Hands for anathema
and whatever else happens to fall
from the sky in your mouths.

Mountains, valleys, fountains,
stanzas slung in alleyways
outside the houses of our youth.

As loud as the views.

As bright as an empty noose.

We were here before, remember?

The sky,
now the hue of dead futures,
still reeks of the need
to be photographed.

All of you want to
watch me rip my heart
from my chest while rhyming "our trauma"
with "the wide wide world" and never
letting my widest smile break.

On top of that you expect it free of charge.

I mean, I'll do it but I need you all
to at least recognize my skin stretched
tight over soon-to-be cracked ribs
among other things.

The other things are as follows:
Algorithms are taking what glimmers
in secret and burying it deeper beneath hashtags
and posting schedules.

The sky isnt as big as it once was.

This planet is past the point of
sustainable support for your
progeny and will
be an inconceivable hellscape for theirs.

Your compassion is as plastic
as your currency and just as stable.

A truly selfless act is blowing
your brains out at the government buildings
of your respective countries
or at least refusing to bring children
into this yawning grave of a world.

You don't want to hear that
but **** what you do or dont want.

Go ahead, throw your rotten
produce.

I'm ******* starving...

My head cracks open
and spills onto tables at least
three times a week,
so please stop being nervous.

Cut to compatibility unencumbered
by the noose of proxy acceptance.

That is an example of my yolk
sizzling so, again, chill out.

Oh, what megaliths we can dismantle
now that all the walls are dust.

Jumping the gun, as usual.

Lift a cup for the frustration
that comes from missing the kairos.
What is stasis when the cusp
of "stuck" can become the love of the lust for greatness?

I wont draw a line in any sand if you pay me.
Maybe it’s a “wouldn’t”.

Paintings on the wall.

in the words of Ceschi Ramos,
"art is dog **** on a wall,
art is magnifying vices.".
subjectivity is the life-blood
of that abominable thing
crawling through the proverbial
landfill that is our collective
understanding.

we dip every angel feather
in the ******* and drool pooling
at our feet because we can't seem to see
the defining line between
shutting the **** up
and screaming "what does it mean?!"
at the top of our lungs.

something like that.

the only acceptable political idealogies
are an open mind, a heart as blind as it is boundless,
or a molotov cocktail waiting to shatter
against anything built in opposition of
the first two.

I was dragged out of the void,
shackled to these atoms,
and told to swim across oceans
of pain and in doing so
I fell in love with words.

Ill be ****** if anyone
steals the only bit of win
I deserve by trying to make
me think in terms of profit margins
instead of drawing spirals and stick figures.

this darkness, again, is forgettable
and in some way needs to remain
that way.

besieged by the sky,
my lungs have already burst.
never found the words.


i still drift nowhere,
first to find out I'm alone;
I would hate to hide.


the smell of honey
and lavender paints the walls
of mornings lost to...

junk stock depleted,
the sky is now dirt and bones.
i wait in the void.


gravestones bathed in grey.
flowers dance in full spectrum.
i am lost between.


towers built to fall
are beautiful as rubble.
rising dust, their souls.


cracked mirror, bent sight.
everything was always like that,
explosions reversed.


nevermind that one.
cinematics are sickly,
if i let them dream.

on top of a broken throne,
a hopeless ghost that eloped with control
and then leapt off a cliff when
he was supposed to invoke
all those happy memories,
sits uncomfortably.

half of his entropy flows from disasters detached from his history
and the rest is the wind through the trees grown from bitter seeds
thrown into the dirt of what was meant to be forever.

crowns melt with enough heat.
clouds swell above the heads of those condoning his death,
a true crown for the ugly...

off with his head!
off with his head!
off with his head!

he sees them seething and he forgives himself for being a fool
as their screams retreat from the growing light of oblivion.

the flame of the candle
dances with the shadows
on the wall.

life and death are no different.
a dance.

one where I am still watching my feet...

im melting.
each breathe is a flame kissing the wax of my edges,
flesh to air, air to flesh again.
straying from the path is just another
precipice,
a precedent set against fair shares of neglected death.

i was promised a sleep so peaceful
even non-existence would be jealous,
but im still wide awake paying homage to every detail through a fogged lens...

its not as tragic as I would like to paint it.
more a backflip over a slight frustration.

i always said there was
nobody after you.

i don't think i wanted to
believe that,
but my beliefs have never
been able to cast light on
any horrifying nightmare
lurking in the shadows.

so, sounding poetic aside,
there is and never will be
anyone after you.

this is roses thrown into those shadows

Stumbling down the street
whilst scratching your middle name
onto a shabbat candle is me
doing my best Phillipe Petit.

I'll try to remember to read by the light.

as your grace tries to stretch it's wings
in that rusted cage he glues plastic gems on
i am besotted by the elegance of the plumage
falling to a floor i would give anything
to sweep.

the night i proclaimed my love for you
i made an attempt on my life,
the rationale was of the "if i can't have..."
kind, blended with other poisons,
and entirely half-assed.

only now, i understand that
whispering into tin cans and writing
poetry with hand-made quills is far better
than the inky black screaming oblivion
i almost slipped into.

We have a bad habit of scavenging
through any distant tragic
for any and all anecdata.

Brand it Dada,
if you want.

But please miss me with that
"mystically a misfit" shtick infinitely.
It's pushing 2020 and no body is blind
to being persona non grata,
given that it's written on every bit
of our skin like the insignia
of some designer product
we'll forget about before '21 hits.

Brand it post-romantic,
as long as you get past the ****.

Picture a match flipped into gasoline.
Static on a glass screen
destined to crack.
Etcetera.
Etcetera.

Rabbits dragged out of hats
only to be stashed in better ones.

Brand it neo-whatever,
if you absolutely have to.

Im not paid to care.

Eternity loiters outside
the corner store trading
conspiracies for loose cigarettes.

I give her 3, a half empty
Clipper and get ghost as quick
as winter in Qaxaca.
There is air to steal,
bones to pick clean.

This city is a scourge
and I have no plans to change that.
Only the compulsion to
throw my trash on it's burn pile,
pour my salt over it's fields,
and somehow stay numb to the wiles
of the smiling wild down every street
while it all lasts.

That's the only other charity
I'm willing to dredge up.

Don't make that face at me
when the only difference
between us is that you
do the same as I do
just wearing nicer clothes.

We are of the same ilk;
the militant disillusioned
awaiting the next spoonful of anything
that'll turn memory to mist and future to myth.

So ******* back to your routine life
and I'll do the same.
Haven't you heard that mutinies
are useless these days?
The currency of a failed nation.

I wonder what dark plots I could've
feasted on had I not been in so much
of a hurry to leave that corner store?
What forms of wickedness I could've glimpsed slithering; me and dirt covered eternity, just children flipping rocks to watch
centipedes and spiders fleeing from
the heat of God-on-high deeper into
the Earth...

Only the light polluted sky
will ever know the answer to that.

treading water,
pen gripped,
attention a fluttering
gold finch.

i seem to only author
plates, once spinning,
now shattering across
the kitchen floor.

let me drown.

i should maybe write
that down.

Scattering when the caterwaul
shatters the silence
has been the modus operandi
since band tees became mandatory
for imparting a personality.

I'm a casualty of my own inability
to mask anything except excitement
for that same silence.

This is all over the place,
I know.

Art, artist.
Form, function.

It's whatever.
It's nothing.

But I'll still harvest the stars
out of any hardship
like some lovesick punk
drunk on the assumption
of the eternal life of his forgettable darkness.

"if" is no longer
in my vocabulary.

effect then cause.

waveforms to particles.

sliding backwards is
a casual stroll towards a future
i've been wearing like a crown
all along.

that blazing divinity
you wear like a hand knitted
scarf is blinding.

so i bow my head
as i offer the only
things i can;
a palm full of wild honey
and a weary soul.

A shimmering angel
glided in front of me
as I sat in the bookstore coffee shop
watching a documentary on
Pedro Manrique Figueroa.

What height had she fallen from?
How much of her brilliance was
from gleaming alabaster,
my divided attention,
or the loneliness I have come to call
colaboradora?

Obviously, she will never read this
and I will never know the name
which one could utter to bind
her to this lowly mortal plane
like magazine clippings to a canvas.

******* hell I need to get out more.

go ahead, confuse drunk and stumbling
down **** soaked alleyways
with a victory march
ending at an aureate throne
that i would wager
looks as if it were set atop the dais by
the most righteously fickle of pantheons.

in the spring of my life
i levitated everywhere i went
and started wildfires with
just a glance.

now, as my summer ends,
i'm begging strangers
for a light,
hoping they don't notice
the dust and blood on my feet.

it's already getting cold out.

I worry about commas
and semicolons while
a neutron star collapses
behind my eyes

two sides

I’ve made a hobby
out of getting lost
in the apocalypse
blossoming in the "ad nauseam".

Dolly zoom on the obelisk
I’ve scrawled my nonsense on.
Jump-cut to my fist clenched
at purple firmament;
blood running down forearm.
Fade to black.
No credits.

Again.
Nonsense.

Once i wished we would
eventually turn a front porch
into a cathedral.

Honey still dripping from every moon.

Some sh#t like that.

there is always more hallways.
this labyrinth is unyielding
to my desire sitting like
a king atop my curiosity's corpse.

more hallways,
more thrones.

stop, please.

you have to stop
holding onto
every ****t thing
that happens to you.

Worlds will bleed before they sing.

Sorry to be the dying spider curling up
underneath your church pew,
but i’m not really.

This is a service of another colour.
Pays less, as well.

Again, what the f&%k am i talking about?

i get lost in my gibberish.
picture an old witch singing
to vapor rolling out of a
black iron cauldron.

haphazardly smashing words
into one another.
CERN, but a person
lacking a purpose...i guess.

realities collapse.

what the f%&k am i talking about?

Every breath as heavy as
the world, every second a waiting room.

You can’t leave yet.

You can’t.

you're dancing under the light
of my unraveling;
i crawl out of my own mouth forever.

say what you will,
but smile at me as I catch each and every syllable
like fireflies in a jar.
smile at me as I show you them,
smiling like a child.

Cut to tower,
crumbling.
Check the sun
every hour;
Im underneath concern always.

Something about this void feels
off this time.

some sanctioned grandiloquence
and what i actually write
fight one another
for height in this blight of a hierarchy.

in other words, they are ****.

i want you to feel something,
even if it is negative.

you would be surprised at what is combustible.

we don't believe in believing.
we believed in you and, well...

we have a reason to be all teeth
for any and all demagogues
dreamimg themselves into demi-gods
some weekend next February.

we are the stars that have been dead
for millenia,
but still make me feel divinely insignificant.

we are the new constellations
named by a future us.

we are the deepening ethos
which lifted them up to rot
in the lofty quantum myth of consciousness like the rest of us.

we are entangled with the ever-blossoming constant
we watch like a top spinning ad nauseum.

we are indifferent to your opinions and principles
and tired of your excuses for not "getting it".
we view that **** as background music for the apocalypse
unraveling before our collective nakedness.

we are ******* hostile.

we are clenched fists ****** to clouds
after a rousing battle speech
collapses into echos we weaponize
on accident like Mingus on a piano.

we are as colossal as the fossilized intimacy you lost
on the blackened avenues of past uses
of compassion as a mask.

we are starving for the space
inside of which you remain just to atrophy.

we are the cloven hooves of crooked
discipline dancing to sounds of
splashing gasoline.

we are the mushroom clouds crowning
our boundless potential.

before anything else, we are you.
you're worst-case scenario
unearthed by the prayers to float off
into the fade-away before a pretty credit roll;
unwavering.

we are catastrophe, but we don't have to be.

I lose poems written
by the long dead monarch "me"
in the liquid hues moving
across cheap gessobord.

Call it the lost art of disillusionment
treated as dreams imbued
with defeat.

"Viva la revolution"
screamed from every rooftop
and useless street
by the youth who refuse to
eat or drink anything
but silver spoons full of ellipses
confused as spots where ink...

My eyes have been wide.

Tracing the lines
of your light in my mind
I vibrate; "blind me, please"
I try to scream at the vibrancy
to no avail.

Waves to particles,
handshakes to arsenals;
it's all background noise
I avoid while my darkness pulls
your shine closer.

Blind me, please.

I've resigned my faith
in being reshaped into anything
but just another face in the crowd
if your light ever fades.

Blind me, please.

Stasis to stasis,
stations of the cross
lost in a basement
beneath some planar baseline.

I hate time.

I'd rather daisy chain rhymes
like claymores arranged
in gateways;
bouquets of daffodils
and baby's breath
on a grave.

Slain means dead,
they say.

They say a lot of things.

We cogs will spin until,
one by one,
our teeth break
and are reattached.

Then they'll rip us out,
melt us down,
and forge a new "us"
when there is enough
of us piled up
to bother with.

Rinse.
Repeat.

Tumbling down
the same hole, same rabbit,
blah blah blah

What depth does the foundation
of my bastion of atoms
crack at?

The adversary,
that nefarious nature
laughing madly throughout the ages,
knows the cracks by heart
I'm told.

He could speak of the stones ground
to dust under the glacier of my soul
for days without repeating himself.

Then he has to know I'm a sucker for romance.

I hear a low hum constantly.

Imagine diamonds falling
in slow motion,
facets catching light,
soundtracked by
Whiter Shade of Pale.

I've long since mastered
the subtle art of getting sidetracked.

I'm also told younger generations
can hear electricity or something.
Still doesn't account for the hum
because the fridge sounds
like talk radio.

The night sky is so far beyond
being described by some
primitive technology such as language.

I fall in love with her over and over.

My lips remember her feet
in every sip of anything.

Over and over.

"Never been one for dancing"
would be carved into my headstone
if it weren't for the fact that
my grave was robbed of it's
distant dreary locality by the
winding rattlesnake of a path
that I now stumble down.

It isn't me who whistles
that tune you can't quite taste the name of,
even as it dances on the tip of your tongue.

I promise.

I promise this is homage paid to
whichever lofty lord or lady
decides to descend from
their alabaster irrelevance
and keeps the change in wind
direction to their ******* self.

It's not oxen driven off a cliff
or anything, but in this economy
it will have to do.

You mumble your myriad mantras.

The hissing mysticism crescendos.

The whistler switches the octave.

Me; dizzy again, ******* off the tip
of a cryptic world with a pristine grin
as the dense twisting mists of mystery
beginning to drift betwixt the...

The whistling fades.

Tricks of the wind.

Never.

The hardest thing I have ever
attempted in my 30 years has been
keeping my grip on the serpent's tail
as it spirals up into infinity.

This candle that burns before me
is dedicated to the times it slipped
from my fingers and I was
reacquainted with the dirt I
had forgotten would embrace me
like my great-grandmother used to.

Wax in the bowl,
supple dark.

A single syllable slides out of somewhere.

Another candle.
Another heart softly beating.
until it isn't.

It's disgustingly unfair, I know.
But...

Visions,
smoke rings and grocery lists,
ovaries to kicks;
prisons of genetic streaming.

Kings dream of thieves
and thieves dream of
learning shinier schemes.

Laugh when the moon
sings eternally.

Laugh when spoonfuls of sense
are lifted by my shaking hand.

Laugh when anyone spits into
the abyss forever at their feet.

Laugh when the prismatic facsimiles
of mastery are scattering in the winds of change.

Laugh like it's the last cadaver stacked.

No scavengers.

No glass to crack.

No Saturn's curse.

None of that.

So laugh.
Laugh like the mad *******
you act like only exist
in past saturdays spent
in the bastion that was your grandmother's backyard.


Laugh.
Please, for ****'s sake, laugh.

de-focus.
being alone as a kid
in a parking lot is poetry later.
de-focus, please.

hope is deep, i know.
the lack of it is worse.

Suffering is a hovering
mother ship made of cheap tissues
hardened by ***** spilled
in shame and shadow
by (fill in the blank).

It's a crumbling mobile home
awaiting the day it's replaced
by the space it defamed
with it's sloppy symmetry.

We could raze it with a lazy
string of syllables, but we...

We flicker; pixels on the screen
of a digital camera discovered in a yard sale
under the tyrant-sun of a southern summer saturday.
"I'll give ya four for it.", we mutter to the resplendent deity sipping her ice tea from amber pressed glass in a neon pink plastic lawn chair.

The ice clinks in her glass
and the cicadas answer for her
and I think to myself that this has to be a dream,
that the Japanese have a term for the sound cicadas make that is infinitely more fun than "crepitation".

zing-zing-zing.

I'm laying on the floor of some kitchen
ive never been in and can't here a ******* thing besides the electricity coursing through the endlessly twisting-turning wires hidden just beneath the drywall.

I'm actually not anywhere at all.
writing from a...

I like destroying what I create sometimes.
It's easier than never finishing something,
sometimes.

need to break patterns,
dust,
fall through nebulas of flesh
and thought often enough
to touch the past with the future
like it matters or mattered
.
crash, burn, etc.
scatter in the wind.
imminent is the division
drifting in those same nebulas.

someone, anyone, paint them.
cage the visage to canvas or brick.

please.

what i need is to stop the dialogue
between myself and i.

need to break patterns.
need to sleep.