you ever feel like your head’s in the dirt?
and everything is
blurry? and every
word you hear sounds too
slurred to even stand
a chance of hurting?

and yet the worst
things fly high in your mind
like birds of worry? and
you hurriedly
misinterpret, the world is
cryptocurrency,
and the only thing
you’re sure of is
that uncertainty is certainly
the only purpose
you’re serving

but on the surface,
you stay working,
and learning, and
let the bourbon wash away
that lurking serpent of
nervousness that
snuck in through
a curtain that’s flirting
with closure,
undeterred by
the purple you’ve been
turning ever since you
realized you’ve submerged
yourself into Earth and its
absurdities

Two bros converged into a fellowhood
And stoked to share their Fight Club quotes
And be two broskis, juiced they stood,
And shotgunned PBRs, long as they could,
till they were wrecked in a sweet-*** boat

Then proclaimed the bros, into the air,
“Turn on the flatscreen, let’s watch the game”,
it was Saturday so the day was theirs;
and as they sat in their folding chairs,
the smell of axe the air became

And clad in their Costas they loudly played
a song no bro’s cracked iPhone lacks.
Oh, they know their bops like they know their whey!
They smelled their teen spirits and exhaled away,
JUUL clouds of fruit flavors with swag densely packed.

There is no replacing these two guys
and their dudely jockish fashion sense.
Two bros converged as two would, and aye-
They forged the path bros travel by,
a path of bliss and ignorance.

we say
that “nothing lasts,”
and we’re too old to ask
why gold can’t stay past
sunrise

we get
by folded, passed,
and sold en masse,
kept cold and
advertised

we choose
to mold and mask
ourselves solely after
the soulless laughs
that leave us

it’s true
that holding fast
is bold, but glass
breaks wholly grasped
when heedless

with hearts left
swollen, gashed
from a scroll-on-past
control mastered
with age

we chase
a goal of basking
in rolling grasses
where something gold
can stay

**** jenkins says to drink more water

I’ve been dehydrated
living at sea, pirated
but here's some tea, I made it
to some knee high waves
passing my feet, I wade
and start to deep dive away
into some me time, maybe
now I see why I felt
Like I was 3 lives away from
something sweet, like honey
from a beehive, I think
I tried to deny away that
It was me, my way of
painting free skies grey, as
if my green eyes glazed and
then left me blind to rays of
blue that define days and
nights, that we find stay in
every designed way the
sun and streetlights aim their
light at things like bays where
Otis sings tides away and
water brings life paving
ways for tree lines, shaving down
the screen time slavery where
pictures we like wave at
us from behind eight gigs
of our own devices, waiting
for an e-vite to say, “welcome
to the free life”, take us
back to T-9, making typos
due to key size, lately I
drop speed by lacing
life with Jeep drives, break from
running it’s the Suite Life, saved time
is a dream mined straight from
underneath shrines made to
teach us “decline today, to-
morrow’s reclined shade is
worth the bee line”, race against
the streamlined weight of
the “keep grinding” wages, get
your lease signed, waive your
rights to free fly, pay with
card get denied, straying
from the street signs may just
get you steep fines, say that
we can realize today that
we can reply, “hey, let’s
fall asleep by the lake and
watch the leaves fly away and
maybe drink wine that tastes a
little refined, play some
songs that beat right against
the heart and keep finding ways
to really greet life amazed
by every tweet by jays of blue
that leap by faith into
the color”

draw what you see, the
jaws and the cheeks, the
flaws are the key to the
raw, simple peeks through
walls in the green room:
all of the sweet and the
salt of the deep blue, the
straws that we breathe through,
the gauze that we bleed through,
words lost in our teeth to
the pause as we speak to the
laws and beliefs that
call us to be too
brawl-at-the-beep, those
falls to our knees like the
ball on the eve of a
small little seed of a new year, it’s
plausible we do
cause ourselves grief, but we
scrawl, and we read, we
enthrall, we exceed, we say
“y’all” when we greet, we
sprawl and we speed, we’re
flawed but we’re free to be human

- AH 9/17/2019

this morning,
the air was crisp like the edge of a
perfectly toasted everything bagel, but
the everything was coolness and warm colors blended together with light from the sun waking up behind the trees overhead.
I stepped outside onto leaves that crunched like a bowl of my favorite childhood cereal that my dad used to pour for me before school, reminding me I need to rake, but giving me reason not to.
My bike ride to work was smoother than usual, due partly to newly greased brake cables, but mostly to the rough heat of summer being scared away by the growing shadow of fall against the city’s antique glass windows.
It’s getting hard to use the senses I’ve taken for granted these past few months, and a first glance at my passing might lead you to wonder why I’m crying, but I assure you I’m okay.

See, the kicker about beautiful things is that they take your breath away.

caught between screens
like a rock and a hard place
laced with beams of green,
the command line screams into
dark color schemes that maintain
a clean theme of extreme
control
in a world lacking

whoami
to say sudo i'm
just the pseudo-king of
all the pings
i see'em sing ICMP but
the ether stream contains
more than pings,
no it flings about
all the things modernity
can't think without
like some machined spring
spewing strings
made up of  
every dream we need
fresh from the
version-controlled source

the click clack of
mechanical keys on
a thick black
switch-backed board
in tic tac mint condition
is the sound of
strict syntax enforced,
if there's a problem
you fix that,
else the big bad bugs
will kick back with
sick bags of tricks
that make you
wish that there was better
logging for life's mistakes

slow and steady wins the race, so
let’s live like drying
plaster on the drywall,
not any
faster than a slight crawl,
and maybe
after all the light falls,
we’ll have the
cracks on the sidewalk
to guide us
back to all the time lost
we spent
laughing at the sight of all
those
passing us on life’s haul
like
nascars on the asphalt