unbeknownst to oceans,
the clouds they reflect
are their souls.

i scratch your endless names
into my wretched heart;
what is darkness anyway?

you'll be ok because you are already.
you'll see.

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.

I am all things, life.
the night sky knows me by [blank].
spinning, spinning slow.

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.

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.

the kind of empty you feel
as a kid having just learned that
your parents are never going
to care to understand you.
that and jazz.

that kind of emptiness and
Mingus, Coltrane, Davis, BBNG;
still careening,
still empty,
still.
ancient.
time means nothing
and nothing is notes on a saxophone,
or piano, or trumpet, or the sky itself.

where are we in the whirlwind?

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?

Emily Dickinson earned her immortality.
fair and square.
if not for any other reason besides
being the reason the words "squirrel" and "eclipse" get to exist forever
right beside one another in print.

this new Pharoahe Monch and th1rt3en album keeps crashing
YouTube Music.
cheap *** phone.

I've written a poem,
a list of websites paying for poetry with how much they are paying for it,
and this.

I picked up Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch for inspiration and never made it passed the first page
of the contents before all that manifested.

threads have only ever
been a human thing.

lost in the wind,
seeds of something.

I've got this hypothesis
on why a threshold
sometimes feels like
baptism.

marigolds,
baby's breath,
blue roses.

it's real until it isnt.

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.

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...

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.

gather your lilies and I'll hang them
from my exposed ribs;
I've always been good at ruining
the beautiful that blooms
because of you.

it's never too late to run.
it's better too scrape the husk
of connection than dream up
a wreckage forever sinking.

dried flowers makes the smell of rot
remind me of the morning sun
bringing out the red in your hair.

it's never too late to run.
it's better to taste the blood
than forget that it's there at all.

f#@€ that.

it's never too late to plunge
headfirst into the acceptance
of the failures of the head
when heart was what we needed.

gather your lilies and we'll hang them
in the windows in our memories
to remind us of the bigger picture
when rain clouds roll in.

it's never too late to love
what we hated once.

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

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?

wedding day
picture Tristan Tzara
reading horoscopes
scene
we all seek out horror shows
to throw quarters into
bored with this
gorefest
metamorphic
CRISP lower case r
NA meeting
we stopped going
we sit in bars
DOC in bathrooms
touching stars
meet Elohim
EMTs weren't fast enough
black
oblivion
slipping from skin like Prada
la la la la
pranayama
for the love God please stop
we did yesterday

"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.

See, I've been eviscerating self
for the viewing pleasure of shadows
for 13 years,
in dark corners all alone
save for those souls holding black holes torn in reality who occasionally
came around to share drugs or a beer with me.

What I am saying is this isolation driving
you all to drink or sink teeth into anything
is my default setting.
I've been laughing like a lunatic watching a
mushroom cloud way bigger than my thumb at arms length rise in the distance for so long that it's become a feather-top
with more pillows than every bed
in every sorority house combined.

You ******* are less than amateur.
I'm the unsung tyrant king of this cancer-verse.
There was never any answers to any questions
or any standards for anything anywhere ever
and there never will be

**** screen.
Acceptance.

it feels like a sunset
in an orange grove
and a swarm of flies choking
the life out of a raccoon
dying on the side
of the highway.

at the same time,
yes.

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

one ghost amongst
an innumerable mass,
seething,
seething.

we're leasing a room.

If you were to only see
the light from the flames dancing
on my face could you believe it was yours and feel unmoored for awhile?

More meaningless questions
to explore.

Undone or undoing?
In the sky or at the movies?

Kith and kin.

Ghosts.

Wind and windows.

Smoke.

Did slipping show us when to
slide?
Did mystery steer the misery to rhyme?
Did Odin limp after?

Meaningless questions.

awareness of self comes as a storm,
filling the rivers and sweeping decay to an ocean
so focused on becoming clouds
each molecule grows a mouth
and preaches only of ascension.

this is just a way of saying
I stare off into space in public.

the dry seasons are of irregular length,
prey and predators shrink into better
versions of themselves
before extinction occurs,
leaving the heat to leech the ink
from any pen within reach.

this is a way of saying i write too
many ****** poems when im depressed.

it lightens the load though,
acts as a lodestone to low points
and distracts like a thrown voice
when my mask slips.

should this be considered enlightenment?
should i be thankful?
should there be a matchstick
for any angels that want to
be numbered?

who is the authority on
matters of the immaterial?

this is a way of stating my
indifference to explanation.

so please, spare me.

white owls in the trees.
it might be the reverse.
this might or might not
have been rehearsed.
absurdity.
verdigris.
kintsugi.
lucidly losing things,
it's ******.

it's ******.
[off screen mutiny]

( )

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.

urtext purge staccato,
you know what I'm saying.
automatic,
learned,
purchased;
below, suddenly cutting in;
call it a symptom of sample culture.

that sibilance is sickening,
no vultures.
deranged,
no victims though.
I hate it.
we all do.
I love that.
infamy, intimacy;
something came between us.

that is why I never unpack.
you should try to.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

burning alive.
I can turn a kairos
to a sky full of
stars
and back again,
just to miss.

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

Alcyone wailing about anything.

if you ever want to talk
about Baudelaire
or greenhouses
then I'm your man.

I've clenched my fist enough
in this life.

so have you.

all of this is an abatoir,
all of it,
and all I want to see is
phospenes or the black
of the big sleep.

I'll match the scars
you feel alright about
showing me.

in my head, that is.

in my heart...
well, ive been known to leave
without leaving,
so I would advise trying
the "not knowing me" thing
and seeing how it shakes out.

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...

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

isn't that beauty enough?

obliged to what?
smile and say, "danke"?

I could hide forever if I could hide forever
behind something.
anything.

I'll abide the dust and sunshine
and the blood i taste
on my tongue at night,
every night,
but not you putrifying the *******
ground water.

anything.
anything.

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.

this path was meant
to be walked alone
and i have accepted
that now.

the birds don't sing for me,
but i delight even more
in the melodies because of it.

my tarot deck fell between
my ocean blue wall and my bed.
I pulled up what I thought was all of them.

no.

the missing only numbered one though,
Strength.

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

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.