I see her there
A dark look in her eye
Smirking at me
Inviting "give it a try"..

My Shadow dares me
Into the ring
Smuggly she grins
Thinks I've nothin to bring..

"You know ur smoked!"
She gleefully taunts
"You wanna spar with me?
I'm fueled by your wants!"

I shuffle my feet
Timidly taking my stance
The first round, a blood bath
That b@tch kicked my A$$

Bruised and beat down
My trainer now pleads
Where is your fight girl?
Ya think I brought you to bleed?!

"But she's mean!" I sob..
As I spit out a tooth
"She breaks every rule!"
"So resentful and uncooth!"

Even still she is
A true part of you
Learn to dance in this ring
Or you, she will rule..

Now I stand with conviction
To face my brutal self
She may take her pound of flesh
But none will leave til its dealt..

We are not so separate
One good, and one bad
We move with congruence
Our conversation now had..

I dodge and I weave
As I feel her wear out
I take a few blows
But I leave her no doubt..

I am in this ring
Til our dealings be done
She may beat me down
But our pieces are one.

You used to laugh (and
    pretend my spiny sweet-gum
       words would cringe at the very
  brush of a lifetime), but
                     our seasons are changing
                (everything is all at once an
                  unwavering green), adopting
                      breadth of iceberg proportions
  
    (we dance around forever.)

Complicit in His schemes
We seal our destiny as we approach it
As we scurry from the light of pure truth like cockroaches into the safe shadows
Where the giants can't see and pretend not to notice
We focus on crumbs and morsels we can see from our little caves
And dig graves to remember the feeble lifetimes we spend waiting for the safe shroud of night
And look not into the eyes of the gargantuan beasts who can destroy us with one stroke of their fist
Or take mercy on us
Feeding us their leavings
We eat the **** of gods
And fleas have smaller fleas to **** their blood
And geese return in flocks, the sheep huddle under shade trees
The gay bumblebees and the wasps in the storm drains
Say hello and we gather for games in the night, Forgetting each other

And on the 23rd attempt she was half-realized
But across the sea she began to see in her dreams
What her eyes on the paper stared out at from the past

She forgets dreams upon waking
She creates schemes with fake actors,
Attractive and confident people
And evil surrounds her
I don't like to be around
Fearing their presence
And she hears on the wind that I won't be returning
But all that this tells her is
Life will go on as it has since the time
When her faces were being
Configured on paper,
Her true form solidifying
With each passing club meeting
And art school submission
And throw down the gutter
And substance test warning
The morning before being
Forced to report on the innocent wives of the kinds
Who prepared what our minds
Would later consume and disintegrated
Reforming 10,000 years later
More open and flexible and appreciative and reverent
And ecstatic and creative and mindful of its functions

Rhythm straightening
The early morning gray looks at me
Overcast, the sky blankets me in bliss
The cool rain chills to the bone
The cool bones rattle to the ground
Skeletal street lamps illuminate dark business
The occluded acts of idleness on a weekday evening
Sitting on paved carpets and waiting for It to happen;
Today we create for ourselves
Because there is no path but our own
Through the sterile darkness of de-electrified night

The dead hyena by the highway
The leering eyes of his surviving kin
Beasts can feel the concrete start to crumble
They're waiting outside the city walls, gleaming fangs, gnashing jaws
Knowing our day has come and gone
Our soft, tender meat will be all that remains
When the tools of our dominance disintegrate
Breathing easy this late in the game
It's safe because all we can do is wait,
Or create

It’s winter
and the radiators make for hot summer bedrooms,
fake heat for a false season,
high humid air in the canopy,
a western, British, Tunisian bazaar.

But outside the window frame into
the rooftop mouth
of chimney teeth and foggy breath,
a pair of speckled starlings,
with deep coffee eyes and rings
of white for plumage decoration,
nest in the wound of this building.

Surely if they migrate,
to warmer climates, past
the Spanish-African gate, they’d
be able to bask in the dawn desert
sun that’ll drift slowly overhead,
raise their young their instead.
I’d like to migrate too,
leave this town for
somewhere new.

Going crazy in the normalest way
So jealous, so alone
The world doesn't open up to me
Because I press my face against glass doors
The windshields are fogging as I focus in on my disgusting and shameful acts of mutual *******
Waiting till life comes knocking at the window with a flashlight
Asking me to touch my nose,
Walk a straight line

You make me wanna **** myself
But I don't wanna die
I've just run out of ways to make you
Look into my eyes
I'm standing at a crossroads with nothing on all sides
No matter where I walk the future's always past the sunrise

I get up late each morning
Forget what I was dreaming
The memory of my eternal self
Floating through infinite kaleidoscopic
Worlds of pure imagination
Fades as easily as the lurid detail
Of the *** dreams I wake from in paranoid self-delusion

The church marquees say the skies open soon
But they lie
How could the answer to my woes be shining at me on the roadside
Between home and community college?
Everything is everywhere
But thus far NOTHING is here
There's an invisible dome over our heads
And none crane their necks to see beyond
The social order needs tending to
The community garden can wait
We'll always be able to survive on
Just-in-time produce deliveries
To our nearest grocery store
We have more important concerns
Like the meaningless jobs devised
By an unthinking static regime
To grow the economy and keep us from every questioning this way of life
The American way, the baby boomer's dream
Hidden within a shaded alcove
Of the barren wasteland we decided would suit the planet better
Than an unlimited, self-regulating biosphere
Powered by solar energy and God's will

We really did eat the fruit of the tree
But we didn't let it **** our egos
We didn't break on through
Adam and Eve didn't know the machine elves
And if they did the Vatican will have no mention of it
We must no longer be individuated consciousness
But we fail to see that we are ALREADY ONE
With each other
And everything
Even I cannot see it
When I spite my own flesh and blood
For a little bit of sensual grokking
Drinking in green eyes and pink lips

No jealousy!
I am you!
We are me!
Where does this jealousy come from?
The inability to SEE
OPEN YOUR EYES
OPEN MY EYES