not a soul can save the ocean
from drowning.

stop hoping.

today, i found mana in the corner
of a coffee shop and shared it
with your ghost.

I don't write poetry.

I spill Paul Masson and Pepsi
out of styrofoam cups
on the floors of every theater
within walking distance.

Later, I call it heresy
and start the walk all over again.

But I really don't write poetry.

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.

The sound of me taking
drags off a cigarette
as all these mean dark clouds
roll roaring out all of your heads
is an award worthy soundtrack
all by itself.

and yes, I totally get why the skies look this way.

I just needed something to write about
and the climate seemed to have the
perfect amount of "meta" in it to...

birds are a theme of mine;
I pick up feathers off the street.

they finally settle on my altar
in a 87 cent vase
only big enough for a dandelion
or two.
or feathers.

hawk, turkey vulture,
raven, bluejay, mockingbird,
hummingbird.

however they lost them,
they play bouquet for love now.

like me,
finally.

what we fear as death is just
decor.
victorian, french country, industrial,
rustic;
doesn't matter.
the bones are the same.
some people expire smiling in
neon pink plastic lawnchairs
or pierce the veil ******* themselves on dove-grey french provincial settees from the 18th century.

we have numbed ourselves in our
endless pursuit of complexity;
walked off the precipice of that
final ecstatic unraveling
while wide-eyed and trembling
at the sight of aesthetics,
as cheap as they are fleeting.

we must garder à l'esprit that it all burns to ash, singular in characteristic, that is scattered by winds indifferent to any distinguishable feature in the
many beliefs twisted into the teeth
of sleeping behemoths dreaming of feasts they had yet to awaken to.

it, what we fear, is shapeless.
the absence of all accumulated
delusion, confusion, or fluid lucidity.
ancient.
a non-locality that is the total
sum of the All collapsing in on
it's most basic components
also collapsing in on...elsewhere?

i'm done.
please, come and sit.

tell me how you like your tea?

watch me as I burn
this candle I've been
balancing on my nose
all night.

call it finesse.

ive been left in the rain,
my "separate" is praying
for rain and a good harvest.

darkness creeps under your
your bedroom door,
reaching for you,
reaching for youth.

I lost that last life.
just saying.

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

isn't that beauty enough?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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...

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

before it stops;
peep the structure.

none of this **** is autobiographical.

above everything, remember,
I am a ******* liar.

all of this is a farm.

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.

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.

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.

tin can transmissions
sent and listened to by entangled  
heartstrings long before
the birthday-balloon-blooming-doomsday-dance-off was
standardized as the answer
to any and all questions
regarding the textured pressure
of her breath blessing my forehead;
a vesper my wretched flesh is desperately stretching towards.

(i know, i know.)

this is a test of will.

(i said i...)

this is that mad dash
into the ashen catacombs
to slash the throat of the
last cackling basilisk
so passionately it shatters bone
into the rapturous jazz
crafted with cracked saxophones,
maps the fastest route
to her faceted fathoms
reconstituting past afternoons
in which i was never fortunate
enough to touch the gravity of her
napping naked beside me.

this has always happened
after a collapsing hasn't-yet
and it's enticing.

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.

feel the most alone
when im the most sincere.
you all just want a poem
that feels like one of those
"after class" notes you wished
were passed to you in math class
or at least one that reminds you of
what you think that felt like.

well, bad news in Bosnia.

im in arrears to the
myth of self as well,
which is why
i ****** moons out of the night skies
i tattoo my hands beneath.

I don't know what you expec...
never mind.
(laugh track; plays through credits)

even sorrow solemnly
follows the solace seeking
masses;
I'm last on every list,
ever.

is that enough?
is that the rough of it?

whispers disappear into
the sound of the shower.

blunt burning,
unlearning isnt the only
prerogative.
my "mobbin" is listening
to a faucet dripping.

I'm sovereign after 2am.

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?

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.

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.

this mixed-media paper
curls every time I impose
my watercolors upon them.

I might be using too much water.
I'm definitely using too much water.

I don't care though.

I love the way the paint blooms
from the tip of the brush when it touches the water;
blood dripping into cheap pinot grigio.

as cheap as the word "I",
or family,
or atypical,
or grief.

I wonder what it would be like to
crawl into that hole that you keep
calling the sun?
only pigment blooms around here.

that was dramatic,
I know.

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.

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.

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.

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.

the outside world is eldritch,
inside the crib is meanwhile...
meanwhile, inside the crib
I'm hellbent on using the
downtime to drift
through the ceiling.

pulling teeth out of the maw
of an almost perfect night,
I'm getting lost in
talking about my allergies.

ceiling still solid.

"I don't make promises I cant keep.
which is why I won't make promises ever".
I found a home in that,
so thank you.

I heard you live in my city now.

crowds or people
between us.
my lonely has arrowslits.

the pharaohs sit as dead
as the rest of us.
I've shared the glitz I've gathered.

nothing matters
and you know it.

meanwhile,
drip,
drip,
drip,
it's all good.
this is fine.
the woods are whispering
my name.

my real name.

I love you.

the word verbosity,
the words for ****'s sake.

those are some words
that come to mind
when I think
about your attempt at trying.

you either **** or **** later.
ivory towers turn
to chalk in the rain.

I'm exhausted with the stakes,
as well,
so don't take any
offence from this.

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

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.

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.

who would laugh if hired to?
oh, constable of costly canvas
and lamb of dust;
his art, Nature, with centaurs for show or sale,
once the world has seen
God’s forced politeness
we will all lie to mothers drooling
while fools in their faults, gag grinning.
that sort of book displays a crowd without head or feet.
this is winning somehow.

poets all know a little mutual mercy,
making monsters from
gentle handshakes.

Exordium, sometimes tends to end, nonsense in lofty down feather,
the Thames may shine shipwreck
but dwindles Lethe whose wit is  troublesome.
the greater portion are led astray by labour,
following bombast.
too low to fly, satisfaction;
who engraves the woods beneath waves!

I even hate me,
thanks for asking...

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?