all of these atoms,
in spite of will.
the paralysis,
a false inability to
alter the world's drift.

it makes me think of
dumbstruck faces pressed
against glass watching
the mechanical function
of collective helplessness.

all of these atoms though.

seen this more than sky.
the sky now, this life, I mean.
I am all things, dead.

oracular inversion...
she is alone in her head
my lonely eats the same bread

***** on the carpet

but the moment was so ambrosial,
like snow melting in gorgeous chestnut hair,
like Coltrane's Favorite Things for the hundred-thousandth time,
like the morning Sun shining
through Manuka honey
slowly dripping off my spoon into
the black abyss of my coffee cup.

I am present.
I promise, ya.

I'm indebted to the
wretched headtrips of "yesterday"
for never letting me do more
than whisper a single death wish
(thank you)
between labored breaths.
I'm deathless now.
just flesh stretched tight over bright smiling, and otherwise unbridled,
sunlight in love with just being here to lend the luminosity in the first place.

I only learn of grace
from kids grinning and ripping birthday gifts open in grainy VHS tapes I probably shoplifted from the local thrift shop.
Either there or on park benches
tossing seeds to flocks of pigeons
cooing at my feet.
Did you know they were brought
to this country by immigrant chefs?

Again, I'm present.
Honestly.
I'm as conscious of it all as it gets;
the God of the phenomenological slog
we all call "the now",
unbound from His vow of vigilance
in the watch-and-plot of all apocalyptic
loss of momentum...

my attention span is like
incense smoke curling out of
a monastery window somewhere
in the Himalayas,
like the hidden weight of a whispered "thank you",
like the half empty silver cigarette case rattling in Camus' coatpocket as he walks,
collar up and head down,
to Café de Flore for breakfast.
or lunch.
or...

I'm present.
I promise.
(thank you)
I'm present.
Honest to God.
(thank you)

I'm ******* nowhere.
no, thank you.

I'm present.

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.

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.

a zygote to high hopes
splattered on streets
that lead to Zion;
a new day to pay for
if you got it like that.

america dreams in 4k
and all we have is an
old CRT with rabbit ears.

the revolution will be
printed on recycled
paper and handed out
in the grocery section
of wal-mart.

digital and analog
and minerals and masks.

all is comedy and we don't
laugh anymore.

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.

after all these years of spitting
blood and laughing until it feels
as though ribs have cracked,
there is one fact that never
changes.

one note that persists after
the curtains stop swaying
and the audience has gone home.

one line that seems as though
it is etched into the bedrock
of everything.

it has haunted me throughout
my life, only because i
misunderstood it's attempts
at relaying it's
message through slamming doors
and creaking floorboards.

i've come to know it as grace;
a gentle touch of my face
by someone who loves me more
than i could love anything.

it is that it's not easy being green
and it never will be.

( )

skydiving still,
put a comma where
you want.

I'm lauded,
better ask about me.
this is that "ah nah" ****.

ad nauseam.
bats in the belfry.

but why do we always have to be
writing to or at someone?

mirror talk.
cheer them on until stars die,
all of them.

i wonder if perspectives could be
even more slippery than they
already are?

mirrors shatter in our faces.
blood in the sink.

all of it in all of them.

halfheartedly;
artistry is vacuous.
acquiescence come after ****,
gotta love it though.
everyone is a judge with
not a care in their heads other
than
insurrection's growth.

oh ****
no bliss breathing between here
  and seasons forgotten about.

cattle corralled,
antlers on the raw wood, looming.

Iast on the lists, remember?
Ive never felt ok.
rarer with the hellish day,
agog at the god-head
coming apart like a
house on fire, where's the bellows at?

fade.

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?

erasing the outline
of a full moon;
I'm struck with how much
I couldn't give a ****
about this parralel
"reality"
losing it's whatever
the moon was to it.

casually...

can you be claustrophobic
socially?

an ocean between me everyone
just doesn't seem to cut it.

[budget fx-whatever]

my monsters never needed
to be goaded into anything,
they have always been able
to make a show of things
all on their own.

these kids are talking about
guns because they have no
control over their own lives.

slaves to every change in wind direction.

they will definitely shoot you.

plot twist:
the plot wasnt
ever dropped.

chunks of an ice cap
taking the plunge
into the frigid water
of the Arctic ocean
is picked up
by a microphone
off the coast
Papua New Guinea.

it's all connected.
it's all a lesson.

ive learned it
more times than
I could count.

there is only now.
"duh" the void says with the voice
of my dead mother.

like I said,
I'm the ******* bedrock.

sharks circling,
I'm thinking about
how our desperate pleading
screams
sound to the people
on vacation on the deck
of the passing cruise ship.

does the desolate breeze
make it sound like jazz?

all of these poems you
all write about love,
be it gained or lost,
are the same *******
piece over and over
and over.

we all fall victim to this.
almost like falling...

I am of the mind that art should never stoop to our level but we should always rise to it's.

The low-hanging fruit is our lives.

Never drag your art down into the mud where it can be trampled and unseen by the seething masses.

This is why I will never connect dots for you. I want you to fill in the space between my words with whatever you choose.

I will never hold your hand.
I will never love you.

"though the most simple creatures"
in black gloss Ironlak
on the back wall of the gas station
I was told to stay away from.

I didn't do it,
I promise.

my promises are matches struck
by a nervous mom.

you get it.

we were never not just
wisps of smoke twisting
slowly off the remnants
of someone else's hopes
yet to be made manifest.

maybe, they were.

éphémère.
perpétuel.

nothing ever ends
because it was nothing
to begin with.

everyone,
scatter like opossums
caught in the headlights.

I didn't use that right.
the reason:
because I wanted to draw attention
to the fact that being mesmerized
by eminent death is akin
to being caught in some
cosmic trap.

I bring this up
and by "bring this up"
I mean to say it's all pervasive.

"save us" written in
what seems like driftwood.

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

You can’t leave yet.

You can’t.

lost friends,
lost teeth,
always another cigarette;
bees on bouncing lavender.

isn't that beauty enough?

lich king with a litany
of reasons the ****'s creek
trip went off the rails
last season

in the doorway
on the playground
there may even be wonder
man was watching
before thought let sight
clean knowing like desire
still pitch dark
and something further back
than anyone wants to dwell in
as swiftly as country dying
on the cold floor of unsilvered future
history of nothing
I'm just having fun

You can't even let a poem exist.

You say I have the entitlement issue...

blood flow,
gun smoke,
untold,
untold,
untold.

one ghost amongst
an innumerable mass,
seething,
seething.

we're leasing a room.

I believe the night was smiling
when I found out your lips
were 4th of July fireworks
on some long-exposure ****.

it's not ****, I mean.
I mean.
dot.
dot.
dot.

I'm chasing shadows, I'm sorry.

go ahead,
arrogate the treasure's weight.

I'm never late for anything.

changing weather patterns
don't excuse being aloof
on the route to a better "you".

ive putrified between walls
too many ******* times.
never late for anything,
remember?

remember.
remember.
remember.

remember.

re­member.

I really don't know
what you want from me.

all of my close friends
are dead now
and I don't want to know
if that pattern will continue.

head down on the desk.

happiness has always
been a hallway to me.

the kind of hallway ghosts
watch little kids sleeping from.

Tripping on Lynch
and sipping a fix mysteriously
digitized while any friction
imprints onto my drifting mind.
I used to wonder if the missing time
disappeared into the wicked "Why"
until it proved that concern was
the hidden eye that's twitches
behind the lid of the night sky.
it's indifferent to the light that splits
blissfully prismatic,
these dimensions lack what we wished they did.
That's a sick sadness to witness.
Believe that.

Tragic like the traffic lights reflected
what's left the windshields of smoking cars.
Bent steel,
horns blaring,
gas leaking onto cracked concrete.
Stars hang silent as the space between them.

Comfort zones.
I abandon those even better than I used too.
So pursue what you want.
Because as you can see I don't hesitate.
I chase narrative threads
like a pretty face in a crowd.
Being dead to things that chain you
to the proverbial radiator is good.
I promise.

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.

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.

bleeding from somewhere,
cheers to routines and the walls
I beat my head against though.
I only put my fists into sky now.
why drown when backstrokes
look like Pablo or Baudelaire
or gospel whispered in your ear
while all the awful flares out
like an ancient star?
ive taken hearts out off of sleeves
too many times in this life.
who is really alive anymore?
too many questions,
plenty war to be desensitized to;
my minutes die trying to bloom
infinite.
weaponsize truth.
linchpins pulled.
ascension is as cruel as children
are to other children.

it's **** and you know it
better than I do.

ive been stuck serving verses
to the undeserving and it irks me
to even think of letting it happen further.
this is nurturing a burgeoning
fervour for burning certainty
down to the ******* dirt the worms eat, sleep, and die in.
curtains swing on your "why me"
why me,
why me,
why me,
why, why, why, why?
why this?
why that?
why sink,
why swim,
wine glass,
high G.
please.
self is a hell,
it helps if you let it break,
waves;
waving on the iller side
of heaven's gate.
pilfer life out of what's left
of the seven days you've yet to waste.
thanks.
thankfully you'll think of me.
don't.
please.

our lives are house fires
darkening the sky.

we are told we are lazy
by those who handed
us a plastic water pistol to put them out.

they also poured the gasoline and struck the match.

so let's dance, mad and wild,
into the night until only embers remain.
we can cook our breakfast
with what is left of the kitchen.

The days are becoming too many bricks
through one window
or too much hornet soju before hitting
the next noodle spot.

Old news like the petrichor.

The walls are screaming "pick up the pen"
like it's so simple to not sip the sickness
out of this distance and call it a friend.

Mentally melting,
sell it quick,
sell it quicker.
The market's on nose-dive.

Stuck and helpless but on a slow climb
to mindful of what "self-as-center" gets.

I guess this isnt idleness...

High life bottles broken in knife fights;
the novel is hopeless but at least
that "dying light" **** is happily
it's own niche now.

Dreams have been louder
than usual lately.
Lonely linked linguistics with
a home-free ***** fit,
I'm a rose through the
drywall if you pay me.

They don't.

Wigs split themselves
and Incels run up gripping
Lysol cans and white bics
claiming they can make
halos with them.

They can't.

I'm torn between hoping you smile when you read these and wanting to laugh at the thought of you limiting me so much that you believe they are about you.

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.

a little bit of distance
goes a very long way.

is that a pun?
honestly, is it?

ive been shaking
off a shadow for
most my life;
Ceyx washing up,
rotting,
screaming the loudest.

Alcyone wailing about anything.

I promise I am happy.
         content.
                  content.
                           content.

   please, validate me.