lives, not in multiples but powers

Walk with me

I stand before you a King
A court of gods at my feet
They bow to me in worship
In jest
In mocking of my demise
Self-inflicted
And total

I raise my eyes
A yawning expanse before me
I have become a wisp
In the night
Journeyer to places
Spoken of only in dead tongues
Which will not be named again
Until this tongue itself has died

There I’ve found the beasts
Which wallow in the blackest mire
Scraping
Gnawing
Strafing
Wasting
Frightening
Guarding

The treasures
I came here
First
To seek

The spirits of those who came before chase me

The find me on the border of dreams

They haunt me with whispers of things to come

Cities not yet burned
Blood not yet spilled

The history of humanity is a history of war

They tell me I have victory coursing through my veins

That my mind is the storm from whence the Tuatha De descend

That my voice is the flame with which Fafnir conquered

That the Hall is open for me if I choose to take up my blade and walk

The history of humanity is a history of war

Fought for land
For lineage
For freedom

But what of this modern warfare

Fought for the whim of puppeteers

Fought for the ideologies of elitists

Fought to pave new paths of corruption

In hopes that they might relieve us the ******* of the former

How does one know what to stand for when all one knows is corrupt

How does one fight in a war against violence

Take up thy blade

Walk

Find a weapon. Anything will work. Yeah, a pen is perfect. Use your weapon on everyone except yourself. Make them ugly. Accentuate every out of place contour, every blemish every grotesque discoloration you can think of. Take your weapon. Turn it on yourself. Make their ugliness your own. Know it was always yours.

Lay awake at night. Stare at the ceiling in your bed until your eyes adjust to the dark room and it is bright as day. See how deep the shadows truly are. Watch the creatures crawl out from the depths - scurry across the room. Always just outside your vision. Take your weapon. Imagine what they look like. Place the forms of the most disturbing things you have known on them. Dismember them. Disembody them. Strip them of any piece of them that makes them look like you. Contemplate yourself. Take your weapon. Draw the pieces of them that are you.

Drift off. Feel their hands wrap around your ankles. Don't be afraid. They are not forgiving but they are not unsympathetic. Drift further. Feel them looming over you. Sense their warning. Take your weapon. Spin their wisdom to fit your narrative. Use your weapon on your self. Find the narrative that unwinds your truth.

Look in to the fire.

Tell me what you see.

I walk with grace
Not gracefully
But alive
And therefore with more grace
Than may be deserved

My life
An affront to itself
A poetic type of irony
Which deconstructs the whole
To find each piece
Microcosmic
Our lives

Kaleidoscopic melding of melting crown moulding mounding

On the floor

Where I lay flat
On my stomach
Waiting for it to form
Into something more exciting
Or at least less
Digestible

A child’s pursuit
Of confounding
To turn around
And confound

To be got
To be able to get

What I’m trying to say is one time I ingested psilocybin mushrooms in the forest and climbed to the top of a tree fort. My friend told me to draw what I saw and handed me a pen. I grabbed the pen and it slipped from my hand to the ground. And I knew. I knew in that moment there was nothing to say. I saw two shadowed figures standing on the ground and one of them pointed up to us.

The wheel is turning
Ever and onward
Rushing at speeds
Incomprehensible
To the acute observer

Obtuse the angles
Of the eye which catches
The periphery
And sees moving
Or shifting

The pavement is veiled in zig-zagging patterns superimposed and waiting to split open revealing the universe

And I lay
Tired and wide-eyed
A stone stabbing the back of my head
Staring at the sky
Wondering how infinite
Infinity

A vain pursuit
To place words
Where there are already
Stars and space

What I’m trying to say is, months later I was in the same forest with the same friend who had given me the pen which taught me to speak. We were doing ******* off of the case of a digital scale by a fire pit lined with fallen trees. It was fall and it was windy and we all had to gather around to lay out lines so it wouldn’t blow away. My friend points to the tree fort and asks if I remember the time we sat there tripping. I remember the shadowed figures and I remember there is nothing to say.

Silence a slippery thing
Not like darkness
Gauged in tone
Simply there
Or not

Seemingly never not
Always a ringing
Almost chirping
If you listen close
To the walls

The stories of dead trees whose lives spanned unspoken aeons and whose roots tasted plowed and plagued soil - felt the crisp rain before we turned it to acid.

I hear this rain
I stand out in it
Feel it on my skin
Listen closely to its story

A stalemate
To say things are known
In opposition to that
Which dictates knowing

What I’m trying to say is, I spent a lot of time going back to that place. There were abandoned storage containers we used to smoke **** and drink beer inside of. I would try to phase through the walls on dextromethorphan, always getting stuck about a foot behind where the wall is. You see it’s not the wall you have to worry about, it’s the underlying concept of a barrier that manifests itself in a wall that I could never seem to get past.

Until that time
Asleep in the next room
I walked to the bathroom

Whispering walls foreboding dark fortunes. Blue reflections of artificial light contorting face and shadows.

I saw it

It placed one finger on its lips

The other hand outstretched
Reaching in to darkness

What I’m trying to ask is,
What I need to know is,
“What were you reaching for?”

Steel grey mars the sky of a dead world

A specter stares at a stained glass rendering of a dead story he read about in a dead book on a dead religion in a dead language.

He sits on a dead tree and kneels on its dead kin.

A revenant sings

Smoke pours from the burning remains of dead plants turned incense - dying

He walks toward the pulpit

Carved and engraved by a dead artist from a dead town named after a dead slave owner

He grabs the pulpit

Dead skin of his fingernails gripping twisted filigree molded from dead vines

He speaks of life

Of Sunday morning soirées dancing in the summer heat laughing through the harsh winter laying under covers hiding from their nightmares board games on the floor of the living room of the new house on a rainy Tuesday afternoon the smell of pancakes every Saturday morning driving thriving twisting writing breathing bleeding beating

Living

And he almost forgets

She is dead

And his stories

Are ghost stories

Heavens!

Whose angelic bodies sing
Eternal in service
To supremacy

Whose chains of light confine
The awful creatures’ existence
To knees

What shallow merit in good
To be condemned to
Servitude perpetual

And yet,
Here we are

This world a frightful Eden
It’s laws unbroken binding
Their exception paradise
For fools

Heironymus!

What say you of our garden
For whose earthly delights
We do tread shallow waters
Longing for release

What say you of these new-built cages
Steel and glass spires rending
Views of heavens for multitudes
Of scuffling creatures

The fertile forest lain flat to mound
Smoldering bile skyward

What say you, Heironymus?

And Marcus!

What say you of the rampant plague
Indifference
Of stoic nature not hard fought
But fostered from the womb

A generation’s tethered dreams
Of vain glory
Seldom pursued

Whose very tools of liberation
Themselves became
Their ties

What say you, Marcus?

And Plato!

What say you of the shadows
We have cast from whose dancing
In the flickering light
We have grown to know
Bemusement

Would you call that virtue
Justice which has stole
Away our vessels

Where would you have
A soul migrate
Which, lost, knows only

I

A vagrant - a lion?
A king - a sheep?
A beggar - a lion?
A soldier - a sheep?
A doctor - a lion?
A priest - a sheep?

What say you, Plato?

1:45 PM

My clock falls from the wall

Unacted upon by outside forces

The time reads

1:34

And 33 seconds

I remember the screams of the children out on the Common that night. I remember the deafening sounds, as sparks flew past my eyes. I remember the canister landing and pouring it’s smoke to the sky. I remember the look in that man’s eyes, with his hands stretched to the night. As he walked toward the chaos and knew he was ready to die for what’s right.

Chanting, “no justice, no peace”
Forced to live up to the promise

“No justice, no peace”
Turning the masses to prophets

There is neither justice nor peace

As they walk from their cells as free men

“No justice, no peace”

And must we live up to this promise?

How many veils must be lifted to see what is true?

Impatience - the curse of the dying
Who wait with bated breath
For it to be taken from them

Expectedly

The promise of eternal life with which to lift these veils itself a curse

Enlightenment

An ancient joke told by those who have seen true darkness

What could be left to ponder in such a context
With no constraints
And time an endless yarn
Not waiting to be cut

What matter the mysteries that might rise from the well
And what sense in waking from passive slumber
To have hand in the inevitable
Which eternal shifts

No,

Fading is the light

And from it’s last dim flicker may expand again

But mourn not the memories lost
The veils placed gently back to shroud things once thought known

For impatience is the curse of the dying
But death the blessing of the eternal

If you bled the way I bled
If you died the way I died
If you were tied how I was tied
To that hospital bed that night

Would you feel the things i feel
Would you see the things I see
Would you know the things I know
About the shadows in the night

The way they dance
The way they writhe
The way they breathe the scared light
How they’re the only holy thing
I’ve ******* found
In this god
******
Life

An empire rises
It is built trading fetters and blood for gold

An empire falls
It is buried by an oilfield inside of a dismantled nuclear chassis

No gold to its name
Only fragments of promises
And lies
Fed to infants and children through play and flags and glowing screens and pledges of allegiance to dead concepts and gods who only love the people who spread their name and poison - literal poison that is the only source of sustenance for slave wage debt prisoners ******* at the **** of late stage consumerism betting every extra penny on fifteen minutes of fame sold to them by a man who built his name out of making things that say only that they are nothing and the raving somatic processes which stem from bleeding every other living being to get on top so you can scream from the top of a twisting metal skyscraper as it succumbs to the earth, “Look at me! I made it.” and the everyone who listens even though nobody really cares

Who grow to hate

Either

Everyone

Or

Themselves

As though we aren’t all pedants working fruitlessly to scratch our names onto anything that is still pure.

We were smoking molly off of tin foil through a plastic straw made from a pen in the public housing complex of a small town. It tasted like black licorice and the kind of bug-spray flavor that I’ve always associated with being poisoned. I was jammed. I couldn’t not be anymore. He took his hit and stared blankly at me. He fell sideways, shaking violently and jumped up as soon as he hit the floor. I almost panicked for a second thinking about walking into the hospital. Pin-***** pupils staring a medical professional in the face, trying to keep my head up from between my knees in the waiting room. He laughed. I laughed. We carried on this way. For some time, actually.

I feel the source of creation inside of me

I expand with every uninhibited inhalation

I contract with every exalted exhalation


The observer -

Ordered masses each doing that which is its prescribed duty

Driving forward and ever expanding -
Exerting dominion over all

Rejoicing the adoration of all who look upon its beauty

Et cetera
Et cetera
Ad infinitum
So mote it be

The birds of the South American jungle carry seeds to Norwegian fjords whose scent floats on wind to Australian plains whose creatures sing songs to which Californian redwoods dance to the admiration of Himalayan peaks who greet the birds on their return from where they came

I see standing before me a visage which I can not comprehend

Benevolent strength - awful power

I feel behind me his guardian - vestige of warriors

Grabbing my right wrist the pillar of justice - immutably unspoken

I hear to my left a roaring thunder which holds secrets none living may speak

I try to say the name and my tongue becomes a dagger

I drink from the waters of the Moroccan coast and they become dry

Pillars of salt rise before me

Irony

The cruel fate of thirst

To come to the place where it may be quelled and find only its first cause

In perpetuity

God is a lie

All is I

Health to those who seek

Health

To those who seek

The eyes of my corpse are a shattered mirror.

I see in their reflection a hundred blue lipped hollow eyed refractions of the same moment.

This is it

Here - Now

The moment where timelines converge, forcing the universe to observe itself through me

Here,

Now splayed out lifeless and limp contorted to wrap around the patterns in the carpet whose million fibers reach out to embrace me as if to say

This is ok,

This is only here, now.

I am pulled through the floor into darkness.

I remember to breathe

And I awake.

The irony of spending a lifetime chasing oblivion only to cower in fear when confronted with its most pure form is not lost on me. I am a coward. I was always a coward searching blindly for something that makes sense, only to become lost on the far reaches of the inexplicable. Raging wildly against the mundane, only to to walk this same path that has so many times been trodden.

“You’re a ******* ugly mug,”she said.

Fragile lace
Draping from the nape of her neck
Fair skin glowing
Preternatural in the waning moonlight

Soft hair framing
Sharp full eyes
Piercing through the bedroom wall
As if to stare at the painting
In the next room

“I’d imagine much of the world is to you,” I reply.