Words are lodged into the murky water of my mind
Pearls of meaning in the sandy beaches of the pineal gland
Like warm court proceedings
Is this fair? Right?
Did you know that some people
Aren’t groovily depressed
They can leave their rooms
Be real toothed cogs in society
I’m a toothless gear
Spinning with nothing to grip
Spinning my tires in black ice
Freezing in the fields
All I hope for
Is that next years crops use this dead meat
To make something beautiful
Something that can grow
Merry
Something that can live up live up live up
To the things it wants to say
My motif is a sown mouth
With spiders thread

They are always with us, the thin people
Meager of dimension as the gray people

On a movie-screen.  They
Are unreal, we say:

It was only in a movie, it was only
In a war making evil headlines when we

Were small that they famished and
Grew so lean and would not round

Out their stalky limbs again though peace
Plumped the bellies of the mice

Under the meanest table.
It was during the long hunger-battle

They found their talent to persevere
In thinness, to come, later,

Into our bad dreams, their menace
Not guns, not abuses,

But a thin silence.
Wrapped in flea-ridded donkey skins,

Empty of complaint, forever
Drinking vinegar from tin cups: they wore

The insufferable nimbus of the lot-drawn
Scapegoat.  But so thin,

So weedy a race could not remain in dreams,
Could not remain outlandish victims

In the contracted country of the head
Any more than the old woman in her mud hut could

Keep from cutting fat meat
Out of the side of the generous moon when it

Set foot nightly in her yard
Until her knife had pared

The moon to a rind of little light.
Now the thin people do not obliterate

Themselves as the dawn
Grayness blues, reddens, and the outline

Of the world comes clear and fills with color.
They persist in the sunlit room: the wallpaper

Frieze of cabbage-roses and cornflowers pales
Under their thin-lipped smiles,

Their withering kingship.
How they prop each other up!

We own no wilderness rich and deep enough
For stronghold against their stiff

Battalions.  See, how the tree boles flatten
And lose their good browns

If the thin people simply stand in the forest,
Making the world go thin as a wasp's nest

And grayer; not even moving their bones.

It’s just easy for them
Isn’t it?
This couple on the train.
They walked on laughing together
Holding hands
And I felt that familiar something-
Not jealousy
Not envy
But...
Chagrin.
Astonishment.
Incredulity.
Incomprehension.
Looking at them feels like looking at one of those
Impossible pictures
Where the stairs keep going forever in a loop.
It’s just
Easy for them.

It doesn’t hurt anymore, that thought,
But thinking it feels so odd in my mind
When I can’t imagine loving someone without
Shame,
Without pain.
They fit.
These people,
They fit without having to carve anything out.
They fit without punishing each other.
They fit like puzzle pieces cut from the same board-
No worries, they just go together, and that
Is that.
They fit like
“Of course.”
Like breathing.
Neatly.
Simply.
Carelessly.

I can’t imagine what it’s like
I can’t comprehend it-
To fit
Somewhere
Much less to fit somewhere
With someone.
I am always trying to corset myself into this world,
Lungs burning,
Trying to remain small enough to squeeze by
Catching myself by the wrist to keep from reaching
For anything.
And if there seems to be a spot where I might be able to exist as I am

It is always

Occupied.

Like a shiny pinprick
That thought hurts-
Not like the others it is newly cut
And still ******.
The idea that maybe there is a home for me
And that maybe I was too late for it.

They’re laughing.
He says something clever,
Passes a hand along the small of her back
And she leans into it,
Smiling because she loves that he wants to touch her innocently.
They seem to exist behind glass.
Not for the first time I wonder
If I could just slip into that life
Like a drop into an ocean
I want it badly
I want it stupidly
And I examine all the parts of myself,
All the edges and cracks,
All the things I’ve worked so hard to protect and repair.
It is not a welcome sight-
I am not a home
I am like an old ruin
Full of murmurings and cold spots
Full of dusty sunlight.
I sigh,
Knowing the secret I keep so poorly-
That if I really had a choice to be otherwise
I would have already made it.

I couldn’t reach them if I ran for a thousand years,
They are too far away.
They walk off the train, arms linked
Talking about nothing
And I watch them go
Like a hallucination,
Like a mirage in the desert.

Her perfume smells like forgetfulness
And it lingers.

I would break a thousand mirrors
To draw the dark away from you
Break them with my palms
And grind them to glittering dust between my fingers.
I welcome the shadows with the sacredness of ****** hands.

Let them come.
I am not afraid.
I am ready
For war.

I am an empty wasteland
Studded with stained remnants of coffee cups
Papers are strewn about, telling stories about people
Who will never exist.
They seem so much more real than I have ever been
Musky clothes line the floor sending unseen spores deep
Into the lining of my lungs
I am one with where I am
Food and pills surround every speckle of surface
A myriad of tye dye colors
How much happiness can they fit inside a pill?
books and posters leave plastered imprints on the walls
Anything to show that this isn’t all there is
To a life that was never worth it to you

I am a bleeding liver
Half guzzled liquor
Spilled into cracked cups creates scummy films
Rainbow reflections of light from vertical screens
How’s that for a pride display?
In the rainbow of puddles
A failed education fills a shelf
Reading is so far beyond
Me
A fan buzzes in my ear
An angry bee that pounds thousand ***** to keep me cool

I am a furnace
That burns paper ideologies
Nothing here is permeant
Real is just a concept
Gallons of water to satiate an always parched throat
Diluted blood fills these veins
A slow death from oxygen deprivation
With no belt around the neck

I am a fetid corpse
That can still move
Still think
Still spew methane
Use a screen to reach out
Talk to a thousand other blank eyed, slack jawed clones
What does it mean, these words on a white background
Are you the reaper?
The coroner?
I’m breathing
I’m sweating
I’m *******
I’m not living
Air fills these two sacks
Red sewage is pumped into grey hands
A jolt down the spine
Is all I am
What am I?
I am a medicated pig
I am an artist failed dream
I am a cloud, high and falling constantly down
I am a camera, only able to record, but never interpret
I am
I am

I went to the river
Sank myself in
Struggling there upstream
Is where I saw you swim

On the same journey
Different within
Arms against the current
Is this a fight we could win

Blue hypothermia
Brown swaying reeds
Fighting in this wilderness
The rocks that scrape our knees

Coming over now
But the water remains wild
Reaching out with nothing to hold
Drowning words I can’t make out

And on the shore I see
In shapes and silhouettes
Monolithic still and old
The ghosts that remain your family

I cannot breathe
When it comes in cold
Pouring ice down in my throat
And it is only then I know

That I won’t see you grow old
I’ll have to let you go
And your eyes they tell me so
Your eyes tell me:

Let go

just apart
radiant
refusing to exist

no media
no touch

erring the side
catching the wreck
this double standard won’t survive
so what’s the point?

the closest cliff is a ride away