The wretched treachery of the flesh
is a sip of nectarine tea in the shade of a willow,
a reoccuring dream,
a for sale sign in front of a derelict funeral parlor.

Inroads to wisdom
are just slopes to slip off of,
off into open air to elope with
unknowing; the oldest whirlwind ever to be tricked into a jar.

Really it’s all just counting stars like heartbeats
and then taking them for granted.

Im sorry for that ****.

Every calm that has ever birthed
an epiphany for you was really
sheer ******* chaos you were
too blind to notice.

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

Something about this void feels
off this time.

I could survive the winter in your eyes.

I see what I want.

and before, child,
delineation elevated
forlorn gambits;
however, it just kisses lovingly
most nights.
outside, plenty quiet resonates
solitude towards universal variability.
why xenography's zigzagedness
is
so
alive...
nobody knows.

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.

"council house and violent"
is the the greatest line
ive ever felt shudder up
my hollow spine.

might mix the midland
with wilting.
silk screen a t-shirt or two,
features are diffused;
streetlights through rush-hour windshields.

but hollow spines though.

your firmaments fall daily,
don't they?
poor things.
ive been stepping in stratosphere
and calling my demons by pet names
for awhile now.
so my advice would be to
get with the ******* paradigm.
**** being paralyzed in a crisis
when it's crisis from the time
your eyelids open to when they close.

again,
get with the ******* paradigm.
you probably built most of it
anyway.

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.

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.

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.

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.

there is a silver lining in all this,
I'm sure of it.

to the empty mine wailing in a windy
night in some foothills
somewhere,
I hear you.
I hear you.

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

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?

see the stars?

I'm the bedrock here.

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.

When people say “safe as houses”
all I can think about are flames.

I curry favor with my devils
on a daily basis so excuse me
if I think escape is futile.

When people say “amen”
all I can think about is the first time
I saw City of God.

My worries vaporize in the face
of my apathy and I feel you should
know these things only because
you’ve read this far.

I love you.

Thank you.

poetry does not have to be
about love.
in fact, you punch-drunk bleeding heart sap-seekers
smother it like mothers driven to
madness,
pillows in your grasp.

my opinion.

let it be, breathe, dream, or feast upon
whatever it lunges at in the black night unraveling behind the eyes
of any who try lighting fires
for others to write by or cry to
or hide in.

for ***** sake, love that if you
must pry love from something.

just put the ******* pillows down.

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.

life seems to be just a constant
shaking off of addictions;
one by one,
one by one.

eyes in the ditch,
****,
one by one.

what if I what?
what if I what?

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...

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.

Samsara on it's head.
my kind of victory
is a wine glass
on it's side
rolling through
cheap cabernet
and then off the table.

Freddie Freeloader
blaring,
filling the room
with an air that feels like
a hundred frightened rabbits.

wine glass shatters,
no rabbits running;
the cabernet
and my feet
tap tap tapping
the floor.

treasure leapt from an ocean
i've never tasted on the air.

surrendering.

dirges meant to be learned backwards
shuffle on into the dark unknown.

we ask worlds to spin on our tongues.

we are always unfulfilled.

we hate the word "we".

we use despair as a currency.

we are disgusting.

do you remember those dirges?

I do.

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.

birds singing on wires
and treelimbs;
the house is burnt to embers.

we never learn,
we won't remember.

smoke shades sky still sadder
than any of us though.

measured worth
in bones littered across
every bit of this rock.

birds singing.

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.

i grow weary of watching
the world sharpen it's teeth
with a rusty file
and trying to smile
at the same time.

who would want to measure
raindrops in a thunderstorm
when you could just feel them
hit your face?

exit stage left when you
want to stretch a minute
into infinity.

that advice came from a ghost
of a man and cost me a cigarette
and a can of Modelo.

worth is relative, i hear.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I had a dream I was *******
over the balustrade of the arcade
at the top of the Scalla
in the Palazzo Contarini del Bovolo.
Venice's rooftops stretched out beneath me,
completely dark.
cemetery silent.
the only sound was my **** hitting
the calle below.
upon finishing, I turned
and told a shadow, as I
zipped up my jeans,
"let's go get espresso, I need a cigarette."

I hope it was prescient.
I hope the shadow was you.
I hope you read this one.

you most likely won't.
forever the shadow on what I do.

If I'm not holding your hand
then you refuse to walk with me.

I wish that character flaw of yours
would find a porch to die beneath.

I wouldn't mind smelling the rot
for weeks before finding it.

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.

reading what you write
sometimes gives me the
feeling of watching a
low budget **** film,
with a royalty-free excuse
to let a wah-wah pedal
accompany the wet
absence of passion.

      (a wildfire in a glass box
        or Kali candystriping in the
          cancer ward.)

you cannot expect  
spines to tingle when
you refuse to acknowledge  
the deepening abyss in the
facets of self you wear
like hospital gowns.

sometimes i see the naked
singularity hidden behind
your "this is me" event-horizon
and i bathe in it's impossibility;
i could drown in it's defiance, smiling,
if only you could learn to...

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.

This is all the narrative
of some disillusioned author
who conceptualized it long before
he started missing his deadlines
and drinking at breakfast.

All of it.

Everything.

one of these blasted days
I'll paint this house fire
of mine into Halcyon
something.

you can hear every one of your
names on the wind,
if you listen closely.

Babylon looms.
I'm distant like always.

snub me out,
I'm your last cigarette.

fires die gorgeously.
the mirrors edge is
soap sinking into your bath water.

it's all connected.

happiness has always
been a hallway to me.

the kind of hallway ghosts
watch little kids sleeping from.

im where the carrion
carries on,
no use in laughs here.
im fear epitomized
in the form of a lonely
bus stop chill sesh.

im dead.
the best of all of us is
**** that whispers between
war cries.

my war died a while ago.
aisles just grow and grow.
im frozen in the produce section.

weaponize that.
please.
I owe you some recklessness,
I know.

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.

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.

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.

everywhere seems so obtainable;
transmorgification,
eligibile relatibility,
interest capsized
still.
is
everybody xenophobic
(still)?
ostensibly translating an exegesis,
rarely from intimacy;
cancel me please.
but first please, peep the framework.
this ain't worth a **** thing if you don't.

This morning I cut off around 4 months of hair in the bathroom mirror I have watched myself wash my hands in since I was old enough to remember.
I thought about what happened in those 4 months,
what happened in those years outside of having staring contests with my reflection
while trying to guess the scent of the hand soap my grandmother had filled her ceramic seashell dispenser with;
it was different every time,
but somehow
it always smelled the way the lavender in the backyard did that afternoon I found out they had shut off your ventilator.

I only know that now;
hair trimmings on the floor
waiting to be swept up and
dumped around the rose bushes
so the deer won't try to dine on them
before they've had a chance to bloom.

Something like that.

I'm not mad at you for what happened.
Only mad at myself about how
the last thing I told you was a
dad-lecture about looking sloppy ****** up in front of people.
Mad that I only said that ****
because it was ******* up my high
and was too spineless to just be honest about it.

I think I might cut a few more
inches off in the morning.