My acting debut
was recorded at midnight.
My starring role, "Guy,

tripping on acid."
My fifteen seconds of fame.
Eating rice paper

and looking "spaced out."
I also got to look bored.
It was pretty cool.

It's been hard to write.
Things are mostly okay now.
Guess I'm not sorry.

You are... what? Thirty?
I'm twenty three and full of
******* and pure charm.

You were drunk enough,
didn't care about *******
on your period.

Barely there, yet soft,
so soft you felt like velvet.
Grabbed your stomach and

asked, "Do you like this?"
Sober, sober, sober, I
said with a smile, "Yes."

Always get this feeling,
like a bullet the size of a bowling ball
is stuck deep in my chest. Like,
a child lost in a supermarket
whose parents were stabbed
outside in their minivan.
Got a shake in my hands
or a spark in the front of my skull
I can't press out no matter
how hard I squeeze my forehead.
My brow furls.
Think about biting off the tongue
a lot lately. I have you, always,
in place of cold solace or warm comfort.
No real reason, emptiness just
creeps up on you and grabs you
like a good friend. Gotta love it, right?
When you want to just
climb in a box with your
arms around yourself;
it's like your holding something
together.
"Like" it...
It's not even anyone's fault anymore,
I just get here on my own.
I know the path, and I follow it.
There's not enough sad songs in
the worn out jewel cases from the
90's to 2004 to stop my...
I don't believe in souls anymore...
from being troubled.
In the back of a yellow cab,
somewhere inside, raining.
The driver looks at you in the rear-view,
asks, "Where are we going?"
You curl up by the window.
Just gaze at the storefronts,
the gait of the ordinary citizens.
"Yeah", you tell him, softly,
"Anywhere is fine."

Some people live with ordinary nightmares
on a daily basis and treat it like we treat
passing a beggar.

These days those who put their hands out have sharp teeth
and I'm proud enough of anyone
who'll bite any hand that feeds.

I almost spent the holidays alone this year
until I whispered
"I want to be very alone and die"
about 4 times instinctively
under my breath.

I read, "Honest Helix"
and realized nothing has changed.
This **** is ******* maddening.

So ******* for what I did,
and I'm going to make it
through this season,
and ******* for reading this
because I never wrote
**** for any of you anyways.

I hope you're either ecstatic,
or you suffocate when you
think of me.

*******. *******. *******.
And a Happy New Year.

They say there’s a kingdom in the sky,
where people never grow old,
and they never die, and
that’s why I don’t believe in heaven.
I hope there’s a hell for everyone who
accepts this system. I don’t believe in Jesus,
but if Jesus wept, it was for
Kelly Thomas, or
Leonard Peltier.
I don’t see a good outcome for mankind.
I think we all deserve exactly whats coming for us,
and some people would say that makes me a cynic.
I’d disagree with those people.
Well I don’t believe in these concepts of
"pessimist" and "optimist" either.
I don’t think karma is real either, but
it’s a hell of an idea.

Spent years learning how to scream
with your mouth closed.

American liberalism;
How to explode on nuclear levels
without burning a single calorie,

and we're all just
painted blue.

If your question was a tree,
the answers would be the fruit
and every one
is ripe
and low hanging,

yet somehow you manage to partake
in a feast of rot and harvest sickness
where fertility is rampant.

Withheld fortunes of spring's past
spoiled in the jar,
yeah, you ****** it up.
It was really simple too,
but you break your own themes
over your knees to be correct.

You fail anyways.
White noise in sheets like
rain over your party
and your guests burn you
for treachery.

Whether you assume responsibility,
or it is forced upon you
these consequences will be yours.
The answer is simple then really;
Don't **** up.

I'm chewing on my thumb
and listening to ice
crackle and hiss
as it deflates.
"Melts."
Once,
you were an
artist swearing your
mistakes were your genius.
Now you are locked in
place and waiting for
some monster in
a fishtank to
manifest,
but you mailed
your change to some
shady place in Wisconsin
you saw in an advertisement
in a comic book from the
seventies, or eighties.
You've gone mad.
Everything else
suffers for it
and you
can't
see.

Burn in the deep seat of your throat.
Ibuprofen in your sleep.
Naproxen sodium, whatever;
couldn't sleep so he daydreamed
all night.

A room with more than four walls.

Sprouted from the concrete
with resentment and defiance
in his DNA.
Double
Helix-
Hell is two more aspirin to
get through the rest of the shift
and realize it's not enough.

Sprouted from between the cracks
in the sidewalk, birthed into a fight;
sunlight as your first caretaker.
Screamed in his head,
because you think in one volume.
Never bit the hand that fed.

Sprouted from the sidewalk.
Crushed under hurrying heels.
A love story in two weeks.
Died in sunlight,
under white collared boots.
Rush.

There was a river
sixteen miles north the highway
where we lost our sins

and sent them downstream,
where they wash their hoods with them.
White like oppression.

When we hang our heads,
they're behind us with the rope.
The same as ever.

Dry your eyes children,
the fight for bread has ended.
We fight to survive.

I took too much aspirin
and when I finally got in place
next to her, comfortably,
my ******* ears were screaming
like they'd just seen a constellation
of invading 8-bit aliens
and I was a blind leader.
The **** part is that the pain
didn't even go away;
was not "relieved".
Well, you driveling dolts, as is;
I see no danger yet, so
I'll take another aspirin.

I’m a woe bearer
Posing as a sunflower,
Reaching for the sun.

They’re looking for me,
But they don’t know that yet, or
How I slept last night.

You are not as helpless to love as you think.

You watch him so closely, the alcohol on his breath can be smelled through his 2am text messages. You admire him anyways.

You are not as helpless to love as you feel.

You left me after weeks of not even trying. You made me feel disgusting. I get over it reminding myself that the *** was awful. You told me you failed me, and I believe you.

You are not as helpless to love as you want to be.

You will lose everyone if you keep choosing to be stapled to someone who feels no remorse over telling others to **** themselves. Stop acting like history is a precedent for dragging that sack of **** around. A lot of girls cut themselves, you just met one who deserves to.

You are not as helpless to love as it seems.

I can't believe my parents got along for long enough to have two kids. My father started texting her to say happy birthday, happy holidays, etc. "He must be lonely", I tell her, knowing fully well he's pushed everyone out of his life. He's insufferable to even his insufferable friends [which he now lacks].
I aspire that those who love me may recognize their lust and admiration, but leave me in a heartbeat for my shortcomings. I would pray that nobody lets me hurt them if they have the chance. I fear myself for them. It's only a little ****** up.

When you leave and you don't appear again? I've normalized the behavior. I imagine that death's ferry travels through this room and takes the lust from you. You leave with nothing but the mediocrity of reality. At least you leave.

I wanted to die.
I want to hate you for this.
Beating a dead horse,

but you taught me love.
You taught me to be patient.
You taught  me to care.

To have empathy.
To be unconditional,
and unrequited.

To give hope away,
to wish the best for someone.
To turn a light on.

You left me behind.
If you are alone, I hope
you remember me.

Remember I care.
I still cared. I don't hold pain.
I hold these fragments,

and offer them to
something in the wind; asking,
"Can this be whole again?"

They are hunters,
banging on the doors drawing the blinds,
putting the children on their knees
with automatics.
Firepower on firepower,
we are more than we need

and we behave so crazy,
so paranoid.
Blood stained carpets;
we sit in a cage and say we're
safe
and still that blood stains grows
to keep us content.

I heard it in the sugar skulls.

They said, "the dead men are still dead"
but somehow they lied as they hissed
exactly what I wanted to hear;

"the dead men are still dead."

If you were a flower
I'd drown you in water,
burn you after you died,
and keep the ashes under
my mattress,
then craft a poem
out of your roots,
and toss your soil
into a lake.

And everything turns to ****,

but it’s not like I’m a professional.

All this time I spent lying to myself,

and only now did I get it.

*******. If you don’t understand this now,

then you’re not supposed to.

There’s no flavor, no reason, nothing.

No mark to be made.

No accomplishment will define you.

All this time I spent lying to myself.

I have my chance to move forward

and I’m trying.

I said, "I love you"
while expecting nothing back,
and I got just that.

Silence, then, "I know."
Meanwhile Cleveland is on fire,
as I hold you close.
~
You ask me to stay,
but your kisses are so short
they fade on contact.

Like butter in a
hot skillet, or water, they're
evaporating.

Yet one is sweet and
the other is so common
it hardly matters.
~
I'm remembering,
the winter we first met, where
I had first kissed you.

Then you disappeared
for three short years or something
pretty close to that.

Reflecting winter,
the sun came up, you started
evaporating.
~
I'm leaving you at
the greyhound station when you
kiss me finally.

The finality
hangs on my lips for so long
it's hardly ended.

Making dinosaur egg oatmeal,
maggots in the kitchen sink,
ants on the floor,
flies in air.
How did I get here?
Žižek on the counter,
and you're trapped here
by yourself, kid.
Trapped again.
Here we are.
Communal
bankruptcy.

There's a resentment that grows in me,
and I don't know when exactly
what day I became this bitter old man
stuck in the body of a **** young idiot.

I take my love wherever
it'll ******* come from now.
I yearn for anything.
Everything.
Death especially.

I don't wanna survive another winter.

Masterful sighs and this concert in a
major key, takes a dive and like an addict
coming down it doesn't want to blame itself.
However, hands are bound and that train
cannot roll sideways, and we're gagging
on our tongues to pray to
mustache twirling villains,
"Oh my, God I don't believe in you,
but still, thank heavens it's all over!"
My family may say I have so much to give,
but everyone and everything is just
taking and exploiting the **** out of my life,
menial labor, minimum wage,
carbon-based education and where am I supposed
to hide?
I see the light at the end of the tunnel,
but I'm headed the wrong way.

Ashes pushed in tight
against the pressure of us;
Our loose breath and words.

We are purveyors,
headcutters, jazzists, brawlers,
writers and killers.

We meet here to live.
We scream and bang instruments.
We come here to die.

Cutting our hair and
writing on the walls, dressing
immaculately.

Trying to keep our
chins above our sweat, rising
an inch a minute.

We come here to be
baptized in this river of
sin, made unholy

before the weekday
pulls us out of tantrum, to
mediocrity.

Woke up at 4pm today
and remembered I have no dreams
that have flown beyond the cage,
and past the cage there's still
a burning coal mine.
Ten foot sunflower standing out back
trying to be a beacon in the night,
like a blind leader for the dead;
sending them down that river,
paper boats across a sea of lies,
and there is no right direction.
Once you set foot here you are
lost permanently.
No one knows if it even
had a beginning,
or if it'll ever have an end.
Woke up late with  a ten-foot sunflower
at the foot of my bed, harvesting canaries.

Woke up late from a nightmare
disguised as a daydream;
the mediocrity of life burning
at the bottom of my throat
from last night.
Failing organs and trying
to age gracefully
to keep dignity.
Dying every day.
Ten foot sunflower out back
like an anti-depressant that makes you ponder suicides.
Ten foot sunflower  can't find the light
but reaches out like there's something out there.
Ten foot sunflower can't run away, can't take the rain,
can't be desperate or in pain.
Ten foot sunflower has peace of mind through emptiness.
I woke up with canaries out my window
and broken organs in my head.
So, people tell me I talk too much,
and I find it hard to disagree.

I feel as if I'm
some terrible sea creature
woken from slumber.

A Leviathan,
a Kraken from the locker.
An evil intent.

The will to rest. Sleep.
For one thousand years or more.
Stay under the waves.

Until they are gone.
Until the faces are new.
The will to sleep. Death.

I hate myself for how fast I give up on things,
especially things that matter to me.
The way every moment seems singular
in time, space.

Gravity crashes in when I see you.
Your mouth is a graveyard
Each of the teeth in your smile,
a tombstone.
You say my name as if it’s
written in stone.
Carved.

I don’t think it gets better.
You feel increasingly mortal the more
they know you on a “first-name-basis”.
Working 8 hours a day doesn’t give you
the same distance anymore.
Everybody is doing something to get high,
get altitude, relief, waste their health,
except you.

Live your life like it’s the last.
Smile, for the illusions and lies they give you
are pillows on your death bed.
The courtesy you give others;
bury the truth.

To burn the skeletons in your closet.

Bury it six feet inside you.
Keep it deep in your stomach,
so that when you speak
only the crows come out.
Your tongue is the gravel path.
Lips, black iron gates.

Your smile is a graveyard.

Shade is much less banal than shadows.
It says, "I want to be in the sun."
The shade of your sun is chalk full
of miserable creatures.

One;
Me.

Crashing on multiple couches and
all the cats are black,
and all the people
need you out soon. ****.
Breaking lines to fit more text in;
dumping your head out everywhere,

talking to yourself in public for extended periods of time.

Smile just because you're so *******
sick of being sad all the time.
Wait, that's me. *******;
Got to claim my labors,
but can't show the weight.

A deep resentment for everything.
It's like math for some people,
and it's an art for others.
It's like math sometimes,
and it's an art the other half.
It's like math, but it's art.
It's like art, but it's mathematical.

White lies, breaking apart while
gluing the cracks back together,
while holding the better portions
and trying to figure out
if you're allowed
to cry
or not.
****.

I remember when I told you that
being with you made me feel like
I was at the center of everything,
but when you're gone,
and when you don't talk,
and when I think
about it for too long;

I'm lost.

At some point every holiday
becomes a masturbatory overload
in the name of insincere flattery,
and gifting is the peak of this.

Everything in motion comes to a halt
as I lie down here and watch the
Christmas tree
sit still like 7 feet of holiday garbage,
and the cats relish it. Black and white cats.

Yeah, we all die in the process.
Successfully, we fail to accept
a single validation of the
handfuls amongst us.
We explore the sandbox
for the tools in our back pocket.

Has there ever been a more
fruitless and pathetic creature?

They laugh meat out from between
their bloodied teeth,
and leave us to ponder this cliche;
"Hell is on earth."

Every day I sit in an ivory tower,
and press my pen to decadence;
live a life of ease.
Few sufferings.

When the ones who deserve what I have
come back to take it,
I will not fight.
I will ponder
new cliches;

"Hell is trying to leave earth,
and we stand firmly in the way."

You are a maybe that made me say
"what if"
And passed by like a hurricane
&
I thought I was trouble,

But I hold my immorality tight
And they call it "honesty"
And I lose sleep because;

They say I have a beautiful soul
(I don't believe in)
Gorgeous eyes,

They say I'm wonderful
I hate that.

Would they love me if they knew my secrets?

Would you kiss me if you knew I'd been kissing gravestones?
Knocking on their front doors,
Begging for superstitions?

I live in a hurricane.
Something tumultuous.
I wonder if the trees also
die habitually,
seasonally.

I got sunshine on my back,
I used to wear a lot of black,
then I found I like the color
yellow.
I got sunshine in my heart,
if it all ends the way it starts,
I'd just like to say,
"hello",
and if the sun doesn't come out today
I like rainy days better anyways,
and if darkness creeps it's way back in
I'll say, "hello".
I got sunshine in my head,
bright ideas and messages,
I got nowhere, nowhere to go.
I got sunshine in my hands,
answers I don't want or understand,
I guess,
I don't ******* know.
But, if the sun doesn't come out today
I like rainy days better anyways,
and if darkness creeps it's way back in
I'll say, "hello".

They swear they can teach you everything
you're going to need to know about
life and how to take on the world.
The same ******* who
can't even tell you an
honest version of history.

If you sigh hard enough, you learn.

Some of us pull everything we know
from the margins and get called part
of an agenda for it.
Most people learn only by what
they perceive on the surface
and miss everything underneath.

Some nights you go hungry, and you learn.

The ******* go to college or university,
get some ******* degree,
and decide it makes them an unofficial expert
on situations they've never been concerned with.
Racists with law degrees.
Some of them go into the military
and come back with scars in their mind,
tell us we're just civilians,
because gun-toting is the education they received.

If you ever slept in a car because you had no choice,
you learn.

I've met a lot of people who read religious texts
and only believe what people "knew" 4000
years ago, at most.
I've met people who tell you they believe in the bible,
then when pressed for information,
obviously can't tell you **** about their own beliefs.

If you have a hard time not biting back out of habit,
you learn something.

The funny thing is, you don't need to learn how to
hate to learn how to love,
but
Once you learn what love is,
it makes it a hell of a lot clearer what hate is.

Something particularly crazy happened
the other day and
I can't remember it already,
and all the old people
tell me I'll be
just like them

except,
I can't even begin to understand
because I can't listen to how many
opportunities I'm supposed to have
and everything is so great
and the kingdom is wide open
if you're young and willing.

Salivating, eager to get ******
for the idea of getting ahead.
We all ****** our way to the
bottom
&
the glass is small.
Not half full,
ain't half empty.

Idiots speak to me with
a flavor of prejudice
because I
don't care
how much money
they never made.

Digging for hatchets.
You found me lost and hungry
for blood sacrifice.

Your tongue salts my wounds.
Your words slice through my stitches.
Your love chills my heart.

I live on my own,
selfish, absent of conscience.
A gentle rage. Blind.

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

All lined up with nowhere to wait,
they seek a great escape.

One last perhaps

till the weekend's funds are all gone,
and we only sweat for rent.
If we get caught in the crossfire,
it's hardly a consequence.
Risk and reward are one and the same,
we just cant die on purpose, but we're

okay?

He had a confident anxiety,
and a stage name.
Who the hell has a stage name anymore?
He ****** down cigarettes like he was
trying to eat their insides. Violently.
Swore he was a fighter.
Feint at the sight of blood.
I knew the last king of jazz, yeah,
he drank whiskey and sang out of key.
Stole his act from Tom Waits,
like any respectable artist does,
you'll come to find.
He was a big man, literally, intimidating in size
if he wasn't so **** funny. Not goofy, just funny.
Southern man, migrated north.
The south of the north; Buffalo.
Most depressing city in the world,
but you learn something from a guy like that
in a city by Buffalo.
How to survive, maybe,
or how to keep it together long enough.
Long enough for what?

...and haunted by
undead royalty.

We sink to extremes
and discover solace in finality,
because we yearn to be
morally black and white.

Engineers of blood-driven machines,
garnered in fleets, unsinkable,
parasites, unkillable.

Your wights and revenant
wander around you like
brain-dead dogs caged in
useless human flesh.

Finding ease in ownership.
Bliss in the wavering ignorance
of taking orders without question.

We are gods or insects.

Lost a giblet of my thumb
to a meat slicer today,
and almost broke down
in an antique shop.
These things creep on us,
and who handles the pressure
even remotely well?

I'm not old enough,
and I'm not hopeful enough,
I'm just tired tired tired,
and most people I know
also want to be dead.
Express a strong desire
to disappear.

Moonlight traces the door frame;
a metaphor for an escape, except
everything is so fundamentally ****** up
the fear of the other side seems irrational
compared to the valid and rational
phobia of right now,
this side.

You disappear and I go
selfless and selfish into
any abyss dark enough
to hide me,
or devoid enough
to absorb me,
or ignorant enough
to forget I'm even there.

I wish terrible things upon everyone else
because I'm bitter and resentful.
I'm also still bleeding through the bandage
and the duct tape, and through the
metaphors and lack of meter.

I'm still bleeding.

Sworn in secrecy,
a language that only we
could read, understand.

A promise we wrote
with our lips on our bodies;
The world would be ours.

We'd start at the stars
and work our way back inside
one sun at a time.

We'd lie other nights,
and we'd never get downstairs.
We'd make our own dreams,

and we'd fall asleep,
full of dreams and promises.
Gone when morning comes.

You never really frown,
but your face sinks like
the weight is still there.

Your eyes are just
dealing with it.

Shoulders bent forward.
Spine like a roller coaster.

Unkempt everything.

Practically dead;
a skeleton wrapped in
worn tissue.
Breathing ignites the dull
pain in your head.
Breathing hurts.

Neck feels swollen
somewhere untouchable.
Uncomfortable is the word;
Uncomfortable everywhere.

Uncomfortable.

My body is made of information,
I see in infrared and j-peg,
PNG formats I can't
share over
the internet.

Their eyes see mere mortal things,
and nothing supernatural in technology.
No ghosts in the machines,
no flesh in the software.

No hope in the problem,
nothing thick in the water,
don't call me at home,
remember I can't be bothered.

My skin is a spreadsheet and
my hair is string theory in action
and theory.

My brain is afloat in liquid caffeine
so it's no wonder I over react.
Where do people go when
they daydream?

Don't mistake fire in eye for flame in heart,
iron in build for steel in mind,
wear for worthlessness
or shine for vitality.

We fear becoming our parents,
and then spend years learning
everyone becomes
an ******* anyways.

30+ years committed to suicide
in slow motion waiting to die.
Tigers frozen still and broken,
their eyes wild, their faces frantic,
frozen; clawing each other and running
like a container of bulls on fire and starved.
Their stripes like tears in the fabric of some
uncaring and cruel reality.

Dare to call yourself an artist.

Sunlight streams
directly onto an orchid
and
eventually it dies.
Beautiful parasites.

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.

Some talents will always go to waste.
At the end of the day it's good to feel numb,
sometimes even better than feeling good.
A strange misery can feel so cozy.

I’m not quite sure, yet everything I do
appears to me as being viciously half-assed
yet sincere.
I write this mid-winter [I guess?] on the RTA
with twenty dollars on me and I don’t want to know
in the bank, with cold feet, both literally and metaphorically.
The future looks decent from a distance in bar light.
As I feign some resemblance of being classy and
collect more sodium on my footwear,
I ponder the passing of an officer who flashed a light
to look at me in the dark on my way from home.
It makes me glad I speak English, where there
are such hard, sharp and unsympathetic undertones
to phrases like, “*******”.
It’s dark on the way through Cleveland.
Try to stay warm.

Buried by insane deities
that live in single cell domains.
Insecure in the best ways,
holding on blindly without courage,
not brave, not adequate.

Pick up your textbooks and
learn how to fly with
your toes on the ground.

If you go searching for dinosaurs,
or particle physics,
you'll miss everything so terribly
gorgeous and lovely
about today.

And about today;

Cracks in immersion,

like broken bones in

the hands of the one holding

you underwater.

Do I stand a chance?

Could you catch this bullet?

Even if you could, would you

turn the tide or

dam this river?

Who would turn their back instead

and weep for themselves, and

who would mend the hand that’s broken?