I sat outside in the dark finishing up the end of a cigarette and reading a book of poetry,
Classy night, I'm thinking...
I stood up and took a step to the door hearing no - feeling - a crunch beneath my foot,
A ******* roach.

My first roach-squash,
I've managed to avoid this situation even though I've lived in Texas for 23 years of summer nights.
I wish you'd been here to hear me scream at the carnage in horror,
This was always your job.

You've trained me well.

Driving down the street with my jeep's window's still off,
It's a beautiful tonight and I'm glad I didn't let you convince me to put the windows back on due to the recent rains that have dampened the interior,
**** it, it'll dry
Lost in the cool spring air I'm fantasizing about the vacation I'm planning to get over you,
A bug hits my face and I swerve into oncoming traffic,
I pull over in panic to find a June bug on my floor,
I wonder if it's acceptable to call you one last time,
After all, I need some help putting the windows back on...

I stare at the yellow, orange, red
leaves
floating across the top of the water
With my net - I chase them.
Those who escape my path
are sent
downing in the suctioned whirlpool.

It's ******* cold,
all I can think about -
That fabricated adage, "Fool me once - shame on you. Fool me twice - shame on me."

A genius of a liar,
a salesman at heart.
Intended to be used by the aggressed to remedy the pain,
surreptitiously crafted by the aggressor to ease their own.

Yes, lets!
Blame the beauty of an innocence so sweet they can actually forgive,
and try again.

Hopefully you believe that you're the fool, so that I can ******* over one last time.

Seems I am a bit stuck here
in this
maelstrom of malcontent.

The grand absence of the ebb and flow
of this
most frustrating perennial disposition.

The years progress and the packaging is altered,
but the contents are the same.

Yes, it seems I am a bit stuck.

If it weren't all so forced, the to-do list of the American Dream.  
Pour yourself another glass, light another cigarette, and listen to the bacteria eating away at time.
You think you're so ******* creative, writing misogynistic poetry to soothe the pathetic soul you've become. Woe is you, women don't find it glorifying in real-life.
Read your old-fashioned, crass **** written by the men of the Day
Compare yourself to them, if you'd like
But just know that at the end of the night, you'll still be sleeping alone
With your **** hard and your dreams stale.
Pour yourself another glass, light another cigarette, and try not to listen to the reality of what your life has truly become.

Anticipating the anticipation,
Anticipating the living-life-on-the-edge days.
The ones you hear about
Or you think you've heard about.

You, you've fallen into monotony,
An inescapable feeling of restless contentment.

Some call it depression,
You call it boredom.
They're one in the same,
Except boredom has a much less negative connotation;
And a much shorter life-span.

Mostly, it depends on your age;
The children are bored,
The adults are depressed.

Filling days with self-innovated anxiety,
The kind that didn't always exist,
Or you don't think it always existed.

A drive to be taken by storm
Overwhelmed.
Engulfed.
Something to shake you out of this trance you have been stifled by.

Like a visitor from afar,
You continue to sit in that hotel room,
Anticipating the anticipation of travel.

While you glance
Between the alarm clock,
The room service menu,
The T.V. Guide.

Bored.
Depressed.
Anticipating the anticipation of living.

There is a period of time
Immediately proceeding a conversation you had
Where you shared, what you are sure in retrospect,
Was too much

And when they go its nearly silent
Aside from the car engine
Your ears are on fire
On one hand you’re glad you said it
On the other hand
You wish to rewind
And unsay the things you did.
Reverse and greedily fill your arms with all the
Pieces of yourself you’d given away freely.
They’re yours and they don’t own them.
But like a dusty collection of spoons,
From all fifty states,
You know that you have no use
Harboring those thoughts.

Maybe they will somehow affect that person
And help them when they’re feeling down
But you doubt it.
They won’t fully understand,
Because you’re a bad story teller
Who can’t describe the feeling of the sun
On the tops of your legs and interpolated
Between your toes.
And you're selfish and don’t care
You feel incomplete now and hope
That maybe, just maybe
They weren’t even listening to you ramble
Or couldn’t understand you
Or cast the little wads of memories away
Like pencil shavings
Which are fun for a little under an hour.

And you’ve almost convinced yourself
Until you see them, and they see you
And open their mouth to say something-
And like some horror movie
The secrets come swarming.

That
I have not written anything worth two *****
since We were together

Although I do not remember
any of our conversations
I do
Remember every place we had them
and the feelings that
ran wild through my
innocent body.

It occurred to me
that
this poem
would be pointless to write
and worthless to read.

As I brush my teeth in the bathroom, a young woman enters- tooth brush and face wash in hand.  I watch her reflection in the large mirror a front the sinks, I put an over-sized glob of tooth paste on my brush.
******* it Danielle, she sees this mistake you’ve made.

I turn the water on and attempt to wash away some of the toothpaste. We start brush at the same time, I smile to myself because these synchronized flukes, such as speaking in unison or laughing simultaneously, make me feel briefly connected to someone. Sounds a little silly, but don’t all ways of relieving loneliness?

My anxiety stirs again as I realize the volume of bristle to tooth.* Can you hear this? Is is disgusting to you? That sound of saliva and paste being ground into my teeth.
I lean forward to spit, inspecting the rusted faucet. I see my face in it’s metal stem, it convoluted my face.

I’d rather be disfigured, so that I’d no longer have to guess and worry about whether people were eying me. I would know. They could clearly see my faults if I had a missing jaw, drooping eye and liver spots mapped across my grey skin. I wouldn’t have to worry about the possibility of being seen in a favorable light.

The possibility of fooling anybody into thinking I’m not repulsive. I would know it.  I stare into the metal, I spit. Blood is all over the sink. I spit again and more blood. Again, blood. It’s pouring out of my mouth. I turn the water on high, panicked that the girl beside me will see. But she leaves, “goodnight” she says as she walks by. I try to say something but I’m choking on the blood. Where the **** is this blood coming from?

I glance up to the mirror, there is no blood in my mouth. Back to the sick- no blood. I am so confused, just moments ago Armageddon was spilling from my mouth; and now it’s vanished?
I stumble back wards into a stall.

“I saw that.”

A voice whispers from within the stall, or was it outside?   I open the door, but nobody is there.
Okay, Danny, calm down. Nobody is here, you’re imagining things.

“No, you heard.”

Confused, the voice, that voice- it’s coming from the stall door. No, doors can’t speak, I open the door but still, I am alone.

I run, bladder still full. Sundries still on the counter, I need to get out of there.
_______________________________
Paranoid Schizophrenia- A mental disorder characterized by a disintegration of the process of thinking and of emotional responsiveness. It most commonly manifests as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking, and it is accompanied by significant social or occupational dysfunction.*
___________

Within two weeks of my first experience of hallucinations, I was in the Summit Valley Institution for Mental Disorders. Highly medicated, with stitches along my chin and staples in my head.
I’d lost all control, they found me at the bottom of a stairwell after falling 3 stories.

Nurses told me that when I’d been taken in, they found more that one hundred scraps of paper in my pockets, on them were different snipets of conversation I’d heard throughout the day. It was a compulsion, I was told, associated with Schizophrenia.