Little tiny objects like cigarettes can
**** you. Not sure

                    I know this
                    secondhand
                    or if

forgetting is a coping tactic. It's best to
put the things I most forget on paper
because writing burns into the
brain.

I can't be sure who told me.
No, I can't remember.

I am walking for escape
Silence, darkness

It is sudden. Sound of
two-by-fours smacking grain
lit up in the distance,
                       the street

Maternal scream mistaken for
coyote howl, sticky-tongued
lamentation filling the space,
                       lockbox

Grey matter spilling
the street for a
beggar's mouthful

I could make known my notice
Or leave his peace at asphalt
rocking skull-bone;

marrow cut loose: free

Nothing I make of words can ever be confused with beautiful because I don't see beautiful things, only things in tandem, stuck between, feverish and naked as my burning brain substitutes ******* for dead protesters. This is a sickness I will not grow out of; I cannot say I want to grow because I do not want, I am a mind in a hollow shell which I keep beating with toxins that will **** me sooner than most. I do not care if you read this. This is not for you. This is not about you. It is always, will always, be about me. That is as close to happy as I will be. When did my poetry become so self-serving: I have turned art into work, art for the sake of speaking literally about my conscience and how are you still reading? I am not talking to you. This is not poetry but narcissistic whining and who doesn't love wallowing in the endless sea of their own *******. One thing: When I am dead, do not say I am gone. I have gone nowhere. I have been the only place I will ever be; a brain in a skull in a body, every second I know trapped in crawling skin. Do not say I am gone. I was never really here to begin with.

So ******* heavy-
handed that I cannot put
anger into words.

The purest of pure irony in that
we live to die, this is endgame,
nothing reminds us about life more so than
death. And so we fear, because we
do not know the result of the thing,
only the thing. Humans who assume too
much makes for messy subtext.

If I could pop open my skull,
find the part of my brain so often
mistaken for the heart, and ask it
a question, do you think it would
have the courage to respond?
Am I a soul, or is this brain and
its infinite connectivity capable of
fooling itself so deeply? I side with
the latter, not for depression,
but truth.

My poems sound like mindless simplicity.
They are poems because I call them such.
**** what the editor says.

Imagine burning by fire,
hustled bones piling up, a sanctum
seeped in dust.
It his here where I compartmentalize
the fire, its embers and heat
stacked neatly on hotbed coals, a flame with
labels, numbers, a name.

I keep the space neat and airy,
I have room for all of the fires
as well as some extra storage
yet to have a specific set purpose.
In this room of fire I read
constantly. I am currently on Marx, and
my next read is Durkheim's
Suicide, which is much less strenuous
than one would believe, having been
familiar with Durkheim but
not his work. All of this clatter and
sociology.

The fires remain lit, I have no need
to run the heater this winter.
Fire, in all its compartments,
organized and labeled as it is,
and still, with my world in such a state,
I cannot hold fire in boxes.
I am blindly adding fuel.

Is narcissism
an excuse for worshipping
my own handwriting?