It's loud.

Violet, Blue, and Green lights
scatter across the floor,
across a canvas of house music,
echoing back into itself.

She crawls towards me,
wearing only poorly inked tattoos
and the lights that kiss us all.

I touch myself,
wishing it was her.

- I leave the room,
the music fading away,
like retreating from
sound-carrying-birds -

The smoke that comes from the cigarette
forms a skeletal web, reaching for the moon.
With rain slapping the dark brick walls,
hugging and creating an alley reminiscent
of a salivating, crooked-cement mouth,
I stand drenched in silver forgotten.

I drop the cigarette in a petrol-colored puddle,
watching it sink, become hard to distinguish,
and fade away.

- I reenter the room,
the song has changed
and is more mechanical. -

It's loud.

The lights are now
Bubblegum, Aqua, and Tangerine.
She lays supine, watching dollars
drift down, slowly, almost frozen.
Then the splitting of the air.

Fat-Man's body does a half-spin
as I lodge a bullet into his obese shoulder.
The music still blares, almost meaning more, now.
Regrouping himself, Fat-Man is weaponized,
drawing a greasy, inky blaster, desperate to spit.

A supernova erupts and quickly disappears--
like the aftermath of blowing birthday candles--
as his black speckled, crewcut scalp peels back,
letting fragments of chalky skull and pink penne
***** out of his square, boxed head.

Blood appears black under these lights
and instantly whips across
Samantha's still supine body.
The remaining people in the room
scatter like light exposed roaches.

Haunted, she is a toppled statue.
My steps move with the rhythm of the song.

Fat-Man's leather jacket
holds more meat than some mouths.
I plant my hand inside all pockets, find $6,480
in greasy, bloodier-than-usual presidents,
and move towards her, with the music.

Crouching beside her, I wipe the blood.
I clean her pale, tense torso
and help her up.

On two painted feet, she looks detached.
Silence exists, now, despite the music,
while she studies me with the same brown eyes.
Her lips quiver, she remembers
and wraps me with much thinner arms
that used to exist in nothing but memory.

A radio perches on a mahogany end-table,
singing like a mechanical bird:
bellowing fuzzy jazz, reaching my ear.

Its sides are rounded
like the curves of a classic car.
The antenna is *****
like the arm of an eager child
I've had swinging in-between
phantom-bytes and sonic slush:
my mind: inexcusable and mush.

A deck of cards shrugs it's shoulders
before it climbs on top of the radio;
it's rigid joints straightening and angling.
It tucks the tab back into it's head,
concluding before singing along to
'Somewhere beyond the sea.'

The voice of the deck rattled and squeaked,
like a caged mouse doing a capella.
Shot spit of it's mouth,
like a translucent spaghetti noodle. Bloop.

- I stormed outside, inaudible to all,
unmoved by few, chosen by none -

Today I sat across from a girl --
across the room, not across a table
or across the universe --
Her hair dangled like a carrot's wig,
a carrot's impersonation of a blonde girl.

Of course, her skin was closer to orange than pale --
but I like that stuff. I want it rubbed off on me,
physically, spiritually, mentally, emotionally.
Old-oxidized-green-coins invaded her eyes
and settled in the center of eggshell-white buffer.

Pants were as denim as a brush of shale
or the picture-pose of a flannel-clad beard,
holding a pick-ax and a dusty journal.
A journal of my thoughts, timeless
in their irrelevancy, until discovered
and claimed by someone else,
someone with a beard, a daughter, a smile;
See: Things I will never have.

What could I mean to this person?
How could I be desirable to her?
What am I but an alien,
coasting a galactic sea,
unable to relate to what I see?

- And what was your prize,
in this life? To be loved?
Or to be conquered? -

The deck of cards disappeared.
And I, I without consequence,
rummage through dust blanketed boxes,
hoping to cut my hand on something
I have mistaken as dull.

I have been told that my mother inhabits this box,
somewhere, sometime, somewhere, sometime.
A framed image, a polka dot cloth, a forever
unprecedented by a sunny-day funeral,
where I am the tail of the dying snake
that is my family: last to perish, last to wait:
a corrosive ingestion of unadulterated isolation.

My beige fingers wrap meat and bone,
but also a cheap-golden frame of my mother and us.
Our glasses are all too big, but we were all too poor.
My mother is wearing her wedding ring,
but I don't know why.

So young and vulnerable,
held by a freckled, strawberry blonde.
I don't even know her, any more.

The deck of cards reappears.

- But I've been alone for too long.
Even the winds have stopped whispering.
I have become a witness to my own death. -

Money melting in a spoon,
let's shoot it into our veins.
Flashing Kardashian lights,
streaming into our brains.
Donald Trump! He's our man!
Mark Muslims is the plan!

All-you-can-eat-
Pile. It. The. ****. High.
When you walk or
When you talk,
let the words squeak out
like they're between
Your thighs.

Thighs. American thighs,
Dreaming next to our Calvins.
Our slacktivism, our regurgitated ideas
spitballing out of our McDonald's mouths
into our peers' ears, distilled by years
And years of "almost-knowledge"
that we quasi-ascertained,
if we knew what that meant --
but we've been left behind!
No child left the **** behind!
We were left behind and there's no
possible way we slacked off, that we're dumb,
that we aren't the movie stars destined for
Lamborghini cars, five-star bars, designer bodies
for designer you and designer me:
the most special of the unique, the
Pearls that have been made in the
darkest parts of the sea, the darkest parts of
origin. Origin. ******. ****.
American ****: virginal ideals sliding around
the muck of a marketable ****, fuckfest,
******* of the American mind, the
congratulations of the American ego,
the proud mother and father tears associated with
buying and lying, "trying" and frying our food,
our ideas, our friends, our neo-impressionistic
children in Jordans, skinny jeans, on tumblr:
the unknowing cousin of Fox News, surprised
by its own wit and wisdom: they're ******* twins.
Carbon copies, unknowing, unwilling, un-un-un.

The romanticism of mental illness.
The close-up of reality-tv emotion.
The manipulation taught to servers
from managers.
The manipulation taught to customers
from society.

All we care about is ****, image, and ***.
Self-preservation: **** Donald Trump
and *******.

Maternal French kisses
Mental illness defines her
Pretend to forget

And I am tortured by regret,
things I've not done yet.
Thinking this defines me.

And I cannot deny
that I'm terrified
of fading to black.

I used to cherish every doubt--
now unsure in what I've found:
my instability was transparent
and now it's apparent...

And I now keep the lights on,
lay in a cold bath until warm.
My lips, so purple and svelte,
have sealed all I have felt.

And I stay a static transplant,
a homely nomadic infant,
stumbling towards the abyss,
thinking it's what I've missed.

I used to utilize the past,
stretching time, but at last,
the only fire I've consumed
will soon fade to black...

This reality, different from yours.
Sandpaper ice-cream cones sold
in engulfed, aflame stores.

This body, tense yet soft
tears underneath
the rub of rope.
My friend's feet swiped
a flailing chair,
And her neck did snap,
feces everywhere.

This sky, wrapped in saran wrap,
becomes pregnant when it rains,
the plastic weighed down by water,
slumps down the aquarium sky,
we slump down as it kisses us,
crushes us, mashes us, thrashes us.

- It all changes here,
from god to god,
from year to year -

Her hips lay like cursive,
pale, promising, pent up
like the shoulders of
an anxious angel.

Her hair a burnt brown,
wrapped around a whatever-count pillow,
like a L'Oréal snake, sleeping sullen,
drifting off into a designer dream,
unsure of this, unsure of me.

I see her as a child --
No, I see me as a child --
No, I see us as children.
This. This surreal feeling I get
when you're around me.
When the world is around me,
vibrating underneath my Toms.
Vibrating in my prescription bottle.
Vibrating between her legs, my ribs.
Between each page, so much is hidden:
my early swearing that my late love
is slowly draining.

The darkest fields, an interlude
to parallel sparkling, suspended
watching eye upon vermilion sky --
like a harbored god pretended.

Killing trees, roots eating deep,
my father mercilessly alluded:
branches high and branches wide
found the sky and intruded.

Altogether, the night we wove
a trickled treasure, tangled:
skirted legs spilling out from
the teacup of a denim lap,
validation in the vacuum cove.

- Dusty Nikes before the dusk,
who art in heaven, my god
he thrusts.

- Why'd your mother
let you talk that way:
You smoke cliche cigarettes
in such an unfamiliar way.

- The hanger left welts, weeping
into post-relevance landline love,
body lay like the hands on the clock,
copper landmarks seeping.

What a feeling, ever so same.
Arched eyebrows, a trademarked shame:
like a fighter, like ****** oozing.
Like a functional inability,
divine in its losing.

Yellow soap for a yellow me.
I don't feel like being pure
means being happy.

- I scrub scarring
with more definition
than a dictionary.

Moldy bread kissing
gravid navel oranges,
in a cherry plastic rib cage.

- Can you find me altruism
hidden in the heart  
of ecstasy and rage?

Satellite bobbing above
the air supply,
are you out of reach or am I?

She was taking pictures
of us in the aphotic zone.
Saying, it was the only way
to capture me vulnerable.

Extirpate my species
to save my life.
I am saturnine for
the only adoration I accept  
is mine.

The bloodied marble is
where the youth was sold.
I sit and wobble on
a mind of gold.

Burn the end
and pass me a thought.
Pale smoke differs
from state to state.
Top forty hits;
songs or cigarettes.
What was your dream
but an isle of regret.

Your tears were insects
burrowing into your cheeks.
Red painted hands
and yellow stained teeth.
I could've remembered
that I had sworn.
I never found your death
a place to mourn.