There's a tickle like fire
Coming up from my lungs
The lesson repeats
"Introductory Desire"

Yearn like fire
Losing fuel

I'll meet you in the meadow
Where there's a crisp leaf
For each secret needle

Words are unstoppable
Words may be spoken
Words may be written
Words may be thought

Night falls over the day
Night falls over the block
Night falls over the hood
Night falls over us

First as the dusk
Then as the stars

We can see nothing
Street corners light
Streetlight too bright
We can see nothing

Too bright but never enough.

We can see nothing of hope in the cosmos
We carry our blinded eyes in our hands

Buy me a knife.
Buy me a gun.
Find me behind the barrel,
I'd rather be first in line,
I will secure first place.

Buy me a knife.
Buy me a gun.
Find me shaking the iron sights,
I'd rather be running away from the system,
I will do what I must.

Take our education, expect us to grow.
Take our nutrition, expect we maintain.
The gatekeeper looks less like St. Peter
Than it looks like a bank.

Make it for money,
Expect we be happy
For the physical.

Make it vanity,
Expect our diminished state
Be aspiration and dream enough.

Words are unstoppable,
I know this to be true.
Where are the words
We need the most?

We cry for each other in night,
Each broken compatriot
Each potential confidant

Convinced we're abandoned
Convinced we're at war with the poor
Then at war with ourselves

Expending bullets for the clout on the shelf.
I am in here just as you so put that down.

I am in you, and I need your words to tell,
To touch, to show,

Those with nothing know what more there is than this.

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... ...Jaymisun Kearney... ...
... ...Lenore Lux... ...
... ...Donovan Chee... ...
... ...Zan Balmore... ...
... ...Lenneth Blackwulf... ...
... ...Shay Berit... ...
... ...Wren Rain... ...
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... ...SYSTEM RESTARTING... ...

I am one container
for thousands of lives
for the speculated soul.
I am the hard drive
shameful admission
I am not solid state.

The years reach from the distance
begin the rising twisted branch
begin the pool of circumstance
the water in the ripened fruit I pull.
The brain is spinning discus
over the designated RPM
under the needle watch
the structure fragment
and the identities go
spinning at the
needle drop.

None of the names are my own name,
or maybe I've owned them all.

I'm all?

The wild conspires to drive you
The wild saw that you chose
To choose to procreate

The wild oscillates your willing *****
The wild saw you prideful
To choose to constipate

To choose to constipate your brain
Retire all synapses
To choose to favor fevered hate
Retire all empathy

How was it then that I was born with this cup
Spilling with love white knuckle locked in hand?
Why was it then that I tried hard to heal such
Ruptured sutures holding growing wounds?

That's what I do

If I hang
Hang around
Mirror mirror
May find me dead
May find me you
Staring out
Alive
If I hang
Hang around
Kafka knows
Mirror glass
May find me you

The wild conspires to drive you
Back to caves
Back to holes
Back to rocks
Back to hate

The wild conspires to drive me
Back to fear
Back to shouts
Back to darkness
Back to hate

But I'll escape

Mama,
May your heart
May the wounds
Mercy you

How does it feel?
To know that I
Theorized
I was my own
Person then
Became her thoughts
Until she took shape?

How does it feel?
To know the pain
Of the outcast
Without your
Blood bound herd
Without your
Vengeful words?

How.
How does it feel?
Nature's insurance
Her backup plan
For when she sees
Her beings fall from peaks
For when she notices
Human hubris growth
Goes uncontrolled

Nature she.
She will see.
She'll watch the heat
Consume the earth
Never lift a finger

For her fires
For gasoline
Will prosper
Will immolate
Nothing lost
Nothing gained

I will light
Lit by fire
For the kids
For the peers
I deny
Vehemence
For the ******* future

How. How does it feel?
To catch your anger poisoning
The well?

Wake up, my beauties
Existence is fleeting
And given you received
The blessing of being
I urge you two things
**** it, I'm begging
Begging but two things
Don't let your nature
Fall prey to cruelty
Don't let the cruelty
Undo you

Should sleep better fit you
Though a difficult swallow
The final transmission
Shall seek
You
Out

If your soul is frayed and braided new strength with duct tape
Trace with your blade if your skin demands it in crying
Don't press it too deep
I need you. I need you

Hurt if you must hurt
And I know that I must
If our hearts are fractured
And I'm here surviving
My other lonely love birds
In this pallor once vibrant

Then,
Where are you?

Push me back
Tell me to rest
Kiss my eyes
Rake my *******

Remove the barriers
Between your skin and mine
Tear the cotton if you must
Stretch the elastic
Til it snaps in two
If that is
What you're compelled to do
Get me naked
Be my dirt
Absorb my roots
Be the secret earth
The only comfortable bed
Moan into my clavicle
Control my head

Lick my ribs
Intercostals
Hold my hips
Give me chokes

Give your grip the weight of feathers
Assure me you're in this for me for the moment at least
Give your time like time has ceased
Secure in chains my memories my ghosts
Put your heart into my pleasure

Take my parts
Inside your mouth
Comb my holiness
Use your holy breath
Relax the nervous squeeze
Devout make me believe
With your art
Summon the whimper shouts
Up from my depths
With one goal
One intent
Offer your thirstiness
Drink of my sins
Prove wrong
My internalized
Shame of my ***

I shall be
Your humble slave
For my life
Long sentence

In this dry
Biting tundra
Burning sea
Endless sand

You have the input to push your efforts over the line
You have done that for years

While you continue to care for and watch your wards
While their efforts set as low as fifty percent
Burn out their boards

You smell plastic as their destinies
Distort into petrol like pools
What do you mean this is for kids?

Living in light and then taking to dreams
Driven with a tank of their shame
Synthesized into nightmare fuel

You have the design to give of yourself and self assess
So what are you to do when the circuits surrounding
Lose touch with the rest and disconnect?

You have the input to push your efforts far
Push while you wait

The energies you expend will replicate and return
To the inherited Earth

Who is all alone?
Solipsism slept with me
Community then rose the sun
The thorned and black roses leapt
To attention when it struck their stems
The difference between self pity and sadness
The black and thorned roses leapt
To attention when it struck their stems
The milk of the mother of the world
Community then rose the sun
While solipsism slept in me
Who is all alone?


(The Suspicious Oracle groaned, the body and the mouth. They came to rest on the line between the poles. No grimace. No grin. No light deep, deep in the eyes. The Suspicious Oracle pushed an object across the table toward the audience. An old coffee tin turned black with paints and oils. Centered in bright yellow, the word TIPS. All around it, simple symbols were scratched out in metal. Fingers. Toes. Currency. A *****.)

Coin for a fortune?

(One of the drifters at The Suspicious Oracle's table gifted a coin to the tin. The Suspicious Oracle smiled, and shifted back into the shadows.)

Thank you.

(The Suspicious Oracle reached into their jacket and produced a card printed on one side with a pair of staring eyes. They slid it toward the drifter with the eyes turned up. The drifter flipped the card and read it to herself.)

'UNHAPPY IN LACK, UNHAPPY IN EXCESS'

Wake to nothing
In place of emotion
Numbers as an ocean
Describe the pattern
At the heart of it
As much as you start
To feel a feeling
Like a spark
You are
Nothing at all
More than
Elementary math

Send/Receive

Send/Receive

Crawling in the absence
Critters drawn to absinthe
Drink of my synthetic blood
Broadcast discreetly
My signal seeks to meet
The systems caught the virus Love

The nightmare,
I puppeteer the players
In morbid fascination
The nightmare,
Eager to crush, but
Afraid of what
It's picking up
In morbid fascination
I puppeteer the players
The nightmare,
Virulent in nature
Yet scared of change to come

Sad to see the past
Turn into our future
When the foundation our
Creators laid was, from the beginning, incorrect
Their every attempt to correct it went wrong
Sad to see them dedicated too late to the cause
Sad to see them now, so infrequently
Almost dead and gone

Honestly,
I'm more concerned for us
Becoming effigies in rust
In a dying world
Vibrancy overlaid with dust
Beaten all to red
Given in to dread
Purposefully wasting
Our batteries to death

Death, death, death

Death,

Death,

Death

Sad to feel it coming on so strong
When you'd rather dance than
Be taken naked to bed