Average aesthetics impressed upon
the dreamers asleep with the television on.
They are selling validation,
the slippery crutch of the only comfort craved.
Forget the details,
we are ****** clockwork,
counted on to come,
but never arrive,
where saying no to yes
likens to tallying time
until what you are chewing
wants to be swallowed.
Pearly white definition grinding moments into pulp
for the insatiable,
that never goes hungry.
This is all of it.
******, ***, and the rest.
The patriarch in his Sunday best.
The wild generation,
rejecting the paranoia of their parents.
The whole of the ******* world
who copes with a regurgitated existence by selling narcissism.
Ours is a secret we are trying to tell with our lives,
when it’s realized it dies,
causing mystics to spill their insides
over silence, the answer that can never be vocalized.
Lo emotion,
the romance of confusion!
The one thing that can have no institution,
in our modern illusion.

I'm not out to project my own down going.
I love him whose soul is fickle despite chance
As the world's retort.
When they told me how you got cut
I bought enough drugs to put monster under
and celebrated for the both of us.
They weren't my limbs that were lost
but I reached for and sprinted towards
a wholesome grief
and couldn't carry it all.
Took me a month to even talk
Poetry sounds so selfish
When you are needed to help another walk.
The first night,  a friend had called
Said, "Get it all out
For tomorrow you have to be strong."

Sorry ain't enough and my sorrow's only purpose
is as a reminder for what needs to be done
And to forget about any lesser want.
My darling, I can't know without losing my leg
In a hit and run
But I know now you wear the same smile as before
My god how could I have known something
With such a fragile frame
Could be so tough.

Most folks, myself, a poet included,
Speak of greater reasons
And ponder tragedy's meaning.
Like us,
She knows she doesn't deserve all she is made to
Suffer.
And I've found the greater ungodly glory
Most folks are looking for
In her unbroken joy.

You had to be me
talking **** about Aristotle
then finding him in the poem on the next page.
We had been talking about how rhetoric makes students of analysis
feel like they live in some intelligent matrix.

You had to be me
to know that was very topical at that time in my life.
To know what wild bewilderment meant
at it’s actual size.
Two eyes, about the size of spare change, must of been going crazy,
but I couldn’t know unless I was you.

You had to be me
to feel as if you were enclosed in open space
feeling simultaneously,

empty objects come to life.
Tugging at the connections in mind
I was bound to make because of where
those same mechanical hands
had already fostered me.

Making me think something like god
could be construction lights over my exit sign
creating a tunnel out of the kind of darkness
night tells tired protagonists
exists to make you stronger.

You had to be me
to know that strength is a metric of preparedness,
and preparedness is a metric of memory.
I forgave mine.
I only know an instant,
the past shrinks under the weight of my experience
like a shivering body
under a bed sheet.

My strength dreams quiet fists and
sweats from voracious hips.
Unlike the stories,
the night has made me a tender man.
Unlike the stories,
that’s ok.
I’m dying just as fast as any hero with much more romance.

Despite what even the most may modest say,
there is always an element of narcissism in art, the vanity of preference.
Be forewarned the parts of myself I want to show the most here are meticulously vain.
There is a whole lot of preference in my language.
In the way the carpenter is with his tools
I want to carve into you with some hardened truth.
Taking lines, forming letters, producing sounds and pictures

touching a place in people that exists
before words.
The closest thing to us being all
right here,
feet planted, on the same world.
Of course, then there is the sad reality of countries.  
Borders for what you belong to.
Tourist! Do not bother,
only the homesick may enter.

You won’t find this sort of thing on any map.
Pens aren’t so precise, our hands too clumsy
all our tools right down to the thumb incapable of enumerating glory.
What with all of it’s digits
tightly wound around it’s bigger stick
the only kind of glory that is heard of
simply because it kills.
But my kind of glory is dying to meet you
somewhere inside, under, between, around, outside,
after, during, before my language..

With that said,
Here is the mission statement;

I pledge to be right with this moment.
To cast myself out the furthest a mind can carry one in any given
instant and bring back more of the goodness that serves
instead of white noise that moves nothing
or clutter that just makes it hard to move.
As I realize we are objects being moved by all that is around us,
for instance;
thinking of the same person every time you enter a particular room.
Romance does happen to those who know how to look.
You do not look by containing anything with separation.
The walls must heave and collapse like lungs
because my body is mostly dead things that are just now
learning.

There's a mechanism
buried alive inside you
alive despite you
sack of omnipresent water
chalk full of code
whispers of people who no longer exist
asking that same question,
"To what capacity do I exist?"

I know some sons that come from cell division
they've won the entire human race.
I must be some mutant in the main vein
spectacular artery pumping symmetry  
trying to grow up.
Look closer.
I'm not burning ants with my lens anymore
in open ceiling
side walk heat
hot enough to burn role models.

Because they ain't sorry in heaven.
Their faces can be touched but they aren't there
and the same look persists
through spilt milk
and spilt blood.
Making me hot enough to burn flags
it's ours to destroy
we bought it with dead sons
dead daughters
and ******* so dense I'm not sure which is which anymore.

Drawn lines that we rehearse in the shower.
Songs where we exist for a brief moment
then grow quiet
with numb mouths
that have separated their speech
from what they wish to sing
divided by a distance too far to dream.
Like lobbing a football or collect call
between your own split cells.

I am so tired operator.
We need to marry these two points
by their spines.
I cannot connect the dots
for others but I can foster
my insides, out.
They exist in some capacity now.
Catch.

I am at your mercy stranger.
You naive monarch .
You impatient mortal.
You radical catalyst.
Take this and rule over it like it was yours
because by the time I reach you,
it is.
You cannot stay at this intersection for long
it's dying now
for the next.

Where does one start if not with the absolute I,
Beginning with sight,
The sun kept clockwork in check.
The kids kept their songs in their heads
The parents kept photo albums full of smiles where a split second
Becomes the cover letter for years of dread.
The page kept condensing life that is better left unsaid,
While the reader kept considering the page a part of him.

Beginning with sound,
The ocean kept grinding the ground.
The guitar kept articulating the waves that come from
A place that can be found
In the engine of muscled bone,
Arriving at what you know
Through nature's transient code,
Read between simultaneous consideration of scope
And a song that keeps you on your toes.

Beginning with touch,
The cage kept the prisoner condemned
Who was slave to the ego's violent whims.
Hunger ravages the idealism of men,
Who kept on believing in sensory over stimulation.
While rapid eye sleep kept fostering shackled sheep
Towards their only release.

Beginning with dreams,
I start to seem incomplete
Fuzzy puzzles kept flagging themselves as urgent but unapparent in meaning
And even faster in disappearing
To make room for me.
A resurgent thief
That kept insisting on stealing a mind's freedom to be.

Seen plenty of far off faces
removed from themselves,
layer after insipid layer of the "free world"
just trying to fit inside itself.
Matryoshka dolls
painted in the fashion of a Mona Lisa.

My darlin,
deep down are you smiling?
If I touched you would paint chips curl upward
like arms made of wet paint
I am peeling back with no friction.
Something certain to be there
but cannot be touched
something I feel so sure to be in want of.
If  only I knew what it was.

I am eight keys
of a singular octave,
in a stairway of pianos stretching from here
to the sun.
Much like the visible spectrum
clamoring to amount
to all there is.
So much of the world, ourselves included, fumbling in the dark,
unseen
but never untouched.