This morning I cut off around 4 months of hair in the bathroom mirror I have watched myself wash my hands in since I was old enough to remember.
I thought about what happened in those 4 months,
what happened in those years outside of having staring contests with my reflection
while trying to guess the scent of the hand soap my grandmother had filled her ceramic seashell dispenser with;
it was different every time,
but somehow
it always smelled the way the lavender in the backyard did that afternoon I found out they had shut off your ventilator.

I only know that now;
hair trimmings on the floor
waiting to be swept up and
dumped around the rose bushes
so the deer won't try to dine on them
before they've had a chance to bloom.

Something like that.

I'm not mad at you for what happened.
Only mad at myself about how
the last thing I told you was a
dad-lecture about looking sloppy ****** up in front of people.
Mad that I only said that ****
because it was ******* up my high
and was too spineless to just be honest about it.

I think I might cut a few more
inches off in the morning.

Saints in the grass,
snakes in the red inked rice paper,
no stakes.

Paydirt to just dirt,
inertia,
stealing the first buds on your neighbor's rose bush
because you've earned them.

Worth is a burned bridge
glimpsed over a shoulder,
burgeoning burned already
lest we embed flesh in cold earth because to smoulder is a fate worse than rehearsing a death wish
in the cracked mirror of modernity.

Learned behavior.

These days the
development of a style
is like trying to translate
the leaves blowing across
concrete into Naruda
at his most heartbroken.

You either try or lie about what
is dying in the background
of every family photograph
yet to be taken.

Being well received is a gold star
sticker by your name written in
yellow crayon;
I don't want you to like me.

Wilmot in the park,
the dregs hurled at the world,
teeth stained red or falling out.

I don't want you to like me.

I want you to feel something.

The more the reader
is left to ask what happened
the more the mask slips
and the trajectory of this elliptical orbit I'm absorbed in can be
learned and mapped out.

Black clouds holding hands
with the laughing child in my chest.

Where's the threads,
the vein that runs through it,
the ******* point to it all?

You can't daisy chain clouds
with "I love you" whispered
in abandoned houses
and expect it to rip out hearts.

Patterns, patterns, patterns end.

Nothing matters anyway.

More masks,
less friends.

This lassitude is a path
I intend to stray from,
go laughing like a madman
off into the wild wild faceless
fade-away until I wake up
in another's afternoon.

Square one is etched in my light-body.

Masks, masks, and masks.

Sad poems stacked somewhere
between our past and the shattered
glass still scattering Saturday sunshine;
I think I've loved life enough, thanks.

Through the narrow window
in my cell I see the
sunset shading everything,
from sky to soil,
the color of watered down
merlot soaking into fresh white linen
and I wonder how much
you've been laughing lately.