bedroom fades back in
groggy eyed perpetual
no need to worry
i whisper to the dust motes
they will all read this how they want
or wont read it at all
so keep dancing
it lends the moment something dead
i can take for granted
as i stumble down the hall
to the bathroom
where i stand and
stare at myself in the mirror
half naked

I want the audience to know that i
show up to any gilded scale with my own dagger and feather
and usually leap into the
gaping maw of the Ammit analog
before the latter is ever placed
in the bowl opposite
my still beating heart

but
something about this go-around feels
a bit different
a bit off
a bit clearer maybe

maybe not

maybe

yea maybe not

and
yet
somehow
another
gaping
maw

no jumping this time

I don't miss people
I miss the parts of me I gave them

All of these people gnashing teeth
over 2 months of an isolation
drenched in comfort takes my
mind to Thoreau at his cabin,
tending to his beans
and befriending bees
while the orchestra of the
afternoon breeze plays
the branches like a cello
to that brilliant gilded lonely he danced
with like a lover in a living room
or a child standing on his shoes at a wedding.

You touched rolling clouds
without ever knowing there would
be no touching down
and that “good enough for jazz” ****
is ******* trash.
So, just come back.

This lassitude is a path
I intend to stray from,
go laughing like a madman
off into the wild wild faceless
fade-away until I wake up
in another's afternoon.

Square one is etched in my light-body.

Masks, masks, and masks.

Sad poems stacked somewhere
between our past and the shattered
glass still scattering Saturday sunshine;
I think I've loved life enough, thanks.

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.

These days the
development of a style
is like trying to translate
the leaves blowing across
concrete into Naruda
at his most heartbroken.

You either try or lie about what
is dying in the background
of every family photograph
yet to be taken.

Being well received is a gold star
sticker by your name written in
yellow crayon;
I don't want you to like me.

Wilmot in the park,
the dregs hurled at the world,
teeth stained red or falling out.

I don't want you to like me.

I want you to feel something.

My bailiwick is perpetuating
mania back on itself,
the radius is shaped
like canopic jars carved in the likeness of mad gods of hells
I've missed on trips through the blackened aftermath imagined
ad hoc in afternoons which we were meant to scatter like ashes, like truth,  like flattery, like rats..

Ladders to illusory
for proof of the usefulness
the numinous has in obfuscating
my *******,
past lives,
fugue states,
immune to the mutagenic malaise of this routine rebuking of being aloof in the face of futures yet to be hewn from the quantum foam.

Empty bottles.
Ghosts given up too indifferent sky.
Empires toppled by nightfall.
There is no "why” to all of this,
just a primal drive off the tallest cliffs we can possibly find.

When no one is
available

We find a place
to put it

A place to
get it

Can get bent
for it

Belonging is the
weapon

we too often
wield