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.

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.

first off,
no,
I dont think so.
so slow,
I'm throwing myself off a cliff
in an infinite number of other realities;
it's all gonna be alright.

slipping.

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.

( )

if only you knew
what the view actually
looked like.

it's a good buy.
it gets real low.
can't **** high fast enough.

well, actually.

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.

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.

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.

these million million molecules
between the things we hate
about each other
smother me in the night.

"mama has lost it,
hasn't she?"

I wouldn't think of blaming all of you.
ever.

RIP MF DOOM
You helped teach me how to rhyme.
Thank you.

this morning you came to me
in a dream,
with your hair dripping wet
and wrapped in a cream
colored bath towel,
looking like the ******* image
of the cosmos collapsing.

right as i felt like God himself
i started crying like a child
alone and lost in some monstrous night.

i never knew i missed you this much.

I'll take all of those terrifyingly gorgeous photographs of you
just to cut them into pieces
and use them like paint.

That is me pulling your visage
down from the heights only
to confuse it with the dirt.

It is also me showing you that
the pervasiveness of your form
is never lost on me.

Every particle, entangled.

I don't need to see you.

You will make a science of yourself
before me and I will ask,
"why?"

I drew your viscera by candlelight
before I ever watched you avert
your eyes from mine.

I wept while shrines built in your name were pulled to the earth, your disciples chanting as they bloomed black into the hungry sky.

Every particle, entangled.

"Seen" is a stupid term.

Although I am still seemingly
bound to it's use because of
every single one of you.

in the malarial stink
of you having me all so
figured out
I laugh like coyotes in the ******* night.

haven't you learned where suffering
crawls out of by now?

I could waste anything if "anything"
were made to fall like seconds
from a clock face.

"Perspective" was scribbled
on the title page of the tattered
copy of The Merchant of Venice
I found in jail.

It collects dust on my shelf now.

More seconds.

In the past I would pride myself
on resiling as stylishly as possible.

That Most-High hope climb
choked and died and now I'm here.

No idea why though.

Fossils pulled from the cold cold earth,
their dimensions
meticulously documented,
are locked in filing cabinets
some place way too eager to become the past.

Of course I know now though.
Damage done.

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.

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.

go ahead, confuse drunk and stumbling
down **** soaked alleyways
with a victory march
ending at an aureate throne
that i would wager
looks as if it were set atop the dais by
the most righteously fickle of pantheons.

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.

poems are not the maw
but the drool dripping
from it onto a "same old, same old"
protagonist realizing their fate
as they tremble trying to keep
the alien jaws at bay.

what should i do with that intel?

spin wheels with friends killed
in the fantasies they awoke in?!

im spent still with a grin in the
"you mad at me?' ocean.

oh **** is a cloak,
hope is a dagger in the back.

at least the ghost will be potent, right?

days drag;
I tattooed monster
on my forearm
to remind myself
that my heart is softer
than every sky we ever laughed beneath.

i make a mirror
of everyone
while you dream
of the windows
in our old house
raging like rivers
you never wanted
cross anyway.

you rolled your eyes at that,
didn't you?

i lost count of how
many times you said I never
wanted to know you.

came out of nowhere
saying "good night" and "good morning"
in the same cough.

my "now" didn't know scared
until the good fight couldn't hoard bliss
anymore;
it's days lost to years and then some.

its been fun.
I'm a liar.
you know this.
still,
its been fun.

smiling,
you were constellations
I had never glimpsed before.
I'm shivering at your door
like its nothing
because it's nothing.
I'm just lucky as ****
to even be here.
trust me.
it's "keep clear" mostly
if you haven't noticed
already.
not usually the one
at parties at all,
let alone the one
throwing confetti.

throws confetti.

"Never been one for dancing"
would be carved into my headstone
if it weren't for the fact that
my grave was robbed of it's
distant dreary locality by the
winding rattlesnake of a path
that I now stumble down.

It isn't me who whistles
that tune you can't quite taste the name of,
even as it dances on the tip of your tongue.

I promise.

I promise this is homage paid to
whichever lofty lord or lady
decides to descend from
their alabaster irrelevance
and keeps the change in wind
direction to their ******* self.

It's not oxen driven off a cliff
or anything, but in this economy
it will have to do.

You mumble your myriad mantras.

The hissing mysticism crescendos.

The whistler switches the octave.

Me; dizzy again, ******* off the tip
of a cryptic world with a pristine grin
as the dense twisting mists of mystery
beginning to drift betwixt the...

The whistling fades.

Tricks of the wind.

Never.

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

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.

ive stood on the threshold
of the need for better
for the better part of a
decade.

ive left "thanks" at the door
more times than I could count.

doubt it if you feel ok
about doing so.

do you though?

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.

I lose poems written
by the long dead monarch "me"
in the liquid hues moving
across cheap gessobord.

Call it the lost art of disillusionment
treated as dreams imbued
with defeat.

"Viva la revolution"
screamed from every rooftop
and useless street
by the youth who refuse to
eat or drink anything
but silver spoons full of ellipses
confused as spots where ink...

My eyes have been wide.

leaving is relative.
"you"is just a view of an elephant
up close.
melt a bit,
then tell the splitting
elegance you'll help it
blend back into the hues
you've given different
pet names to.

headspace.
moon.
deadweight.
truth.
a ruse?
a route?
a mutiny?
a few ravens loot putrification
of any useable patience
in the pay-to-play waiting game.

get over it
or get some beauty sleep.

ive stolen a touch from Pablo,
Frida,
Dali,
even Korine's canvas
has touched my thumb,
but it's your cheek in the
morning I remember the most.

we were never good for each other.
I dont have anything better than that.

I'm sorry.

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.

Whose voice echoes down these halls?

Who asks that question more than one
could otherwise stand?

Immune to voids and letting go,
paralysis precedes the fall from grace.

More turns.
More turns.

One could walk while they chase
if they absolutely had to.

you can hear them scream
"peep the soul glowing"
from the cheap seats
we need to keep the bones
just to throw 'em into stockpots
believe what you want
we wont notice
it's deep sleep or hopscotch over
whole oceans turned to vapor
the pay-dirt is favored over
that traitorous flavor you slang
at the end of your week
wait
who transcended the breeze
without leaving a dream-scape
say it loud
say it loud
my nose bleeds gold
no need to peep the soul
the glow and the punctuation are implied by the flow
plus the gumption fades quick
ive tried writing the folds out of the plot
it not ******* possible
say it loud
say it now
say it proudly
stop

Once i wished we would
eventually turn a front porch
into a cathedral.

Honey still dripping from every moon.

Some sh#t like that.

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.

With the your naked form resonating
in my memory and the taste of you
still on my tongue, I could plunge
into the darkest of pits and smith
flaming swords from any excrement.

You never left me and I will forever die at your feet, smiling.

So, can we dance?

The more the reader
is left to ask what happened
the more the mask slips
and the trajectory of this elliptical orbit I'm absorbed in can be
learned and mapped out.

Black clouds holding hands
with the laughing child in my chest.

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.

walking to the corner store,
the sky smelled like peppermint in coffee.
I mean,
nothing.

I'm non-local,
slipping temporally,
slipping.
just speak to me sweet;
there is a bird beating it's wings
against my ribs,
dying to escape.

I watched a male cardinal giving
a female a twig in my driveway.

it's gorgeous,
this moment.

slipping.

right when we think we
have it figured out,
doors behind doors
behind more ******* doors.

every black cloud in
these ugly grey skies
hides that blue that I've
already started to forget about.

more ******* doors.

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.

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

love for the city.
stuck in the suburbs.
I want to go unlearn
myself in a alleyway
or ten.

spinning tires.
mud is **** and death,
so where does that
leave us?

Every morning I try to coax
the End Times out of a single second.

So far I've only managed to slip
between minutes lost to watching
the coffee *** fill to it's brim.

Little victories.

Fiddles played while any and all mystery
falls on bent swords,
you can hear the sadness in the notes
as they float between the oxygen molecules.

Solitude is an honest friend most days
while others it is another bent blade
awaiting my laziness.

I sleep standing up or running in place
so jokes on it.

My protean soul transmogrified
on the altar of your heart;
what am I now?

I've watched homes construct
themselves from our past incarnations
and burn to ash in the same rainy afternoon.

You are forever unchanging.
You are change, forever.

They are the same;
the maelstrom I would smile and sing "Come Fly With Me"
to as it ripped the nuclei of my atoms from the electron clouds that obscure them.

I am static on the television that almost sounds like Sinatra;
a murmuration of starlings unaware
of the beauty in their intricacy.

Our gestation was cut short;
the television caught fire
and the starlings lay broken on an elementary school playground.

You, to me, are the silence that
replaced the staticky Sinatra or the wailing
children that find the murmuring ceased for good
by the monkey bars and plastic slides.

You are the reason for my loss of faith
in the words gorgeous, stubborn, and coincidence.

I am contented for the moment by just knowing I breathe the same air as
the flesh straining to contain you.