The human operation
Unholy truths
The utilitarian view
The evolutionary science of empathy,
Collectivism, tribe.

The philosophy of love,
Indomitable.
The crooked trident of justice,
Did any artist ever render it right?
Knowing has changed us
The unknown is what keeps us tethered

Tethered to insanity,
Which must have something to do with death
The open-ended
Freedom
Anarchy
Indecision,
Erasure.

I'm digging through cold mud,
Looking for things I can use to fix my life.

My hands get feeble,
They shake...
But my heart keeps shooting warm blood to my fingers
And the muscles,
They take.

I'm still digging when I pull my hands from the yard
And stop to contemplate.
My mind is digging at the sky
Through memories,
Through itself,
To the end,
I am
The definite Why.

Through crowds of people
And promiscuous Time
Through hard countenance
And slippery slime
Through the cold hard mud
And the loathsome grime
I am digging for merit--
My reason and rhyme.

I plucked a book from my closet
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
I open to a random
573
The Test of Love -- is Death

It hurts
to hold this book
to hold this poem
in my hands

because you got me this book

you showed me all the most painful things
brand new, this book, ******* you with wine in my veins
and played me out, and I was young and dumb
I should have played the game, but I flipped out
you were terribly cute, threateningly Norwegian
I HATE to admit this, but I STILL love you like
the deepest laceration, the sorest wound of this animal
though I know it to be only longing
for the semblance of a truly wild life.

It hurts so bad because I'll die and never talk to you again
I always purposefully acted crazy and burned bridges with every ex-lover
Here's what I held from myself:

I know that I am good enough
That I don't have to worry
That I will overwrite your memory
With new love, true and blazing bright
And it will all be okay. More than that,
It will mean more than you could ever mean to me.

there is a cage around Lansdale
with a hole in the roof

orange street lights
make sloppy kisses with the muggy summer air

moths flutter,
and it smells like wet trees.

how many empty slabs of concrete
like crooked teeth all along the road
will i have to traverse
before i'm out
before i'm able to deploy my wings?

Your brown eyes sear through the thick mud of your life.

You are like the eye of the storm--
Moving coolly over land and sea,
A rare phenomenon
Cloaked in terrifying walls of turbulence,

I love you.

It seems like everywhere you go,
A black cloud follows you
And the weather pelts your soul.

It seems like everywhere you go,
Beauty erupts like a slow-motion volcano,
And I'm the only one who sees it.

You sip your coffee on a ray of sunlight in the morning--
You are woven into it,
Your brown eyes are looking at me with their brows raised
Your stepsister's chickens are out back
And Daisy is trying to go outside so she can get another duckball treat

And I love you.

Oh my god,
I love you so much.

My head is a treasure chest full of these fantasies.

And she can sever it from the precious river of blood--
Then a slow decay will work upon my locked skull.

She can peer inside, and decide I'm not a gate to heaven
But a dead branch, a stop along the way
Better used as fodder for another life, another day.

We can talk, and tease
And play that way.

But this is the reason I toil under the hard sun:
She can open up my mind
And wear my thoughts like jewels on her holy head.

She smiles as she adorns herself with my deepest loves
The fruits of my labor become the clothes that she wears.

O woman, won't you come open up my chest
And harvest this hard-fought loyalty from my weeping soul?

My creature tears up suburban nightscape on a bike
Activate: punk rock soundtrack
Do you have the headphones equipped?

He lost his driver's license
******* idiot
It's still fun though,

I have every intention of Infecting this area
You'll receive a cordial invitation from my lips
I'm imbued with the coming sensation
I just want the soundwaves to hit my stomach
I just want to cast my colors out into the world
And here they go one by one

It's gonna ring from ear to ear

One after another,
One over the other,
The people are jazz music.

Black and white,
Gin and tonic
Diatonic to the key of today

Because
It's all been whizzing by me
And the **** legal system
Has been keeping me down

But I can't even have a drink,
It might show up on a drug test.

But I digress (don't we all)
In and out of life,
Far away and by my side,
You people are jazz music.

You're beautiful in black and white
You complicate fretboards
You provide
The room tension that makes it
So difficult to sing

And then you resolve and melt
Like warm honey
Only to pick up another frantic run
It takes a while to make up its panicking mind

They know no bounds
They only learn the rules
To mess around
Giving rhythm to emotion
And loving in black and white,
The people are jazz music.

What I held hostage, You had in Escrow

God can be a Person if you see the Universe that way,
There's nothing scientifically wrong about that;
I find it an admirable proposition.

Was it my proclivity for empathy?
Or... some "grave wrong" I'll "find out" when I die
Will I find out I was a fissure, and death is the just filler?
Is it balance or anarchy that reigns the nests and deserts?

I hold it possible that our steeper senses of justice, too
Are "rightly" worth considering. Anything is possible.
And yet, at any turn, we can be shown to be "wrong."

But they say sin is just fodder for a new flower.

I was never ready to forfeit, these "angels" are my buttress

Oh yeah,
I love the way that song
Washes up on the beaches of your life
Like every molecule of the sea is a message in a bottle
A trippy concept for sure

Inhale,
Smell a familiar fragrance
Which puts the mind in a better place
Swimming like a dragon through the lifted skies,
Cardinal and pure
A thing born of salvaged treasure,
A story to be told.

Hollowed eyes look disdainfully on curdled blood
On crooked veins and twisted nerves

The clasp of hands might be enough,

But my skin feels fit to burst
Like a monster is knocking on my ribcage.

And what if I told you I had to keep away?

Locked lips sear doubts from my mind
But some vestige of yesterday is left behind
When they pull away
I've got such vivid scenes
Running through my mind
But why

These colors are not supposed to be
With gnarled nerves all spinning free
There is a monster inside of me
And I want to CUT
It out.

her blood is not quiet
it bounds, and razes on
sinking into the world like a burning acid
like teeth into tender meat her blood.

her blood is the new tool of the universe
lighting up the hackneyed American streets
timeless in her elegance it is her blood
that makes her timeless, but me--

my blood sits grey and quiet,
quite lazy and resplendent in a thick husk
like an anemone withdraws,
becomes one with the tether or the tie
to the Universe.

no teeth can get in,
no jealousy
i am alone
with the memory
of her thrashing blood
on the other side
of my ear canal

To tell a terminal lamb
About the appeal of a trial.

To speak to the host and holy ghost
of rapacious parasitism
about faith in a God symbiotic.

The elusive cavity of your heart!

These worlds I trespass on, I feel
as though I should be there

Know that

But empathy is the harbinger of heaven and hell!
Some to whom we bear hard-shelled witness
Some seem to light a fire in our blood.

All in transient form.

It's all worth a Try, if you're into that sort of thing.

There is a dessicated half
A grilled cheese sandwich
Underneath the stove
In my home

I really need to throw it away
I really shouldn't
Eat it.

sniff
.

Can we talk about
funny things

things we put in mason jars
left to rest
on our bedside tables,

and

never judge a guy by the state of his eyeliner,
he's just getting himself together still,

daydreams about squirrels and prospective film productions,

headsplitting laughter with devil dicked eyes,

we're just devil dicked guys,

my Grandma and I.

go off in to the world and die away from me
i don't care what happens to you after this.

You smell
Like baby's breath and
Cigarettes

//

I need you to know that I am not well read

//

It's not like that,
No it's not like that

little red rocks from the garden
stick to his feet

not much of a poet
when he's drunk
get this feeling out of my head
when he's drunk

he just wants to be
a piece of the atmosphere

the dim lit rooms where i met your friends, i left
for the dry winter with salty roads
the drive down the east coast
the blizzard on the way back to PA

the spring and summer
when the bottom of my stomach still stung.

hospital stays
and steady paces into the snow
saw the eventual melting and resurgance
of this spring
except when the flowers came up,
they were all gray.

and when the trees all blossomed,
they were all gray.

and when i looked in the mirror,
it was gray too.

and nobody talked to me
and you just laughed and said
*good riddance

Hybristophile or phobe,
I am a neutral probe
Let the gods dance their several dances
And leave me here, alone

No lasso I could muster
Could hug a Hilbert's curve
No human brick or bluster
Could circumscribe a nerve

I feel this way and that,
And do not feel ashamed
I save the things I know, 'til they are
Caught upon the flame

Until they're caught upon the flame, my love
And how do you suppose it makes me feel,
That You should take the things
THAT MAKE ME REAL

Rogues, and their fractal minions
Break up my beam, my light
I never mind
As long as it recollects and swells
I play, crack the sky.

It really sings in the middle,
There with my two eyes
And they enter the hall of heaven,
One lie.

Oh, I never mind. I never mind
I can only look forward--
I'll never die.

I followed the codex,
Detached from myself
But needing a victory,
I caved in
And fell.

Rip me. Rip me to ******* shreds.
I don't care. I never meant anything.
I'm pinned to this moment.
Everything is a trick,
But you're not fooling me.

Infect me with sadness,
Sadness, sadness,
That is ALL I WANT TO FEEL.
I let the happiness billow up
And Hope can stay the night
She's a ****** thot,
But I am hungry like a black hole for deep, dark misery.

Purple and navy,
Gray and black.
Or void and colorless,
The taste of death.

My talents are a fleeting bloom,
I can die with them curled,
You will never know my true beauty
Because you betrayed me deeply
Wrongly, I will never forgive you

I will make you like death to me
Rank, inimical, raw, s e x y, the truth that reviles us all
And this feeling will pass over me...
Like a storm,
It comes and goes.

I feel the animate corpse of reality bear down
Like a sea of needles under my skin
Pressing with insult and injury, my world is a torture chamber
I am in your gullet, being processed
Stinging with enzymes

You tear pieces of my flesh off and swallow
Caught in the nightmare I assist your digestion--
I reject my eyes, wrenching them out of my skull with bleeding fingers

The pale throat bulges with my body's resistance
Her silver eyes glow when they receive sustenance from my flesh

Hair sprouts from my dying body as I feast on the life of my past self
It is not as good as his but I will create a better mode with salvaged parts

Inside, I cannot reconcile some sort of sick or---sm that will occur with my death
Now bleeding from empty sockets i scream and writhe
Trapped in the gullet of an unknown creature, trapped between life and death I struggle

My new hands create works that astonish
I know you hear the crooked groans of pleasure reaching your punctured ears from the outside
You painful self, my rose
My cause for redemption,
My price
My sweet Adam
My slanted Eve
.

Sequestered hominid,
a temporary waning of saturation
a flurry of cigarettes and hot words
a tangle just around the core
as my world struggles to straddle
its wobbling gyroscope.

I've got a
Chip on my shoulder

But relentless peaks draw up the sallow vestiges of pride
As the ego tolls again and again
I am happy with what I am
Yet I feel forced to "survive"

Looking back at who I was
Speaks volumes for our culture
The sequestered hominid rotates hues, asleep
He dreams
Of painting his image into history

i'm not just a process,
i'm not just a day
i'm not forcing myself
to dream away
and away

i'm one of so many dreams
of a powerful mind!

VANITY, VANITY, VANITY!

SUBLIME just doesn't COVER IT!

To heave forward and think
My life so important
Even goddesses die
And it took so long a Time...

What is born next?
Why fear such a thing?

My lovely toy humans,
What will happen to them?

The darkness...

It used to be a place that i could hide

A comfort pit.

But now it has pierced the full howl
Of the undertow of the falling world.

I feel the wash up rising above my chin
To take me under.

I tell myself if i hold steady
It will be worth it,
I will be great if i just hold composure

But that's just not true

The younger are passing me now

They know not to make the same mistakes as me

They look down at me with passivity, passing

The Weeknd is singing, cooing from my phone
You're only looking for attention...

I am smoking a cigarette bummed from my brother, it feels surprisingly
Worryingly good after a few days
Of not smoking

At that moment, thinking i have pierced the safe darkness and gone fully crazy, not stable when im sober

Deep into the wine

That the fox let out a curdling scream and it agrees horridly with my curdled soul

I fear mediocrity

I have lost the game of life

I am 23, and

It is too late.

As a service to the body
How convenient is the harmony
How delightful it is to survive
And get fat together

A crooked piece went rect today
When a video hit me with a wave
That loneliness was born to save the self.

No quest to save the species
Written in our DNA
How dumb I felt to realize that
It's just a happy mistake

One that fell into my lap--
Tap tap tap, tap tap tap
I can afford to love
And that
Is that

humanitatis
infinitastis
vita... bella

painting must exist
before the brush fulfills the job

amity must exist
before she slobs and eats his ****

God is what you do, yes
Death and beauty, too

They couldn't quite decide that one
Does she lay, or does he do

it isn't clear within this bauble
but the best that i can think
is emptiness is pregnant
she's drunk
he drinks

and sipping at each other
a complication, not
'cause nothing started moving
and that's just how it got.

O that brilliant mind
So treasured there, but not to find
Alight me to your inspiration
Tell me, in the wisps of happenstance
As pseudopods, formed from mine
Reach out into timely air
For new ideas, as I'm trying to capture
Good culture.

Like a living door to entirely new worlds
Inside a shell sunken to the deep
Never to be found again,
O that brilliant mind.

Like the unassuming thoughts of a passerby
Unseen potentials in those eyes
Like when you pretend you're boring,
You could never be boring to me.

Don't hide away your golden tale,
Expand your story, drape your veil
And know your song is never done
But lives on,
It's the only one.

I need to calm. DOWN

Twitching in a pressurized position, I
make jerks and curses towards the sky
My future home. Both tantalizes, and does not tantalize
Because I do it to myself!
And then, because it's they who pressurized.

So I turn on "Just" by Radiohead, a flickered frame
Picked of some random day. And I think,
There must be
Some deeper force at play.

(Alone)
I walk around the house with a rabid mouth!
I talk to myself and let the frothing bubbles boil over
Into insane rambling and I try to pick little poems out.

But just listen to me now...

When the hissing and spitting of my organs is over
I have natural smooth
When my skin catches wind,
And momentum can soothe.

But I feel as asphyxiated by attacks of smoke
Smacked by each wave, unable to cope
See my future home approach in flights
And I welcome home the dreams
That stress me out
Some nights.

That drunkard, that ebullient hostage-taker of the self
Who you heard singing last night, in and out of beauty--

He took a bad step and fell through the ground.

He landed on a concrete slab in the middle of the sea
An island with no natives, a convicted crush of innocent souls
(All marred by the enemy of God)

He fetaled on the floor, effectively forsworn.

But lo, the silent forgiveness personified by mankind
Knew the time and the place of that *******'s heart
And filled it with light, and now

He makes for the bow, sees hope on the horizon.

Won't you stay
Out of harm's way?
With each little cell pointing north
They seem to cloak you in an aura
Dress you in a song
That's celebrating life

Carry the dear thing forward
And take care of your self and kind
And leave maps and symbols behind
To keep on the love wave

Stay out
Of harm's way
Please, unless you're evil
And you're about to **** us all
But that just speaks to the same point anyway
Anyway
Stay safe
And keep out
Of harm's way

Plod on, brave traveler
Beer down the hatch
9 to 5's not easy, don't complain--
She's a catch
22 is long gone...
But brace your mind from such thoughts
Can you feel the insanity
Boring a hole?

Let it out when you're alone,
Oh you freak,
Oh you motionless stone.

Feel the peaks start to flatten
Feel your colors start to fade
I'm just writing this because I'm angry
I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

Don't feed me,
I'm fasting.

Don't wake me,
I found the cozy corner of a dream.

Don't move me,
I was just perfect.


DON'T LOVE ME--
I WAS JUST SAYING.

DON'T LOVE ME!

DON'T LOVE ME.

I want to let the moon melt away my worries
Like it's a big pill and the sky is my mouth
Just because it's there, hypnotizing
And I know what it is

Actually,

I'd like to go there
Live on the far side
I'd take a summer vacation to watch all of you
But always I'd go back to my secret cave
On the far side of the moon.

Because the moon doesn't melt,
It just stubbornly hangs there,
Leaving my worries untouched
Never rescuing me from a sick mind or a lazy eye.

I'd like to drag my big bag of those things off,
Let the rot set them to sleep
Because I think my heart is weak
Because I think my heart is weak.

What was once green skin
Gripping the fruit
Is now a browning husk
Coming loose

Age stirs in the dissolution of the ego
And as time passes by
We learn not to whine
Nor ask why
But we fight by calling truce.

And how long will you dote to tell my story,
My love?
And how tight can you possibly hold me,
That my insides should crumble
And my hopes and dreams should fall?

This, no, this
Is our middle space
The place where we come together
And compromise it all.

The life doesn't belong to me
Or the tree
Or the forest,
That is the force which gently pries with time
This husk from my body
And it feels good
But it hurts,

I fall

There is a weak genesis that strings me along each day,
I am looking for the strong one
That will break the morning's ice with exercise
That will learn about good investments and bad ones
And give to the self the gift of renaissance,
It is free,
Oh why are you even holding back?
You might be a little nervous, but

I slow dance with Circumstance
She looks on me with even calm,
Sickly disdain and pure love, puncturing the moment

I listen to love songs,
And my lover is Time.

I wish I was The Weeknd slow dancing with
A fine woman
I wish Pete Wentz would just come our of the woods and save my ***
Buy me a truckload of music equipment
And everything I need
I have piles of these desperate wishes saved up in my soul

Because I feel too brilliant to be down this far
I feel mixed up in my circumstance

So I tell her I love her
Tell her I mean well
But I figure I'm just as ambivalent as she

I listen to love songs
And my lover is Time

I want to be looked on fondly by the future
I want to be remembered
But there are so many other people.

I'm a
Total
Alien

touch my young body,
or it will go to waste

do not be deceived by my stammering--
i will love you like a strong man loves.

see through the circumstances of my life
and realize that i am rich.

touch me, and i will come alive for you.

you'd never
hold onto something for too long
or let it go too early
you're always
right on time

passing through both ways, she was
holding to a limb, heaving suddenly up
exhaling out again

stiff as the flotsam clung her
yet liquid, like everything, in the grand scheme of things

the grand scheme of things that is perfectly still
perfectly dead and reborn, somehow
the unseeable color just above
whatever precipice

you'd never be right on time for me
you'd have to **** me and leave me scraped and scrapless
you're always too late
you flip nestlings to their deaths
a perfectly empty mechanical meaning

don't have time to think about what it is--
gotta head out that door and make that money.

i am a bead of sweat
on the skin, on the streets
of my town

on a bike, cuts through
soft summer night
i lead the desecrated
fight.

i have siphoned my blood to birth art,
but it always turns black
and here in my body
the world ends in a scream.

i'm riding so fast
i just can't seem to be
a friend to the dream,
a friend to the dream.

i'm part of a mind mind
i came up with all these people
who came up with ideas i couldn't
who are and will be things
i could never ever be

it's interesting i feel like a little key fits into the letter 'i'
we are one brain, for sure
empathy and killers all one plane

void careless
rock-star dreams
hopeless probation
fuzzy American ethics
loom secret command star
surrounded by angers
told i'm sick -- growth on track!
rising up to an unknown home
craves attention
can't sleep
need money, poor family
turning 23
need to become a rock-star
void careless

I live the life of a loner.

I'll pop over a friends house on my bike
for a couple hours, and it's cool
I really have a great assortment of friends

But everywhere I go
I wonder if those kids I'm looking for
Are right on the other side of that wall

How do I get there from here?
My eyes are flitting, ticking time bombs

I like my alone time, lone wolf adventures,
Plugged in, unplugged, cityscape, outbound, whatever.

But I need house shows and young punks.
Drunk nights (I may or may not be drunk) and water guns
filled with beer? that'd be interesting.

Be patient, give it time. You're not done yet,
You're still young. Get through the probation,
Show them you really mean it, actually try
And relax because you're good.

Watch it take hold

do you have the guts
do you have the guts
do you have the guts to be your own salvation?

do you have the time
do you have the time
do you have the time to be your own salvation?

hanging' round by the dead end sign
striking our cigarettes
and dancing on the dead tracks

we've been parked up in this
culdesac
for waaay too long.

do i have the guts,
do i have the time
do i have the mind to do anything else?

you know judgy *******
never mattered to me
i think my halo's running low on battery

but hey if i'm alive
then i might as well live--

do you have the guts
do you have the guts
do you have the guts to be your own salvation?

do you have the time
do you have the time
do you have the time to be your own salvation?

i got a little time
for some quiet meditation
i been writing up a plan
i'm gonna be my own salvation

you know what people say
never mattered to me
so i'm charging up my batteries

because hey if i'm alive
then i might as well live

do you have the guts
do you have the guts
do you have the guts to be your own salvation?

do you have the time
do you have the time
do you have the time to be your own salvation?

do have the guts?
or are you nucking futs?
do you have the time?
or are you too sublime?

How far does a ripple reach?
Over the water, the edge of the pond
Up the tree trunk and into every dimension...

Nothing is secret
Until it reaches my heart's lake
And my mind realizes impermanence.

That is how far your love touches me--
All over my body we're singing your song
Me and all my cells,
And all their organelles.

We push and we pull god in different directions
We freeze and we thaw with the winter's spring
But when your waves touch me that certain way,
I'm inclined to call it love.