blank.
drawn.
page.
somewhere in between is
something sacrosanct;
Shangri la.
(jump)
I'll be the last ghost to fade away.
just take it all a way's away from me;
my days are numbered.
trust me when I tell you
I take the comfort like pain medication.
I'm not saying we face death,
but claiming we were the patron-saints
of anything other than taking vacation
days for vacations never taken
is pretty ******* ridiculous.

just saying.

sacred?
half of that at least.
sanctity was but a raft on a beach
before the tide came.
my mind state is in the wind
pretty much always.

late to all parties,
call it fashion.
balled fists,
call it stalwart or passion.
it all ends the same.
it's all dirt.
that is it's name, right?

spinning,
spinning.

disrobing disbelief
as if it were a lover
just as drunk as I am
got me nothing
but more disbelief.

so now I sleep alone,
clothed,
with fantasy.

"tell me a story,
any story,
about anything",
I whisper
to tobacco stained wallpaper
my vulnerability
breeds like
rats behind.

scenes of gold falling like snow
eyes reflecting alien stars in the middle of their death throes
this is fiction of the cheapest variety

maybe ill write your naked thighs
into lazy afternoons ive yet to take for granted
and call it art

you will probably never read this
and ill take that for granted too
and nose dive into the prolix
and intone the name death knows me by
and
and
and
and slip on these ellipsis i keep leaving on the hardwood
i drip paint and candle wax on
long gone down holes blacker than the bottom of swamps
reflecting those dying stars in the croaks of its frogs
no hope of talk
no lotus blooms
just poets scrawling on cell walls about it
mouths sowed up like the industry that doesnt want me
holier than thou
hell calls often
try not to seem so astounded
these mountains i mold out of old guilt
wilt like the orange roses on my altar i pick from my nana's backyard
focus
scratch warnings in the form of black hearts on every desk
locus
elote beneath swinging street light
coyotes locating beneath cracked moon
cut to me eyes rolling out of my bleeding head
bedrock

lets get off the ******* carousel
share the wealth of being able to trace the way back
to the philosophical trap house
parallel to all apparent selves
melt
melt
melt

sell it

To J. Toombs,
sovereign de la deluge:
we love you.

Remember the willows
and our many conversations
about the nature of doorways.

Catch me at the solstice
howling about the half and half
being frozen.

A labyrinth is a match flicked
into a pool of gas one will notice
only if one has ever before ignored fate

Say thank you.

ephemera,
éphémère,
let's talk it out.
its chalk outlines looking
like milk in the rain, remember?

I'm here.
my flesh searing on
a grill more alabaster
than aluminum.

I'm used to "done" as a theme.
keep that to yourself.

I write to the sound of my demons
pawing at the veil
like stray cats at a screen door.

i find meaning in the breeze
and teeth spit in the sink.

this lines of declaration *******
is tired and contrived,
i apologize.

lying.

not alive at all.
this isn't death either.
the next best ether to evolve out of
is probably the farthest away.

so please please please
just stay for coffee
and the exposition.
we all wanna know
if all this darkness is fate
or some incurable sickness
in need of a name and being forgotten.

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'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.

i said “cicada”.
layers ******* everywhere.
getting lost in space.

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.

bodhisattva,
hotbox a square in the lobby
of every hotel at once.
la di ******* da.
"try to stop me" is written in
the auric field,
Lorca in front of the firing squad.
of course it's **** or be built better
by anybody else afterwards.
bet.
i cash checks from the cancer-verse,
dead to whatever panders
to a standard first.
push me out this ******* window.
please.
i need to touch earth urgently.
I need to simplify all of this
balled fist twist and turn ****
burning around me.
don't listen to me.
i'm howling at the moon in my memory.
i'm not new to the entropy.

you know this though.
you know this.

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...

You can't even let a poem exist.

You say I have the entitlement issue...

Aesop Rock and Freddie Gibbs.

My bailiwick is perpetuating
mania back on itself,
the radius is shaped
like canopic jars carved in the likeness of mad gods of hells
I've missed on trips through the blackened aftermath imagined
ad hoc in afternoons which we were meant to scatter like ashes, like truth,  like flattery, like rats..

Ladders to illusory
for proof of the usefulness
the numinous has in obfuscating
my *******,
past lives,
fugue states,
immune to the mutagenic malaise of this routine rebuking of being aloof in the face of futures yet to be hewn from the quantum foam.

Empty bottles.
Ghosts given up too indifferent sky.
Empires toppled by nightfall.
There is no "why” to all of this,
just a primal drive off the tallest cliffs we can possibly find.

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.

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

lucky men have nothing on me.

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.

flowers reaching for azure,
sun gilding everything;
it's all so ******* gorgeous
and yet,
no matter how much splendor
I manage to choke down
I still think about
killing myself every single
******* day.

Breeze of the night is a scream
so cold you'll have to through out
a roast or two.
  More softly murmur o’er the
unacknowledged being acknowledged
being long ******* overdue.
For however long Slumber seals my fate,
  I'll never shun any aliteriation.

Or breathe those sweet æolian strains
  Stolen from celestial circuitry
To charm her ear while anything other than death remains,
it just a ******* picture, face it.

I hate it more than you,
I promise.

eyes wide and watery
in front of the data flow;
effigies
effigies
effigies.
days just grow into decades now.
let me leave.
let me leave.
let me leave.
the night sky i've been authoring is glaring back.

it ******* better be.

sun through boring blinds,
desert;
I'm blind to it.

mind if I sit and not think
of the next 50 years?
ive been trying to disappear
for years.

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

before it stops;
peep the structure.

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.

that pulse,
pulsing,
in and out,
breath picked apart
like a rabbit on hissing
pavement.
like fig leaves in the
wind.

I see why
punctuation
is
meaningless

the telephone never rings;
all quiet amongst the tombstones,
names worn away by the rain.

she died all alone in her two-tone
Chevrolet with a broken radio,
a full tank of gas,
and the garage door closed.

they didn't find her for months.
I say they never found her at all.

only the skies are ever replaced.
Zarathustra was overbriefed
as always.
it makes me want a doomsday,
a noose swing,
a new face.

this spinning plate thing
is not as lucrative as I had thought
it would be.
still no worse than I was
so that is something.

whisper "love" to the pooling
blood at your feet.
we pick our teeth up
as though they were pain pills
we couldn't keep down,
half digested,
heavens half realized.

escape if you can.

ravens roost in our open chests
and our children will name them
after relatives they have only ever
met as shadows in the corners
of their bedrooms.

all of this is melting wax,
the smell of fat dripping
into fire,
a coffin lid to scratch
until our nails break off
and fall into our screaming mouths.

even escape is wasted effort.
we awaken every ******* time.

I can turn a bright morning
into a nightmare as good as any.

it doesnt mean i want to.

so every moment not alone
is "too many cooks" to me.

it doesnt mean i want that either.

in lieu of a gilded rose
in front of a glimmering window
we have this moment
in which we disclose,
to you as much as to ourselves
a memory;
bones pulled from a frozen lake.

call it stolen.
call it entropy.
don't ever call it again.

no matter the path
you choose to crack microscopically
Saturn will still scream on a wavelength
that took 4.5 billion to even be noticed.

that's divinity.
blindly casting unfathomabilty
at the void all around itself:
king, queen, and the thief purloining
the centerpiece from the former's feast table.

so please explain to me why,
a billion miles away from Saturn,
closer to Sol,
suicide is something that exists.
especially since every truth is a myth
that, in the end,
was ripped from the mist of **** memories
remembered a bit differently.

so, is it stolen?
is this entropy?
are you married with kids?

whatever it's become for you,
love it.
as well as however it is you fit into it.

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.

no end,
no beginning.

I think a spider made this.

doubt is a cage.

dont you refrain
from anything
in this whole world
if nobody gets hurt
when you do it.
or if youre the only one
that can get hurt;
do it.

or don't and say you
did it anyway.

either way,
they'll doubt you even did it.

doubt is a cage.

smile and take it.

meanwhile,  
we are in lotus pose
on a crowded sidewalk
pouring gasoline over our heads.

every mirror is a door.
it's always been like that.
time-lapse.
bend light through the way
fresh bread smells right out of the oven.

i knew your name once
and i believe myself this time.

Evoking an old ghost from smoke on the night of a new moon,
curses written in perfect cursive
by the light of my gloom's doom.

I'm purification.
I'm uselessly aloof
but in full-bloom in the basement
where your mutiny is reduced
to a tomb for the nameless.

I am not that dope in the spoon.

Anymore.

hare Rama, hare Krishna.

I'm rabbits running through
a field of barley swaying in
a breeze that reeks of a
Mcdonalds
on fire.

think dreams,
and not breathing.

I'm stars; screaming my name,
your name, our many names,
all night, every night.

delete me, please

in that flow state
where everything is a brushstroke

end to end
grow fade air is buried
I'm as ancient as I am unknown

period.

weary kids make the best
clearly dead adults;
my fabled gilded career tree.
if I built it they would've came, right?
cradled wilted;
the mirror me waving at me
when I'm not looking.

should have been a comma.

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

two sides

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.

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.

She has me spun around;
nothing but this comes to
the page.

I'm ok with it 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.

in love's first winter
I lost my ******* mind twice;
ground is still bleeding.

thinking over years,
I slowly fall forever.
we were happy there.

we were never that.
leverage fact somewhere else.
we were never that.

probably so.

this whole bleeding poetry thing,
poem by poem,
is ******.
book is finished
like the garlic was last year.

and the blackberries.

I'm in the street just begging
for death to possess these
aching bones of mine
like a mother that just
found her lost kid at the mall.

nobody will read these otherwise.

last two cigarettes,
a lot more beer,
I didn't buy more of the former
because the corner store
is too ******* high;
I'm at a bodega and I remember everything.

half right.
half-life,
half light;
I laugh in reverse sometimes.

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

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.

Give me the cup
and I'll fill it,
with guilt,
with blood,
with a future named in honor
of a nightmare that couldn't rouse
my tired bones.

I have found where all roads end
and laughed at the sky like a madman,
drinking the rain that fell into my open
mouth.

Give me the athame and I'll sharpen
it on my chipped teeth before
I plunge it into trembling earth
that smells of my mother's perfume.

I have knelt here before
but only now do I feel the bruises.

Only now do I love them.