With no money in your pockets,
and a desire for a smooth ride.
Yeah, **** it... something simple.
Lust for something easy.
You speak like
anything matters;
I complain in
the opposing
direction.
Bleeding, and everyone would care
if you'd just ******* show them.
Overdriven in lifestyle,
by design without purpose.
Wearing black, but not poignantly.
Cursing because ****,
it feels so good.
Smashing whatever since
you don't own anything.
Dissenting because you can.
Maybe you'll steal **** tomorrow,
maybe you'll tell a lie.
Breathe in.
Cough, choke, turn indigo.
You're gonna do just fine.

Trying to get published is a ******* joke.
My hands are tired of holding my face together,
eyes open at the bottom.
Hydrated by tiny sighs of disappointment
passing through my fingers.
I'm tired.
They seek the ******* about flowers
and the quietness of a lake,
and all I have to offer is
the hopelessness that ensues
most of these messes,
and the reality that this **** exists.
They want the "solitude of a haiku" in every piece.
Well, I have some groundbreaking news *******,
if humans were so content with everything
we wouldn't have or need any **** writers.
This is poetry too,
and if you think otherwise
your definition must be
shallow, jaded, and/or
[most importantly]
incredibly boring.

If you had to get that drunk to **** me like you wanted it,
I think we have serious issues between us.

I don't think we'll talk about it.

Naming objects more affectionately than people,
something stupid I hate to see in others.
Mother Brain stirs the ***, and Kraid
growls infinitely, or purrs in context.

Cheap and lonely, dressed well for someone
who used to be a teenager, but in shambles and
letting it all go to **** freely and crying in joy
at incoming apocalypse.
Nuclear, biological, biblical, bubonic, revolutionary[?].

Sleep in filth, gravity feels like the proper force
we mistook for the human soul.
The center of balance is what we thought was a third eye.
We're ******* idiots is why;
we thought dreams were some kind of heaven.
The sun was god. The earth was flat. Miracles happened.

If we're being honest, we use superstition as a crutch
to elevate beyond our ****** means and pretend
everything is going to be better than what it is.
If we didn't believe in love, and god, and karma, and ghosts,
we'd all go insane from the ******* sanity.
We eat **** to wash our palette for human flesh.

We poison ourselves to imagine we live like royals.

If I turn back the hands on a clock

it changes nothing, lately.

Nothing really said to my face.

No good-byes at least.

What is the rest of this then?

Ticking, talking of ideas I don’t

comprehend or understand?

Ticking, walking down the same path

with more ferocity, less inherent guilt?

Ticking, shocking that all along

I was worse than the measure of

all these “sins” and confessions.

Ticking, locking myself inside and waiting

Armageddon or Apocalypse.

"It's called an Ouroborous",
says the voice,
in the back of her mind in
the front of my skull;
and this coffee taste like cigarettes,
but it makes more sense than
conversation.
Cause for later, like I "need"
an excuse to duck into the
night like a spy. Pity; cardboard boxes
don't work as well in real life.
Privy to the ebb, but avoiding it?
A shape that consumes itself?
A cloud that eats clouds-
A saint to any who would
worship in a mirror.

Overflew from the sewers into the chalice
and they drank it because
it's soaked in
jewels.

Toxic.

Wagging a finger like it's a dense singularity
being hammered into by juggernaut.
No. No. No. No. No.
Smiling because futility,
chuckling because we're so ******* stupid,
blowhards, tryhards, beggars, dancers,
corp. embezzlers, poets with loose morals
and empty wallets.

F is for ****;
like I'm gonna ******* till you **** me over,
waiting for someone to give me a lobotomy in
metaphor or metaphysics, or spiritually,
or actually take a butterknife
to a soft spot in the skull and
drain the fluids with mosquito bites.

I.E; I walked home in the dark alone
and broke down in a cereal aisle
and asked the cashier if I could get
help with the self checkout while
tears in my eyes.

**** whose watching over me now,
white people **** white people just for fun sometimes.
I really don't care how low the human soul falls
even as I investigate accidentally.

Bedlam in the parking lots and Babylon
is burning, burning, burning,
hair held high up by olympian comic book super heroes
[Clark Kent is an ancient egyptian]
tossing egg salad and burnt coffee into
the sphinx's gaping swirling pampered flushing mouth.

We lose ourselves when we follow our moral compass.

If you're heart is always over-explosive,
people will call you a maniac,
I know some folk who fall in love too easy
and they're broke and they live in 2 bedroom apartments,
their rent is like the Romans sticking
nails in their wrists.

I'm not really interested, I.N.R.I.
My younger nephews crying
because I tipped over his new toy,
I laughed way too hard.
I laugh way too hard.

Sleep before work before *******
and **** your day,
constellations on constellations.
Everyone I admire wants to die.
We all commit to suicide more sincerely
than our current relationships.

We're all incompatible,
and no one sleeps enough.
I am a culprit too, I am invaluable,
I'm in denial over a lot of things,
drown it out with aspirin and youtube,
and vitamin D and spicy foods
and water and orange juice...

Enough coffee to drown a child,
they say it only takes three inches though
[everything's a *** joke, everything's innuendo,
or it's a gritty reboot of a silly franchise,
Robocop was ****** up in the eighties
now it's warm milk and
grandma's pull out couch].

I can't figure out why we need
two holidays to celebrate genocide,
my friends probably think I'm insane
and I'd never call them wrong.
I'm not really interested though.

"I think you're moving",
my sister told me over the phone
in the car with my girlfriend's parents.
"Why don't I know about this?",
I asked her, but the answer was
painfully obvious
so we just laughed obnoxiously,
bleeding from the mouth.

Everything happens behind a veil.

I'd make art that wasn't the equivalent of processed
microwave food, without the "gourmet" label.
Then again equal validity in creation is only debatable
if you're an ******* who believes any of this has meaning.
If you're taking yourself seriously,
you're going to get ****** up by
the **** end of this joke; Art is more than these
observable qualities of reality. It is beyond us.
However, everything we are is made of the stuff.
We are art. Life is art. Life is meaningless
Art is meaningless.
We are meaningless. You.
You are meaningless as well.
Roll on snare... None of this holds real validity.
Abuse of cymbal.
In this lifetime I want so many things that simply
will not happen. She says my "dreams" are floaty
although I know I won't live to see them.
Life flies by so fast it's a wonder we don't get
tickets. I want light that moves at 40mph
and scorches on impact. Explodes like fireworks.
It should glow; green or blue.
I'd use it to cook these dinners,
burn these notebooks,
**** these mother
******* guitars.

I grow tired of you hurting yourself with me.
You learn to hate me.
We don’t talk anymore.

My nightmares become fatal.

I stop responding because I don’t know how to answer, and I spend Christmas alone passing out wine-drunk to Naruto. I’m not sorry. My mother calls and I don’t know what to say, and neither does she. Then New Years Eve approaches like a dark cloud to water our crop, and wash away our debts,

but

my acquaintances want to have a fistfight, and I’m asked to be a witness in the police report [but I clearly remember nothing happening, through shades of alcohol].

I clearly remember at the beginning of the night I told you I don’t **** with cops.

Yet, now you’re surprised it makes me uncomfortable.

My daydreams grow immersive. My gameplay grows sloppy.
My reactions grow dull. My body grows weak.
This stranger tastes like cigarettes.
I don’t clearly remember the rest.

They expected some thousand people,
and about thirty showed up.
They put my grandmother's poetry
on tables for people to read.
They didn't.
It rhymed.
She wanted people to dance,
and instead they wept.
Complained about the food.
Some ******* made a pompous, "When I die..."
statement and I was left thinking [and half hoping],
"That can't come soon enough".
People talked about my grandfather more
than they even mentioned her.
Death is pretty ******* mediocre.

Dance flower dance and
When it rains you might drown but
“freedom” has shades now.

To the mower you’re
just taller now. Just taller.
I had dreams last night,

took ill by morning,
I was on a bus headed
somewhere new to me.

I didn’t know where,
I just knew I was scared and
wanted to go home.

I hate this so much,
and I can’t even give up.
I haven’t earned it.

So dance flower dance,
tear your roots out, die trying
to impress us all.

Lint and dust in every corner,
the **** of living builds in all
the nooks and cracks like
furniture for spiders.
The room is wilting;
The walls have been stripped
and slowly everything recedes
to the center of the room.
A monument to what was.
In this room, there was;
an art gallery,
a cave,
a studio,
an arcade,
a love shack!,
a study,
a library,
a concert hall,
a gym,
a dressing room,
a laboratory,
a cafe,
a theater,
a psych ward,
a photo booth,
a club,
and a home.
Now it moves elsewhere,
a box at a time. One-two,
a hamper of clothes,
a bag of cheap technology.
A poster. A picture.
An instrument.
A lot of instruments.
There was a heartbeat here,
and now I hope you can
invest in that.
Keep this room more than
a home. Above an enclosure.
Head and shoulders above;
this room holds legends.

Stepping out of bed listening to
Sun Araw yelp like a cat on marijuana
and wondering if we're all the spawn
of some great singular being.

Lying in your work clothes,
lying to yourself about showing up late
working towards that infinite nothing,
wondering why people expect dreams
out of people, instead of just
give some mercy to the suffering.

Talking about age makes me want to die young.

It's pink and orange and soon it's blue,
but it's still the loveliest most childish
painting the sun has ever spread out
for your eyes to see.

Put on work boots for a job that'd
be just fine with sneakers.
Get your ducks in a row,
and let the cute girls with
big eyes and colored hair
shoot them down
one by one
by one.

Here we are lined up like ******* ants on pavement,
and I've been alienated before, but
never so collectedly. So familiar.
Here we are making small talk and
suddenly I feel useless, or Caucasian, you know;
how you may be something, but certain times
you may inhale too deeply and
feel it. Maybe I felt it earlier...
That type of feeling where, albeit "familiarity",
if I could be in two places at once,
I still wouldn't be here.
Strangers on my welcome mat,
and I just can't close
the ******* door.
It's probably because I don't live here.
Chit-chat and I have nothing to say,
so I'd say anything just to see if you'd
put me on the outside, treat me
like a stranger, or pretend I really
belong here.
The Welcome Party!;
yet I can already tell I don't belong,
I'm unwelcome, I shouldn't be
here.

If I leave this place a wretch

I will have found two facts;

We should all fear death,

and every hell of mine  is

chalk full of angels.

Doesn’t make a difference

when you’re lonely, but

if you come across this

wretch in the flesh;

it will provide.

You live answers and I live questions,
and yes, we can **** each other like this.

Starved in habit and attempt,
crashing on your shores,
flailing wildly, flailing...

Arms waving. Crashing.
Sleep turns red.
Sea turns blue.

Eyes smothered to death,
and a brain that poisons
the body numb.
A mind like
an ******.

You are,
so much like me
yet with a will to live
that swallows us whole.

I survive like this.

Haven't really eaten, in a long time.
Wasting away. Physically,
but not mentally yet.
Yet.
Banging on instruments for
the perfect cacophony.
Stormy tonight outside Cleveland
as I stab away inside my laboratory.
Raining hell and I **** around
till my ears are almost bleeding,
screaming, more aspirin,
lighting thunder, and in the
dead sequences of recording
IT LIVES.
Strings detuned from a menace,
pure chaos on a note rings on,
SKRONK.
Skronk is freedom,
every voice saying what
every voice has to say.
5/4 and it's ******* outside,
and all I know is the key to
utopia is any note you like
in A major.
**** the signature.
Skronk is *freedom.

Recurring nightmare;
I bleed from the mouth and you
slowly disappear.

Love manipulates
as formless desperation
seeking an answer.
I say, “I love you.”
Healing the old scars to pave
way for the new ones.

I say, “I’m leaving.”
Opening the new wound to
breathe finality.

A suicide king,
too heartless for sadism
but once was human.

I once was thoughtful,
I believe in two heavens
that burn like candles.

Slowly, dull, gently.
I believe in two heavens,
laying down awake.

Tomorrow is so uncertain that I'm convinced
if I can make today just a little brighter
I've succeeded. I've won.

I can't beat them.
You bob and weave without precision , swaying to a tune played poorly. Piercing eyes, and heavy hands, yet all the power behind those ten fingers
can't pay the rent on time, can't keep food in the cupboards, can't keep them out of your home. You are so much I cannot even imagine.

They come in like a storm, shuffling through the cracks in the doors and windows, a shiver up your spine, I can feel their breath on your neck. Cold.

Tomorrow is so, so very close, yet I'm convinced if I can sleep in my own bed tonight, they'll never find me. They'll have to wait like I do, till tomorrow, and till another tomorrow.

I didn’t know it’s
unfashionable to wear
Your heart on your sleeve.

I didn’t catch that
lying was part of a game
that we’ve been playing.

It’s just a story
we tell with our bodies and
wash with our bedsheets.

******* salt my open wounds
and eyeballs, eye sores,
eyes are swelling up and
I'm war-chanting,
"Break ****, steal ****."
Start ****, I don't care,
I am a tempest of vulgarity.
Obscenity on high.
I am the meteor that kills
all the dinosaurs.
I am the myth that stops kids
from killing each other
by force of nightmares,
an inherent moral dialogue.
I am the rush.
I am the rush.
I am the rush.
Rush of words that knocks you off
your privileged *** and only takes
your ******* wallet.
******* salt my open wounds and
I will hurt you back.
Not out of my ******* nature,
but because I am.
I continue choosing to be.
Consciously.
I am the rush.

"Affected"
is the only word I have
to describe what you do to me.

Stories on the tips of their tongues,
drool off like dobermans
slobbering over fresh meat.
Eyes like vultures for all the obvious reasons.
I tore my liver out and threw it on the table,
just to test the waters. Went swimmingly.
Better hang in there kid.
Better luck next time.

It's as gorgeous to see the first stick with a sharp rock at the tip, as well as the last mirror polished heavily ornamented spear someone used to try and ****** another human in the name of that quest for greatness, and remember that somewhere in between Jesus Christ was nailed to a flagpole and stuck with the same instrument.
      "Lives Forever."
      To some rate we stopped making weapons to **** mankind, and started building weapons with the destructive power to **** entire branches of thought, philosophy, ideas, and religions. We committed to Hiroshima to tell the world, "Your future is ours." We committed to Iraq and Afghanistan to say, "Thou shalt not interfere with the moral ambiguity of the nuclear superpowers." We fight the idea of terror abroad with real weapons to unrighteously protect the idea of freedom here, dead black men and children in the streets, and in their own homes.
      
      I'm no longer surprised what little effort it took me to stay alive.

      A friend comes to me lovingly and spitefully because they are depressed. Life is hard. People are cold. Nearly every lover requires a stroke to the ego that tells them they are special or great. We build God in the people we ****, and we're baptized in our ******, not the draining of fluids, but the soft verse that "reminds" us we are "objectively good."

       "Pillowtalk; the prayer for forgiveness."
       She comes to me for forgiveness twice and disappears forever. Jacob calls it, "ghosting". It's casual, really.
       They say the universe is comprised of strings sometimes and it sounds like an idea writers can ******* into dust, but I think they do well connecting human bodies without; part metaphor, part science.
      I attend a party and flirt with a stranger. She says we met before. I make out with her friend. She appears out of nowhere. I flirt with her again. I make out with her friend again. Her friend rubs her hand over my pants around the outline of my steel hard **** and hangs her mouth open to girlishly illustrate shock at her own action. We don't ****.
      I finish twelve hours later into the mouth of an amateur **** artist/cam girl and kindergarten teacher for the second time. Her uber driver told her how ****** took the life of his wife and best friend. We laugh at this. We fall in love to some extent.
      I had a dream I saw my father in a hospital bed and told him I forgave him despite my actions. I wake up fully comprehending that he will die without a son.
     I write haiku for a year because everything else lacks structure.

I walk through life

as if it were a stranger’s home;

trying not to break anything.

Mass hysteria
and this is how we rumble
in black clothes with
cops two streets over
ready to assassinate
US presidents and dissidents.
Ready for air.

Ready for takeoff,
the embrace of the long
arm of the law is a chokehold
is a racist institution and
here we are;
junkies, gamblers, jokers, monsters.
Funny thing, we went hunting for
people dressed as monsters
led by monsters disguised as humans.

Yeah, our geniuses die young and brutal.
Ours is the land of stray dogs,
cold rains and streets of garbage
[people included];
The stereotype is today.
The cliche is right now.

Undetectable by the naked eye,
you slip threatening euphemisms
[Bruce Lee yelps and noise]
into the softer parts of my body.

Sleepless unlike god-fearing mortals
drink wine fermented of kitchen tears,
fermented in Dixie cups
held closed by the pressure;
image of a social butterfly
with wings torn off by
childish tyrants.

Sneak into my tonsils
and tear out every crown
on your way to my lips.
Pillage and loot and riot,
bleed from the mouth.
Held together by wire.
Sewn shut with iron.

Eyes as two independent souls,
each a decoy of the other,
hidden, even to themselves.

My ego is intact, I stole **** from work and my mom isn’t disappointed in me.

I got papers, I got coffee, I got a lot of sleep, I read about that boxer got shot in the head [incidentally] and they said;

“You can’t keep a good man down for long.”

So I’m trying to find out what is “a good man”? Was it the hit and run I saw, or the fathers pushing their kids as products for their success? My high school class, or pretentious friends, or my managers cozy in jobs supported by nepotism calling me lazy, maybe my half dead beat father who kicked me out when I was 18 and convinced me I’d be an alcoholic if I ever drank.

Now your cleaning my ***** out of your sink and holding me and telling me I’m so good.

Maybe it’s my landlords who I never see, trying to evict me, or all the police officers who put like a hundred bullets in those folks car, or every guy who dished out a backhanded compliment to a girl who already cuts, or maybe, I know, it’s the president of the United States.

I paint my face red with lipstick and wait for the chatter of a crowd to turn into a riot of bodies. I sparkle in the light. I scream.

I am;
something you forget.

Remember
after.

You don't really care
about me. If you did
I wouldn't be.

Your care for me is
a consolation prize.
An apology.

I'm there after the people.
After the places.
Behind the background.

I'm after words.
After reaction.
After thought.

I'm not saying I'm self-serving,
but I'm only sorry if I have to be
and I hope that's good enough.

I cut down the bridge with my hands
bashing teeth and skull into mush.
I rushed everything for this.
I went ahead.

Distort shadows and repeat offenders,
every other day is a rust belt nightmare
and when it rains it washes all
the **** away, and out of sunlight
it all looks a little less desperate.
It all looks less desperate.

"Smothering me,
setting me free.

I was three steps from heaven.

A voice told me to drown
in feathers and darkness,
let myself down, down, down...
six feet in
I was swept into the space I kept my demons.
I was conflicted. I was embraced.
I was home."

That's all I had too.
Shouting in my head across the kitchen table,
and everyone understands in their own way;
We just need to talk and be heard.
I need to speak and be affirmed.

I just wanted to say something to let you know
I'm still here.
I'm still alive.
I'm still human.

It's an unspoken rule that somewhere out there
there's a sea of ill tempered, cantankerous,
curmudgeonly men. These men are writers.
It would be both a lie,
and not even half the truth.
Today I tried to sell my dream,
and found it's worth roughly $14.50.
I wish about ninety percent of the world would
die in some type of plague or world war,
and just leave me in peace.
I could spare too many people I know.
My phone shut off abruptly.
The internet is out.
I'm roughly forty dollars in debt now,
and I couldn't pawn my life's work out of it.
Handed a gun I would promptly
shoot myself, because if I wanted to ****
everyone I don't care for, I'd run out of bullets.
My narrative isn't even especially unique.
It's summer and I'm trying to pawn an instrument,
and now ebay has killed the value of everything.
Harlan Ellison is complaining that writers
work for free, but he never had to pawn
a supposedly $700 bass to get told
it's worth $70 on ebay.
I want to fight most people I pass on the street, physically.
I want to choke them and try crushing in their faces.
Hypocritically, I'm a pacifist.
I live in a world where children starve to death,
and have been for centuries,
but you can pass an animal hospital and overhear
people saying they "care about animals more than people."
WW3 looks like an honestly
enjoyable prospect from here.
I want to collect my fifteen dollars and get very drunk.
Hypocritically, I don't drink.
It's summer and I want to wreck a stranger's car,
and flip off a police officer. Spit in someone's face.
Anyone's.
I want all those animal lovers to die of pancreatic cancer
while their lovers get shot in the throat in a ditch somewhere,
******* themselves and crying for their perspective gods,
or parents, or homes, or saints, or whatever.
I just want them to be crying.
I'll be rotting in a cell somewhere or dead too.
Hey, love, it gets darker from here too,
but at least I'm still alive, right?
Hey, sister, the will to live is a fire
that now engulfs me as I try
to ignite the atmosphere.
Hey, father, go **** yourself.
Hi mom!
No meter. Still no morals to these stories.
I'm alive in a generation that doesn't
even like talking about itself sincerely.
I'm writing to you via the public library,
a love letter to anybody who feels ashamed
for feeling desperate. Just remember, most
great writers didn't have the internet and
the ones who don't use it,
are just dinosaurs now.
Burn their bones for fuel.
Solidarity,
Austin Heath

You wonder sometimes, don't you,
often as well, but maybe when
you're in bed,
or
on public transportation.

You wonder how they all do it,
and how they all step like ants
to a rhythm without numbers.

You wonder how everyone else
can possibly stand all of this *******
nonsense and not just blow up
or snap and just lose their
******* minds.

Start fires and explosions and
**** prime ministers and presidents,
and cry and **** and protest the
meaninglessness of such a
cruel gift as humanity.

You wonder how everyone hasn't given up.

All the while,
everyone else wonders
when everyone else will
******* lose it too.

We put gas in our tanks and pretend
all our claws are clean and pick at the bones
and the guts and we’re not satiated.

We give our souls and smiles and bodies and ****,
we’re not gifts or garbage, we’re human slot machines.

We are sterile in our thoughts,
and septic everywhere else
in a fashion that’s tasteless,
yet not obscene.

Donate clothes to the poor through
homophobic institutions because
what else can we really do?

Powerless, and yet so convinced we’re going to
fight the bureaucracy some day, and **** yeah
spell check writes half of my good **** nowadays.
I navigate online dictionaries seldom and cowardly.

Most of my writing is anti-revolutionary in the sense
that I hate what I desire intellectually and sincerely
but only because I want it so ******* bad,
and in the end I’m powerless
and empty and distant.

Pretend to me, like a clown/actor, to be strong and violent. You fight like mothers ease their children into sleep, begging and praying. The fight in you is a cartoon predator selling candy to stoners. I never considered myself someone to contemplate the legitimacy of strangers, but I don't know you or your motives.

I don't know you.

I love like a hawk tears into a sparrow.
Viscerally, yet naturally.
Savagely.

Sometimes I feel like
I know all of the sad girls
in the whole wide world.

They call me crying,
or text me in the middle
of panic attacks.

They want attention
but only for themselves so
I disappoint them.

Morally bereft;
selfish for not suffering,
or not like they do.

I am an angel,
but only by default, or
just for being here.

Only for staying
a stationary angel;
to suffer with them.

I have grown heavy,
from their tears and loneliness
and their jealousy.

I can't fall asleep,
at least easily, because
of all the sad girls.

We only connect when you cry it seems.
So many different stains on this bed,
and I wish you were here when I was
happy, but not smiling;
Any of the moments that would be
cheaper for sharing,
but stained if you were there, now.
Here, now.

I wonder, (now, and not often)
if those sheets hold more
tears, or *** fluids, or sweat.
I don't dream anymore, however.

I've never had a beautiful dream
about us, and when I did we were
awake
and a long time ago
we shared that common dream.
You don't even feign interest
in me anymore.

You watch me starve and carve myself into
morsels, easily digestible fragments,
and then turn over and, maybe praying,
though we swear we don't believe in god,
that I'll die mad and half naked in your sleep.

Some trees bear flowers and you'd swear
they die in winter and may never blossom again.
They freeze and turn into wonderful spidery things;
fingerbones strewn haphazardly on some streetlight.
Petals that were pink like new flesh,
rotten out of mind and existence.
I wonder what the blossoms become
when the tree sleeps.

So I've been feeling head backwards
but I'm not trying to make it feel right.
I find it funny you want the sunshine,
and all the comedy in the dark **** gets left to me,
but I didn't come here to berate you,
belittle you, or condemn you.
I came here because although I don't miss love,
well, I kinda miss you.
You are my center when I spin
out of control, up and away,
beyond the clouds.
You are my gatekeeper when I
try to run away from everything.
I try to run away.
I didn't make any reservations for this,
this time or point in reality,
yet here I am.
For you.
I've asked myself a lot of questions,
and tried to stuff the answers in my pockets
and run out the doors before anyone
can grab me. Not this time.
I don't really know why.
I don't, and I didn't miss love,
but honestly, I missed you.

I've seen relatively normal people go insane,
and it makes me wonder when someone
or something is going to pull my ticket.

the phenomenon
of life is over rated,
and here is the end.

We stopped talking but
you've messaged me four times now
to say I'm worthless.

I decided that
we weren't good as friends, and you
did just what you do.

Jay, I'm not asking
for your forgiveness, just that
you keep your silence.

I'm tired and longing
for a peace of mind you seem
eager to ******.

"Manipulative",
you texted me to say that
you were in Cleveland.

I read that message.
I waited three seconds and
I deleted it.

A long time ago,
yet so close to yesterday
I really loved you.

Your friends told you to
cut me out of your life, like
my friends said I should.

Neither were wrong, and
this is what it has come to.
This. This is the end.

Your interventions
always came up to protect
your own interests.

Bleeding in your sleep,
we are closer than our skin.
Flesh inside of flesh.

I’m lost inside you,
I run deeper than your veins.
You scream in pleasure.

I’m dead inside you,
losing grip on the magic
once held between us.

Months later I think,
or I hope, that you’re alone.
I’m bitter for you.

Worshiping in vain;
Touch something ugly tonight.
Touch yourself tonight.

I think the whole point of life on earth is that the smaller creature
adapts and learns how to eat or destroy the bigger creature;
So mankind is destroying the ******* planet,
and I wonder what was taking us so long?

I've been waiting to turn to a stranger and say,
"Do you feel like everyone is living in some
synchronized insanity, and we all want to scream
and cry and break **** and generally riot,
but we don't just because we're told this is how
things should be?

So we just keep  moseying on in our illusion of security,
and perpetuate the illusion with the people who
reject it...[?]"

A stranger flagged me down on the street today,
and I crossed the street and just hopped over the snow bank
to help an old woman to the supermarket,
and **** me, I can't remember her name,
it was like Nancy or Margaret something old-timey.
I bought an orchid and waited for her to finish shopping,
but she told me she would be okay;

Like sometimes you want to let someone know
you're still trying, you're going to be "good",
but **** reading Bukowski still feels so "good",
and all your honesty isn't truthful,
but it's so sincere.
I imagine everyone else is waiting and praying
for everyone else to just snap and go insane.

Those people will look into you and say
"I get it. You're sad", and miss that so many bricks
and stones go into building castles,
and every iPhone shop in the world looks so
empty, disgusting, and caucasian,
and yet every store wants to be the iPhone shop
and so very few places can attempt to be the castle.

The castle takes time, effort... Tolerance.
Stamina. Weathering, aging...
Yeah it looks cold in winter,
but it'll stand in spring, and it'll
outlive the ******* iPhone shops
for centuries.

Anything that stands for centuries
is literally amazing,

And if there is a God, she is a black woman
and the entire world calls her n#####,
and she cries herself to sleep every night.

We are all the company we will ever have in
all those lonely strangers.
If you've ever seen a cat try to **** another cat,
you might be me,
and you may realize mankind is brave and noble
and stupid and messy and disgusting
and terrible terrible terrible and so much better than
their feeble bodies, but so much
worse than gods and heavens and undeserving
of anything supernatural and kind.

We are a cesspool made of solid gold.

Yet, I've taken down my nooses.
I've made my sharp edges dull.
I look both ways when I cross the street.
I take care of a plant now.
I try to take care of myself.
I get by, and that's my plan.

To get by and be happy.

I don't wanna "live life to the fullest"
with some obnoxious artistic gesture
and "wacky" mannerisms,
I force feed to people who don't care.
Trying to make people think I'm
successfully immature, because I'm not.

I don't want to be some retail manager
and employee somewhere else,
getting it at both ends, unpleasantly,
trying to make people think I'm mature
or responsible, because I'm not.

I can't be Bukowski, and I can't be Ginsberg,
and I can't be Emily Dickinson, or Jack Kerouac.
I might have lofty fantasies, and sometimes I'll
attempt them, but I don't want those "plans"
that blow up in your face when the string gets pulled.

I have priorities.

I want to grace through life on thinning plastic wings,
playing last years video games,
listening to timeless music,
and most importantly,
being loved by the people
I love so very much.

My life is tumultuous,
and I've never hurt myself so bad.
I seek a season for which I have committed this great,
great sin.

Without fear to guide me, I drift aimlessly.
Without skeletons in my closet,
I'd be alone.

To sin and sin again. I am not a good person.
I am not ready to be this good person
everyone tells me I am.
I suffer.
I bleed.
I cry.

My life is tumultuous.

Wake up in the morning with
a chip on your shoulder;
like a **** in a serial killer-
someone's going to learn the truth
if you keep dripping.
Trading in your old records
for something new,
you felt the urge to scream
right as they cut to commercial break.
The price of a commodity
becomes outweighed by it's crowd
How truth is like Starbucks.
The metaphysical quality of truth
you seek/ want to burn between
your fingers isn't even
the worst document you've
cleansed from their eyes.
When they learn you,
they're going to tear you apart.
Don't forget.

The dream herein then is to die before they catch you.
To pass in your sleep, fading in new seas
of physical complications and credit debt;
to die before someone breaks you.
To get hit by something so large,
you'll have to call it "God".
For some, before their liver punches out,
and their bodies turn shades unintended.
Epilogue, and the bank takes back the house.
Your day job doesn't skip a beat.
Your art goes unnoticed.
Your clothes go to charity.
Your mattress goes to the curb.
Not a single cloud to sit in
and observe, how bodies rot,
but lives dissolve.
More like salt than alka-seltzer,
unless you have more enemies
than I.

Wrecked on the couch,
my victims asked me who I was
or who I thought I was
or who I was trying to be.

I resented them, like most people
who play into my empathy for
some luxury or to **** out a sucker.

I live on a seat of noise.
Everything is deafeningly loud.
Sinking in screams
like a stale mattress
full of bedbugs,
but you need a place to sleep
for at least another night.

I fly on a deranged bird
that knows one word,
and that word is made-up.
Fictional.
I fly by inches, crawl in the sky
crawl towards death with my
head tilted backwards.

I don't even bother asking
many questions anymore,
especially about people.
I'm not so upset that nobody
particularly cares.

Why are you so bitter old man?
So nihilistic, so feeble and empty...


Was it the strangers? Friends?
The way everyone seems to disappoint you
without hesitation or fail?
You hate strangers.
You hate people you've
never talked to
and afterwards hate them with deeper insights.
You hate the things you see in them, in yourself,
and it disgusts you in the way only you can disgust
yourself, in the way only humanity can disgust you.

How'd you get so mean?
You'd rather people died than left you,
and sometimes they can do both
and you really don't care.
Empathy from you for these ******* strangers,
is like trying to pull a rabbit out of a hat.

Believing in nothing.
Nothing is a belief.
Nothing as a belief.
Belief of nothing.

The way it drags on a vowel
like Nicholas Cage screams.
You're accustomed to failure, loss,
defeat and fear.
You cling to what you have left
desperately
like a dying man
clings to his bedsheets.

For mercy.

"My life is ruined, man",
he said, not having sipped his beer
or taken an anxious sip on his cigarette
in a hot second.
He was a stranger to me, breathed heavily,
overweight, but made of gold it seemed.
My friends were wasted and we were sitting on the roof
after a long night of them getting drunk.
"All our lives are ruined", I replied naively.
"But it's heroine man", he told me,
"Nine out of ten people addicted to heroine die from it."
He was right, at whatever right was.
"You're going to be that one, then.", my friend chimed in.
"I know, it just ***** everyone else is going to die", he continued.
I laughed.
"Don't laugh at that", I was reprimanded.

**** though, everyone else dies too.
I can't stand this place between dying
and being cripplingly apathetic about everything,
and most people I know live it. That edge.
I don't know a lot of people too excited about
waking up and going through the motions.
Most of us think about dying when we're happy;
not quietly into the night but quietly.
Just disappearing in a flash without light.
An instant, but quicker.