days have too many teeth;
the night is a blood orange.

so squeeze it.

squeeze it until its worthy of a cup
in the morning
next to your eggs and hot sauce.

read it back.

came out of nowhere
saying "good night" and "good morning"
in the same cough.

my "now" didn't know scared
until the good fight couldn't hoard bliss
anymore;
it's days lost to years and then some.

its been fun.
I'm a liar.
you know this.
still,
its been fun.

waiting for waist deep,
I'm words,
I'm wasted,
I'm minutes that bit the dirt
to the tune of something catchy.

I'm as ugly as summers suffered
for love;
my lonely puts cathedrals to shame.

shame.
rings bell
shame.

it's ******, I know.

on a lighter note,
I'm bleeding out
in the ******* street.

dogs howling.

how was your day?

three-hour window,
might play a Friday all night
on a Tuesday.

the night we escaped
transitional housing,
most people were
boosting time from
the backkseats of old
four-door Fords
parked on their streets.

yea, the same ones they lived on.

while we lived on instant rice
and the prospect of drunk at midnight,
they were foaming at the mouth
in front of static on a screen.

yea, the same ones they lived on.

these days are fiends for our seconds
and we've been reckless with them
so far,
so I don't know.

my deathwishes snap twigs in the distance,
still.

I call you "mo chuislie"
its honey in a spoon
I know
but you should know that I
forget my heart beats
all the time and
I'm real ******* sorry
about it

no end,
no beginning.

I think a spider made this.

you know that feeling
you get when you know
you have the wrong house?

like that one drink that makes
your body say "we are done".

digging for empathy.

what was the German word
for "almost aliteriation"?

that,
is a one word tome.
my ego pours out
in the form of tears
and sometimes lines from
movies I think people should
see if they haven't yet.

I'm not crying.
I'm sideways on the interstate.
flying,
if you will.

if you build,
remember me
as gold in the afternoon sun.

please.

your face is stars dying
as soon as I wish upon them.

lucky men have nothing on me.

happiness has always
been a hallway
to me.

the kind of hallway
where ghosts of dudes
that died of heart attacks
stare at sleeping kids from.

so I'm in a single room
cabin in the middle of nowhere
trying take over a world or two.

no I'm not.
duh.
I ruin more than contrivance,
stay for the encore.
it goes for three forths of my life,
at least.

"you all should place bets"
he says brushing his teeth
in the mirror,
to himself.
weird.

happiness has always
been a hallway to me.

the kind of hallway ghosts
watch little kids sleeping from.

been trying and failing,
for months,
to befriend the crows
that wake me up every morning;
at the core of my being
I am a cruel person.

ive spent 32 years trying not to be.

brittle steel in cheap cheap oil;
I have no idea how to forge anything.
I have no idea about anything
other than my love for you.

crows cawing at my window.

hold up.
not you
whispered
into tin cans,
it slowly grows and
grows.

before it stops;
peep the structure.

first off,
no,
I dont think so.
so slow,
I'm throwing myself off a cliff
in an infinite number of other realities;
it's all gonna be alright.

slipping.

walking to the corner store,
the sky smelled like peppermint in coffee.
I mean,
nothing.

I'm non-local,
slipping temporally,
slipping.
just speak to me sweet;
there is a bird beating it's wings
against my ribs,
dying to escape.

I watched a male cardinal giving
a female a twig in my driveway.

it's gorgeous,
this moment.

slipping.

my soul is ink spreading through
water on a page,
among other things.
things like a cop passing me with
hash in my pocket,
like sage growing in the kitchen
window of a one bedroom
apartment in Brooklyn,
like sharing memories through
thin walls that stretch across the
whole country.

ive done just about nothing
and I'm no longer proud of that.

how does that sound as far as intros go?

the pillars holding up
my tranquil sky
started trembling
quite some time ago.

just biding my minutes,
biting my nails.
it's a bad habit
I picked up along the way;
ive got alot of them.

I'm working on that.

when the pillars finally
crumble I hope they transmute
into butterflies before a nimbus
even kisses the dirt.

hopefully.

days drag;
I tattooed monster
on my forearm
to remind myself
that my heart is softer
than every sky we ever laughed beneath.

somewhere I read
that my fingerprints
we're set in stone
(flesh)
long before I ever
came to hate myself.

before my first breathe.

yea?

I never saw you dance
and in thinking of that
I realize that I never
actually met you.

I would love to meet you.
that has been a constant.

like breathing.
since I met you.

one of these blasted days
I'll paint this house fire
of mine into Halcyon
something.

you can hear every one of your
names on the wind,
if you listen closely.

Babylon looms.
I'm distant like always.

snub me out,
I'm your last cigarette.

fires die gorgeously.
the mirrors edge is
soap sinking into your bath water.

it's all connected.

i make a mirror
of everyone
while you dream
of the windows
in our old house
raging like rivers
you never wanted
cross anyway.

you rolled your eyes at that,
didn't you?

i lost count of how
many times you said I never
wanted to know you.

my disillusionment,
I spoon it out like sugar.

I stopped using sugar
years ago.

here you go,
darling.
be careful its very very hot.

rolling nickels.
where's the sickel at?
suspense pulled quicker
than dawn when your still drunk
and "if" is guilted out of laughter..

what is it all worth?

dirt.
birds.
that's a contrast for
the whole familia.

im building trust with the jungle
around me.

astound me.

buildings love back.

ive stood on the threshold
of the need for better
for the better part of a
decade.

ive left "thanks" at the door
more times than I could count.

doubt it if you feel ok
about doing so.

do you though?

imagine,
if you will,
a tiger creeping through
the same the tall grass
you and your family
are perusing for food through.

food food.
lose, lose.
I'm used to rejection;
I'm inseparable from wretched
and I hate them for it.

wait,
it's swim or be drowned.
wow.

wow.
I'm smiling still.
im wild child miles away,
thank God.
God dropped the plot.

that liminality though.
I'm casually in the throes
of a lonely never known.
it's baffling;
I'm an Applebee's on fire.

I'm better than all of you.

I hate it as much as you.
only for the fact that my laugh
won't echo.

let go.

yea yea yea.

im where the carrion
carries on,
no use in laughs here.
im fear epitomized
in the form of a lonely
bus stop chill sesh.

im dead.
the best of all of us is
**** that whispers between
war cries.

my war died a while ago.
aisles just grow and grow.
im frozen in the produce section.

weaponize that.
please.
I owe you some recklessness,
I know.

see the stars?

I'm the bedrock here.

I'm an optimist, I promise.

a dandelion growing
out of the eye socket
of a chihuahua
rotting in the street.

it's been there for weeks.

for weeks.

for weeks.

picture me sawing my
right arm off with a
broken beer bottle
while you go on and on
about what I should be doing
with my life.

this nearness we share
is truly awful.

falling apart,
its hardly even art;
I'm growing a fig tree
in an army green ***
on the back porch.

desideratum,
***** at my back,
friends overdosed on whole
pillars of salt long ago.

falling,
falling,
falling.
half the path is overgrown.

I venerate it anyway
and keep on strolling.

why does everyone have
that poetry voice?

that weird inflection up
to the highest archway
that sits shaking above
some contrived nobility,
you know what I aiming at.

"how does thou" type of ****.
im viruses trying at life
in the air and the water supply.

no I'm not.
I'm dying quick.

I just didn't know what else to write;
half-*** author kind of vibe,
right?

all those pretty things.

oh, poor pitiful stupid me,
my "used to be"
is a city bleeding it's population
for no reason at all.

I've stopped the whole escapist thing.
or started to.

harvest moon.
dead of winter.
school bells and bumblebees
and the smell of the Bradfords.

I'm walking backwards through
every labyrinth ever
just looking for somewhere
to sleep.

if only you knew
what the view actually
looked like.

it's a good buy.
it gets real low.
can't **** high fast enough.

well, actually.

sometimes
I feel alone
no matter what

that's a response
to someone who
found me face down
in the mud;
I once breathed through bamboo
for 8 days in a rice paddy
just waiting for the chance
to run.

I'm *** spilled on the deck.
it's something,
isn't it?

evoke something.
it's all *******.

until it isn't, right?
different lives,
fire flies on a humid night
in the backyard.

mask scars with sunshine,
kind of...

line after line after line after line.
don't mind us.

creative output is in overdrive
(that's contrived)
it's exhausting
I love it

jail is like an african black clay
face mask for the ******* soul
I think I'm the only one who
views it as such though
but alas
I remain satisfied

eh

that's what ambition actually sounds like

these million million molecules
between the things we hate
about each other
smother me in the night.

"mama has lost it,
hasn't she?"

I wouldn't think of blaming all of you.
ever.

these walls are thick with paint,
with trauma,
with blood,
with time lost.
I model my mental state
on the falling log levels
in Super Mario World Whatever,
those and the story you told me
crying that one night.

keys and locks,
darling.

the sunshine feels like the scream of something small enough for me to
forget it feels.

feels, though.

pines hold rain longer than
other trees,
maybe;
I build pyramids alone in my dreams.

when you cut my heart out
you better hold it high
enough to block out the ******* sun.

my blood pools at the foot
of God himself;
the best "no" I can think of.

fire watch,
wasp in a wine bottle;
I'm dying to stop thinking
of dying in your head.

I'm fine.
I'm not.
I'm lost.
I'm dead.
its wonderful.

time stops,
curtains pulled.

morose;
more roses though.

war grows like posies
out of pockets.
I've slowly shown self to sun,
still numb to the progress.

gunsmoke, never.
I love "broken" more than
I ever cared to admit.

well, I guess I just did.

was this despondent enough?

the early hour silence
reminds me of shadow puppets
I could never guess.

oh well.

the apple's loved with the oranges.
the swarm is sick.

oh well.

life seems to be just a constant
shaking off of addictions;
one by one,
one by one.

eyes in the ditch,
****,
one by one.

what if I what?
what if I what?

whenever I see New York
I think Dryspell,
always.

thank you.

even though I chase truth through hallways
elsewhere
I've stayed loose while the car crashed,
so to speak.

so again,
thank you.

you were sunflowers
to my grey tones.

it's all so far away
that I can smell it through
closed doors.

it all just rolls like smoke
under buzzing streetlights;
are we the moths or the bats?

whose to say.
I think...
too much, in fact.

it goes,
it's gone,
it's nowhere;
I watch honeybees dance atop
baby's breathe from a jail cell.

it's all so ******* gorgeous.

in the malarial stink
of you having me all so
figured out
I laugh like coyotes in the ******* night.

haven't you learned where suffering
crawls out of by now?