An ocean away from the Ivory Coast,
my feet are too clean and my mind is too *****.

i'm so far away from this euphoric, ruddy discharge that my bed has transformed from a lukewarm boulder into all of my favorite childhood memories-
the unconscious a candy apple,
your dreams a sugary topping.

there you are-
wavering like a flag torn piece by piece from the wind,
savoring my tears like a glass jar,
gleaming ubiquitous affection, yet stoic,
unaffected by the blistering mantle-heat.

this ocean is my hospital gown tied so tightly that i can no longer breathe in your deepest fears and swallow them like morning coffee.

this ocean is my mother, choking on soothing words, repelling suicide with optimistic rhetoric, neurons firing in a tone so hectic that silent meditation is an inaudible conversation.

this ocean is the anti-depressant that ***** on my skin like a vacuum, dr. nestling his blindfold like an infant

this ocean is my empty home, abandoned, lost in the noise.

someday my feet will be ***** again,
and i'll feel your unyielding warmth like quarries in the summer,
dropping all of the noise and mending with what matters most,
where i'm blending in with infinite shades
of the Ivory Coast.

sixty-eight cigarettes on the desktop-
ashtrays,
an absent post-filter prediction
shouting to the leaky ceiling tiles,
America, you've taken it all

marks on the wrist-
no freshly-fallen feathers, but
locks on every door and
allocated times to eat,

QUIET,
I SAID
QUIET!

i always want to be forty miles north of here where
the drugs are taken under my own free will and
there's an amp for Ringo's snare.

oh, bureaucracy, why do the men in blue transform my glass ceiling into linoleum?

the flagpole is not an adequate target for this diatribe-
this transparency is marching me towards a four-point restraint while I sob for the intersection(ality) of Route 2 and 116
and sixty-eight cigarettes
to inhale a Franklin County sunset in
symmetrical harmony.

sleepwalking for one more hour.

sleepwalking for two decades with a protruding gut and
eyes as buried deep as petrified wood,
i’ve dug up a treasure-
a realization, if you will.
everyone will leave when they see the ice sheets on my bones.

a feather without a breeze,
a storm of acid rain,

wind currents in hibernation,

gasping, treading, begging for a direction to open eyelids,
sinking,
sinking,
losing oxygen-

marathons,
pockets filled to the brim with stones,
i am drowning as far inland as a swimmer can be,

i am a cold, cosmic dot and one hour will not burn enough energy-
my brothers and sisters in the cold, i am
one hour further away from leaving this lonely, unforgiving, jagged, racially segregated and
factory farming piece of terrain that has worn down my bones without ever using a blade.

one hour closer to the next heartbreak, to feeling my heart as a vase dropped down the stairs of an apartment complex, friendly enough to feel its walls in my soul like fresh lipstick on my cheek, apathetic enough to leave the shards under the jungle jim for weeks.

one hour further away from the dishonest dream of my grass-stained bare feet, no nails in tires, and mom singing to pop radio while making chicken-
one hour more distant from broken pencils and dad’s empty beer bottles. drifting like a poor, lonely cloud given the horrific gift of conscious thought, i am one hour further away.


sinking.

one more hour of frozen tundra,
i am waiting for daylight to come and pass
as a sheep without wool,
dying much too slowly,

for one more wretched,
godless
hour.

a crossroads-
my fingers are drooping like dampened socks,
as I am changing like a
kitchen table hardens over spills and
senseless childhood arguments.

i’ve forgotten how to breathe as my lungs strain more heavily,
as drains reject water in hypocrisy and your image haunts the table like an apparition with no social courtesy.

the mirror has been less and less friendly. my hair feels like styrofoam.

i felt my worn-down sneakers attract the wet leaves like magnets in another New England autumn. i wondered why they didn’t repel me like logic, purpose, or your daisy-shaped palms.

we fight and bleed to stick to the bottoms of sneakers but winter will come and lovers will pass,
as any breeze will tell you.

march 9th, 2016
five dollars an hour,
copyrights are not ensured agoristically;
minimum wage is ensured by those who ignore the hazel in Yemeni eye sockets,
ribs barren.

October 22nd,
i cannot afford the heat anymore.
i only get drunk so that i may eat ***** without hearing your hymn,
screaming into my ear-plugs like evolutionary theory.

Northampton, Massachusetts-
i wore sheep under my eyes and grey on a heart-sick scalp;
we were all dying and my cerebellum was a private-eye detective, searching for color in a world so plastered in binary that orange and Green-Rainbow never sang emotion in G major.

I am dying, too.

reciprocity is the least common denominator of "I promise to think of your interests later."

August 2016,
my hair is silly putty and this couch has transformed my spinal column into haplessly frozen shoelaces,
tied together.

snowfall, 2016,
i love every single Yemeni and
the cold stings like index, middle, and thumb grazing lit firewood.

yesterdays-
where there is no curtain,
there is no cloud.

(it's always a longer drive on the other side.)

the flight back won't accept a round trip;
we are never quite right in the mediums where we work too much to eat dinner with our families. the coffee *** is whiter than walls, unexplored, unadorned, stunted from existing morally well-rounded or mature.

the prison industry complex is my backyard with pesticides growing green grass and tides rise as my greatest fears of inadequacy hide like colorblind fireflies.

i'll do what i can to survive.

i'll eat so i cannot read but
rather
surmise
so I can't taste oxygen like
a velvet sunrise,
hiding my yesterdays by maksing the destination of my drive,
simply a dichotomy of blood and
first prize.

i'm not inspired to smoke cigarettes because i'm always trying to get in shape but every finger i lift is a freighter's worth of dead weight.

i envy their lack of conscious thought;
i **** them in my mind for the disparity between their capability for labor and apathy towards the thought of an imaginary savior.

faith means believing what isn't there. you held me tighter when i told you that i don't wear seatbelts because i'm always dreaming of dethroning lamposts and kissing trees on the side of the Pike. foliage is far more gregarious without all of the gore but you said that you'd stay forever and your ghost sits on my shoulders like a dump truck full of ashes.

i don't know if i've ever written a full paragraph without dreaming of this pen sprinting through my chest, blood like nectar.

drink me and feel your potential dissipate like dust bunnies.

you would have stayed forever.

lie to me again and tell me that i'll wear my seatbelt someday.