Abraxas in the bathroom mirror,
I am not here perpetually.

Krakens in the coffee creamer,
"here" is a relative term.

Massive is the pile of things
I'll never get around to touching,
my relative's calls are all forwarded
to voicemail.

Worry is a meal all it's own.

Every morning I try to coax
the End Times out of a single second.

So far I've only managed to slip
between minutes lost to watching
the coffee *** fill to it's brim.

Little victories.

Fiddles played while any and all mystery
falls on bent swords,
you can hear the sadness in the notes
as they float between the oxygen molecules.

Solitude is an honest friend most days
while others it is another bent blade
awaiting my laziness.

I sleep standing up or running in place
so jokes on it.

skipping rocks across still ponds,
the gods are comedians.

entropic,
my coffee is still hot.

middle fingers to a walk of shame.

you all get lost like bats in a thick fog.
so let me scratch my scrimshaw
in peace, please.

i write for the ghosts of my past lives.
that's why i leave ink anywhere but on the page.

See, I've been eviscerating self
for the viewing pleasure of shadows
for 13 years,
in dark corners all alone
save for those souls holding black holes torn in reality who occasionally
came around to share drugs or a beer with me.

What I am saying is this isolation driving
you all to drink or sink teeth into anything
is my default setting.
I've been laughing like a lunatic watching a
mushroom cloud way bigger than my thumb at arms length rise in the distance for so long that it's become a feather-top
with more pillows than every bed
in every sorority house combined.

You ******* are less than amateur.
I'm the unsung tyrant king of this cancer-verse.
There was never any answers to any questions
or any standards for anything anywhere ever
and there never will be

**** screen.
Acceptance.

All of these people gnashing teeth
over 2 months of an isolation
drenched in comfort takes my
mind to Thoreau at his cabin,
tending to his beans
and befriending bees
while the orchestra of the
afternoon breeze plays
the branches like a cello
to that brilliant gilded lonely he danced
with like a lover in a living room
or a child standing on his shoes at a wedding.

You touched rolling clouds
without ever knowing there would
be no touching down
and that “good enough for jazz” ****
is ******* trash.
So, just come back.

This lassitude is a path
I intend to stray from,
go laughing like a madman
off into the wild wild faceless
fade-away until I wake up
in another's afternoon.

Square one is etched in my light-body.

Masks, masks, and masks.

Sad poems stacked somewhere
between our past and the shattered
glass still scattering Saturday sunshine;
I think I've loved life enough, thanks.

The more the reader
is left to ask what happened
the more the mask slips
and the trajectory of this elliptical orbit I'm absorbed in can be
learned and mapped out.

Black clouds holding hands
with the laughing child in my chest.

These days the
development of a style
is like trying to translate
the leaves blowing across
concrete into Naruda
at his most heartbroken.

You either try or lie about what
is dying in the background
of every family photograph
yet to be taken.

Being well received is a gold star
sticker by your name written in
yellow crayon;
I don't want you to like me.

Wilmot in the park,
the dregs hurled at the world,
teeth stained red or falling out.

I don't want you to like me.

I want you to feel something.

Saints in the grass,
snakes in the red inked rice paper,
no stakes.

Paydirt to just dirt,
inertia,
stealing the first buds on your neighbor's rose bush
because you've earned them.

Worth is a burned bridge
glimpsed over a shoulder,
burgeoning burned already
lest we embed flesh in cold earth because to smoulder is a fate worse than rehearsing a death wish
in the cracked mirror of modernity.

Learned behavior.