something, somewhere
no matter who you are
would scream at your figure
find you a monster
you may not be perfect
you must not be perfect

at some point the universe not only feels
guilty
for creating you
but it judges you vile,
horrifying, even.

get used to this, child
your dream is a selfish one
rejected by God
thrown down to your current state.

The grotesque tends to grow like a fungus,
From the depths of the living heart
Crawlin' from inside us
You can call to the angels but they lied
Baby Judas
Had a star too, Betelgeuse
Jesus couldn't hide.

She's a girl
She can take you anywhere
She's a girl
She can make you anything

Adam was bad boy, God's *******
Had a black leather fetish
And his first lover lingered
He would sneak out and **** her in the night
Little ignorant
Cause she's same woman, whatcha think, whatcha figure?

She's a girl
She can take you anywhere
She's a girl
She can make you anything
She's a girl, she's got jet black wings
Psychedelic, she will manifest your mind.

Grotesque, here comes the grotesque
Grotesque, here comes the grotesque
Growtesque, here comes the world again
You're a mutant fungus,
You were born grotesque.

Notice the way they fall apart
Maybe today was hard
There's help along that keenest sense
Asylum for the marred.

Notice the mingling of the light
With its fate-all counterpart
Notice the nuanced little things:
They'll light your lonely heart.

Notice the talent in this world
Beyond that glowing screen!
In steady gaze, the fall is known
To sharpen every deed.

And notice the gift of this embrace
A noticer often gives
How heavenly the table
When spirit truly *lives

I am not your farmer
The fruits I grow are wild
So if you think that you're an angel
And your eyes fall on my yield,

If you judge it to be short
Know my ways are fine and natural
I am not a yeoman
I look more
Like a nomad

remember
you seriously hate me
you have it down
to vanity
dissolve me
slowly
hold me
so gently
your dream
is so lovely
not lovely,

but love me.

Sometimes my heart is coiled steel
Pulled tight over wood.

I slip into the mode
On the backyard patio
Feeding blood to my guitar, carefully.

I'm making love in the springtime.
It's so good
Making love on your time.

Good Gabriel has blessed us with music
Hear, the devil says it's useless
But every ictus of the heart of love
Rebuts and rebukes him.

I cannot cordially invite
Everyone to my party
Here at my end of the world
My own private apocalypse, but music
Music can do that.

My heart is just an instrument
That's why my guitar fits right inside
That's why my fingers need to fly,
Slide and pick
These fruits from heaven.

Fruits so good and so holy,
My flesh wilts in the presence of them
But here, my young heart knocks and knocks and knocks
It leaves little etudes in the backyard's sunshine.

Before all I can do is watch you,
Let your love stream over my hands
Let me believe that I am doing the work
No, let me do it.

Before I slip into dissociation--
Before I lose this to gross depersonalization,
Let our child romp in the pastures we'll call Yesterday

And when all I can do is watch you...
When I realize that not even that will do a thing for us,
Let me go!

I won't pose and say I'm returning
Or pretend to be the last drop of water in a plastic bottle--

Just like I've always been.

ever since you went molecular
i sank back in my chair
and let the world **** on my body from the outside
it has a tendency to try to communicate by brandishing scars
and lash its tongue

my ego got popped up into a quaint glass bulb
where i can study myself but the muted conversations
worry me in here, their blurry specters orbit around.

i just really like that first line
i just fell in love with your madness
i don't really care what you do at night
i just fell in love with your madness

You're allowed to believe in your lies
And I in mine
We get better and better
Until we're quite
divine, and

Divine

Someone's fingers
play up and down my spine.

Little thorns come for me everyday
They press into my skin
And leave me bleeding

They are inconsequential
Never murderers, even so
It's hard to call them friends--

It's not that hard to let them go.

I want a girl who hurts me bad.
I want the sunrise to stain my heart with love
I want to wash my spirit in the pure waters of her presence.

And when the sweetness rots my teeth
And they begin to fall out,
I don't want to face the pain

Give me a heavy morphine drip,
Because I have realized,
I want to weave days that will hurt to lose--

I want a girl who hurts me bad.

I want a girl who hurts me bad.
I will trade mistakes for pain
And then surmount a sunny day.

I have taken hard lessons
I have gritted those teeth,
I have known blooms of the goddess of love

Promise me I will go places that make me proud
Before I lay somewhere that makes me sad

I need a radio to play away the blues
'Cause I want a girl who hurts me bad.

(As far as the Eye can See)

I don't care if she's pirates.
Dizzying unbelief.
Carrying my love far away like some thief.

I don't care if she's a cheater
I need her for me
Without contradiction my life couldn't be.

So I do care, I guess
And I must have an enemy
Which I guess must be wrong,
But never mind, me
So back to the story:
This just couldn't be.

So I guess that I'm dying--
I guess that I'm free.

so many far-away eyes
i pass by on a bike
and just what i passed by,
i'll never really know.

but i'll hold it inside
and we'll fall apart fine
keep my eyes looking forward
because you just never know--

what you're holding inside
well, i think it's divine
and maybe tomorrow
i'll go to a show

and where are you playing?
what band are you with?
what songs will we dance to,
and where will you go?

I turn for a Moment
And stand at the bow
The wind whips the sails, and
It's buffeting, Now

A stretched out horizon
What lies in its arms?
The future is silent,
It sounds its alarms

It's what makes me feel so stupid in moments of navel-gazing,
Or personifying unity as if it were a thing like me
It stands there with a kicking womb
To birth the monster of my doom
Its noise ful-ly concealed behind a veil.

My childish virtues,
They withered and wept
They wilted for science,
They felt quite inept

But new virtue turned 'round,
And weathered a storm
I turned for a moment
She's tethered and warm

Well, I lost my **** for a grip or two
But I picked the rocks out of my shoes.
It's time to grow onto my spine
And resonate this body's mine.

Splayed nerve and scattered spirit--
When the magnitude of beauty passes through unhad
And you walk through civilized wildernesses
And even confused food goes untasted in your mouth,
And you worry that it is only serving to fuel worry

Kid... All you gotta do is remember what you love
We all have it. It is solid, reliable
Beads of water condense on your natural soul,
Easy as a spiderweb in the morning.

You are magnificent.
You do not need to twist and turn to get there--
Would you take a moment to stop worrying so much
And return to the home that misses you so badly?

We were foxes
Hiding away in a shed in winter

Snowflakes falling through the amber lights
Of your apartment complex

Sparking brown and hazel eyes
Tiny jaws that harmonize
Searing your incessant cuteness in my brain forever,

How evil...

Damming myself from the silent omen
That slips off the skin of the brave and broken
I miss the way my skin was last spring
I miss the things I'll never be
I twitch in the sunlight and stare
I will never be a king

Hang love up in the open air,
You were never meant to be just a wall
On your windowsill,
Chips of bone and broken teeth from last fall.

My son was born to be a warrior
Busting through time
Woven from nothing

I don't read your stuff, Jack
I read only the colors of the wind
Sensation is nauseating to me
Or maybe I am just jealous

Maybe I am avoiding the heavy envy in my stomach
That I feel when I watch you perform
And the alienated feeling I get
When I talk to someone so cultured and informed

And they'll eye me sourly like an ugly beast
They'll look down on me for my ignorance and raw emotion

I just watch these dumb videos
I **** myself by killing time
I avoid without understanding why

Beautiful things happen in my life
And i don't tell anyone about them.

A leaf blew across my backyard
And got stuck on the trunk of a maple tree.

You will die too, and so I feel alright.
I just get so sick of myself sometimes.

And someone this boyish can not age too well,
And you don't send an honest artist to jail like that,
You just don't.

The marble inside you
Digested eyes,
Leaving them bewildered and struck
But it was whimsical and arrogant, in some rooms,
Was it plaster?

And it'd fall apart in seconds.

...

She brought a well-built house and would fix it for free
But I kept punching in the walls and I'd sit and mope

It'd never fall apart,
I was never once evicted!

!

And I myself am a haunted house
Buyer beware
With landscaped lawns and gently sloped easings
I will reel you in
Lead you past the landings
Where ghosts choke the sunlight

.

Eyes frozen awake glaze over and rot yellow
Newborn buds are fertile in the spiral spring
Off to the side, let's go, let's die
We'll watch them rise and live new lives

I'm sorry my poems are so miserable when life is so beautiful
I'm just sad because I feel like I lost my mind
Did I ever really have it,
Did it come with holes
Did I just pay them too much mind?

I have missed my mark by far
But mixed resolve with fate or fear
Will tighten up a sagging life
Off to the side, let's go, let's die
Take your place in the order
Fall to the side
Close your frozen, buzzing eyes

The stretch and release of the sinews and my ribs
Work in tandem with my lungs
Like I want to embrace my atmosphere

The universe breathing for me, hanging from a pinhole wrapped in cortical tissue
A blood-steeped **** in a cracked case
Like letting go, like simplification

Negation is invisible to my forward-looking eyes,
But I know it's there because it mixes with the light
Buckling my knees, ending life with swift and apathetic precision
Forming disease and making each ambiguous incision.

My body dissolves in slow motion
Like a sucker in a child's mouth
Like pill granules in an addict's mucous membrane
Like a song from a sinking ship

It came from an accident.

From two people who met, loved, and sputtered out.

It came from adoption. From a family in the suburbs around Philadelphia.

And it came from Nowhere, as my brain put out feelers around her
and learned she was real.

It came from Fantasia-- from classical dinosaurs, and from Mickey Mouse with little dancing brooms, and from a line that vibrated with the music.

It came from Love, a word I learned.

It came from feeling like the weird kid in school.

It came from chorus, learning trumpet, and Boy Scouts.

From losing young friends and Sugar We're Going down coming on mtv2.

It came from nooks and crannies and trinkets from my life I am sweeping by and not mentioning.

It came from confusing therapy appointments and being told to take medication.

It came from my first guitar at age thirteen.

From losing control and breaking everything in my house and going to a mental health clinic. From cutting myself because I don't know, other people did it and I'm sad.

It came from puppy love with this cute girl who was pretty averse to me at first. And from sneaking over her house when no one was home.

And it came from identifying myself as a poet, songwriter, a kawaii emo kid who could hang with anyone (but maybe not some of the popular kids).

It came from being arrested for trespassing on accident, not believed, and then put on probation. It came from sleeping in past the bus and then being sent to juvenile hall for truancy. It came from a burning hatred for authority that hurt my life for no reason.

It came from feeling mishandled by my parents but also whiny and unable to stop whining.

It came from Latin class and AP English and Music Theory classes, and my high school sweetheart who is forever my personal Goddess of Music. But I don't think about her much anymore.

It came from feeling self-conscious about being a slow reader.

It came from seeing myself as an intellectual, and from being watched all the time by the government.

It came from starting to realize my brain gets depressed, grandiose, understands the world through fixations, and is sort of a lopsided brain.

It came from high school antics, starting to smoke ****, and becoming interested in the truth about drugs.

It came from starting to realize I was way too invested in these girls, and wow I really let myself become a **** sometimes.

It came from going away to college in the middle of Pennsylvania.

It came from an interest in psychedelics and probably overdoing it a bit and an incident where I hit my head that really had me spinning for a while.

It came from dropping out of Bloomsburg.

It came from starting to feel like I should know what I'm doing by now and for the first time, feeling like an adult lost in the world.

It came from going back to school and meeting a cute older girl who was Scandinavian and new and exciting.

It came from living like a rock star in a college town, delivering food and going where the **** I wanted when I wanted.

It came from my last time losing my **** over this girl. From realizing I am in control of how I react, and finally developing a callus.

It came from a very bipolar drive to Miami and back to Pennsylvania without looking into any new places like I planned.

It came from having to live back home with my bad memories. From an uncharacteristic DUI and banging my head in the cop car until it bled.

It came from getting another DUI for **** because my headlight was out and I got pulled over, but I was driving perfectly.

It came from having to be involved with the law again, and being depressed about that girl, cutting myself and admitting myself to the mental clinic.

It came from my parents really getting on my nerves, and it's not just me.

It came from losing my temper and breaking the TV and my dad's windshield with a baseball bat.

It came from not being allowed back home after admitting myself to the mental clinic again, from being set up with a room in the next town only to have it be destroyed by strangers and kicked out.

It came from living with a new friend, partying all the time, selling **** for money, and living in hotels.

It came from having to get away from all that and working hard as a landscaper. From patching things up and moving back home.

It came from losing probably my tenth job because I didn't show up, and getting depressed again.

It came from throwing that shoe at the wall. From my dad coming downstairs and me yelling at him to shut the ******* door. From my brother being rightfully angry at me because I'd been a **** and throwing his iHome at the ground.

It came from my parents calling the police on me when I was on probation.

It came from de-escalating, talking to the cops, and then using my coping skills and riding my bike after that, but it came from finding my tires slashed and failing myself, storming off and busting things up (only insured things) with rocks.

It came from the police surrounding my house and taking me off to jail, from that being the last time I'd ever see grandpop alive. We caught you on surveillance.

It came from five hard months in the county jail feeling very scared and not treated with justice at all. Except I thought maybe God is treating me with justice.

It came from re-assessing myself and taking some time to breathe.

It came from being locked up again two months after that for smoking ****, for a month and a half long sentence.

It came from behavioral health court, which promised to lower my charge from a felony if I passed this very strict program for a year.

It came from only being able to let it go about 50% of the time and from deep resentment for my parents built up over the years.

It came from being accused of doing opiates when I didn't, and from being reprimanded for not trying hard enough when in truth I was. It came from my psychiatrist is on vacation, and that's why she isn't answering. It came from I know myself, and I don't need medication.

It came from even deeper anger at the system but now I'm an adult. And it seriously helps some of these people, and they really do care I guess.

It came from not being sure if I'm trying my hardest but I'm going to apply here and work on something today.

It came from feeling like a complicated mess no one wants to listen to.

It came from getting up early every day to see if I have a drug test and biking through the freezing cold to make the bus if I do.

It came from love, that's a word I learned.

If I could I'd take my brain out with a hook and wring it free of its ineptitude,
Make it a clear and solid structure
Massage it until it forgives itself
And it lights up as a single torch inside of my head

But right now the fires are several and disparate
As arcs of potential course through flesh
And I am left feeling crazy and tired.

Damming this dysfunctional soup are my wide, brown eyes
Doe-like and lapping at everything.

After it rains,
The water is muddy.

But on a beautiful day,
I guess it is clear.

These nights under construction,
My body is sore.

I ride my bike home through the dark,
The headlights **** past
And underneath me the world is making its slow rotation into the future.

I take my heavy legs off my bike and make light noises in the dark
But in my silhouetted skull thoughts of her are buzzing.

The girl who's loving me a few towns over
Loving me even in her sleep,
Telling me I
Am what she needs.

Will I ever give my songs to waiting crowds, I don't know
Or write a book that strikes a flame in the halls of history?

Either way, the ones behind my webcam know what I'm capable of.

But it's the girl that makes it right,
She is so cute, so passionate,
So honest in her love
And my trembling hands see an opportunity to make just this one thing right.

So even if it's only ever that, it'd be more than enough.

The night digests me and confirms the wrinkles already setting in my 24-year-old face
As I wander around my parents' house and slowly decline into sleep.

And you,
You fill my head with such hopes
You make my stomach glow and I feel you curled up next to me
Your skinny little body--
I love kissing your forehead
Before we go to sleep.

You grasp
For the clutch
Of a wisp
Of a secret... but she knows.

Hands clasped.
Just a touch
Just a kiss
You can keep it... but she knows.

This time
You find a gem and you swallow
Make it like your heart, or your stomach
Swimming inside is the essence of a moment

You peer out at the world
From inside your sparkling skull
And you think yet another sacred thought--
"...but she knows."

but she knows, she knows.

Jay says that he has OCD.

I'm scared he might have plans to **** me.

Jay says

I'm scared

He has

He might

Jay says that he has OCD.

.
Why don't you love me?
She screamed,
Sobbing.

WHY DON'T YOU LOVE ME!?

through stinging, salty tears.

She was at the bottom of the Pit of Despair,
And all the pretty living things turned black
And grew into her hair.

Why don't you love me,
Why don't you love me,
Why don't you love me?

Her screams shattered everything,
And brought down birds from crystal wings.
And all of life would stop its song
In reverence and submission,
In observation of her cry.

In music there's a symbol like
A shatter going through the lines
And all through life, the fracture runs
And from its fractal, beauty comes

But all I want to know is this:
Before her cries, was life just bliss?
And can eternal love exist?

It seems a thing we'd sorely
miss.

His heart became like a dessicated root
And he walked around the world with a stiff spine,
Because he was afraid that the first thing to touch it would simply
crunch
Its vestige into dust,

And he would stop existing.

She will be there.

To cut the string that ties all her fingers
to all my guts
With that katana on the wall, or
A blade like Nordic ice, or
the very last beat of my heart.

Standing over.

These forfeited days dressed so strange
In my last breath.

Show the world, and be the victor
Of my death.

i'm sorry but i really just need to write right now.
because writing is my home.
i NEED you,
i need you to UNDERSTAND
this drunk desperation that i get in
it's like the feeling i'd get when my dad
didn't understand my emotions because i'm not like him,
i'm adopted by birth,
or when my mom just put her hands up and walked away
and i just wanted to be heard, no mom,
not just NO, but WHY did you say no??

i'm far too intelligent, much too handsome
i held way too much promise to still be this low and turning 23 soon
i should be a famous musician by now, at least,
but alas, i may not actually have enough talent
but i shouldn't care, right? i should just care about having fun

this feeling is the same feeling that made me feel
it was worthwhile to throw rocks at a parked car
an expensive electric sign and a window
the same feeling that put me in jail for 5 months
only now, i've been in jail. i've suffered that.

it's the same feeling that wraps me up in the memory of my exes
i feel like i'm in a TOMB with their memories
already buried with the vapors of their love on my soft adolescent skin
already banging on the walls of my coffin
i do and don't want to accept i will never be that skinny teen you used to be obsessed with

now, no girl wants me, or i can't muster up the confidence
or the swagger is dead, and my remnants rattling along
oh, how i need you to understand...
i need you to know that i obsessively listen to
Sugar We're Going Down and have since 5th grade

that it is so STRANGE that i want another cigarette
and want no more cigarettes forever, both so desperately

i am desperate
i am so lost and so broke
broken down
and i just ******* hope
i hope that before my twenties end i can tour with a band
oh, that electric guitar seems ages away now
someone pull me from my drowning, but no
i see that to be a man is to pull myself from this

oh, my heart aches such a terrible swell.

Antipoet
Lazily directing words on a screen
They half describe life and it bothers him
What does his life mean

Sure I'm trying like an average guy tries,
Lost in the plot of the whiniest generation yet
But sometimes we appreciate the edge cut by my physiology and mind chemicals...

Sometimes.

Do you watch me like I ask you to?
Do you really record everything I do?
I doubt it, maybe you do
I don't practice the way I should on guitar
I let it bleed and when it's ready it bleeds well
I strain to be amazing and when I am robust my blood is rose petals
All folded up to the crown of my mind
In a node of epitome

Then the default mode goes awry again and what I am seeing is oddly supported by a crude cranium

I was a sort of genius
In a way
*******,
I love you so
There is so much more on the way

i don't need any Thing,
this world is my Lover.

look! i was born on a landscaped, grassy hill.

no wait! i must humble myself, so
hello. i am just another man in Love
setting up his spine for alignment

i am the king who is no king
who looks up down but sideways at people
i am the traveler granted an open mind,
my smile is my throne.

your smile is celestial
here we float in space

we conspire at night
how to divide the remains
i can feel it, i
wake up
and each day holds off just a little more

the hearth that plays upon
gold-trimmed porcelain
like a grand *****

the room that pulls your steps forward
and makes your eyes glowing

held up by a chemical dream
woven of nothing
so sweetly kissed by nothing on all sides

i am the death god
i am the room held up by dreaming
that hosts the phallus and the womb

a fixed stare
a lovely dare
a poetic doom

Sail to any coast
And you will find these beads of beauty

Strewn across the land,
Turning water into color.

Family, a family
One of nature's many treasures

In the mouths of songbirds
Making music, sewing feathers

Rising from the soil
Nodding to the other flowers

Smiling contentedly
And keeping their own melody

Happy to be taken
So to spread their tiny seeds

Family Rosacea.

Something nature needs.

Blind to quality,
I must carry on
In reality,
I must become aerodynamic.

You are all just the air.
This theory that I'm there.
I will make it an art.

You

Will stay true to my heart.

Dark visions come to me
Lie beneath the shady tree

Come easily,
Like spent leaves gliding to the ground.

Standing up I feel only fractionally alive
My stagnant blood sloshes around inside my big head
And you slosh around on my ****** lake,
And I see colors when you hit the walls of that atrophied cave.

I dress for my funeral and midway,
I am looking to the casket
Because it's midway
And the sky is so heavy and so grey.

And upon my criminal history, I lament
How tragic it is when men govern men

She is wearing my body
It isn't even sincere
I will return to fashion and fade away forever

i'm into music music
all the ways songs and artists dance around the audience
they flow like rivers through the colorful maze of people
who revel and rock out and wallow
chuckle cry sway jump and tap their tiny little feet
write more music and make more art

i wonder about those things
and all the ways songs and artists
are related
in ways no one ever even realized

Approbation pours from one cup to another, STOP
You can cut the line with a word or a motion
Like a knife
It's the social flow
It gets disrupted and it goes

But what about the chemicals we learned about?
The hard science distilled from a million dissections
How does it make you feel
To realize everything is just a mechanism?

Strange.

And yet to be the one driving the machine stirs the same kind of emotion,
Evokes the same sense of dearness that it always has
Because no science can bring up the ultimate root
No exacto knife can extirpate the meaning of everything--

Oh, but it can.
An art was born of the wind,
And every no one knows what it means
We still rustle in the atmosphere,
Ultraviolet and weird
Gathered here in an advanced development
Protruding into the universe like an odd fruit

For now this is what everything meant,
And who knows what else
We work with the same old tools
To get the same old thrills
And we like it,
It makes a sound.

a bad dream darling
these red-black tendrils and feral fangs
an impish hypersexual
wrapped twice tightly
with a crashlanded life

alright you have no money
but at least you can still **** me right ;)

Whatever color Penelope's dress is
today--
Life is just as absurd as high fashion.
She rises, she rises, she rises up your spine
Like a spider
Because we like what we like for good reasons
But we all know that's empty
Well, not really empty but it's just what you are,
So there is that, whatever that is.

So it gives you this suspenseful feeling, you know,
Almost like a spider creeping.

Because we know it's empty.

Or, whatever.

I see everything
And it
Is perfect.

Me and my friends,
We all lost touch
I guess you probably think it didn't matter much
But I still care,
I just lost... touch.

Me and my friends
We all had fun
Playing hackysack in the summer sun
I don't know why,
I'm lost in time.

I hope you know I want a better life.

This one's gonna be about me and my friends,
We're gonna have some good times
We're gonna stay young for life
We're never gonna care about the way that the world ends.

This one's gonna be about me and my friends,
Cuz now I just gotta chill out,
I don't know what you're talking about,
This one's gonna be about me and my friends.

My lucid hero
You are engaged and impenetrable
Cherished in the full grasp of my heart's eye
Fighting for a cause.

With grace you carry your great onus
With great glory you carry the purpose
Of all things good
When you are small and humble
When you are weak and mighty

When you are alone,
You are a stolid friend
When you are submerged in the chaos of the world,
You do your best.

You deserve recognition,
But you decline, deeming it unnecessary.

Instead you reach out,
Widening the warm touch of your only mission

To bring the world a little home
In the wretched hands
Of a lonely human.

our stuttering lungs
fall short of Breath
fluttering tongues
with bodies pressed

ease in and out
life and death
but where is death?
it's in our hands.

we must be pressing around it
pushing it down
somewhere between us
it is infinitesimal.

grasping to unbutton your jeans,
i am the fingers tearing through the keys

and long shifts at boring jobs
mean red trails on my back

tonight, it is the blood of the first bite that i crave the most.

slipping into you, just through the door
(and i can feel it now)
having broken the code and spoken that language
with my body, from its heart
with my searching fingers

with fluttering music

knowing the great adventure that lives inside you...

What they think about me doesn't hurt,
I'm on top.

Take this pill, **** in this cup,
Labels, stigmas, words.

But what they think about me doesn't hurt.

What they think about me can rattle and run,
I'm virile
I'm a real one.

Oh...! what they think about me can rattle
and run.

What they think about me isn't fair,
But I'm there.

Waiting for my chance
To show the air I'm fair.

What they think about me isn't fair,
But I'm on top.
I'm virile.
I'm *there