Base instinct betrays
graymatter, brain left grazing,
gutted by daybreak.

Bend at the waist
be a doll, doll,
dance your *** down
this way, my way
into sentiment, burning
images onto the brain
you can't get away.

Bend babe, shake or
shiver as you please
let lethargy melt into
unkempt smiles, deep
dimples of face-skin
softened in sweet sun ray.

All the people in the street.
Where are they going, and
what does that mean in the
end-times, the ever-present hour
of a dying world's last breaths,
here for sole reason of shepherding
the sheep, because you're a wolf
are you not?

Miles above the weeping masses,
holding it together with barely
a grip to give name; coping
they call it, accepting reality as
objective, something separate from
myself.

I imagine the world as a bubble
and I hold the pin-needle, too close
to body to alarm and too close
to bubble to bat away, bend
please, bend at wrist for sake of
sanity, bury yourself neck-deep in
chance. Bend babe,
bend away.

Searching for answers as to
why I'm so alone is like locating
the holy grail in sand-ravaged
desert, like rationalizing human
action, like taking delicacy
with a grain of salt.

I have turned depression into self-
fulfilling prophecy, so many days wasted
on loathe and pestilence, resisting change,
shutting out what I perceived
to be white noise.

I am drunk during this writing,
This is not medicine, let it be known.
Nor emulation, for simple fact that
I am whole, a whole thing,
silently splitting its ends.

Four walls and one door
maintaining (perfectly) in-tune
with the outside world,
countless libraries and braver
brains in court, fingertips
away.

Too much sometimes, too much
noise and sleepless racket,
no need for hotel wifi or
roaming minutes, change nowadays
burns faster than
relationships.

I woke today to find
bombshells exploding elsewhere,
slaughtered innocents and
captives in bright silver fences
until the next time I
read about it.

My brain is spent running in
slow-motion. I have glasses now,
my vision once was perfect but
staring at screens beat biology
to the punch: a most frightening
revelation.

In those brief places
of prompt and pause, is it truth
if I am smiling?

By book-ends my stomach is churning,
I'm cantankerous and stand-offish
in spurts, barely there in others.
I could not dig up where my head was
if I had to. I do not have to.
There are some things in my life that
lead themselves to failure. I have dropped
instinct, instead adopting pattern,
a means of coping with the endlessness
of life in a globalized world.
This is not lament. I could part with
objectivity, happy to expire for a
scrap of extra sentience. Please, before
my words become manners and manners become
holes full of dirt, pardon me for the mess.
I only had so much time after all.

I've lent myself to self
parody. I am yellow grass
in summer. So easy to see
in daylight, split-rays.

Again I stumble through the
door too closely, nose grazing
siding too rough, not fit for
suburban living.

I am outside now, cigarette in lungs
almost empty of airspace. Tight
breath, silt sinew of exhale and
burning, eyes painted in panic.

Four smokes in, cherry blossom
cheeks, a rosary of liquor, perhaps
lending myself to sanity,
a bright morning in autumn.