Alex is dead.
Alex is indistinguishable from the soil.
Alex is the dissemination of bad ideas, the confusing of such schools of thought.

Ben feels like Alex is.
Ben is lost in a crowd.
Ben is a poor choice of words, on the wrong end of a loaded barrel.

Alex feels nothing.
Alex feels the twitching of an index finger on the trigger.
Alex does not see her target, but catches the vague outline of a thing lost in translation.

Ben misspoke.
Ben makes a sand angel on a beach of excuses.
Ben is the bottom of a wine barrel, sublimates a clenched fist into an outstretched palm.

Alex is the opposite of sublimation.
Alex is subsumed by id.
Alex is locked in the cast iron *** of what she thinks her friend did.

Ben sits down at the table.
Ben places the gun in her hand.  
Ben cannot do this himself; Alex is shaking, shaking, shaken.

This:    
The vacant lot of 2AM - did she hear him correctly?
Not much of a distance for a voice to travel
Meek and fractured though it may be
So surely she heard what he said; the words "pull the trigger".
But what is the f()king point of an epilogue
If it contradicts the book? And what's the f()king point of a moral compass, if the needle is broken? No more can she read and she doesn't know the difference between North and South, she holds a tooth from The Always Open Mouth.

There are three types of people in this world: those who are rocks, those who are hard places, and those are pinned between the first two. Ben is a rock, and Alex isn't sure whether the only way to help both of them is to stay trapped, or to push him down this hill. Alex feels nothing now. And Ben is indistinguishable from the soil.

A pungent petrichor,
The kind to remind you of why you are here.
I was told it is a sign of rebirth.
Deeply lodged axe wounds burrow into the ground below,
And sedimentary formations climb into the open wounds.

You get told to lie deadly still if the bear is large,
And create thunderous uproar if you have a bulkier countenance.
Survival of the fittest, huh?
If lightning is nature taking *** shots at something smaller than it,
I fear to high heaven what it’s hiding from when the skies are clear and I’m relishing in a light of false protection.

note for when you're ahead:

no one very much cares about your stupid little poems
your missives to a sickly version of you.

they're disinterested in your allegories
your holy fables about ***** needles and needless dirt.

and god forbid they watch you climb the ladder
unless your foot misses a rung, and you fall a wonderful fall into the welcoming embrace of the concrete below.

oh but i assure you they are crows
perched on a telephone wire, watching the theater of your car-crash life, as a limp arm tumbles out a capsized window, and the children dance in a circle around the fire, singing:

"we're here, we're here
for all that you hold dear
your eyes so dull and lifeless
yet they cry such pretty tears
we hold you out at arms length
but close enough to hear
the warring two, halves of you
as we imbibe your fear

...but no one very much cares about your stupid little poems."

this is the way the world ends
this is the way the world ends
not with a bang but with a

high price of admission, that being the innate circumstances wherein his ego germinates and grows into two things at the same time: externally pleasant and internally grotesque.

this is the way the world ends
this is the way the world ends
not with a bang but with a

long stretch of beach lined with hospital beds, pyres alight to the God of False Flags and Falser Hope, long speeches and poor teachers getting too close to the water.

this is the way the world ends
this is the way the world ends
not with a bang but with a

difference of opinion - the trickle-down economics of not giving a **** about anyone except one's inner sanctum, from the unrepresented in their little mud huts, to the shadow skulls with buzzing sinuses; Everything, Performing the Dance of the Hearse Driver.

this is the way the world ends
this is the way the world ends
not with a bang but with a

whimper, courtesy of yours truly

although, incredible, the dogmatic pursuit of absent-mindedness, two left feet up the [redacted]

i would make a remark about how fast the time has gone
but i never looked up
to see it moving

wish upon a
wish upon a
wish upon a moribund eternally pessimistic star

[if i was a poem, dear disinterested reader, i think i would be a fridge poem. not very profound, nor eloquent, and rather insipid; though it's quite funny that i exist in the first place]

Me & Earl & The Dying Light Emblematic Of, Or Perhaps Symptomatic Of, My Interest In Whatever It Is You Have To Say

met a genie on a long road
delivered with the smoke of a cracked kitchen kettle
juggling three wishes
in his drunken monologue
like a blind man juggles bowling pins
and stupidly i used them all
on making the next few tomorrows disappear
                                                                                        and now i'm here
...

anyway how may i take your order?