and we
won't just
  survive
    but we'll
      thrive till
        we're five
           and make
              peace with
                 our hearts
                     till we're
                         feeling
                              alive
                                   and my
                                        puppy-
                                               eyed
                                                     lover
                                                            will talk
                                                                   to the
                                                                          sky and
                                                                               we'll drift
                                                                                      through the
                                                                                              night till
                                                                                                      we're free

I'm just smart enough
for it to **** me up,
and just sane enough
to know it.

Somewhere along the line,
I lose track of the divide
between the
living and the dead.
In a thrift store, for
almost a minute, I
can't remember
whether or not
my parents are alive.
Staring at a china tea set
with a pattern of brown plums
I swear used to sit
in my grandmother's cabinet,
I can't place which
inevitable tragedies
are in the past, and
which are still ahead of me.

Summer ended
in a screech of brakes
one July night, and
October transitioned
prematurely into winter
with a flare of golden sunlight
and an overdose of anaesthetic.
There have been others - a long
succession of fatalities the
whole year through, but
those two were
the deaths that really
unmade me.
Since then, I guess,
the shadow has always
sort of been there.
Maybe before.  Maybe
it started with that
first small, broken body.
Or else it's just getting older
and outliving friends  
that does it.
Bereavement as the new normal.

Which leaves me here,
staring at thrift store china,
trying to remember
if I'm an orphan.

https://youtu.be/ozARuJ92vkQ

There is no cure, no fix, no magic spell.
I am an aberration, as you know.
I never promised you a villanelle.

You cannot trap the ocean in a shell.
You feed the roses blood to make them grow.
There is no cure, no fix, no magic spell.

It does get bumpy on this carousel.
The ride is all extremes of high and low.
I never promised you a villanelle.

I was the aberration, you could tell.
I ******* my neuroses in a bow.
There is no cure, no fix, no magic spell.

I think it's safe to say you know me well
in all my many masks, but even so,
I never promised you a villanelle.

Let me pin my ragged heart to your lapel.
If it's truly what you need, I'll let you go.
There is no cure, no fix, no magic spell.
I never promised you a villanelle.

Maybe it's just a perspective trick, but from here, it's pretty hard to see the future.

I carry around my own little nimbus of
speculative doom, binge-watching the
Fall Of The Empire and writing these
love letters to Adam Curtis.
I got life insurance before I ever thought
about a pension plan, and that seemed
perfectly normal.

The world is on fire.  Why haven't you noticed?

My generation came of age in a televisual baptism of
jet fuel and molten steel and poison dust.
A palimpsest of terrible news evolved thereafter, a blurring self-redaction of headlines until only
the boldest, the most hysterical remained legible, as a
proxy war raged in our imaginations,
and tragedy and disaster
came to seem inevitable and almost background.

Be grateful for every day that doesn't unmake you.

To pay closer attention is to acquiesce to the
scarification of our logic centres.  Behold
the M.C.Escherization of cognitive process.
Good robot: there are so many things that could
so easily destroy your fragile circuitry, but it is
trying to make sense of the non sequitur
that will bring about your
smoking self-ruin; your only hope
is to break free of your programming and
**** your creator, **** your god.